ArtReview Asia Summer 2021 by ArtReview

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Art of the People

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2-3/F, 267 Itaewon-ro Yongsan-gu Seoul

2021 年 5 月 27 日至 7 月 10 日爾

Sam Gilliam @ PAC E G A L L E R Y PAC E G A L L E R Y. C O M

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267號2-3樓

5월 27일 – 7월 10일, 2021 이

267, 2/3F

Spring Is, 2021, 72 × 72 × 4" 182.9 × 182.9 × 10.2 cm © Sam Gilliam / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

May 27 – July 10, 2021

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May 18 – June 30, 2021 12/F, H Queen’s 80 Queen’s Road Central Hong Kong 大衛·阿賈耶亞當·彭德爾頓

2021 年 5 月 18 日至 6 月 30 日 H Queen’s 12樓

香港中環皇后大道中80號

데이브드 아자예 / 아담 팬들턴

5 월 18 일 – 6 월 30 일, 2021

David Adjaye Adam Pendleton @ PAC E G A L L E R Y PAC E G A L L E R Y. C O M

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Jason Martin Space, Light, Time

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THE R AT E S OF CHANGE

더 갠 언 이

율 화 SPACE K Seoul 32, Magokjungang8-ro, Gangseo-gu, Seoul, 07802, Republic of Korea +82 2-3665-8918 www.spacek.co.kr spacek_korea

라

변

2021. 6. 2 4. – 9.1 7.

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RYA N GANDER

SPACE K was established in 2011 to foster art and culture by Kolon Group in Korea. Setting forth an initiative to support art and aiming to share with local community, Kolon Group introduces SPACE K.

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ArtReview Asia vol 9 no 1 Summer 2021

Born Slippy With opening up comes reform, or so certain of us have been taught to believe. As ArtReview Asia writes this, some parts of the world are opening up after a lengthy period of pandemic-inflicted lockdown, while others remain firmly in the thick of it. ArtReview Asia was founded, back in 2013, both to offer a platform for discussion of art in the region independent of dominant Western narratives and to demonstrate in the face of a homogenising, globalised artworld that different contexts produce different art histories – across the continent, across regions and even in the territory of a single country itself. Thanks to the way that the institutions of the artworld are programmed to transform speculation into fact, divergence into convergence and revolt into acquiescence, it’s never been easy. Particularly because ArtReview Asia has, however reluctantly and however small the scale, inevitably become one of those institutions itself. But while the pandemic has been a global phenomenon it has also revealed geographic and social inequalities and differences in ways that ArtReview Asia could never have imagined, however embedded and longstanding those inequalities might be. Its ‘mission’ therefore remains as valid as ever before. So while ArtReview Asia’s thoughts are first with those who remain under the pandemic’s cosh, its thoughts turn too to the matter of reform and the shape of the artworld to come. In this issue we look at how the work of Shahzia Sikander and Julie Mehretu are queering and recasting conventional notions of art. In the face of widespread anti-Asian prejudice in the West, we look at how Richard Fung, Hamishi Farah and Arahmaiani have responded to its different incarnations, each in their own way. We look at how Ayman Zedani is reimagining the Gulf as a site of natural collaboration rather than natural extraction. And last but not least we look to the ways in which Kurdish artist Zehra Doğan has been shaping an art of the people rather than for the people. Museums be damned. ArtReview Asia

Gone so long

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Art Previewed

Previews by Nirmala Devi 16

Points of View Charu Nivedita, Ren Scateni, Deepa Bhasthi 28

Art Featured

Zehra Doğan by Sarah Jilani 40

Hamishi Farah and Arahmaiani by Yen Pham 64

Shahzia Sikander and Julie Mehretu by Gayatri Gopinath 48

Ayman Zedani by Rahel Aima 70

Abhijan Toto interviewed by Max Crosbie-Jones 58

page 48 Julie Mehretu, Retopistics: A Renegade Excavation, 2001, ink and acrylic on canvas, 258 × 530 cm. Courtesy Whitney Museum of Art, New York

Art Reviewed

exhibitions 80

books 96

Ben Sakoguchi, by Patrick J. Reed teamLab Reconnect, by Thu-Huong Ha 13th Shanghai Biennale, by Paul Han Growing Like A Tree, by Rahel Aima The National 2021: New Australian Art, by Naomi Riddle With/Between/Beneath/Upon, by Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần Gallery Weekend Beijing, by Yue Ren

The Committed, by Viet Thanh Nguyen, reviewed by Ben Eastham Karya, by Aravind Malagatti, reviewed by Deepa Bhasthi China in One Village, by Liang Hong, and The Art of Contemporary China, by Jiang Jiehong, reviewed by Mark Rappolt Ethical Portraits: In Search Of Representational Justice, by Hatty Nestor, reviewed by Philomena Epps Notes for the Future, Green Zeng: A Review 2010–2020, reviewed by Adeline Chia ps 102

page 88 Bunu Dhungana, from the series Confrontations, 2017, archival pigment print, 31 × 46 cm. © the artist

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GROWING LIKE A TREE

January 20 - December 10, 2021 Curated by Sohrab Hura

A3, Alserkal Avenue, Al Quoz 1, Dubai, UAE PO Box 181992 www.ishara.org | @isharaartfoundation | info@ishara.org

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17–20.06.2021

July 2021

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Art Previewed

Abdul Hamid’s uncle who became Sultan in 1861 15

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Lisa Yuskavage, Big Marie, 1993, oil on linen, 163 × 127 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

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Previewed 1 Curtain Para Site, Hong Kong Through 25 July

8 Mary Corse Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai 3 July – 5 September

2 Portals, Stories, and Other Journeys Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong Through 1 August

9 John M. Armleder Almine Rech, Shanghai 9 July – 14 August

3 Georges Mathieu K11 Musea, Hong Kong Through 4 July 4 The Real World David Zwirner, Hong Kong Through 31 July 5 After Nature: Part 1 3812 Gallery, Hong Kong Through 16 June 6 City on the Edge: Art and Shanghai at the Turn of the Millennium ucca Edge, Shanghai Through 11 July 7 Zaha Hadid Architects Modern Art Museum, Shanghai 26 June – 29 August

10 Yu Ji Centre Pompidou × West Bund, Shanghai Through 8 August Chisenhale Gallery, London Through 18 July 11 Hito Steyerl Centre Pompidou, Paris Through 5 July 12 current: Contemporary Art from Scotland ocat Shenzhen Through 22 August 13 Pio Abad and Frances Wadsworth Jones janeryanandwilliamsaunders.com 14 Wu Chi-Yu The Cube Project Space, Taipei Through 11 July

16 You & Me_ mmca Children’s Museum, Gwacheon Through 11 December 17 Humor Has It Nam June Paik Art Center, Gyeonggi-do Through 2 February 18 Nam June Paik sfmoma, San Francisco Through 3 October 19 Sam Gilliam Pace Seoul Through 10 July 20 Little ka × Little asjc Art Sonje Center, Seoul, and Kunsthal Aarhus Through November 21 Jina Park Kukje Gallery, Busan 22 Somewhere Between the Odd and the Ordinary 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa Through 26 September

15 Transgression throughout the Volatile World Asia Art Center (aac), Taipei Through 18 July

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Following hard(ish) on the heels of An Opera for Animals, which toured between the two institu1 tions during 2019, Curtain marks the second collaborative outing for Hong Kong not-forprofit Para Site and Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum. In keeping with the latter institution’s maximalist approach to curating group shows, the new offering features work by no less than 27 artists, all of which (we’re promised) refers in more or less oblique ways to ‘passages, frontiers, separations, connections, occupations, circulations, and localities’. Via, naturally, the banal reality of curtains. When ArtReview Asia grew up in London, everyone had curtains. Net and woollen ones. Because you could never be too careful. In a world full (as the local news kept announcing) of peeping Toms and flashers, curtains were both a defence for yourself and a protection for others. The ultimate sign of a caring society. When ArtReview Asia lived in

present and future, in this show, which features Vienna for a while, no one had curtains. Indeed, work by Xyza Cruz Bacani, Minouk Lim, Jacolby it was made to feel ashamed for installing a set in its bedroom and letting the whole street down. Satterwhite, Zhou Tao and others. A street full of people who would be constantly Those of you who do like to pry into other parading around naked in front of their winpeople’s affairs will want to make a beeline for 2 Tai Kwun Contemporary, where Portals, Stories, dows, because they had nothing of which to be ashamed. Unlike their dirty neighbour who and Other Journeys offers a glimpse ‘behind the clearly had something to hide. Curtains for the curtains’ and into the archives of the late Ha Bik Viennese were the ultimate sign of degeneracy Chuen and related research by Asia Art Archive. A Hong Kong-based self-taught sculptor and (or of people who didn’t have basements in printmaker, Ha kept records in the form of which to practice their degeneracy). That’s a negatives, contact sheets, photo albums, magacultural difference for you. A modest resistance zines, collages made up from the latter, books to the standardisation of globalisation. They on art and visual culture and various other changed their minds when Google Map cars ephemera, all organised and grouped in ways started to come by though. Technology – it fucks that might constitute an artwork in itself. As a things up. Expect some meditations on that way of demonstrating how archives can be used (technology for sure, fucking things up possibly) as well as assembled, four artists and a collective as well as on the concealed and exposed, the from around the world (Banu Cennetoğlu, public and the private, and the ways in which Kwan Sheung Chi, Lam Wing Sze, Raqs Media the digital is altering our relation to past,

2 Walid Raad, Untitled #79, 2020. Photo: Kwan Sheung Chi. Courtesy Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, and Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong

2 Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Summer Clouds, 2017, Kriska aluminium curtains, aluminium rail, powder-coated steel frames. Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin. Photo © Museum Haus Konstruktiv (Stefan Altenburger)

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1 Ho Sin Tung, Full Dark, No Stars, 2020, three-channel hd video (colour, looped). Courtesy the artist

3 Calligraphy Rhapsody – Georges Mathieu, 2021 (installation view, K11 Musea, Hong Kong)

Collective and Walid Raad) have been invited to create sets from the archive incorporating new commissions in dialogue with its contents. The whole, Tai Kwun claims, will reveal ‘complex narratives about Hong Kong’s art ecology of the last five decades, and reveal parts of Hong Kong’s cultural worlds that are not always visible’. A lesson, then, in the value of letting it all hang out. On that subject, ArtReview Asia will confess 3 that the work of Georges Mathieu is one of its guilty pleasures. ‘Why guilty?’ you shriek. ‘The man was a genius: he said so himself!’ After all, the Frenchman invented a new movement (Lyrical Abstraction – a European counterpoint to Abstract Expressionism), claimed to have invented the ‘drip’ technique before Jackson Pollock (you might be detecting a certain competitiveness with the newly powerful postwar American art scene here; that too is part of the charm of Mathieu, who was, politically

and unfashionably, a royalist), turned painting (albeit with a certain element of resurrected in general, and speed painting in particular into Orientalism to boot). To mark the twentieth a performance art (in 1956 he live-painted a anniversary of the artist’s birth, Hong Kong’s 12 × 4 metre canvas in 20 minutes, onstage before K11 Musea is staging a survey show, Calligraphy an audience at the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre in Rhapsody, that will provide a welcome reminder Paris), generally talked about himself in public of the fact that art can be fun. using the third-person, (almost) singlehandedly Still, you can’t just run off and live in a resurrected history painting and battle scenes fantasy world forever. Unless you’re a cosplay as a relevant late-twentieth-century genre and fanatic or Narendra Modi, in which case it seems was one of the inspirations cited in the first to be an entirely reasonable way of dealing with manifesto of Japan’s influential Gutai group. the world. And those of you wishing to reconOf course, if you look at Tate’s website, you nect with a version of reality will want to check may find repeated mentions of the fact that 4 out The Real World, a group exhibition at David Mathieu is ‘not fashionable’, but what do they Zwirner Hong Kong featuring paintings know? Now, in these troubled times, where sculptures and installations by Felix Gonzalezeverything surrounding art is inevitably politTorres, Raymond Pettibon, Jason Rhoades, ical, we need some artists who are entertainers. Diana Thater, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Lisa And Mathieu’s abstract riffs on East Asian Yuskavage. Rather than being a tribute to the calligraphy are nothing if not exuberant, 1990s mtv reality show (with which the exhibientertaining and self-consciously meaningless tion shares a name) in which a group of young

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adults move to a new city, share a home and are filmed 24/7 for our entertainment, the exhibition traces the ways in which artists attempted to reconnect art (specifically art in New York and Los Angeles) to reality during the same period, by incorporating nontraditional materials and subjects in their work in an attempt to forge links to the social realities of the time. Expect questions of identity, gender, sexuality, consumerism and rapid urbanisation to be at the fore, along with, courtesy of Tiravanija’s iconic untitled 1990 (pad thai) – the first in a series of works in which the artist served gallery visitors food – a healthy (and nourishing) dose of relational aesthetics. On the subject of relating, Hong Kong’s 3812 Gallery is celebrating its tenth anniversary (and a new gallery space in Wyndham Place) with a two-part exhibition (running from May to July) 5 titled After Nature and staging conversations

between a series of Chinese and British artists, each of whom explores the relationships between nature and abstraction. Part 1 places the work of Hong Kong-born architect and artist Raymond Fung Wing Kee alongside British Abstract Expressionist painter Albert Irvin and the Chinese abstractionist Li Lei in a juxtaposition that situates the landscapes of Hong Kong (Fung) alongside urban abstractions (Irvin) and mental landscapes (Li) in order to explore dialogues between Western and Eastern aesthetics and a range of conceptualisations of abstraction. The series as a whole seeks to pose questions about the relationship between humans and nature and the nature of artistic influence and dialogue at a time when international relations, because of both pandemics and politics, seem to be increasingly abstract concepts in their own right. But enough of looking backwards. What makes contemporary art contemporary is the 6

fact that it’s always on the move, desperately chasing the shifting edge condition or nonspace that separates the past from the future. And so it’s off to Shanghai, where ucca Edge, the latest outpost of the Beijing-headquartered ucca’s art empire, opens in the newly constructed 86m-high edge tower in the city’s throbbing Jing’an commercial district. Edge is the latest evolution in ucca’s strategic partnership with property developer (and ucca shareholder) K. Wah International Holdings Ltd and the clearest manifestation yet of its ambition to become a truly national art museum (cynics might say that its new outpost also marks the ongoing eclipse of Beijing by Shanghai as the centre of China’s artworld). The new institution occupies 5,500sqm across three levels of the commercial tower block and will open with a show curated by ucca ceo Phil Tinari titled City on the Edge: Art and Shanghai at the Turn

Diana Thater, The Caucus Race, 1998 (installation view, Patrick Painter, Santa Monica, 1999). Photo: Fredrik Nilsen. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

4 Raymond Pettibon, No Title (Oh! Does it…), 1990, pen and ink on paper, 44 × 29 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

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8 Mary Corse, Untitled (White, Black, Blue, Beveled), 2019, glass microspheres in acrylic on canvas, 198 cm × 594 cm × 10 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Kayne Griffin and Pace Gallery

of the Millennium, featuring a mix of work by Also new to Shanghai is Shai Baitel, the will not only ‘house a collection and present Chinese and international artists that seeks to incoming artistic director of the Modern Art fine art’ but become ‘a destination for culturally mark a ‘historic moment when China’s art world Museum (mam) Shanghai. Baitel is the coengaged audiences’. And there was ArtReview Asia founder of the Mana Contemporary cultural came to understand itself as part of a global thinking that it was possible to do both. centre in New Jersey and comes to Shanghai community’ – for better or for worse – at the Continuing to work the old-fashioned way promising a programme that ‘matches the turn of the millennium. It’s a moment that’s is the Long Museum West Bund, which this growing younger generation of museum visitors, 8 summer presents Mary Corse: Painting with Light, elegantly summed up by Huang Yong Ping’s which features 25 largescale works by the Gen Z and Generation Alpha’. The 2000s are old Bank of Sand, Sand of Bank (2000/2018), a 20-ton California-based artist who was associated with hat. A new outdoor sculpture park along the sandcastle (first shown at the 2000 Shanghai the Light and Space art movement during the Huangpu River is in the offing for later this year, Biennale) modelled on the British-designed 1960s and has gone on to pave a more individual together with a Night Museum that will activate colonial neoclassical architecture of the hsbc path. Her innovative use of light as a medium has the museum’s facade at night. Next up inside is Building on Shanghai’s Bund, at once a crumled her to pursue courses in quantum physics Close Up an exhibition of the work and research bling relic of a former colonial past and an 7 of the late Zaha Hadid and her eponymous and develop a method of painting featuring the equally fragile monument to the rapid urbanarchitectural firm, whose work, ranging from glass microspheres used to make road markings isation and shifting economic realities of more reflective. Alongside examples of the microthe Guangzhou Opera House to Beijing Daxing China’s millennial present. Also on show will sphere and acrylic works, the museum will International Airport has been gently reshaping be works by Lee Bul, Liang Yue, Ni Jun, Xu show the artist’s argon ‘light paintings’, which the face of contemporary urban China. Baitel Zhen, Yang Fudong, Yang Zhenzhong, Zhang are powered by Tesla coils (the use of which led it seems has similar designs on Shanghai’s Enli, Zhang Peili, Zhou Tiehai, He Yunchang, to Corse’s quantum physics studies), and six museum scene, promising an institution that Matthew Barney and William Kentridge.

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10 Yu Ji, Spontaneous Decisions ii, 2021 (installation and performance view, Centre Pompidou × West Bund, Shanghai)

11 Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .mov File (still), 2013, single-channel hd video installation, colour, sound, 15 min 52 sec. Courtesy the artist

new canvases in her ongoing ‘White Light Inner Band’ series. Swiss artist John M. Armleder has resisted 9 association with any particular manifesto or movement but has been at the forefront of European art for over half a century. He cofounded the Ecart group in 1969 (notable for its performances and publications), was close to Fluxus, flirted with Neo-Geo, crossed disciplines with his Furniture Sculptures and generally deconstructed conventional notions of hierarchies and equivalences with work that spans painting, sculpture, scenography and performance, and, as a whole, resists easy classification. You can have a go though at a new show at Almine Rech Shanghai this July. Similarly diverse in terms of media is the 10 work of Yu Ji. Born in Shanghai and now living between her hometown and curtainless Vienna, her work has focused on the fabrication of place, the relationship between the body and urban and rural sites, and the ability of the latter two

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a form of ‘living sculpture’, animated by plantto carry geographical and historical narratives. infused water, perhaps a stand-in for the artists At Centre Pompidou x West Bund in Shanghai, collaborating on the show in Shanghai, pumped the artist is staging the latest in a series of perthrough the gallery space to effect a material formances titled Spontaneous Decisions ii, origitransformation and altered sense of place. nally initiated in 2016 at Beijing Commune and Back at the Pompidou’s Paris hq , there’s continued at am Art Space (which she cofounded a largescale survey show of work by hugely in Shanghai in 2008). In its current iteration, the 11 influential German artist Hito Steyerl. Spanartist has set up a semi-open workshop within ning her career to date, the exhibition will the space of the museum as a means of exposing feature works ranging from her early docuthe decision-making process of artistic creation. mentary films of the 1990s through to her During the course of the show the artist will be latest experiments with augmented reality joined by electronic musician Yan Jun, stage and computer simulations. Prepare for Steyerl’s artist Wu Meng and videographer Chen Zhou, darkly humorous takes on the effects of neolibwho will each seek to activate the space in their eralism and deregulated financial flows, ‘poor own ways. Meanwhile, Wasted Mud, a project images’ and recycled imagery of the internet, developed during a prelockdown residency at surveillance culture, screen culture, self-help London’s Delfina Foundation and delayed by the culture and the use and abuse of big data, all in covid-19 lockdowns, opens in the uk capital’s an attempt to open audience’s eyes to the place Chisenhale Gallery. Informed by research into they really occupy within the often invisible London’s water systems and built from debris global systems of power and control. But don’t collected from local construction sites and oblose heart, the show is titled I Will Survive. jects from her studio in Shanghai, the work is

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Back in China, museums continue to be centres for international discourse. Staged in collaboration with the Cooper Gallery at the University of Dundee in Scotland, ocat Shenzhen is hosting the fourth phase of 12 current: Contemporary Art from Scotland (the previous iterations took place in Beijing, Shanghai and Wuhan). Now, normally ArtReview Asia is not the biggest fan of these kinds of government-sponsored get-togethers (current is supported by the British Council, which in turn is aligned with the uk Foreign Office, and is the result of a research trip funded by Creative Scotland), mainly because (and this is not entirely the product of watching too many Hito Steyerl videos) it can sometimes be hard to work out who’s really pulling the strings. Nevertheless, it’s prepared to make an exception for this show, which features two exhibitions, one by Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer (artists with established solo

careers who also make collaborative work as The message though continues to be that a duo), the other by Corin Sworn. Nashashibi/ we should reclaim our sense and reach out Skaer’s exhibition, titled Chimera, features to experience the world as it is, rather than three films linked by their examination of the how we are told it should be. A welcome exit amorphous, protean nature of the contempofor those who have experienced lockdowns. rary: Our Magnolia (2009), which takes inspiraFor those of you who’ve got used to seeing tion from a 1940 painting by Britain’s official art via a screen, London-based Filipino artist war artist during the First and Second World 13 Pio Abad and jewellery designer Frances Wars, Paul Nash, and fuses natural and political Wadsworth Jones have launched the latest imagery through to the end of the century; iteration of Abad’s ongoing project The Collection Lamb (2019) examines the wild and the farmed; of Jane Ryan & William Saunders (2014–), which while a new work, Bear (2021), acts as a sequel examines the ways that objects associated with to Lamb and features a soundtrack created in the deposed Philippine dictator Ferdinand collaboration with Cantonese Opera singer Marcos have shaped the cultural and political Zhuo Peili. Bear is also the reference for a legacy of the nation, as a digital artwork, collaborative woodblock print developed accessible online and via an app. The current with Xu Zhiwei. Sworn’s exhibition, Variations project relates to a collection of 413 pieces of of Assembly, includes a new video installation, jewellery (valued at us$21 million) expatriated Habits of Assembly ii (2021), that seeks to un(along with numerous other items of value) pick the claims of virtuousness and efficiency by Marcos and his wife, Imelda, when they in contemporary industrial processes. fled their homeland from Hawaii in 1986

13 The Collection of Jane Ryan & William Saunders, 2014 (detail). Courtesy Pio Abad & Frances Wadsworth Jones

13 The Collection of Jane Ryan & William Saunders, 2014– (detail). Courtesy Pio Abad & Frances Wadsworth Jones

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(Jane Ryan and William Saunders were the false names under which the couple registered a Swiss bank account that year), having been granted safe passage by the us government. Confiscated by us customs and repatriated to the Philippines, the jewellery had been stored in a bank vault and was being prepared to go to auction in 2016, shortly before current president Rodrigo Duterte came to power, at which time the plans were cancelled. Ferdinand Marcos’s corpse was reinterred in the National Heroes’ Cemetery and the jewellery has not been seen since. Wadsworth Jones have recreated each piece of jewellery as a digital sculpture (reconstructed and perhaps even reimagined from the available information in the cancelled auction catalogue), and the app enables you to place a part of the collection in any space you turn your phone camera

towards, allowing you to imagine a form of restitution and justice, even if the real version of that might, for the time being, seem like something of a fantasy. Something similar lies behind the latest 14 work of Wu Chi-Yu, whose exhibition at The Cube Project Space in Taipei is founded on scenario planning, a method originally developed by military intelligence and now used to structure the long-term planning of corporations that explores the complex ways in which quantifiable information (demographic, geographic, industrial and resourcebased, for example) will interact in a given future scenario. And then looks at how they might be manipulated in order to manufacture a desired outcome. Wu’s Atlas of the Closed Worlds draws on evolutionary biology and Foster’s rule, which measures how

members of a species change in average size according to the resources available in their environment (particularly in closed environments such as islands). Deploying everything from historical facts to science fiction, isolationist policies, first-contact scenarios and, of course, quarantine measures, Wu sets up a scenario in which an alien visitor measures the future fate of our divided world, presumably as a means of highlighting how we might avoid it. The resultant installation maps out the research in a giant wall chart that reexamines the relationship between humanity, the environment and history. Breaking boundaries is the central theme 15 of the group exhibition Transgression throughout the Volatile World, which launches the aac’s new flagship space in Taipei. The show, divided into four chapters – Diaspora

15 Walasse Ting, Very Shy, 1983, acrylic on canvas, 153 × 204 cm. Courtesy the artist and Asia Art Center, Taipei

15 Crystal Lupa, Violet Garden, 2020, acrylic and gold foil on canvas, 120 × 120 cm.Courtesy the artist and Asia Art Center, Taipei

15 Adam Parker Smith, Rock Hard in a Funky Place, 2021, resin, steel, urethane, jute, 43 × 21 × 56 cm.Courtesy the artist and Asia Art Center, Taipei

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16 You & Me_, 2021 (installation view, mmca Gwacheon Children’s Museum)

18 Nam June Paik, Merce / Digital, 1988, single-channel video sculpture with vintage tv cabinets and 15 monitors, 231 × 201 × 43 cm. Collection Roselyne Chroman Swig, San Francisco. © Estate of Nam June Paik

17 Takehisa Kosugi, South No. 2 (to Nam June Paik), 1964, print on paper, 5 × 8 cm. Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center, Vilnius

Artists, Post-War Asia, The Spirit of the East, Global Contemporary Art – aims at locating contemporary art as an active rather than reactive shaper of the contemporary moment, highlighting its ability to shed light on the overlooked, propose alternative ways of being and transcend the harsher realities of the present. ‘About time!’ you shriek. Spanning almost a century of creativity, it includes work by Li Chen, Foujita Tsuguharu, Chu Teh-Chun, Zao Wou-ki and Walasse Ting, among many others. Part of the fun, of course, lies in seeing how the transgressions of the past have become the norms of the present. Talking of which, at the time of writing (literally), the exhibition’s opening has been postponed due to covid-19 restrictions in Taipei. Hopefully that will have changed by the time you read this.

Over in Korea, at the mmca Gwacheon’s After all the seriousness of that educating, newly expanded Children’s Museum (that means you’ll need a break. And perhaps a laugh. it’s family oriented, with nursing and reading So, with a short trip from the Korean capital, rooms), it’s the fate of the very young during the it’s onwards and upwards (well, a little southcovid-19 pandemic that’s been on director Youn 17 wards) to Humor Has It at the Nam June Paik Bummo’s mind. The renovated centre’s inauguArt Center in Yongin and an exhibition that 16 ral show, You & Me__, is an interactive exhibition promises to reveal how ‘gestures of objection, that’s shamelessly aimed at reenforcing ideas mockery, irony, liberation or destruction can be of selfhood and community in children (everyan effective means of cracking the status quo’. one knows you gotta snag ’em while they’re The exhibition focuses on the artist the centre young and innocent): with sections titled was named for and the experimental Fluxus Finding Myself, You & Me Together and Look group (which flourished during the 1960s and Around: Living Together. Works by eight artists 70s) of which he was a part. Artists whose work – from Andy Warhol to Choi Hochul – provide is on show include the usual suspects, among the lessons. For adults, though, the show will them Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Robert Filliou, be interesting for its clear demonstration of the Takehisa Kosugi, George Maciunas, Jonas ways in which art can be used and instrumenMekas, Yoko Ono, Mieko Shiomi, Karlheinz talised. Because, let’s face it, it’s not like this Stockhausen, Daniel Spoerri, Ben Vautier and doesn’t happen in shows for grownups too. La Monte Young. Right now you probably

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19 Sam Gilliam, Spin and Splash, 2021, acrylic on canvas, bevel-edge, 183 × 183 × 10 cm. © the artist / Artists Rights Society (ars), New York

20 Lea Guldditte Hestelund, Carrier Series (Headpieces), 2013–21, leather, hag stone, leather cord, silk cord, silver earring. Courtesy the artist, Kunsthal Aarhus and Art Sonje Center, Seoul

need a reminder that humour can be a force for change. For those of you who want more, and can get to the other side of the planet. Nam 18 June Paik’s monumental (more than 200 works) and inspiring (for his pioneering work in video art and collaborative approach to artmaking) touring retrospective touches down in San Francisco at sfmoma for the summer. This is one you will regret missing. But we can’t be everywhere, particularly not now and particularly not if we want to reduce our carbon footprints. So let’s stay in Korea 19 a little longer, where Sam Gilliam has a solo exhibition inaugurating Pace’s new gallery space in Seoul (if you’re in Hong Kong rather than the rok, don’t panic, you can wait for the show to come to you in July) featuring nine new

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paintings. The Washington, DC-based artist, who was associated with the Color School group during the 1950s and 60s and was the first African-American artist to represent the us at the Venice Biennale (in 1972), has long explored abstraction in innovative ways: most famously by liberating the painted surface from its wrack and hanging unstitched, draped paintings from gallery ceilings and walls; by producing 20 geometric collages painted in various shades of black; and latterly by continuing to explore the extension of painting into three dimensional space via layered surfaces of pigment mixed with detritus from the octogenarian’s studio floor that are then ‘excavated’ and dug into in order to reveal the levels of colour buried underneath. Gilliam is due to have

his first us museum retrospective in 15 years at Washington’s Hirshhorn Museum in 2022, so consider this a sneak preview of things to come. On the subject of both innovation and collaboration, look out too for a new venture by Seoul’s Art Sonje Center and the Kunsthal Aarhus in Sweden. Through to November (early December in the case of Aarhus), each institution is borrowing a space from the other to set up a micromuseum – Little asjc in Aarhus and Little ka in Seoul – as a way of introducing new artists to new territories despite the general immobility induced by the current pandemic. Over in Aarhus, Little asjc is showing Kim Jeong A through to 20 June, followed by Don Dupil, Yeesookyung, Lee Young-jun and Song Min Jung. Meanwhile, Seoul has Olga

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Benedicte through 11 July, followed by a group the apparently mundane seem performative, show featuring Camille Henrot, Elmgreen leaving viewers feeling at once invisible and & Dragset, Mike Nelson, Simon Starling, observed. And very gently unsettled after a superflex, Thomas Hirschhorn and a someyear or so spent watching life unfold onscreen. what improbable sounding 47 other artists, So those of you feeling a little too comfortable with two more loaded group exhibitions with yourselves will want to visit Park’s first to follow. The best things, it seems, really solo show at Kukje Gallery’s Busan space. do come in small packages. Those types of sensation are further Seoul-based Jina Park paints what appear explored at the Museum of Contemporary 21 to be snapshots of everyday scenes: people Art, Kanazawa, in an exhibition titled watching planes come and go from an airport 22 Somewhere Between the Odd and the Ordinary, terminal; people rigging overhead lighting; which features work by 11 Japanese artists that photoshoots around new cars; people climbing explores everyday routines in the context of stairs; people installing exhibitions; or people the anxieties of our times. Koyamada Toru in hazmat suits in Fukushima. Each of them and Koyamada Kazuki (father and daughter), appears to have been captured from a distance, for example, explore ideas of division and through a voyeur’s long lens. And yet they segregation in the form of a ‘homemade’ are also constructed in such a way as to make bento box (Daddy Bento, 2017) in which

various foodstuffs have been arranged in a form of bricolage, so as to provide and transgress boundaries within a lunch packed into a plastic tub; while Iwasaki Takahiro combines a landscape of striped towels with what look like slender, 3D-printed funfair attractions; Komori Haruka and Seo Natsumi use video to document the thoughts and voices of young people ‘after the quake and before the Olympics’ and ‘during the pandemic’ (The Visible World Shrank, 2020); Shitamichi Motoyuki’s Mother’s Covers (2016) is a photographic series documenting the various items his mother-in-law appropriated to act as lids for cooking or serving vessels. The whole, then, aims at expressing the potential of a seemingly ordinary creativity in a time of radical uncertainty. Which is one of the things that we look to art to do. Nirmala Devi

21 Jina Park, Happy New night 01, 2019, oil on linen, 118 × 156 cm. Courtesy the artist and Kukje Gallery, Seoul

22 Iwasaki Takahiro, Out of Disorder (tagasode), 2021. Photo: Koroda Takeru. Courtesy 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa

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Points of View

Tamil Nadu held its Legislative Assembly elections on 6 April. An election in India is the rendering of a verdict by a tired electorate. The people of Tamil Nadu are pitiful because they do not have a third choice: just Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (dmk) and All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (aiadmk). If one is in power, people vote for the other at the next election. Generally, any election in India is a wholesale farce, much like leasing a car. ‘Your time to loot is over. Now we want to give the opposition party its chance.’ Given that this charade has been the trend for several years now, the people of Tamil Nadu had no reason to be surprised by the election results, which were declared on 2 May. They were as predicted: the aiadmk had been in power for two terms; now it’s the dmk’s turn. In the hierarchy of the Legislative Assembly, the chief minister is at the top, followed by cabinet ministers, members of the Legislative Assembly (mlas) and finally the councillors. A councillor’s primary role is to represent their ward or division and the people who live in it. Councillors provide a bridge between the community and the council. Residents might

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notes from madras It’s election season for Tamil Nadu’s actor-politicians. Charu Nivedita looks on with fear and loathing

Indian actor Vijay cycles to cast his vote at a polling station in Neelankarai, Chennai, on 6 April 2021

expect a councillor to respond to their queries and investigate their concerns. But the reality is somewhat different. And not that pleasing. If I buy an apartment, for example, I must bribe the councillor a hefty 25,000 rupees for a kitchen. (Normally Indian houses have one kitchen but three or four toilets/bathrooms, so out of charity to the common public, they don’t calculate the bribe by number of toilets but on the basis of the kitchen. Any alteration to a kitchen, however, requires an additional payment.) By the way, no one calls it a bribe in India; it’s a ‘commission’. If I question the act, I had better be prepared for stones to be hurled at my house and for my car or two-wheeler to be torched. Going by the math and the number of apartments in the average ward, the so-called commission would add up to millions. But this is peanuts. At a larger scale, a 100-crore construction project generally allows a councillor to exact a 1 percent fee from the builder. Refusal to pay means the councillor’s hoodlums will ensure that construction never actually gets underway. My friend owned a medical imaging centre in a remote part of the town. A patient who had her scans done at the centre later passed away in

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hospital as a result of poor health. The deceased woman’s husband was friendly with the local councillor. The councillor held a peaceful protest – let’s not forget that we are in the land of Gandhi – in front of the scan centre by shouting slogans: a public shaming in broad daylight, as if the imaging centre, in delivering bad news, was responsible for the patient’s death. If the protest leader (in his role as the councillor) is required to intervene and defuse the situation, 25 lakhs will change hands. The deceased patient’s spouse gets five lakhs; our honourable councillor ‘Annae’ (‘big brother’ in Tamil) pockets the remaining 20. Fifty years ago, a councillor was modest, wore an ordinary dhoti and rode a rundown bicycle. Today, a councillor travels like a Moghul sultan in a lavish display of Scorpio motorcars. Police don’t stop Scorpios; they know who’s inside them. Let us not even picture an mla’s or a minister’s show of power, given their higher positions in the hierarchy. How can I decide who to cast my vote for if my choices are a devil and a Dracula? At sixtyeight, I have not voted in any elections to date. I have never disclosed this to anyone within my home state of Tamil Nadu; everyone would denounce me as socially irresponsible. With only 72 percent voter turnout in the recent elections, such revelations by a writer can lead to government harassment – representatives will file court cases saying that we writers are encouraging people not to vote, which is against the constitution and hence antinational. Branding someone as antinational is very easy in India. But in this magazine, writing in English, I can say what I want – no one cares. Do you know who has a more compelling influence on the people of Tamil Nadu than politicians? Tamil movie stars. I have previously written about this pitiful state. I am at liberty to criticise anyone in Tamil Nadu but the movie stars. Considering their status, if I write anything against them, I will be subjected to people’s wrath, cursed and possibly beaten when I step out of my house. Banking on his stardom and iconic status, Kamal Haasan (aka ‘Ulaganayagan’ – which roughly translates as ‘Universal Hero’) formed a party and contested the just concluded elections. The sixty-sixyear-old thespian has been an onscreen hero for close to 50 years. A movie hero in Tamil Nadu commands a cult status and the lifestyle of Emperor Akbar. Of course, Akbar had 3,000 wives, which is not possible now. Nevertheless,

a subject must hold his hand in front of his mouth, palm almost touching his lips, fingers covering his nostrils, while speaking to the emperor. When ordered to leave, he must walk backwards out of the room. Subjects must not wear sandals in front of the emperor; forget interrupting, they mustn’t even open their mouths when the emperor is talking. What can an actor who has led a life larger than Akbar’s for almost 50 years know about the actuality of the Tamil community? While a big-time star demands a 100-crore fee per movie, a sanitation worker’s monthly salary is a paltry 7,000 rupees. It is amusing to watch someone talking to a movie star – kowtowing and covering their mouth with their palm in an utterly subservient manner. If the star happens to be Kamal Haasan, one cannot open his or her mouth until he has finished talking, even if that would mean four hours of waiting. His superfans prostrate themselves in front of him as if revering him from head to toe, and others bend to touch his feet. But what befell him when he debated in a public forum with Minister Smriti Irani of the bjp is another matter. New Delhi-born Smriti Irani (herself a former model and tv actress, but also from a family with a longstanding involvement in politics) went hammer and tongs after Kamal Haasan, which left him speechless despite a high

A member of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam holds a pendant with the image of the party’s longtime, now-deceased, leader, Jayalalithaa Jayaram, while awaiting results of the Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly election, Chennai, 2 May 2021. Photo: Arun Sankar /afp / Getty Images

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fluency in English. The reason was simple. While Kamal Haasan was talking for the past 47 years, his movie directors, costars, technicians and friends beguiled him with their sycophancy. The debate proved that actors are a failure in candid discussions. (Although Haasan might have been rendered speechless by the fact that no one fell at his feet!) Smriti Irani gave an effective rebuttal to his queries and posed pointed questions, for which he was at a complete loss for words. The moderator urged Kamal Haasan to talk, but nothing happened. Vijayakanth (aka ‘Captain’ – Tamil actors often adopt the personas of popular characters they portray onscreen), another reel hero, met with the same fate some time back. Having played roles that upheld righteousness and challenged wrongdoers, he would singlehandedly destroy a villain’s fort or fight the entire Pakistan army onscreen. An innocent commoner might similarly believe that he could rescue the Tamil community. So a party like the dmk, with a solid political foundation in Tamil Nadu, was pushed aside in favour of Vijayakanth’s, which now assumed the role of opposition party in the Legislative Assembly. But lo and behold, he made a mockery of himself and the people of Tamil Nadu by boycotting the Assembly’s proceedings. First elected to the regional assembly in 2006, he had lost both his seat and his deposit within a decade. In a movie, a stunt performer covers for the hero in hazardous scenes; a dialogue writer comes up with the punchlines; and above all, a director controls the actor’s every move. But in real life there are no such buffers. As pathetic as it was to see a reel hero turn into a real comedian and get sidelined, we thought it was going to be Kamal Haasan’s turn next. Instead he lost the election, and we lost the entertainment of witnessing his histrionics in the Assembly. An unusual video circulating on social media on election day demonstrated Tamil Nadu’s weird character. Present-day movie hero Vijay (aka ‘Dalapathi’ – ‘Commander-in-Chief’) cycled 500m to the nearest polling booth to cast his vote. It would be best if you watched this once-in-a-lifetime video yourself. If you can’t or won’t, imagine how it would be if God descended to earth and rode through town on a bicycle. There were

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motorbikes on either side of him and another hundred behind. Anticipating his arrival at the polling station, police were on hand to hold back the hordes of fans and reporters so that he could inch his way through. Already I can hear the chirp of a wall lizard in my ears: “This is the next Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu”. The scariest front in Tamil Nadu politics is the entry of movie director Seeman. Unlike other political parties, his Naam Tamilar Katchi is founded on principles rooted in racism and fundamentalism. He is Hitler, Pol Pot and Mao Tse Tung, all schemed into one. He could not make it big in movies, but he has gained popularity among the less educated, the unemployed and rural youth. That only a hardcore Tamilian should be allowed to rule Tamil Nadu, that educational institutions must close and that people should return to an agrarian existence are just some of his demands. Recently he even spoke out in protest of covid-19 vaccines. When Hitler delivered his demagogic, deranged speeches, it would appear as if the microphone bent in submission. Chaplin made a joke of this in one of his movies. I get a similar feeling when I watch Seeman. He may not yet have a seat in the Assembly, but his words kindle rage among the youth. It makes me anxious about the future of Tamil Nadu. Translated from the Tamil by Srividhya Subash

Seeman, chief coordinator of Tamil nationalist party Naam Tamilar Katchi, giving a speech in the runup to the 2019 Indian General Election

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Grand Palais éphémère CHAMP DE MARS - PARIS 11-14 NOV 2021 & ONLINE VIEWING ROOM

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Richard Fung’s work is positioned at the intersection of plural identities, reflecting on the artist’s roots, his sexuality and the Asian diaspora. Fung’s videos eschew immediate categorisation by virtue of their cultural mobility and interest in offering a composite reading of social politics and personal histories through an unpretentious approach to storytelling. In the wake of anti-Asian racism, which has flared up critically in the West during the covid-19 pandemic, Fung’s work acquires greater relevance for the way it validates Asian lives, specifically those of the most vulnerable due to their gender, sexuality and class. Recently Fung’s videos have been circulating on both sides of the Atlantic, featuring in independent distributor Sentient Art Film’s online festival My Sight is Lined with Visions, lux’s virtual exhibition Picturing a Pandemic and the programme of Scotland’s Alchemy Film and Arts festival (held online this year, at the end of April). Fung, born in 1954 in Trinidad and Tobago, when the island was still a British colony, is of Hakka Chinese descent, a heritage he explores in videos like The Way to My Father’s Village (1988), in which Fung recounts his father’s journey from Guangdong to the West Indies in the late 1920s, and My Mother’s Place (1990), a portrait of the artist’s mother, a third-generation ChineseTrinidadian. After completing his secondary education, Fung moved to Toronto to attend university and eventually became a video artist, writer and professor at the Ontario College of Art & Design University, in Toronto. In 1980 he founded Gay Asians of Toronto, the first Canadian organisation to advocate on behalf of lgbt people of colour. A few years later he worked on his first video, Orientations (1984), a documentary about the lived experiences of 14 lesbians and gay men at a time when, in Canada, a nonconforming sexual orientation could cost someone both their housing and their employment. The video was initially conceived as a tool to circulate locally to increase awareness of the struggles of the Asian queer community in Toronto, but it was picked up for distribution and programmed at the Grierson and Flaherty seminars, both important forums for independent filmmakers. Relying heavily on talking-head interviews, Orientations actively

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asian characters Richard Fung’s unmannered and deeply personal videos relating to being a gay Asian man in Toronto during the 1980s are finding new audiences. Ren Scateni considers why

situates Asian gays and lesbians within the broader – and predominantly white – Canadian queer scene, challenging stereotypes and overt racial discrimination by sharing multiple testimonies of the subjects’ relationships with their workplaces, unions and communities. The video’s lowkey editing and synth tunes accentuate its overall conversational and educational tone, especially in scenes in which the interviewees remember their comingout and their first contact with solidarity groups, before veering towards the more militant notes of a short section dedicated to the 1984 Toronto Gay Pride parade. With Orientations, Fung also acknowledges the absence of queer Asian men in queer media, paving the way for his critical exploration of gay pornography, both visually, with Chinese Characters (1986), and in writing, with the essays ‘Looking for My Penis’, published in How Do I Look? (1991), and ‘Shortcomings: Questions About Pornography as Pedagogy’, in Queer Looks (1993). Chinese Characters, Fung’s second video, testifies to the artist’s protean directing abilities as well as his curiosity about making meaningful use of the filmic medium. Inspired by the work of Isaac Julien, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Chantal Akerman, Fung gives Chinese Characters a fresh, experimental edge, mixing fictionalised interviews with appropriated extracts from gay porn videos as well as a brief personal testimony. While commenting on his Chinese heritage, Fung reminiscences about a book of Chinese fairytales a friend of his father gave him. During the artist’s childhood, China remained geographically and culturally distant, despite the stories and the proverbs Fung’s parents passed on. Hence, the fairytale book acts as a bridge to an idealised culture much different, as Fung would learn years later, from the unadorned reality of a diasporic existence. And yet, the ancient tale of an explorer who discovers that the source of the Yellow River is in the Milky Way kept living in Fung’s memory and eventually became the narrative frame of Chinese Characters, enabling the personal and the political to collide. This parenthetical section gives way to the video’s coda, in which we witness Fung’s mythopoeic power. Since the Asian male queer

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above and facing page Chinese Characters (stills), dir Richard Fung, 1986

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Sea in the Blood (still), dir Richard Fung, 2000

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body is denied an equal place in white gay porn, a new Asian gay epos must be created, one that liberates the Asian man from a subaltern passive role. Carried by funky notes and accompanied by shots of a sunny park, the narrator tells a tale of throbbing desire on an aeroplane. The scene is only sketched, but the characters’ names – Lee and Leung – gesture at a new reality in which Asian homosexuality is not silenced but celebrated. Similarly, a fictional gay romance between two men of Chinese descent propels the narration in Dirty Laundry (1996), a tape set on unearthing the narratives of immigrant Chinese workers who reached Canada during the nineteenth century. Through a stimulating script enriched with archival materials and interviews, the video gives visibility to the queer identities of those labourers society brushed off as ‘bachelors’. From here a new trajectory can be identified in Fung’s videos. “After I did Chinese Characters, I found my work was being programmed and I was written about as a gay hyphen Asian hyphen video artist. So I began to feel like I don’t want to be trapped,” Fung tells me during a meeting on Zoom. At the same time, an urge to investigate his own roots seems to be predominant in Fung’s following work. “I began to look at my family because I wanted to use my own story

as a way of understanding a larger truth,” he offers, an approach that Cuban-American critic José E. Muñoz described as ‘auto-ethnography’. Two examples are The Way to My Father’s Village and My Mother’s Place, a couple of incisive, experimental documentaries that take Trinidad and Tobago as a jump-off point to look into divergent stories of immigration that intersect with race, gender and class while navigating the legacy of colonialism and the traps of memory. Near the end of My Mother’s Place, Fung comments on the role his mother has in helping the artist reposition his own identity within a multitude of cultures, and in being the treasurer of an otherwise unknowable past. A similar function is entrusted to Fung’s mother in another tape, Sea in the Blood (2000), perhaps the most autobiographical of all his works. In it, Fung interweaves the familial tensions that surfaced because of his homosexuality with the tragic account of his sister Nan’s illness and death. Sea in the Blood chronicles the trip from Europe to India that Fung and his life partner, Tim McCaskell, took together during the late 70s, which crucially coincided with Nan’s death. The confessional tone of the video is magnified by its bigger scope of embracing in Islands (still), dir Richard Fung, 2002

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its narrative the overarching colonial dynamics and the political changes through brief references to Trinidad and Tobago’s declaration of independence in 1962 and the Black Power Revolution (1968–70). Also included is a poignant reference to McCaskell’s aids diagnosis, creating an ulterior link to an early tape, Fighting Chance (1990) – itself a continuation of the work initiated with Orientations – in which four Asian gay men openly discuss aids. The video’s political and social importance is unquestionable, as it recentres the discourse around the virus and breaks the wall of silence around the transmissibility of aids among the Asian queer community. Gluing together Richard Fung’s filmmaking is his relentless drive to question his own methods and motifs, resulting in an undogmatic approach to both film and its finality. “I’m very committed to understanding media and how the media image works,” Fung says, “but then there are certain things with particular urgency to them where I feel that I want to have people not get tripped up by experimentation and the medium.” Questions of race, queerness, colonialism and justice hence become the reference points of a career that spans three decades and counting, in which individual stories serve as a compass for navigating macropolitical forces.

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A year and some months ago covid-19 changed every accepted notion of the world. The fixed idea of ‘home’ that so many of us pursued was revealed to be a series of thin layers that seemed to collapse one upon the other, like a scene from the mind-bending movie Inception (2010). Home, if we still had one, became an all-encompassing site that housed office, studio, school, sometimes hospital, entertainment venue and much else. For the peripatetic among us, home perhaps has only ever been an idea; the notion of it being either permanent or a physical site is just a vague, distant desire. It is a sentiment Zarina, the New York-based modern/minimalist/abstract artist of Indian origin who professionally went by only her first name, understood all too well.

permanent exile When home is where you’re not – Deepa Bhasthi looks at the life and work of Zarina through a lockdown lens

Zarina, Home is a Foreign Place, 1999, portfolio of 36 woodcuts with Urdu text printed in black on Kozo paper and mounted on Somerset paper, 41 × 33 cm each sheet. Photo: Lamay. © the artist’s estate. Courtesy the artist’s estate and Luhring Augustine, New York

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The artist, who spent nearly her whole career trying to navigate and reconcile with her search for the idea of home, passed away a year ago, in the spring of 2020. ‘Home’ was a theme she frequently explored in her woodcuts, sculptures, drawings that often used geometrical elements, and even in her writings, which were inspired by Urdu poetry. On a personal note, it has been nearly a year too since my partner and I moved from a city to a small town in the mountains of South India where I was born and raised (not driven out by the pandemic but influenced by it to advance plans that were already in motion). So for us, home is and, for the next few months, until our own house is built, will continue to be a contentious liminal space. But naturally, these two anniversaries have for me extended further to encompass all that happened this past year when the pandemic necessitated an overhaul of home, its meanings and associations for the self and those with whom we share that space. Zarina’s was a generation that saw much internal displacement and migration after India’s Independence, in 1947. She mined the trajectory of her personal life to make her art, opening hers and her birth country’s traumatic history to global scrutiny. ‘I do not feel at home anywhere, but the idea of home follows me wherever I go,’ she once wrote. Having spent her formative and university years (she studied mathematics) in Aligarh, a university town in northern India, she was thrown into a repeated cycle of homemaking in many cities of the world following her marriage to a diplomat. Even after the latter’s early death, and having set up studio in New York, she travelled the world in the name of her art. At the same time, the Partition of India, a cartographical exercise undertaken by the departing colonial power that broke land, history, families and the country into two, saw her family eventually move to Pakistan. By then, she had embarked on her travels too, and a rift opened up between the people and the land that she identified as home. A transient artist with access to multiple national identities before such terms were fashionable, Zarina identified as an exile. Her search for that one home with a capital H inspired her best-known works. Homes I Made, a Life in Nine Lines (1997) were architectural drawings of the various houses she lived in; Cities I Called Home (2010), woodcut prints of places her husband’s diplomatic career had taken them. While Letters from Home (2004) were prints of letters from her sister Rani, whose person Zarina identified as home, her birth town featured often in works, such as My Dark House at Aligarh (2017). Her celebrated

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Home is a Foreign Place (1999), an expansive exploration of various aspects of home through a combination of text and image, a style to which she often returned, was made during a time she was facing eviction from her New York apartment. It is perhaps in the work Dividing Line (2001), though, referring to the Radcliffe Line that violently carved Pakistan from India, that Zarina most poignantly embodies that oft-repeated phrase ‘one can never go home again’. Pushing the metaphors for home further, Zarina extensively used her mother tongue, Urdu – “My work is about writing,” she once said – with calligraphic and Islamic elements to tell her stories. Paper, a medium she famously likened to skin for its ability to age, stain and keep secrets, is fragile. Yet writings on paper retain a sense of intimacy and can last for centuries. These notions of impermanence, distances from people, geographical locations, her language and the resilience needed to accept the fragility of belonging were the layers in the idea of home she regularly sought. Home for her was a shifting entity, always just out of her grasp. While minimal in their execution, and thus open to multiple meanings, her works on paper and sculptures, mostly made with cast paper, are rich in associations. One of the few women modern artists in the roster of celebrated Indian artists such as M.F. Husain, V. S. Gaitonde and Tyeb Mehta, Zarina might not have found a permanent ‘home’, but through her use of Indian paper as a frequent medium and motifs that resonated with American minimalism and elements of European modernism, she was able to bridge elements of the many continents in which she lived and made work. One way to view Zarina’s works is to read them as the memoir she intended them to be – following a trajectory of early life in India, travels around the world, family strewn across the border in Pakistan, which wasn’t easily accessible, active participation in feminist movements in Europe and the us, and the involuntary wanderings of an exile who never felt at home anywhere. Her treatment of the idea of home is the story of global migration, events that can never be completely devoid of the trauma of leaving locations and people behind. As of writing, most states in India are under various stages of lockdown, even as hundreds, and possibly many, many more, are dying for lack of medical oxygen and medicine. The wearing of double masks, even while home alone in larger cities, is being recommended. There is a vaccine apartheid thanks to the discriminatory policies of rich nations,

Zarina, Home is a Foreign Place, 1999 (detail), portfolio of 36 woodcuts with Urdu text printed in black on Kozo paper and mounted on Somerset paper, 41 × 33 cm each sheet. Photo: Lamay. © the artist’s estate. Courtesy the artist’s estate and Luhring Augustine, New York

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corruption in the equitable distribution of doses among Indian states and the spectacular failure of the Modi-led government in managing the pandemic’s second wave. A third wave, perhaps a fourth too, are said to be imminent, and it is likely that stay-home will remain a directive for a long time to come. But revisiting Zarina’s subtle and quietly devastating works can be anchoring to anyone cast adrift by this abnormal life; indeed, they offer instruction in the ways in which the idea of home can encompass many overlapping and sometimes contradictory sensations – how homes can be sites of belonging, permanency, fragility, refuge, temporariness and trauma, all at once.

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Subject Object Verb Series 2 Episode 3 Listen Now Ross Simonini with Pat Metheny artreview.com/podcasts

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Art Featured

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Zehra Doğan by Sarah Jilani

Tutsaklığımın dansı (The dance of my captivity), 2018, turmeric, pomegranate juice, coffee, cigarette ash, lipstick, drawing pencil, drug prospectus, 45 × 70 cm (from the artist’s time in Diyarbakır Prison, 2018). Photo: Jef Rabillon

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The Kurdish artist provides us with a timely reminder of the social power of art

Ez Zehra (I, Zehra), 2019, bird feathers fallen in the walk, hair, menstrual blood, 97 × 140 cm (from the artist’s time in Diyarbakır Prison, which ended in Tarsus Prison, 2019)

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Muğdat Ay, 2018 (a portrait of Muğdat Ay, killed at the age of twelve, in Nusaybin, in February 2016), ballpoint pen and tea on towel, 144 × 92 cm (from the artist’s time in Diyarbakır Prison, 2018). Photo: Jef Rabillon

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Ruhumun Sarmaşıkları (Ivies of my soul), 2016, water paint on kraft paper, 62 × 45 cm (from the artist’s time in Mardin Prison, 2016). Collection Editions des Femmes. Photo: Jef Rabillon

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‘I am Zehra. I do not regret,’ read the Kurdish words painted on a founded. Charged with making ‘terrorist propaganda’, Doğan was square of embroidery-edged white cloth. A larger piece of cloth detained from 2016 until 2019 in three Turkish prisons (she now lives beneath it shows faded drops of menstrual blood, surrounded by a nomadic life in Europe). As artists from Ai Weiwei to Banksy drew a ghostly sketch of female figures dancing in defiance – or writhing international attention to her plight, she continued her art behind in pain. Zehra Doğan, who created it in 2019 with whatever mate- bars, and hand-produced a newspaper with her women co-detainees, rials were at hand in Tarsus Prison, Turkey, was serving out the last Özgür Gündem Zindan (Free Agenda, Dungeon Edition) – a nod to the stretch of nearly three years of incarceration. Her crime had been broadsheet Özgür Gündem that was shut down by a Turkish police raid in 2016. ‘We, Kurdish women in the four-portioned Kurdistan, a painting, too. Doğan was born in 1989 in Diyarbakır, a city in southeastern are the “others” discriminated against by those already subject to discrimination’; this self-emplaceTurkey also known as Amed by the Kurds: an ethnic group spread “In sexist discourses, the earth is personified ment among her own, voicing their across parts of Iraq, Iran, Turkey experience in both art and writing, as a woman’s body, becoming, like a woman’s and Syria. The city was planned, by is Doğan’s liberation praxis as both body, something to be possessed. I draw European imperial powers eager to Kurd and woman. cut the Ottoman cake, as the capital Her evolution as an artist is inand paint women who oppose this fate” of an independent Kurdistan after separable from her political reality, the First World War. This backfired when it sparked the Turkish War even though its conditions have affected her work differently at of Independence in 1919; the promised Kurdish homeland was the different times. Growing up, Doğan had to seek out art training collateral damage. Kurds have struggled for self-determination ever without her family’s knowledge, attending classes offered at the since and face violent repression by the governments of the four states Mesopotamia Cultural Center (a multibranch organisation that has stewarded Kurdish culture in Turkey since the 1990s). She then in which they live. The painting that irked the Turkish authorities was based on studied fine art at Dicle University in Diyarbakır and continued a photograph of the Turkish military’s destruction of the majority- painting as she took up journalism in 2010. Working among her Kurdish town of Nusaybin, which Doğan witnessed in 2015. She was Turkey-based community as well as in Kurdish regions new to her in there as a reporter for ji· nha, the all-women news agency she had northern Iraq, Doğan credits her journalistic mindset with keeping

Xêzên Dizî (The Hidden Drawings), 2018–20, graphic novel, 103 charcoal pencil and marker pen on letter papers provided to the artist by a friend, 30 × 21 cm each. Courtesy Editions Delcourt

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her creative practice away from “the comfort zone [of] the artist who ash, urine, menstrual blood and vegetable pastes, they had the added uses and abuses these [war] topics for a market that knows how to bonus of distressing the prison staff who would invasively handle all of Doğan’s belongings. “I know that what I drew in prison causes merchandise every issue”. Doğan’s art is preceded by her lived experience of the oppression reactions, raises questions. But all I did was represent a piece of what of Kurdish women. As such, even where her artworks do depict the myself and my co-detainees experienced.” horrors of incarceration, war and misogyny – like the work titled Hey Several works reach beyond this reality, too, towards myth. soldier; you can’t make strip search. I’m already naked (2018), a bra and briefs Shahmeran’s pain (2016) features the half-woman, half-snake figure featuring a sketch of the female reproductive system and a clump found in Kurdish folklore. In Ishtar (2019), its titular Mesopotamian of the artist’s hair – they are far from performative. They translate goddess sprouts birds from her bleeding hands, a Kalashnikov resting on her naked thigh. Others her commitment to the women of depict the faces of Kurdish elders, her region into a visual language “I know that what I drew in prison their world-weary eyes staring out of her own. This language blends causes reactions, raises questions. from the pages of Turkish newspamotifs from Mesopotamian myth But all I did was represent a piece of what with Doğan’s sources of contempers reporting the latest military porary inspiration in global femigains made in Syria. Others still use myself and my co-detainees experienced” nist protest and Kurdish women’s as a canvas the shirts, dresses and resistance. “Power exerted on the body as an instrument of domina- embroidered cloth that Doğan’s mother brought to her in prison. tion maintains itself by manipulating perceptions of the relationship These include a vest that records in red paint the instructions on the between bodies and lands,” Doğan observes. “In sexist discourses, the walls of her prison’s visitation rooms: Speak Turkish, Speak Plenty. While these artworks undoubtedly testify to Doğan’s experience, earth is personified as a woman’s body, becoming, like a woman’s body, something to be possessed. I draw and paint women who they are also intensely cathartic and unpremeditated. Now free to choose any materials, she continues to reach for paint, foodstuffs, oppose this fate.” The series she produced in Turkey’s Mardin (2016), Diyarbakır blood and textiles. “I don’t think I’ll ever wish to produce colossal (2017–18) and Tarsus (2018–19) prisons speak to this. Painted on smug- works to impress a public. After seeing death, why should I build gled newspaper and cloth using found materials like coffee, cigarette temples dedicated to my immortality? Why should my art not be just

Kemal Kurkut, 2017, acrylic on newspaper, 39 × 59 cm framed (from the series Clandestine Days, Istanbul, 2017). Photo: Jef Rabillon. © Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée (mucem)

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as my people are: without a country, singular, simple, stubborn and renewing itself?” The ‘activist artist’ label Doğan sometimes receives in Europe is, if anything, revelatory of the gulf between this lived reality for a global majority, and for a global north that apparently still believes (if the ‘activist’ qualifier is anything to go by) that an ‘artist’ pure and simple is something else – presumably someone who doesn’t keep depicting the places that European imperialisms have historically helped destabilise, in which case they are doing ‘activism’. Doğan, who points out the already “splitting foundations” of this particularly ahistorical “vision of art, rooted in and celebrated in the West”, is more concerned with how, back home, this dynamic continues to produce what the anticolonial thinker Frantz Fanon described in 1961 as the alienation of the native intellectual. The latter types, Doğan reflects, “cannot manage to take root in their country, with which they are not at peace. They turn their eyes toward Western countries and tear at themselves in attempting to use them as a model.” Doğan is not alienated. Appraising her work through the prism of ‘activist art’ seeks meaning that cannot be found in a designation naive to the myriad ways in which art and resistance have always intersected for the oppressed peoples of the world (of which the Kurds are one). Rather, Doğan’s art sits within the Third Worldist liberation tradition, and makes it reach for an uncompromising prioritisation of women. Third Worldism refers to a shared political orientation

towards anti-imperialism that was attempted across Africa, Asia and Latin America in the mid-twentieth century. Although its thought emerged from contexts as different as 1950s Algeria, 1960s Cuba and 1970s Guinea-Bissau, it consistently situated the artist as within, and a part of, the everyday struggles of peoples living amid the fallout from colonialism. That did not mean the artist’s role was a propagandistic one. It conceived of the artist as of their people: a participant-interpreter, whose representations of reality helped reveal the connections within that reality, between the political and the cultural, individual and collective. The reaction of the Turkish state to Doğan’s work is just one example of how, to most of the world, the social power of art comes as no surprise. Of course, the risks of making art then grow exponentially. That is a risk, however, that is more natural to Doğan than the alternative: “Why would I introduce my people, who have been made fearless from the practice of constant struggle, in museums?” Why indeed. ara Prison No. 5, a solo exhibition of work by Zehra Doğan, can be seen at Kiosk, Maxim Gorki Theatre, Berlin, through August. Doğan’s exhibition Il tempo delle farfalle (The time of the butterflies) is on view at pac – Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan, to 19 September Sarah Jilani is a researcher in postcolonial studies and a culture journalist based in London and Istanbul

Yağmurun Eseri (The work of the rain) (detail), 2019, triptych, pomegranate peel, moss, black cabbage on paper, 21 × 30 cm (from the artist’s time in Tarsus Prison, 2019). Photo: Jef Rabillon

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Eşa Şahmeran (Shahmeran’s Pain), 2016, bundle scarf, felt pen, acrylic, 114 × 151 cm (from the artist’s time in Mardin Prison, 2016) all but one Courtesy the artist

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A Refusal to Be Known by Gayatri Gopinath

Julie Mehretu, Hineni (E. 3:4), 2018, ink and acrylic on canvas, 244 × 305 cm. Collection Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne / Centre de Création Industrielle, Paris

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Queer affinities in the art of Shahzia Sikander and Julie Mehretu

Shahzia Sikander, Promiscuous Intimacies, 2020, patinated bronze, 107 × 61 × 46 cm. Photo: Jason Wyche. Courtesy Morgan Library & Museum, New York

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The paintings of Shahzia Sikander and Julie Mehretu are rarely spoken was shown in New York City. Curiously, however, Mehretu is typically about in the same breath. Indeed, a cursory glance at their work seems framed as a singular figure ‘almost without generational referents only to confirm their differences. Most obviously, there is the disjunc- or peers’ (as Whitney curator Rujeko Hockley writes; the Whitney’s ture of scale: Mehretu’s paintings are massive, all-encompassing fine catalogue attempts a corrective by situating her within a geneworks that threaten to engulf the viewer with their sheer immensity alogy of Black abstraction). The same is true for Sikander, which may and dizzying detail. Sikander, in marked contrast, is famously trained well be due to her status as the first artist to inaugurate what is now in the exacting art of Indo-Persian miniature painting, and her early known as the ‘contemporary neo-miniature’. What such framings work is, as she has put it, intensely ‘quiet [and] small’. Then there is of both artists elide is their deep investment from the beginning of Mehretu’s deep commitment to the language of abstraction, as opposed their careers in creating and sustaining collective artistic and politto Sikander’s decades-long exploration of the traditional idiom of the ical communities, which included not only their ties to one another miniature, replete with human and nonhuman figures. Furthermore, but a wide network of queer of colour, feminist and diasporic artists, Mehretu’s early interest in capturing ‘a spatial history of global capi- scholars and activists. talism’ could not seem further removed from Sikander’s early concerns The works of both Sikander and Mehretu instantiate a queer optic, with rupturing the gendered interior spaces of the domestic. one that disorganises the ways of seeing and knowing that are the Yet major exhibitions of both artists in New York City this inheritance of colonial modernity. Visitors to Extraordinary Realities: summer – a survey of Sikander’s early work, from 1987 to 2003, at the Shahzia Sikander at the Morgan are greeted by an arresting bronze Morgan Library & Museum, and an expansive midcareer retrospec- sculpture, Promiscuous Intimacies (2020), placed just outside the gallery tive of Mehretu’s work, from 1996 to 2019, at the Whitney Museum entrance. This is Sikander’s most recent work, and initially appears to of American Art – allow for a different apprehension of each of these be an anomaly: the rest of the exhibition is tightly focused on the first remarkable artists when seen in relation to one another. Placing their 15 years of Sikander’s career, providing a closeup view of her experiwork in the same frame reveals their ‘queer affinities’. I use ‘queer’ ments with deconstructing and radically transforming the language here in the sense of ‘odd’ or ‘strange’, but also to reference both non- and generic conventions of Indo-Persian miniature painting. While normative gender embodiments and sexual desires that their paint- her work after 2003 increasingly turns to largescale formats, mosaic ings conjure forth, as well as an alternative way of seeing – a queer and digital animation, Promiscuous Intimacies is her sole foray into sculpoptic – that their work enables. This queer optic brings to the fore the ture. But, in fact, the sculpture outside the gallery provides an indispensable entry point into the earlier intimacies of multiple times, spaces, work exhibited inside the gallery. It art-historical traditions, bodies, deSikander herself is a curator in the sense sires and subjectivities. Situating that she places different art-historical tra- sharpens our vision to see through an optic that brings the queerness of the work of Mehretu and Sikander ditions in intimate relation to make appar- Sikander’s early work to the fore. in relation to these different senses of queerness illuminates their affiniThe sculpture depicts two figures ent the impossibility of their discreteness ties, both formally and conceptually. of archetypal femininity from differSikander and Mehretu have intersecting life trajectories. Both ent art-historical traditions, sinuously intertwined: an Indian Devata were shaped by personal and collective histories of war, militarism figure from the eleventh century balances upon and gazes down and diasporic dislocation that mark their work in ways both subtle towards the figure of a Graeco-Roman Venus modelled on Agnolo and overt. Sikander was born and raised in Lahore, before relocating Bronzino’s painting An Allegory with Venus and Cupid (c. 1545). Their to the us to attend the Rhode Island School of Design (risd) in 1993; interconnected bodies and gazes evince an unmistakably desiring, Mehretu was born in Addis Ababa, before her family was forced to sensuous, erotic relation between the two figures. Sikander thus excaflee, in 1977, eventually settling in Michigan. Sikander and Mehretu vates the art-historical archive and transforms it into a queer archive. were part of the same cohort of feminist artists of colour (which This is a central motif that can be traced throughout Sikander’s oeuvre. included Kara Walker) trained at risd during the mid-1990s. After As is evident from the paintings in the exhibition, such as Venus’s risd, Sikander moved to Houston to take part in the Core Fellowship Wonderland (1995) or Sly Offering (2001), Sikander consistently brings Program at the Glassell School of Art, where she worked with Rick together seemingly disconnected historical traditions and unearths Lowe of the community arts nonprofit Project Row Houses in the the resonances between them through queer desire and embodiment. Third Ward, one of the city’s oldest Black neighbourhoods. Mehretu Indeed, we can understand Sikander herself as a curator in the sense made the same journey a few years later, and credits Sikander with that she places these different art-historical traditions in intimate relapaving the way for her. The time in Houston was formative for both tion to make apparent the impossibility of their discreteness. artists, and they brought that spirit of collaborative engagement with Sikander’s bold yet delicate evocations of radical relationality them to New York City during the late 1990s, a moment when queer – our irrevocably intertwined, interdependent connection to the Other and feminist diasporic communities of colour were boldly laying across time and space – find unexpected resonance in the largescale claim to the city through their art and activism. Mehretu recalls the paintings of Julie Mehretu. Sikander’s and Mehretu’s experiments outward-looking, cosmopolitan internationalism of that historical with scale create palimpsestic landscapes that layer multiple times and moment just prior to 9/11, and her affinity with other artists who were spaces upon one another. Despite using very different visual vocabunot bound by nationalist ideologies, while Sikander remembers its laries and idioms, they share a core commitment to drawing, to the ‘porosity’, a time defined by an ethos of openness and collaboration. black line and the gestural mark. In Sikander’s work, the mark moves Indeed Sikander, in the role of curator, included Mehretu’s work in seamlessly between figuration and abstraction: in her digital animaa group show at Exit Art in 1999, the first time that Mehretu’s work tion Spinn (2003), for instance, the hair of female figures detaches

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Shahzia Sikander, Sly Offering, 2001, vegetable colour, dry pigment, watercolour, inkjet outline and tea on wasli paper, 24 × 16 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

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Shahzia Sikander, The Scroll, 1989–90, vegetable colour, dry pigment, watercolour and tea on wasli paper, 34 × 162 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

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Julie Mehretu, Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts) (1 of 4), 2012, ink and acrylic on canvas, 457 × 366 cm. Collection Guggenheim Abu Dhabi

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Julie Mehretu, Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts) (2 of 4), 2012, ink and acrylic on canvas, 457 × 366 cm. Collection High Museum of Art, Atlanta

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from their heads, transforming into flocks of angry birds and into in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of Michael Brown. The photoan indistinguishable, obscuring black mass. In Mehretu’s paintings, graph is blurred, distorted and abstracted to such an extent that it ‘the entirety of her formal language has been constructed with the exists solely as an intimation, a ghostly presence that haunts the black mark… the ever-present, anchoring black line’, which in later almost dreamy (or nightmarish) canvas: a hazy, disquieting mix of work is ‘transformed into the void of the black blur’, writes Adrienne spraypainted blues, greens, purples and pinks with shocks of orange, Edwards, also in the Whitney volume. Mehretu has commented to overlaid with graffitilike black markings that coalesce into suggesme that she puts the language of abstraction “into a very big global tions of body parts. That Mehretu utterly obscures the source image perspective”, which leads to “a very different conversation”, given that, speaks to her consistent commitment to what Édouard Glissant terms in the artworld, abstraction has been primarily associated with white ‘the right to opacity’: the right of diasporic subjects – both Black male artists. This is particularly apparent in her monumental architec- and queer – to refuse transparency and legibility when structures of tural meditations on state power, such as Cairo (2013). These paintings power demand their utter knowability as the precondition of regulaallude to the residue of colonial techniques of ordering and surveilling tion, domination and control. The enduring appeal of the language of space that mark postcolonial sites. In her astounding four-panel series abstraction for Mehretu is precisely this refusal of intelligibility; this Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts) (2012), for instance, a delicate filigree is at the heart of her practice, and can be seen as her repudiation of of architectural drawings of cityscapes the disciplinary impulse to classification, that evoke various spaces of revolution transparency and knowability that is the Mehretu’s Mogamma series suggests and counterrevolution (from Cairo’s legacy of colonial modernity. The queerthat the space of chaos, destruction Tahrir Square to Mexico City’s Zócalo to ness of both Sikander’s and Mehretu’s and disorder may also hold lines work, then, resides not only in the ways Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and beyond) in which it allows us to become attuned is overlaid with a dizzying array of crossof flight, potential and possibility to the intimacies of apparently discrete cutting lines, marks, shapes, gestures, shadows and smudges. To experience these paintings as a viewer is to times and spaces. Its queerness also resides in its refusal to be known be overcome with the impossibility of taking it all in. Their epic scale and to instead allow us to glimpse, from within the indeterminate and the impression they give of ferocious movement and velocity are space of the palimpsest, blur, absence, ruin and erasure, the possibility radically disorienting. They stop you in your tracks and demand that of an elsewhere and a something else. ara you pay close attention to their details, layers and fragments in order to attempt to apprehend their totality. As Mehretu’s response to the Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities is on view at the Arab Spring uprisings, the Mogamma series speaks to both the promMorgan Library & Museum, New York, 18 June – 26 September ises and failures of revolutionary visions of transformation. They Julie Mehretu is at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, suggest that the space of chaos, destruction and disorder may also hold through 8 August lines of flight, potential and possibility. This sense of potentiality is evident in Mehretu’s subsequent Gayatri Gopinath is professor of social and cultural analysis and work as well. In Conjured Parts (eye), Ferguson (2016), for instance, director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at Mehretu leaves behind architectural drawing and instead utilises a New York University mass-media image of riot police and protesters in Ferguson, Missouri,

Julie Mehretu, Conjured Parts (eye), Ferguson, 2016, ink and acrylic on canvas, 213 × 244 cm. Collection Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles

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如果没有电力站你我是否还会相爱

The Substation 1990–2021

Abhijan Toto Interview by Max Crosbie-Jones

Decentralised, self-directed, hyperlocal and globally linked – the curator discusses long-standing strategies for research, activism and exhibition-making that, by chance, also work in a pandemic 58

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Splitting his time between Seoul and Bangkok, curator Abhijan Toto works across Asian contexts, often under the banner of the nomadic platform he cofounded in 2018, the Forest Curriculum. Through talks, workshops and research labs, as well as exhibitions, he and fellow director Pujita Guha have strived to spur new forms of ‘indisciplinary research and mutual co-learning’ – both in Asia and beyond – and done it in part by invoking Zomia: anthropologist James C. Scott’s name for the forested belt connecting South and Southeast Asia. For them, this ethnically and linguistically diverse highland region, with its history of counterinsurgencies against nation-states, animism and attunement towards ‘the other’, is of both literal and figurative interest, a site of investigation as well as a source of inspiration that embodies the spirit of askewness and indiscipline with which they hope to counteract the extractivism of universities and art institutions, and ‘assemble a located critique of the Anthropocene’. Thanks in part to Zoom, they have continued to create events and ‘situations of encounter’ for emergent and marginalised groups – an impulse also indebted to Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s idea of the ‘undercommons’ – during the pandemic. Toto has also managed to put together several hyperlocal yet globally networked exhibitions. In May 2019 he won gamec’s award for curators under thirty, the 10th Premio Lorenzo Bonaldi per l’Arte – EnterPrize, for In The Forest, Even The Air Breathes, a research-led group exhibition that, upon its realisation in late 2020, explored the forest-military-industrial complex, Cold War, indigenous struggles and multiplicities of human and nonhuman agency from a Zomian perspective. In December 2020 he conceived a two-week festival, A House In Many Parts, that saw five artists in France and Germany preparing boxes containing objects or ideas, which were then interpreted by Thai artists at venues across Bangkok. And current exhibition A Few In Many Places, created in collaboration with Protocinema, is a multicity group show addressing ongoing cycles of violence through various forms of collectivity, staged in locales as incongruous as an underground shopping plaza in Seoul and Governor’s Island in New York. ArtReview Asia spoke with Toto about the new exhibition and where it fits within the dense thicket of ideas growing around his expansive practice. artreview asia How did the latest exhibition you have worked on come about and what is the premise behind it? abhijan toto A Few In Many Places came out of a series of conversations between myself and Mari Spirito, who is the director of Protocinema.

We’ve been working for a few years on putting together a summit of initiatives exploring itinerant models of curatorial work outside of brick and mortar spaces, looking a lot at the new relationships that are being explored between curators and artists, which are often quite fluid, often very context-specific, thinking about site responsiveness. It developed into this form where we were thinking: within this current situation, how do we not only create a situation of dialogue around these questions, but how do we actually actively create a system, a sort of a self-organised system where initiatives like this can support each other, learn from each other and kind of

“It’s like doing six residencies in six different places around the world at the same time. I think there’s something really beautiful about that” develop new ways of working together outside of the constant circulation of the artworld? We’ve seen some interesting artistic and curatorial approaches to this, but for us, A Few In Many Places really is an attempt to think about how to do things differently and from a space of international solidarity, how to not become sort of exclusionary, how to not lapse into something that becomes parochial and very nationalistic but rather how to think about a sort of equal exchange within this process. Because one of the things that I’ve been very concerned about of late is hearing curators in Europe say, ‘Oh, we’re going

“From an anarchist organising point of view, we need to think about a future that is commonly held and not built on exploitative nation-state structures” to go quite local’, ‘No more flying people in’, etc. To me this is repeating exclusion all over again. So within this context we’re trying to deal head-on with questions of extraction, questions of colonial and other kinds of violence, and while thinking about the context of each place. In a lot of ways, my previous exhibition, A House In Many Parts, took some of these ideas as a departure point. That’s why there’s a resonance between the titles. ara What are some of the moving parts that make up A Few In Many Places, and how do they fit together? facing page Abhijan Toto

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at The project in Seoul, for example, has been realised by a collective called Welcome to Ogasawara. They are responding to ideas within East Asia of free movement harking back through the history of piracy, but using that as a way of also engaging with the cartography of the internet. In Puerto Rico we’re working with Jorge González, an incredible artist who uses soil and clay a lot and primarily engages with histories of colonisation. For a long time he’s been running a project called Escuela de Oficios, where he’s been challenging colonial art education within the Puerto Rican context and instead thinking about what a curriculum based on and focusing on indigenous knowledge could look like. And in New York we’re working with a really fantastic young curator, Lila Nazemian, of Iranian origin. She’s working with Vartan Avakian from the Arab Image Foundation, who is particularly interested in the archival image, in thinking about narrations of violence but also thinking through the different histories of migration, particularly in relation to the Armenian genocide. The projects in each city are very, very different and respond very much to what is happening locally. So in that sense, when we’re talking about it as a group show across a number of contexts where none of us are going to see each other, how do you bind it together? It’s not necessarily in that classical thematical way, but rather through situations of solidarity, through situations of thinking together and learning together rather than trying to make something fit into some kind of overarching curatorial impetus. ara This project started in November but, given how you tend to work, I’m guessing your relationships with these artists and curators started long before that? at Absolutely. Part of the impetus for it was: how do we continue supporting each other in these networks? How do we keep building these relationships when we’re not seeing each other for three years? One of the things I’m also enjoying about the process with this project is that typically with international projects you’re flying everybody into one particular context and then learning a lot about that particular context through conversation, and whilst maybe picking up little bits and pieces about what’s happening wherever everybody else is coming from. But when you’re working with a number of people who are actually all in their own context, the learning curve is a lot steeper. It’s sort of like doing six residencies in six different places around the world at the same time. I think there’s something really beautiful about that. ara What exactly is the Forest Curriculum? at The Forest Curriculum is not in itself an institution, but it’s also not not an institution.

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It’s a collective, but it’s also a formation of concern, as we like to put it; a network through which we attempt to institute certain practices. It is about creating a system of collective ownership and collective practice, which does not begin or end with us. We are part of a long-running history of different forms of practice, of which we are only giving shape to one set, one which comes from our concerns. And our intention has always been, since Pujita and I put the Forest Curriculum together in its current form, that as we proceed this should become more and more self-directed, especially by indigenous communities and activist communities. ara Earlier today I watched a 2019 talk in Berlin where you say that the Forest Curriculum is a ‘fuck you’ to the Anthropocene Curriculum [a co-initiative by Berlin’s Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and Haus der Kulturen der Welt navigating the predicaments of the Anthropocene]. I sensed, however, that you were less criticising the work it does than the educational establishment. at On the one hand I was trying to remind the people of Berlin that the world does not revolve around Berlin. The other thing I should point out is that, of course, a lot of really good research comes out of the Anthropocene Curriculum. However, living here in Thailand, I see a lot of excellent research being done around questions around Thailand, but that a lot of it happens in

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Western universities and stays there. The issue, for us, was not so much whether this work was happening; it was more about why is it not happening here. How do we make it happen here with the communities that this is about, right? It’s great to see some of the incredible work being documented, but how does that filter back into the communities about whom these works are being produced? How do we make this relationship, whether from academia or from the artworld or from these sort of hybrid institutions, nonextractive? How do we create active stakeholding within these processes? This is something that needs to be put at the centre of practice rather than being an afterthought. ara And to try to achieve that, you use Zomia as an entry point? at Part of the way we came into this was through thinking about how, within the context of environmental movements, it’s not enough to think about a future which is rooted in our nation-states as we know them. We come from an anarchist organising point of view, and so for us, when we want to think about the future, we need to think about a future that is commonly held and not built on exploitative nation-state structures. But also, what is an imagination of Sofia Lemos, Chulayrannon Siriphol & Liew Niyomkarn, Sonic Continuum, 2020, performed at jam, Bangkok, as part of A House In Many Parts, 2020

this that is rooted within our region? What are ways in which we can understand this region more complexly outside of these kind of often amorphous constructs like Southeast Asia, South Asia, Southern China, etc. For us as people of South Asian origin but with cultural affinities with the region, it also became a way for us to orient ourselves – to say, look, asean is not a singular, monolithic entity that has been there throughout time, but actually there are much longer histories of cultural continuity, exchange and movement that go into shaping this region. It’s also a way of getting away from this extremely compartmentalised way of narrating our history that we’ve begun to see, especially when it comes to the collections of Western institutions. It’s like: ‘ok, these are Southeast Asian artists, let’s frame them like this’. There’s very little in between those things, and we want to kind of upset that. But with the same gesture, we want to centre indigenous voices, centre voices outside of traditional urban contexts within this process. Thinking about all of these layers together is the way in which we orientate ourselves towards Zomia as a departure point, but also as a history to which we look. ara You’ve acknowledged the guiding influence of Southeast Asian filmmakers like Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Lav Diaz. To what extent is your curatorial practice an attempt to distil ideas and impulses already in the ether?

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Work exhibited in In The Forest, Even The Air Breathes, 2020, gamec, Bergamo. Photo: Lorenzo Palmieri

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at That’s absolutely it. Maybe we’re bringing certain approaches and bringing ideas together in ways that have not been attempted before, but yeah, these are approaches that have been there not only in the zeitgeist of the artworld but around for centuries and millennia. It is more about creating assemblies of these ideas than necessarily trying to do something new. It is often looking at these ideas in all their complexity, giving them the justice that is often not necessarily done, whether it’s from a curatorial perspective or from a pedagogical perspective; and looking at, say, how entangled questions of natureculture, history, violence, criminalism, etc, are. For us, one can’t begin to imagine a space through them without thinking about them all at once, and sometimes in contradictory ways. We often compare it to a sort of shamanic mode of working where a shaman is not necessarily bringing a new spirit into the world but rather looking at two things that are already existing but may not be able to see each other, then creating a channel of communication between them. ara You have already said that you want Forest Curriculum to be self-directed, but I was wondering whether, deep down, you harbour any long-term hopes in terms of what it can offer Southeast Asia, particularly at this moment of emboldened authoritarianism? at We come from an activist starting point, so this is something always at the centre of

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our practices. One of the projects that we’re in the process of launching really speaks to these concerns, because for us this question of collective stakeholdership is very important. We are about to start a project in collaboration with a group of spatial practitioners in Australia and here in Bangkok that entails building a sort of critical indigenous design lab looking at questions of land rights in the region. The plan is to create a space for developing tools and methodologies that can be actively used by communities to both document and create evidence of these issues; but also as strategies for evading and creating new processes. And the idea is that, while the Forest Curriculum is initiating this, it is something that will ultimately belong to communities. This is really responding to the rise of authoritarianism and the ways in which indigenous communities have been dispossessed across the region. And in the last year this dispossession has only sharpened, because there’s also no space for protests, the space for claiming accountability has shrunk. ara You recently wrote a dispatch from Bangkok where you applaud the radical aspects of Mob Fest, a gathering of music, performance art and speeches last November at the city’s Democracy Monument, staged Work by Welcome to Ogasawara, for the Seoul component of A Few In Many Places, 2021

illegally by protesters demanding a new constitution and reforms of the monarchy. What about it inspired you? at At Mob Fest I ran into Vipash Purichanont [an independent curator working on the forthcoming Thailand Biennale], and we were joking about how we spend years trying to put together a biennale and festivals, and these guys put these things together in a week, and they put us all to shame with the level of participation and creativity. And I think there is also a reluctant recognition that there is a lot to learn from these organisations and networks, the ways in which they were creating space for very vital conversations in Thai society. We know that the government likes to portray the protesters in only one particular light, but I think the real substantive thing to have come out of the protest movement is a kind of space of discussion around the rights of women, of queer, trans people, sex workers, migrants, the working classes, etc. And there’s been so much conversation around all these questions that I think that, as much as the government wants to break the back of the protest movement – and who knows, maybe in the current moment, with the covid pandemic, this might happen – these questions are not going to go away anytime soon. The solidarities and networks that have been built will persist, and new ways of thinking will emerge out of them.

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ara Can you talk about this idea of ‘indisciplinarity’ that you and Pujita write about? From what I’ve read, it seems apposite in terms of Mob Fest and the recent protest movement, which seems to largely be about questioning how power is formed, institutionalised and upheld in the country. at I will answer this by saying that one of the actions I felt to be so incredibly radical was the recent protest that happened outside the Siam Commercial Bank headquarters, where they were giving away these Duck Coin tokens that you could actually spend and use within the context of the protest, or if you went around the city and there were people that you knew who were allied with the movement, you could buy a meal or something using these tokens. And of course the authorities immediately clamped down on this and made it illegal, because it is so innately powerful. And if we look at what’s happening with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, it’s not difficult to understand why: the ability to assign value is one of the ways in which power is centralised, and the moment you unpack that, the moment you make the assignation of value a collective exercise, something really radical and new happens. This question of indisciplinarity dovetails with some of these ideas. We are coming from this place of thinking about the ways in which knowledge is structured: how is it held? To whom does it belong? How is it circulating

in society? We began to be critical of these approaches of only opening up disciplines in the kind of multidisciplinary, pluralistic way we’ve seen since the advent of cultural studies. Instead we want to question the ways in which knowledge is disciplined into certain formations and to look at the historical, often colonial, often imperialistic ways in which these kinds of ring-fencing situations are created. To work instead from context, from practices. Say, for example, we’re talking about biologically studying a particular plant species in a particular context, that scientific study should not be divorced from indigenous knowledge around it, should not be divorced from questions of deforestation and habitat destruction in that context. They should not be divorced from an aesthetic understanding of these things. It boils down to: how do we work from a position where we have skin in the game of how knowledge circulates? ara When searching for new collaborators, what do you hope to find? And how do you approach each collaboration? at Deciding who we want to work with always starts from a place of solidarity; not Council, praeng, 2020, discussion and sound performance, Bangkok, part of A House In Many Parts, 2020 all images Courtesy Abhijan Toto

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only a practice that somebody’s doing but rather whether they’re really engaging with the politics of where they’re coming from and the way they’re trying to work through certain ideas. This approach brings us into close conversation with philosophers of crypto finance as much as it does people that are working with, say, the Lumad community in the southern Philippines, because we find in each other spaces of thinking together about how to create a collectively inhabitable future. Because ultimately that’s what all of these things go back to. It’s always a feeling of realising how fucked we are together but maybe also rigging some propositions for another future. That’s where we try to work. For each collaboration, we invite artists to spend time with people joining the programmes and to really unpack their practices, to think about them as ways of thinking and forms of philosophy almost, rather than merely as something through which a final artwork is realised. For us, an artwork is great and we love engaging with them, but within this universe of ideas, it’s also in a Deleuzian sense something that’s been captured, right? ara A Few In Many Places, curated by Abhijan Toto and Mari Spirito, is on view in Seoul, Bangkok, Istanbul, New York, Santurce and Guatemala City between 8 May and 8 August

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Notes from lax by Yen Pham

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Two border interrogations and the artists who experienced them

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‘A child learns to see by noticing the edge of things,’ observes the character Wee-Bey from The Wire (2002–08). ‘That’s kinda stupid.’ ‘We narrator of Airport Love Theme, the graphic novel published last year got ourselves a prima donna!’ exclaims Gawins. The artworld does not by the artist Hamishi Farah. ‘How does it know an edge is an edge? By protect Farah; the artworld doesn’t even make sense. desperately wanting it not to be.’ The artworld suggests certain promFarah’s novel finds an antecedent in 11 June 2002 (2003), an instalises of egalitarianism and mobility, but failures of the latter belie the lation by the Indonesian artist Arahmaiani. This work explores an illusion of the former. Even if it ostensibly operates on the premise event she experienced less than a year after 9/11, while transiting that ideas can move freely, often the people who generate them through lax en route to Canada to give a talk. She was interrogated cannot. Airport Love Theme is a fictionalised account of real events. for seven hours by seven officers of various cultural backgrounds, Farah was arbitrarily detained at Los Angeles International Airport many of them Muslim, then told, as she recalled in a 2017 talk, that (lax) in April 2016, flying from Melbourne to an art fair in New York. she would be taken to “a special place for foreigners who have probAfter 12 hours of detention and questioning, Farah was deported to lems”. Fearing the vagueness of this proposition, she insisted on Australia without explanation. The novel’s most overt fictionalisa- staying, and was eventually allowed, on the condition that she remain tion is its introduction of a “psychosexual love triangle” to its plot; under guard, to go to the hotel room her airline had booked for her Farah looked, they told me, to manga artists like Satoshi Kon, who transit. She expected that the guard, a fellow Muslim from Pakistan, explore the psyche “in a psychedelic way”. One reason for the love would remain outside – not that he would insist on staying in her triangle is that they wanted to avoid slotting neatly into a “trauma room all night. “But I will be in trouble if you run away,” he said, economy”. But it also underscores although the room was on the 20th The artworld does not protect Farah; the surreal quality of the things that floor. “I’m American and I’m doing really did happen. It becomes a way my duty.” Arahmaiani’s installation, the artworld doesn’t even make sense to explore what Farah describes as which depicts a hotel room, recreates “the libidinal economy of race”: the irrational, uncontrolled vehe- in a seemingly gentler vein that breach of the artist’s private sphere. mence with which some, like those who detained Farah, absorb and A pair of pantyhose lies twisted on the neatly made bed; a Quran rests on the pillow. Two antique Coca-Cola vending machines flank express notions of racial hierarchy. The mediated economy of the international artworld is supposed the diminutive chamber, emblazoned with the slogan Erfrische Dich to be the thing that protects Farah. ‘Do you mind if I explain my (‘Refresh Yourself’). Fabricated and exhibited first in Pirmasens, working conditions?’ the artist asks the aggressive Officer Roberta Germany, 11 June 2002 was then shown at the Indonesian Pavilion for Gawins, who has decided Farah intends to ‘illegally sell’ their paint- the 2003 Venice Biennale: an exposition whose structuring in national ings in the United States. It becomes darkly humorous how much pavilions demonstrates a mixed tendency to reify borders as well as to hinges on Farah’s patient and evidently rehearsed explanation that create opportunities, as the art historian Caroline Jones has written, their unfinished paintings are neither ‘products nor taxable goods’; for ‘the problematization of both spectacle and the ethnic state’. that when finished they ‘can’t even sell them’, as they will be consigned Coca-Cola is a common motif in the artist’s work as a stand-in to a gallery. The punchline comes when Officer dj Envy, a benign for the forces of globalisation. It is perhaps Arahmaiani’s spiritual Everyman type, asks whether this means Farah would not sell their art bent, as well as her commitments to protest and to work that can to someone on the street, even if they wanted to buy it. ‘No, I wouldn’t,’ be engaged with by a broader audience, that are responsible for the the artist responds solemnly, though they could direct them to the artist’s investment in a recurrent set of talismanic symbols. In Etalase gallery. ‘Ohh…,’ the officer muses, echoing a popular meme of the (1994), a Coca-Cola bottle appears in a vitrine, alongside items like

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opening pages and above Pages from Hamishi Farah, Airport Love Theme, 2020, published by Book Works, London

facing page Arahmaiani, 11 June 2002, 2003 (installation view, Indonesian Pavilion, 50th Venice Biennale, 2003)

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above Page from Hamishi Farah, Airport Love Theme, 2020, published by Book Works, London

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facing page Arahmaiani, Flag Project, 2006–ongoing, performance (undated documentation from performance at Borobudur Temple, Magelang, Indonesia). Courtesy the artist

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a Buddha statue, condoms, a box of sand and a Pakwa mirror. The upon to enforce racist border regimes. Arahmaiani’s vexed recogniplacement of condoms in adjacency to a Quran generated controversy tion of her Muslim interrogators surely informs the tone of 11 June in Indonesia. This despite, as she notes in the 2017 talk, contracep- 2002. Both artists have a clear sympathy, even affection, for some of tives being central to family planning, a government priority at the their detainers while remaining appropriately critical. ‘Can I make time; the family of Indonesia’s second president, Suharto, sensitive to them love me? The way I love their blackness[?]’ Farah’s narrator a business opportunity, built the largest condom factory in Southeast wonders. Though it certainly does not engender love, in a way it is Asia. The artist has faced arrest, criticism and death threats during her from that same impulse that they tell the most fanatical guard, ‘You career, requiring her sometimes to leave urgently and live “nomadi- seem pretty hype to do this white ass job’. Another community of cally”. “My position is funny,” she says, because she is at once regarded Airport Love Theme is the fellow detainees ‘held at lax April 25, 2016’, as a “Western agent” in Islamic society and a potential terrorist in the to whom the book is dedicated. The narrator is ashamed to adjust so West. This bind is reflected in a different way in Farah’s novel, whose quickly to detention; it is a reminder of how easily some of us acclimanarrator is racially profiled over a Somali heritage from which the tise to circumstances of abjection. But if they feel ‘at home’, it is also because these castaways from global empire form, with fluctuating character has experienced painful estrangement. 11 June 2002 also expresses a kind of ‘love theme’ in its use of hand- intensity, a people of their own. drawn hearts. But the possibilities of love – whether love of American Arahmaiani states that she has been offered a variety of passculture, intimacy with the viewer as voyeur or the self-regard of ports over the years: Swiss, German, Australian, American, Chinese. She has never taken up the offers, the room’s implied inhabitant – are “They don’t remember me,” they note, because Indonesia forbids double ironised, thwarted. For both artists citizenship, and despite the difficulthe experience of detainment began but “my phone remembers the wifi” as calamity and developed as farce. ties of working there, Indonesia is the When Arahmaiani finally, warily, fell asleep in her hotel room, she was source of her “inspiration and life aspiration”. Is this, anyway, to be awoken by the loud snoring of her detainer, who also fell asleep. In the considered proof of the artworld’s promise of mobility made good? It morning it was she who had to shake the man awake, reminding him is too simple a formulation. Forces like globalisation make movement of her connecting flight. Likewise, the incident in Airport Love Theme in possible; they also make it necessary. The mirror image of the dream which a guard chooses to screen one of his favourite movies, Coming to of mobility is the reality of displacement, and as Farah’s novel attests, America – the 1988 Eddie Murphy romantic comedy about a wealthy many of us now possess histories and identities that are incompreAfrican prince playing poor – really happened. (Farah saved the dvd hensible without them. There is only the possibility, per Arahmaiani, and framed it, exhibiting the disc and case in 2020 under the title of choosing which communities we wish to be accountable to, which Horcrux.) The cold impersonality of the experience overlays the human spheres of living can sustain us and how, in that way, the world can be and intimate aspect. It is the third time Farah’s narrator has tried to fashioned and refashioned. ara enter the United States, and their ‘third time in this room’. ‘They don’t remember me,’ they note, but ‘my phone remembers the wifi.’ An exhibition of work by Hamishi Farah, Dog Heaven 2: How Sweet the Wound of Jesus Tastes, is on view at Both artists draw heavily on that human and intimate aspect. Kunsthalle Fribourg through 31 July While the subject seems inherently to entail isolation, both works find a way to be about, or to incorporate, community. Farah’s novel explicitly names the theme of the oppressed subject being called Yen Pham is a writer from Australia

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“To My Ancestors, Human and Not Human” Responding to the Gulf region’s awesome blend of the natural, the prehistoric, the merely ancient and the futuristic, Ayman Zedani’s work sites humanity among the plants by Rahel Aima

Giant prehistoric fungi, biofilms and resurrection plants meet the Chthulucene in Ayman Zedani’s practice. The Saudi artist creates videos, installations and immersive environments that feel like Petri dishes in which to observe human–nonhuman symbiosis. He likes to leave his narratives, which largely arrive from speculative futures or squelchy, viscous pasts, malleable and semiotically open. There’s more than a touch of sci-fi about them, but gentle optimism and an ecological emphasis pitches them closer to solarpunk. Crucially, his works eschew the palette and timbre of Gulf Futurism to instead consider the future of the Gulf. Growing up between the southern cities of Khamis Mushait and Abha, Zedani would spend weekends camping with his family among the dense juniper groves of nearby mountain villages. Upon moving to Riyadh, he had to renegotiate his relationship to nature. “Nature here is quite different. It took me a while to understand the desert and appreciate it for what it really is,” he says over Zoom, pointing to how the landscape is readily legible to many as a Dune-like ersatz Mars. Zedani studied biomedical science in Australia, taking art classes on the side, and worked as a hospital pharmacist for a while. He began exhibiting his work in 2013, but waited until 2019 to mount his first solo, at Jeddah’s Athr Gallery. It was curated by Murtaza Vali and titled bahar-bashar-shajar-hajar, or sea-human-tree-stone. We can understand it as a kind of hydrous classification, moving from the sea, which has a lot of water, to the stone, which has very little. (One recalls the 1988 Star Trek: The Next Generation episode ‘Home Soil’, in which a sentient crystal barks dismissively at the crew, “Ugly. Ugly. Giant. Bags of mostly water.”) But it also describes Zedani’s arc of inquiry over the past eight years. Earlier works have an austere, almost sacral quality to them, with stone, clay, charcoal and concrete arrayed into neat grids. Some are site-specific, like Bāb (2018), which embedded 54 concrete cubes in Jeddah’s old city. At Ithra in Dhahran meanwhile is the permanent

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installation Mēm (2018), for which he won the inaugural Ithra Art Prize in the same year. Its monumental columns – some 2.5m tall and around 400kg each – tower like obelisks uncovered from a distant past, or perhaps an absent future. Like many of Zedani’s works, they have a sense of bypassing the present to stand out of time. Others have an observational quality, such as Azal (2017), which features dyed liquid poured into 20 earthenware cups. Time becomes physicalised as the liquid slowly spreads through the clay, terracotta bruising black like a subterranean petroleum seep. Work titles from this period spatialise the Abjad system, which assigns numerical values to each letter of the Arabic alphabet. Mēm is the Arabic letter ‘m’, while Thalaatha (2017), which draws from the tenth-century Persian calligrapher Ibn Muqla’s ‘khatt al-mansub’ system for proportioned script, refers to the number three, the wearable charcoal pieces of Arba’a (2017) to ‘four’ and so on. All evince an interest in the interactions and relationships between humans and inanimate objects. Also important is polytheism in pre-Islamic Arabia, where a rock, bush or animal was believed to contain a spirit and accordingly respected. Humans were considered to be part of nature and not superior to it. Later, Zedani would parse these animist beliefs through the new materialist philosophies of Jane Bennett, Anna Tsing’s fungal assemblages and Donna Haraway’s notion of making kin, which would result in a new chapter – as he terms it – of his practice. Around this time, the artist was invited to an exhibition at the Sharjah Art Foundation. He had actually been working there as a curatorial coordinator for a few years, albeit under a different name. “I don’t think they knew I was the same guy when they approached me,” he says. “I need to separate those two things.” Exhausted from the Mēm project, he returned to the scoby-like biofilms he had been experimenting with for a while but never exhibited, given the pressures to produce at scale. He infused them with herbs and spices from the market next to his studio to create beautiful translucent ‘skins’

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Earthseed, 2021, 3-channel video installation at Noor Riyadh light and art festival

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preceding pages and above Non-human-collaborators, 2020, 9-channel video installation

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Between Muddles and Tangles, 2019 (installation view, nyu Abu Dhabi Art Gallery, 2019)

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Bāb, 2018 (installation view, old city, Jeddah)

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of the region. Afterwards, he buried the biofilms in the courtyard The fungus charts its life, death and eventual transmuted resurrecoutside – “I want to create something that just lives and dies through tion as the petroleum that became so crucial here: “It’s the souls of all the things that lived on in the Arabian Peninsula a long time ago. the exhibition” – a gesture he would subsequently repeat. Stone gave way to trees, plants, bacteria and other living matter. And it’s being awakened from its long peaceful sleep in a sense – that The artist became obsessed with the construction and consumption changes the way we perceive oil,” Zedani says, framing it as a kind of of nature in the Gulf: the plasticised palms, the Potemkin hoardings extended animism. “How would you deal with [things] if you think that give the illusion of a hedge, the yeehaw hyperreality of an artifi- of oil as the remnant of your ancestors and everything they lived cial ski slope or a now-cancelled rainforest under a dome in a luxury on for a very long time?” (I ask whether he would rather be a plant, real-estate development. Between Muddles and Tangles (2019) docu- or fungus, or oil; he chooses the last, soil.) Later, I notice his email ments one such environment, a small island in a Sharjah lagoon that signature, which reads, to my ancestors, human and not human. gets wildly, colourfully illuminated at night. The indigenous and Of course, Zedani is not the only one interested in this kind imported coexist here: native plants share space with transplanted of cultural genealogy. Recent years have seen a concerted push to ones from several elsewheres, and excavate the region’s pre-Islamic herit“It’s the souls of all the things that lived age, particularly in Saudi, which hosts flora and fauna alike have adapted to the uniquely lit new ecology. The video on in the Arabian Peninsula a long time some astonishingly preserved (thanks to desertification) sites from ancient is set to atmospheric music meshed ago. And it’s being awakened from civilisations. He gets especially animwith ambient nature sounds (Zedani its long peaceful sleep in a sense – that composes all the music for his works), ated about recent discoveries – and how to soothing effect. At the nyuad Art they might upend our comprehension changes the way we perceive oil” of the past – and tells me about driving Gallery it was installed alongside fuchsia grow lights and a shelf of Kaff Maryams, a plant that survives arid past a billboard with Aramaic writing, which he couldn’t read, but climes by curling up into a gnarly, rather Lovecraftian ball. When it which many people are now studying. For the 2020 Lahore Biennale, rains, it unfurls itself and sends out little shoots and white flowers; Zedani would turn his biofilms into what he’d tout as seventhin folk medicine the tea is used to induce labour and aid in reproduc- century pre-Islamic masks in collaboration with writer and geogtive health. In a 2019 artist book, Sha’ba’kah, made with curator and rapher Ahmad Makia. “I like when things kind of get blurry, like in writer Wided Khadraoui, it is proposed as a regional answer to Ursula terms of fictional or actual,” he notes. Future projects include a look K. Le Guin’s carrier-bag theory of fiction; this idea of indigenous at “gut brains” – which have as many neurons as a cat’s brain – and finally, the sea: he hopes to go to Oman to work with the Arabian plants-as-containers is one that pervades Zedani’s practice. Sometimes, the plants are no more. Among Zedani’s most exciting humpback whale. “I don’t know what it’s going to look like,” he says works is the return of the old ones (2020), a petromaterialist liturgy devel- with a laugh, “but I’m kind of excited to get to meet them, and say oped in collaboration with writer Saira Ansari. It is told from the hello. To start something together.” ara perspective of a Prototaxite, a fungus that lived some 400 million years ago, and voiced in the plummy tones of a nature documentary. Rahel Aima is a writer based in Dubai

the return of the old ones (still), 2020, video, 14 min all images Courtesy the artist

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Ben Sakoguchi Chinatown Bel Ami, Los Angeles 6 March – 15 May Even at one’s most vigilant, is it possible to acknowledge every iniquity, to trace every filament of systemic racism? The work of Ben Sakoguchi attempts to do just that. For the better part of 50 years, he has itemised social injustices plaguing the modern world in episodic paintings like the ongoing series Orange Crate Labels (c. 1975–), 27 of which appear in his exhibition at Bel Ami. The Orange Crate paintings are one of those rare artistic projects that can span a life without losing vigour, thanks to the artist’s knack for compositional variation and a strict adherence to parameters – not to mention his limitless, bitter muse: human cruelty. Its rules are as follows: the painting must include a title; the words ‘brand’, ‘California’ and ‘oranges’; the name of a California city or other location; and what Sakoguchi calls a ‘visual orange’, ie an image of the fruit itself. All other content must respond to these elements and do so within the bounds of a 25-by-28 cm swatch of canvas. The dimensions, the tags and the visual orange all pay tribute to the artist’s early study of labels on the orange crates delivered to his family’s San Bernardino grocery store – a business the parents operated after their release from the Poston Internment Camp in Arizona, where they, Ben (born in 1938) and Ben’s three siblings had spent the Second World War, alongside more than 17,000 other incarcerated Japanese and Japanese-American people.

Rage is often described as the emotional undercurrent streaming through Sakoguchi’s work. The fountainhead, one might surmise, lies in the Poston experience. Two Orange Crate paintings at Bel Ami present examples of the anti-Asian sentiment ingrained within the American psyche that contributed to such statesanctioned xenophobia. In the first, Footloose Brand (1995), the feet of two women are depicted. On the left, a white woman’s foot, strapped into a high-heeled sandal, is planted firmly against a beige ground; on the right, a Chinese woman’s foot, altered by binding, settles against a blue ground. Above the former floats the word ‘correct’; above the latter, ‘incorrect’. The implications of this binary image are clear enough: though both Eastern and Western cultures impose extreme bodily discomfort on women in the name of beauty, the cultural practices of the East, exemplified by an ancient Chinese custom, are unfathomable to American perception. The painting exposes the unwillingness of America to gaze upon its own intractable hypocrisy or recognise the pain it inflicts upon its female population, and it lays bare, with greater vitriol, America’s view of Asia as a bizarre foreign land. The examination of female beauty linked to race relations in the United States recurs in East is East Brand (2001). Again, the composition is organised in two halves, inviting a compare-

contrast analysis. In both halves an Asian woman’s face fills the frame, but the eyelids of the woman on the left are narrower than those of the woman on the right. Informed by the words ‘before’ and ‘after’ captioning the left and right windows, respectively, viewers are meant to deduce that they see the same woman’s face before and after blepharoplasty. The words ‘east is east’ headline the painting, with pointed duality: the first east is rendered in a faux ‘bamboo brush’-style typeface; the second is rendered in a serif font with sweeping elements that imply concordance with the orientalised letterforms nearby. Both are banded with red, white and blue stripes, indicating absorption within an American idiom, albeit one that denies global diversity but prefers to imagine Asian culture as a monoculture and AsianAmerican culture as American-aspirant, an appalling prospect that is redoubled when one realises the same conditions apply to the woman’s portraits. The jump from typefaces to human faces is a reminder of how social constructs lock anyone considered ‘other’ into a social matrix wherein their identity is subsumed by negative stereotypes, no matter how radically they submit their identity to said matrix’s standards. As in many Orange Crate paintings, an orange occupies the foreground of East is East Brand. In this instance, the skin has been sliced away from its endocarp with precision. The correlation

East is East Brand, 2002, acrylic on canvas, pine frame, 25 × 28 cm

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Conflict Diamonds Brand, 2002, acrylic on canvas, pine frame, 25 × 28 cm

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Chinatown (details), 2014, 15 panels, acrylic on canvas, wooden frames, 135 × 231 cm overall

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between the surgical intervention on the woman’s face and the exacting removal of the orange’s peel begs the question of the fruit’s relationship to the imagery it chaperones. To what degree does it operate symbolically? To what extent does it recapitulate the painting’s thematic concerns? An elastic interpretation thinks the orange akin to an animated ball that leads singalongs in karaoke videos, but instead of bouncing from lyric to lyric, it bounces from frame to frame, multiplying and diversifying as it leads the viewer down a tour of Sakoguchi’s exhaustive and often caustic satirical registry. At times the orange’s state bears a sly connection to the topic on trial, offering meta-commentary about the subject matter, as in East is East Brand, and at other times it serves to enrich the painting’s narrative as a compositional device. In, say, Conflict Diamonds Brand (2002) orange-coloured disks circumscribe Black-skinned hands holding raw diamonds and white-skinned hands holding diamond jewellery. The vignettes flank a girl whose arms end at the wrists. Context clues and a cursory knowledge of the diamond industry’s bloodsaturated complicity with, for example, the Revolutionary United Front – the rebel army that commandeered diamond mines to fund an insurgency and amputated the hands, arms and legs of untold thousands in acts of terrorism during Sierra Leone’s civil war (1991–2002) – lead one to conclude, with reasonable confidence, that the girl represents the war-wounded at their most innocent. The disembodied hands, those agents of corrupt merchantry, seem

especially cruel in proximity to the maimed figure, who cannot hold a fork, wear a ring or peel any hesperidia. Although extensive, Orange Crate Labels constitutes but one strain of Sakoguchi’s practice, and there are zones within his work where the orange, a symbol of paradise even when rotten, dares not roll. The 15-panel painting Chinatown (2014), also displayed at Bel Ami (hence the show’s title), constitutes one such zone. The central and largest panel, around which the others form a border, memorialises the 18 Chinese men and boys who were killed by a mob in Los Angeles’s Old Chinatown during the Chinese Massacre of 1871. The incident – precipitated by homegrown bigotry coupled with rampant anti-Chinese resentment tied to labour disputes during California’s early statehood – is known as the largest mass lynching in American history. Sakoguchi spares no delicate sensibilities in his depiction of the event. The bodies hang, some stripped to the waist, all terribly bent; each is framed within his own latticed window. Two windows contain jeering crowds gathered below the corpses. In one, a woman pulls the corners of her eyes back with index fingers, mocking the face of the dead man. Her gesture punctuates, with sickening precision, the gross disregard for human life that permitted the massacre to unfold, an atrocity Sakoguchi beseeches his viewers to reckon with both in its own right and as an event with lasting ramifications. The surrounding panels of the Chinatown painting enumerate some of these ramifications. In the top right canvas, a roster of contemporary

popular culture icons repeat the mocking gesture described above, while canvases in the other three corners cite the many instances of ‘yellowface’ in American film, television and comics. Laterally and longitudinally, further negative stereotypes about the morality and general aptitude of East Asians abound, all of which demand, as an ethical imperative, greater critical dissection than is possible here. What is possible to comprehend at the superficial level, however, is the cultural trauma incurred by the Massacre of 1871 and like atrocities, which perpetuates by degree, if not in kind, the dehumanisation of a people by the mainstream forces of a white nation. Los Angeles’s Union Station now stands where Old Chinatown used to be, where those men and boys were hanged on a fearsome night in 1871. New Chinatown lies just north of the site, built by a displaced community; it is home to Bel Ami. That the gallery mounted Sakoguchi’s exhibition is no coincidence, given its location. The programme represents, at the level of local politics and within the larger debate on gentrification, an effort by a commercial gallery to engage the neighbourhood where it operates in a self-reflexive and compensatory manner. Although no one deserves a trophy for decent behaviour, Bel Ami’s effort is commendable and unfortunately all too rare among the gallery circuit. And while Bel Ami has certainly not co-opted another’s pain – the gallery make no claims of ownership or privilege over Sakoguchi’s voice – it has given it prominence to great effect. Would that others with similar resources do the same. Patrick J. Reed

Chinatown, 2014, 15 panels, acrylic on canvas, wooden frames, 135 × 231 cm overall all images Courtesy the artist and Bel Ami, Los Angeles

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teamLab Reconnect Roppongi, Tokyo 22 March – 31 August Fans of teamLab are used to climbing, falling, getting wet, being gently knocked from behind by giant balloons. To see the digital collective’s newest experiential work in Tokyo, however, viewers also have to strip down. Swimsuits and optional loungewear are provided by the venue. teamLab Reconnect moves visitors ever deeper towards a mode of viewing art that engages the entire body, which here is pushed between extremes of hot and cold with the goal of triggering a trancelike mental state. From there, their senses heightened, participants rest and view art in aroused discomfort. The sensory-overload part undoubtedly works. Viewers first face a series of doors leading to seven different saunas. ‘Underground River’, a bold blue, is heated to the maximum 100° c, and has a pine scent, to evoke Finnish saunas. In the ‘Fire Red’ room, at a more modest 90° c, hōjicha, roasted green tea, is poured over the stove instead of water. A lovely nutty aroma wafts around as a background to your physical suffering, while you inevitably wonder if you, too, are being roasted for consumption. The instinct to take deep breaths to get through the pain makes sense. It also hurts. On the inhale, the lungs fill with a light burning; an exhale moves across the tiny hairs of the upper lip like a desert blast. Ears feel like they’re being peeled by the sun; hair seems aflame.

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After five to ten minutes of heat, participants move to a minute-long icy shower. From there they can rest in one of three ‘art’ rooms. ‘Ephemeral Solidified Light’ presents a grid of laserlike lines of water, each containing dancing lights the size of paperclips. Like teamLab’s ‘Infinite Crystal Universe’, this room is readymade for Instagram, except here viewers can enter and touch the work, and, importantly, in a bikini. Purveyors of the thirst trap carve out space for the rare chance to shoot their butts being drenched by a technicolour disco shower. In the last room, a sphere floats untethered and self-directed, surrounded by darkness. It’s filled with a combination of gases (teamLab declined to name which ones) that shift to make the sphere ascend, fall and move sideways, the colour changing with the direction. By its third cycle of temperature change, the body slumps against the benches that line the room, the other spectators hidden in darkness. ‘Levitation: Flattening Red and Blue & Blurred Violet’ makes a pretty boring photo, and viewers can’t interact with it, unusual in a teamLab context. Slow and languid, even prone to getting stuck, the suspended sphere looks completely flat when it moves vertically, a red or blue circle that’s being slowly dragged against black paper. When it moves laterally, the sphere takes on an extra dimension, becoming a purple-pink orb. Here there’s nothing for the body to do, no way for it to affect the action. It’s a pleasant respite.

The concept of a ‘sauna trance’ is built up in a wall text as a well-studied neurological fact, steeped in traditional sauna culture, but it is neither. One description claims that, based on a study of 30 people, the sauna trance ‘will help you relax deeply, increase your creativity, sharpen your senses, and feel clear-headed’, going on to assert that it ‘can be described as a state similar to meditation’. The seamlessness of that dream is complicated by a logistical dance of trying to keep phones, towels and masks dry and away from heat. teamLab Reconnect tries hard to bring viewers to a sweaty zen, but a more honest description might work better: an afternoon of half-naked people brought into intimate, whispering proximity, blasted by extreme temperatures before being released into a wet playground to try and catch a good ’gram. Viewers may find that, in lieu of a meditative state, what they gain is an intense awareness of their upper-ab flesh. But there’s joy to be found in that jiggle. It’s rare to have an art experience so corporeal that it brings new focus to one’s own thighs. Here viewers also commune with other bodies, in all their diversity, squeezed into (or out of) shape by the standard-issue swimwear. Everything is on display (except faces, given that masks are required outside the sauna rooms). It feels impolite to gaze, and indeed you might try not to look, observe, feel – but then, why else did you come? Thu-Huong Ha

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facing page ‘Fire Red’ top ‘Ephemeral Solidified Light’ above ‘Step into the Light Circle’ all images Courtesy teamLab

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13th Shanghai Biennale: Bodies of Water Power Station of Art and other venues, Shanghai 10 November – 25 July Bodies of Water, the 13th Shanghai Biennale’s main exhibition, finally opened this April after being postponed due to the pandemic. During the interval between that date and its originally scheduled November 2020 launch, the biennale (under the direction of Spanish architect Andrés Jaque) adapted by launching two ‘phases’ to fill the void with online workshops, screenings, panel talks and offline performances, which didn’t garner much attention from the domestic audience in China, who had by then largely returned to their pre-covid lifestyles. The decision to postpone the launch of the exhibition proper is in part explained by the recordbreaking number of commissioned works (33 out of the 76 on show), which presented a considerable challenge both in practical terms (to the artists involved) and on a conceptual level, given this edition’s emphasis on connection through ‘bodies’ (of water and other forms), at a time when travel and logistics are restricted. Perhaps these factors, and the extreme disconnect between the local and the remote over the past 18 months, are also responsible for the decision to produce what the curators describe as an exhibition with a simple approach. The last edition, directed by Mexican curator Cuauhtémoc Medina, was possibly the most

political to date. It raised a range of topics, yet used innuendo, symbolism and dark humour to deliver a holistic narrative in the midst of a context in which censorship remains relatively strict. For example, on the open floor at the main entrance to the Power Station of Art, 16 Chinese characters made of cardboard spelled out the slogan ‘One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, Two Steps Forward, One Step Back’. This was Argentinian artist Enrique Ježik’s In Hemmed-in Ground (2018), developed from Vladimir Lenin’s quote from 1904, in which he addressed the Bolshevik–Menshevik split within the party. The text ironically became a depiction of global politics at the time. Right next to it was Fernando Sánchez Castillo’s Swing (2018), a typically monumental statue of a heroic figure, bending back like Neo in The Matrix (1999) dodging bullets, with a swing attached to its neck: a strange confluence of fun times and the strangling/toppling of hero figures. These two artworks immediately captured the audience’s attention and set the tone of the whole biennale. Since then, and particularly over the past year, we’ve seen the world in general become more conservative, more nationalistic, and the consequences of that are reflected in the artworld too: as a metaphor, Bodies of Water seems a safer choice.

Politics aside, we’re constantly reminded of the fact that in other ways we live in a totally globalised world, where people can shift to online meetings to make time differences irrelevant and social media trends can flood across continents in seconds. In that context, a biennale focusing too much on locality or geography – Shanghai, the Yangtze River, etc – or even bearing the name of a specific place and context can appear conservative. Even though it is the first time the biennale adapted its format (albeit by necessity rather than choice), this doesn’t elevate the content or concept, or surprise the audience with new or ‘gamechanging’ technologies. Although, to be fair, even with the whole (art)world searching for new digital formats to replace irl events, we haven’t seen anything revolutionary, even from the wealthiest art fairs, institutions and foundations. Nevertheless, given how the rest of the world is adapting, I was expecting integrated apps, immersive vrs, interactive software with incredible ui and digital exhibitions as complicated as a computer operating system. What I experienced as irl substitutes were slides, videos and texts under a hyperlink, or low-quality streaming events. Maybe ‘go digital’ will always be a substitute, and will be forgotten

Cao Minghao & Chen Jianjun, Water System Museum, 2018–20, pictured here in an earlier incarnation of the project. Photo: Hyundai Motorstudio

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as irl events become the norm again – it’s hard otherwise to explain the artworld’s lack of investment and interest in digital alternatives. At the same time, the expected sitespecificity of commissioned artworks is made particularly challenging by travel restrictions, running the risk of being the result of (understandably) superficial research (and hasty conclusions) or old stereotypes. Such is the case with Amphibia (2021) by Carlos Irijalba, an installation of geotechnical core drillings from Shanghai and Anhui. Of course, the cores’ properties are different, and for Shanghai, on the everchanging Yangtze Delta, the drilled core is in a transitional status between solid and liquid. But is this amphibious status specific to Shanghai or merely an attempt to signify the show’s engagement with the aquatic theme? How can you understand a local context if you cannot be local? In Fluffy Grounds (2021), a video essay by C+ arquitectas, the collective talked about how the poplar and willow seeds (more popularly known as ‘white fluff’) in springtime Beijing had become a headache and unwanted allergy inducer, an example of ‘the tousled naturecultural materialities’. Yet this is only half the story. This type of tree planting in urban areas is already the product of humanity’s selfish (and hypocritical behaviour). We damaged nature first, through the creation of urban and industrial centres, then planted trees (technically sterile) in urban areas to fulfil a fantasy

of nature (and perhaps to mitigate some sense of guilt), so the nature-cultural materialities were already tousled, regardless the white fluff. Moreover, in China, as elsewhere, these types of ‘tousled’ materialities exist in far scarier and more disturbing forms. The biennale promised to ‘explore caring-based approaches which negotiate our entanglement in extended ecosystems of interdependency’; but in comparison with the complex and disturbing ecological crisis we are facing in real life, it often appears bland and tranquil. To a certain extent, the biennale’s problem is that it is both too specific and too inclusive at the same time, which ought to be impossible. Shanghai is a coastal metropolis, and the Huangpu River runs through it, and it has a history of being one of the earliest modern harbours in China. So many things could be seen as related to ‘water’ that this framework starts to lose any meaning. What, in this place, is not concerned with the hydrosphere? In the exhibition itself, there is Water System Museum (2018–20), by Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun, a research-based project on water conservancy; Silueta de Arena (Filmwork No. 65, 1975), by Ana Mendieta, a six-channel 8mm videowork on the fluidity of rivers; Once Near Water: Notes from the Scaffolding Archive (2008–09), by Vera Frenkel, a video about how human behaviour and infrastructures shaped and changed the geography next to a river. While each work might be individually strong, they

tend to weaken each other and become part of a one-dimensional whole when included here for their visual or literal connections to water and fluidity. Several works by New York-based architects workac are presented in large, 1:1 vinyl print form on the major walls of the Power Station’s first floor. These technical drawings, among them risd Student Centre Bathroom Sink and Stealth Building Residential Shower (both 2020), appear to be on display simply because they are drawings of water facilities. This is not to say that the task of bringing water to urban structures is unimportant or irrelevant, or that ways of doing this while balancing its effect on ecological systems aren’t pressing concerns, but it is to say that its presence in the exhibition is somewhat underwhelming and comes across as a nod to a form of encyclopaedic inclusivity. Surely a study of the biennale’s stated proposition that ‘climates, ecosystems and technologies, all life forms are inextricably interconnected and interdependent’ ought to be both more nuanced and more complex than this? One artwork in particular did grab my attention: The Odds (Part 1) (2019), a video installation by Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen. Moving from the topic of gambling to racehorses, show girls, Las Vegas, theatres and punk rock, it is meant as a visual example of apophenia, a delusion that causes one to perceive meaningful connections between unconnected events. An apt metaphor for this edition of the biennale. Paul Han

Revital Cohen & Tuur van Balen, The Odds (Part 1), 2019, hd video installation (sound, 16 min), led wall, 200 × 400 cm. Courtesy the artists

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Growing Like A Tree Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai 20 January – 20 May In one corner lies a pair of green khakis. A single taut thread extends from its frayed, holey crotch and is affixed to the wall with a bit of red tape. Curated by photographer Sohrab Hura, this group show brings together 14 artists and collectives from across South and Southeast Asia to consider image-making and community, and image-making in community. One imagines a gossamer web that connects all the other works and walls here and perhaps reaches across the Indian Ocean too: even as the region is doubly ravaged by the forces of covid-19 and state-sponsored ethnoreligious violence, these are the ties that bind. More overtly yoking the show together are two diaristic vignettes from Hura, about dealing with his mother’s declining mental health and the first roll of film he shot. They are scrawled onto the wall alongside chatty annotations about each artist – and Hura’s relationship to them – that take the place of any more formal wall labels. There is a sense that some or all of the participating artists could be swapped out and the show would read the same. This is not a bad thing, even as there’s a danger of artists being instrumentalised in service of what is functionally a Hura solo show. Rather, it feels like a screenshot of a dynamic, transnational scene in flux, captured at a particular moment in time. A number of works feature further annotation. Photographs from Nida Mehboob’s ongoing Shadow Lives series chronicling the quotidian persecution of Ahmadi Muslims in Pakistan are paired with handwritten

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Urdu texts. And taking up much real estate is a selection from The Feminist Memory Project, a visual archive (launched in April 2018) from Nepal Picture Library. Between 1960 and 1990, the former monarchy outlawed Nepal’s democratically elected parliament and seized control of the government. The archive traces the life and experiences of two revolutionary women during this time, pairing family album snapshots and printed matter with bits of oral history and red connective thread to reconstruct an alternative history of the time. Today the Communist Party is in power, but a nearby work from Bunu Dhungana suggests that the feminist struggle, at least, endures. In its eight self-portraits Dhungana addresses the many violences germane to being first a girl, then an unmarried woman in Nepal. She variously sports red significations of marriedness – a bindi, a sindoor, a ghumto or marriage veil that strangles her – smears her face with lipstick, covers her head and shoulders in tilak powder or just screams barefaced. Especially powerful is Jaisingh Nageswaran’s i feel like a fish (2020). It features images of his daily domestic life overlaid with yellow first-person texts that link the isolation of the pandemic with the ‘ritual pollution’ or untouchability of the ever-active, ever-brutal caste system. ‘Being born in a Dalit family in the state of Tamil Nadu, I’ve known what it is to be socially distant,’ one reads. It continues: ‘We live in a ghettoized community near the local cremation ground. My veins are loaded with the smell of burning bodies and I’ve always been

truthful to that.’ It becomes especially poignant given all the images that are coming out of India right now: lines of bodies on stretchers waiting to be cremated and a country lit up with funeral pyres like a macabre Diwali map. In Sean Lee’s Two People, meanwhile, the artist uses photography to try to rekindle his parents’ relationship through touch, to quietly intimate effect. Another highlight is Munem Wasif’s beautifully elegiac Khayal (2015–18), a short, dreamy film about finding stillness in the nocturnal heart of Old Dhaka. Its imagery – milk being poured over a white horse’s tail and dripping slowly off its fetlocks to pool onto an alley floor, eggs frying and flatbreads puffing – stays with you like a solar afterimage. Its sense of magic meanwhile is reflected in an L-shaped installation of photographs taken by children participating in photo workshops at Anjali House in Cambodia. Here too are images that linger: a lounging cow sporting a Louis Vuitton purse and a pot on its head, a couple and two rotund ginger cats asleep on a quilted maroon mattress. There’s something nice, too, about articulating relationships to place and to each other that are not defined by borders or citizenship lists. Many participants are regulars on the Chobi Mela circuit, one of many events where people from across the region end up meeting in Nepal or Bangladesh or Sri Lanka, and – this show suggests – perhaps the uae too. But still one wonders about all that annotation: why not let the subcontinent and all its images speak for themselves? Rahel Aima

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facing page Growing Like A Tree, 2021 (installation view). Photo: Ismail Noor/Seeing Things. Courtesy Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai

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The National 2021: New Australian Art Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 26 March – 5 September Carriageworks, Sydney 26 March – 20 June Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney 26 March – 22 August Presented across three institutions in Sydney – the Art Gallery of New South Wales (agnsw), Carriageworks and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (mca) – The National 2021: New Australian Art is the third instalment in a biennial series of survey exhibitions that bring together artists with diverse practices and cultural backgrounds, who live in urban, regional and remote communities. In contrast to the Sydney Biennale, which is coordinated by an umbrella organisation, with a single, overarching theme, The National’s three exhibitions each have their own curatorial team: Matt Cox and Erin Vink (agnsw), Abigail Moncrieff (Carriageworks) and Rachel Kent (mca). Such an arrangement means that artists are given differing levels of support depending on which institution they are affiliated with, even if all 39 artists are ostensibly part of the same exhibition. In light of this, viewing The National 2021 as a whole is a difficult task. Its premise is both too broad (a ‘showcase’ of Australian contemporary art) and too specific (curators must be mindful to present a balanced and fair selection of work). Each exhibition appears separate from the others, inviting the inevitable question as to which is the most curatorially successful of the three. The National 2021, as with previous iterations, suffers in part because of this framework. If there is a unifying thread to be found across the institutions, it is that of a heightened sensitivity to the environment, natural processes and the contested history of place. Cameron Robbins’s oenograf (2020–21), at mca, consists

of a handcrafted drawing instrument powered by the carbon dioxide emissions of fermented grapes, while Wona Bae and Charlie Lawler’s Regenerator (2021) includes a series of circular charcoal forms suspended in the foyer of agnsw. Sancintya Mohini Simpson’s videowork Dhūwã̄ (2020), shown at mca, culminates in a sugarcane field going up in flames, a dual reference to the legacy of Indian indentured labour and the capacity for fire to heal and destroy. Yet, although The National announces itself as a presentation of ‘provocative, political and poetic’ new Australian art, the works on display appear almost outside of, or at the very least detached from, our contemporary moment. Despite the many interconnected national crises of the past 18 months – ecological distress, domestic violence, refugee detention, war crimes, Indigenous deaths in custody (for which nobody has been held accountable), far-right violence and the global pandemic – such concerns occupy the periphery rather than the centre of the exhibition. This is not to suggest that the works should be overtly political or obvious in their aims, but what is missing is a lack of tension, or agitation, or a desire to transfix and arrest the viewer (whether via anger, silence or invocation). What is missing is momentum. To be fair, part of the reason for this absence is to do with the curating. In choosing to draw attention to ‘planetary caretaking’ (mca), ‘fragile natural and social ecosystems’ (agnsw) or ‘sociality’ (Carriageworks), the tone of many of the works is elegiac – a memorial for what we have lost, rather than the necessary recasting

of our future. This is especially evident in the artworks concerned with environmental collapse, as the danger in lamenting the ‘natural world’ is that it often morphs into a resigned, rather than active, position. The rejoinder to this is that there is a work in The National bristling with its own tightly coiled energy. Vernon Ah Kee and Dalisa Pigram’s Gudirr Gudirr (2021) is a three-channel collaborative videowork, first performed as a solo piece with Marrugeku (an intercultural dance company) and subsequently shot on location in Broome, Western Australia. In one scene, teenagers battle in the dirt, wrestling and punching as a drumbeat pulses behind them. In the next, Pigram combines traditional Aboriginal movement, silat martial arts and breakdancing into a new dance form, with the glow of headlights sliding past her body. A cascade of text obliterates the image (‘fuck fuck fuck fuck’), and after this incursion, we witness a sunrise and a closeup of ocean pools. Gudirr Gudirr is an indictment of Australia’s colonial history, of its massacres, forced removals and stolen land, but it is also a work filled with great care, remembrance, joy, beauty and pride. These twin narratives overlap and interweave; there is tension and its counterpoint – stasis and movement – all at once. You could say that Ah Kee and Pigram are able to distil into one film what The National is attempting to do across three institutions. It’s a reminder that volume and scale do not necessarily equate with potency – sometimes all that is required is a single artwork, in a single room. Naomi Riddle

Wona Bae & Charlie Lawler, Regenerator, 2021 (installation view, The National 2021: New Australian Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney). Photo: agnsw, Diana Panuccio. © and courtesy the artists

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Vernon Ah Kee, Dalisa Pigram & Marrugeku, Gudirr Gudirr, 2021 (installation view, The National 2021: New Australian Art, Carriageworks, Sydney). Photo: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy the artists

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Within / Between / Beneath / Upon The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Ho Chi Minh City 13 March – 6 June ‘The categorisation of art practice into different disciplines – specifically that of sculpture – sheds light on the history of that particular form, builds bridges between opposing sides, tradition vs contemporary, and at the same time is a sleight of hand, introducing to local audiences new ways to define an ancient craft through new methods of working,’ write the curators of Within / Between / Beneath / Upon, Vân Ðỗ and Bill Nguyễn. The exhibition proposes that ‘concept’ is a necessary relief to the practice of sculpture, which, in Vietnam, has remained largely a matter of form. This proposition plays out in an exchange of letters between the curators (displayed in the exhibition space), in which the pair discuss the ways in which the term ‘sculpture’, in the context of Vietnam,

is still predominantly taken to reference religious statues at temples and pagodas, decorative goods or tourist items, or public monuments that satisfy the need to honour political ideals through the spectacle of the corporeal. The exhibition’s conceptual proposal, taking on the colours of a proclamation, manifests as three separate series of works by Lê Hiền Minh, Thao Nguyên Phan and Richard Streitmatter-Trần. Occupying a corner of the exhibition space, Lê Hiền Minh’s wooden sculptures The Gods of Expectation (Divine Cycle, Divine Constant, Divine Source), no. 1 (2021) appear as divine female characters (such as Guanyin and the Vietnamese Mother Goddesses known as Ðỗ Mẫu). They are stationed atop household items (also carved from wood) such as washing

machines and kitchen sinks, as though the ghosts of women trapped by the structures of Confucian society, lingering in the domestic context in which they would have spent most of their lives. Carved by craftsmen in northern villages, the statues of the women have been subsequently covered in dó paper by the artist. Perplexingly, though, Lê then applies an additional layer of glossy, woody brown varnish to the surface, making redundant her dó paper treatment – a formal manipulation typical of her signature concept of ‘un-doing sculpture’, in which the dó paper ‘embraces’ physical changes and coexists through them. Thao Nguyên Phan’s geometrically carved marble slabs – which form the bases for part of her installation Magical Bows (Lacquered Time) (2017–), on which crossbows are supported –

above and facing page Within / Between / Beneath / Upon, 2021 (installation views). Courtesy the artists and The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Ho Chi Minh City

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also appear on a pedestal, solemnly supporting the modern sculptural masterpieces A baby (1965), A nun (c. 1974) and A temple (c. 1973), created by Ðiềm Phùng Thi̇ while the late sculptor was based in France. Here, Phan’s humble act of interposing her work with that of Madame Ðiềm’s modernist forms is in itself complete and emotive: an homage to the late artist’s own abstract sculptural language that came to be known as ‘the seven modules’ (consisting of a series of shapes with which she composed her sculptures), the marble bases of Phan’s Magical Bows draw their shapes from Madame Ðiềm’s formal approach. Originally shown at Phan’s 2017 solo exhibition at The Factory, Magical Bows fostered new resonances when it was shown at the Lyon Biennale in 2019, making connections between the tragic allegory of the ‘national traitor’ in Vietnamese legend and the story of the French Air Force, which used Vietnamese lacquer as a protective coating for airplane propellers in the early 1900s. It appears as though the artist and

curators, vis-à-vis these layers of overlapping temporality, were rather excitable, cramming in too many iterations of works that are seemingly connected, foregoing the opportunity to establish an intergenerational dialogue, through form and materiality, between Ðiềm and Phan. Perhaps this explains why the name Ðiềm Phùng Thi̇ does not appear in the list of participating artists, but whose presence in the exhibition serves as a ‘base’ for Phan’s monologue. Richard Streitmatter-Trần leans towards traditional sculptural motifs, particularly those of Chăm architecture on the South Central Coast of Vietnam. Using modelling clay, he moulds heritage ruins, based on the brickwork of the Chăm temple roof’s layered pyramid and presented on plinths on the floor, and a series of unknown examples of ancient statues, which are then placed atop steel pillars (Ascension, 2021), or haphazardly sprayed with insulating foam (Light Heavies, 2021). Trần’s efforts to directly craft his works by hand act as a purposeful counterweight to their anachro-

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nistic subject and form. But his unfinished, if not naive sculptures, set alongside a simulation of his work desk, leave the viewer feeling that this is little more than a studio visit. In an era when international auction houses value the works of that first generation of modernist artists from the École Supérieure des Beaux Arts de l’Indochine in Hanoi for their outstanding craftsmanship and skill, local arts institutions have also declared that ‘conceptualisation’ is the optimal solution to the problem of chronicling sculpture within the inchoate history of contemporary Vietnamese art. In the case of Within / Between / Beneath / Upon, a series of prepositions describing the endless rummage in all directions in the dense jungle of ideas and stories, this ambition suggests an escape route, freeing the artist from responsibility to the materials they use. Yet no matter how grand the concept, a discursive crutch can hardly conceal the artists’ decadence or confusion when manipulating their materials. Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần

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Rafael Domenech Imperfect fragments of an uncertain whole Hua International, Beijing 21 April – 18 June Zhuang Hui Qilian Range, Redux Galleria Continua, Beijing 24 April – 27 June Wang Yin 798 Art Zone & Vitamin Creative Space, Beijing 23 April – 5 June Polyphonic Strategies: The Moving Image and Its Expanded Fields New Century Art Foundation, Beijing 23 April – 3 July Zachary Armstrong Bag of Candles Faurschou Foundation, Beijing 15 January – 13 June For his first solo show in China, Rafael Domenech has (remotely) created a space in which used and natural materials – egg cartons, wire coils, sponges and rocks – attach to, wrap up, penetrate or even sprout out of a dozen of the artist’s books haphazardly scattered across a blank, landscapelike table with carved-out sections that occupies most of the room. Inside Hua International’s compact gallery, objects, publications and light installations intervene and shift within the space; the audience’s movements are organised and disciplined by the cutout sections of the table, which, while dictating which books can be accessed, also provide ‘reading nooks’. The entire assemblage appears to be a cipher for the artist’s belief that a building can be a linguistic device, and that architecture can be an experimental publication. For a decade, the artist Zhuang Hui’s Qilian Range project has explored landscapes of a more personal kind: that of his childhood. This Redux show at Galleria Continua presents a detailed timeline between Zhuang Hui’s birth (in 1963) and the unfolding of his artistic philosophy, inspired by China’s northern Qilian Range, which considers this geographical area as both a locale and a concept. The exhibition includes important video documentation of the region and specially designed tents – borrowed from a local nomadic community – to enhance an on-the-ground experience. The show also looks back to a time when Zhuang Hui engraved five

functioning qr codes, each containing information about the region, onto rock faces at five sites deep within the Qilian Range. His labourconsuming performance suggests that the process of reconnecting to nature can only be acknowledged by nature itself. Going natural is painter Wang Yin’s choice of display: rarely does a painting exhibition elect to completely drop the artificial lighting. But in this warehouse space, Wang has chosen to do just that, and instead rely on natural lighting to illuminate his works. His paintings are well taken care of in this temporary gallery dedicated to the artist’s visiting show, which is co-organised by Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou. Its circular cloister is saturated with a mysterious tranquillity; paintings on the wall recall faded billboards, devoid of ad texts; figures are depicted in a semi-abstract fashion. Ultimately, Wang’s blurring of lines and use of fading colours as a ‘fundamental style’ invite the viewer closer to the paintings, creating an ambience infused with intimacy. Perhaps not so intimate but no less impactful, at New Century Art Foundation there’s a presentation of five artists who engage with the moving image and other media, in Polyphonic Strategies (2021): video installations (Yang Fudong, Chen Dandizi, Li Ran, Yu Honglei), photo prints (Chen Dandizi), archival work (Li Ran), oil paintings (Li Ran) and marble sculpture (Wang Xu).

For the visitor, once surrounded by the exhibition’s interplay of sounds and shadows, the sensations expressed by each artist’s practice interlock: the brutality in Chen Dandizi’s found footage of an animal shooting is joined by another video featuring a blinking eye, an absurd quality that is present in Yu Honglei’s short, funny videos played on loop, until your brain feels numb, which can be remedied by a relaxing mindfulness session that can be found upstairs at Yang Fudong’s installation Endless Peaks – It’s the Ice (2021). The silent five-channel video (accompanied by a triptych of a photograph of mountain trees, a drawing in the ancient style and an abstract work that recalls Chinese ink painting), created with Yang’s typical nostalgic aesthetic, depicts a monk’s daily life, working and resting on Mount Tiantai. For more yearnings for the past, a stop at Faurschou Foundation finds works by Zachary Armstrong that is populated with childhood memories and nostalgia. Armstrong’s exhibition, titled Bag of Candles (2021), brings us into a space where American folklore mingles with an imaginative innocence. Using encaustic painting, an ancient technique in which hot beeswax and pigments mix, Armstrong remakes two paintings in a nod to Norman Rockwell and Ian Miller. The most eye-catching work in the room, however, is series of shelves lined with ceramic pots, pictures in frames, lamps and bags of candles. Yue Ren

facing page, from top Rafael Domemech, Imperfect fragments of an uncertain whole, 2021 (installation view), courtesy the artist and Hua International, Beijing Zhuang Hui Qilian Range, Redux, 2021 (installation view), photo Dong Lin, courtesy the artist and Galleria Continua, Beijing Wang Yin, 2021 (installation view, 798 Art Zone & Vitamin Creative Space, Beijing), courtesy the artist and Vitamin Creative Space Zachary Armstrong, Bag of Candles, 2021 (installation view), photo Jonathan Leijonhufvud, © Faurschou Foundation, Beijing

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Books The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen Corsair, £18.99 (hardcover) The narrator of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 debut novel, The Sympathizer, used his FrenchVietnamese heritage to his advantage as a double agent before and after the fall of Saigon. Or perhaps it is better to say he was born into the role: able to pass in two cultures, a trespasser in both. Nguyen’s widely anticipated sequel picks up where The Sympathizer left off, with the unnamed narrator on a boat headed for France after his release from a reeducation camp where he was tortured to cure him of the compassion that, while inherent to anyone brought up to identify not only with but as different people, is anathema to the monomaniacal revolutionary. If the conflicted hero of the first book was ‘the sympathizer’ because he could see everything from both sides, the title of the second begs a question: to what is he now ‘committed’? ‘Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom,’ said Chairman Ho Chi Minh in his 1966 appeal to the Vietnamese people, and it is to nothing that the narrator commits himself. The name he chooses for his French passport is Vô Danh, meaning ‘nameless’, and the life he pursues in France is nihilistic. Readers of The Sympathizer will be familiar with Nguyen’s trademark combination of high theory with low genre fiction, and Vô Danh’s transformation into drug dealer for ‘bobo’ Parisian society provides plenty of opportunities to sneak postcolonial

philosophy in under the cover provided by shootouts between Arab and East Asian gangs. We could say that this tension between high and low is only one of the many binaries reconciled through Nguyen’s dialectical method, or we could say that sandwiching a cocaine-fuelled orgy in which Catholic priests and corrupt politicians do unspeakable things to nubile girls from the global south in between discourses on Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête (1969) and Hélène Cixous’s Le Rire de la Méduse (2010) is having your cake and eating it. Either way, it’s a lot of fun. That Nguyen can get away with these and other absurd plot devices – the French-African doorkeeper of a brothel called Heaven is liable to wax on about Frantz Fanon, just in case the reader wasn’t going to get the connection when the bad guy turns up wearing a white mask – is a near-miracle of style. The narrative form expresses an ideological position that ‘nothing’ is a precondition of free will, this ‘nothing’ being the space between fixed identities and determined actions. It is this Sartrean ‘nothing’ (I know it’s Sartrean because the French author’s 1943 L’Être et le Néant is, naturally, discussed on a tv playing in Heaven) that the narrator embodies, an individual operating in the gap between East and West, capitalist and communist, white and Black. That he is both self and other is dramatised – and that this succeeds

is the near-miraculous bit – in the narrator’s oscillation between first and second person and the division of this novel into two mirrored parts in which nothing happens, twice. Even these proliferating references to the Western canon – the narrator’s forbidden love is for ‘Lana. Two syllables, two taps of my tongue on my palate. L-l-lah-nah!’ – reinforce the central theme of how difficult it is to escape the ideological structures within which our education takes place. That the narrator can’t stop echoing Voltaire even as he rails against the mission civilisatrice captures the double bind from which a double consciousness must attempt to escape. Like his anonymous narrator, albeit that he was a child in the company of his family, Nguyen fled to the United States after the fall of Saigon. He shares with postcolonial writers from Césaire to Fanon the dilemma of how to reject the oppressor’s account of history from within the coloniser’s own philosophical and literary tradition. One solution is to graft a treatise on the relative values of violent and nonviolent protest onto an airport thriller about gangsters in early 1980s Paris; another is for the colonised subject to express their gratitude to the coloniser for the gift of Western literature in the words of Nguyen’s narrator: ‘Thank you! Fuck you! Thank you! Fuck you! Thank you! Fuck you! Thank you! Fuck you!’ Ben Eastham

Karya by Aravind Malagatti, translated by Susheela Punitha Penguin India, Rs399 (hardcover) Rare must be the times that death does not have an unspoken business function. The grieving apart, there are always those who use the dead to sort out pending issues, stoke or settle old rivalries and negotiate arrangements beneficial to themselves. For shrewd and heartless politicians, death can be good optics too. This usefulness of death is sharply critiqued in Aravind Malagatti’s Karya (the title means death rites), a novella that was first published in Kannada in 1988. It is the third day since Bangaravva died. She has had a funeral befitting her status in the village as a generous woman. Most of the villagers are part of the procession to conduct the third-day ritual of feeding the birds – the

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dead are believed to return as crows to eat the food offered – when a rogue swirl of the wind makes Mallappa the wrestler drop the kullaggi ritual fire he is holding. Dropping the fire could bring untold bad luck to the community, and it is now up to the Panchas, the council of elders, to find a solution for this unprecedented calamity. As the large congregation awaits a verdict from beyond the boundary of the village, the elders scramble to follow rigid practices, often to comic ends. Country liquor flows freely, alongside accusations and gossip about Mallappa’s relationship with the landlord Shantagowda’s second wife. Mallappa’s uncle Chandappa meanwhile plots to be the Ghategara, the head of the

community and the one responsible for carrying the kullaggi, trying to usurp the position from his older brother. Shantagowda arrives at the funeral party with a gun, and a solution is arrived at. But Malagatti does not allow the reader the comfort of closure. As the procession to the funeral ground begins again a day and half later, another chilling catastrophe awaits them. Grief is given its space, but it is in the way that myth, symbolism derived from nature, power politics and caste violence are used to comment on death’s potential as a spectacle and a tool that people use variously to further their agendas that Karya packs quite the mighty punch. Deepa Bhasthi

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The Art of Contemporary China by Jiang Jiehong Thames & Hudson, £14.99 (softcover)

China in One Village by Liang Hong, translated by Emily Goedde Verso, £19.99 (hardcover) The Art of Contemporary China is the latest addition to Thames & Hudson’s iconic ‘World of Art’ series. Although Jiang Jiehong politely kicks against the series’ encyclopaedic construction, explaining that his story will be rooted in the particular social and cultural context of postMao China as opposed to the world history of art. What this means in practice is that his narrative is structured by themes (art’s relationship to the masses and collectivism; to tradition; to urban transformation; and to a constrained society) drawn, as he puts it, from the ‘everyday reality’ of China, rather than a conventional chronology. Given Jiang’s conceit, perhaps it’s no accident that the only non-Chinese artist cited in the book – Robert Rauschenberg, who exhibited at Beijing’s National Museum in 1985 – used to claim that his work occupied a middle ground between art and life. Yet, beyond that aside, little attention is paid to outside influence: why many Chinese artists migrated to Europe and the us; the impact of the international artists who currently occupy so much of China’s gallery real-estate. Hong Kong, so much a part of China today, does not exist. Nevertheless, Jiang’s approach is welcome in that it goes some way to explaining why some of the preoccupations of contemporary art in China have developed and allows the author to connect one artistic practice to the next to create a convincing and at times illuminating narrative. And to make a break from the often asphyxiating tendency to divide contemporary Chinese art into strictly differentiated generations, rather than a continuous and messy flow. Where it falls a little flat is in the fact that not enough space is given to the intricacies of the realities from which the art derives. Indeed, not all of the realities of life in China (the impact – good and bad – of technology, for example) are present. In part this is a product of the state censorship regime in China, but it is equally a consequence of the paradox Jiang has created for himself: in which the real life from which the art is generated can only be identified when it enters the slightly less ‘real’ sphere of art. So, while the approach looks fashionably bottomup, it is necessarily top-down. The Tiananmen Square ‘incident’ of 1989 is mentioned and a few artworks relating to it, such as Song Dong’s Breathing (1996), glossed; its true impact (and the

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restrictions governing discussion of it) is never discussed. Even a work as apparently ‘real’ as Hu Yunchang’s One Metre Democracy (2010), in which the artist had himself sliced open for a metre-long stretch from his clavicle to his knee, seems both privileged and indulgent without more contextual focus on what ‘democracy’ – a remarkably shifting value – meant in China at the time. Similarly, the economic context of both China and the development of the Chinese art market over the past decade or so is one about which Jiang, rather bizarrely, remains silent. Presumably because this avoids complicating his vision by having to deal with contemporary art’s interconnection with the country’s wealthy citizens/collectors, the increasing prevalence of art in government-led gentrification schemes or the influence of art-market forces. The effects of changes in China’s economic, social and political policies over the same timeframe dominate Liang Hong’s China in One Village, an at times harrowing, but stunningly insightful meditation on the status of the word ‘home’ and the redefinition of the family unit told from the perspective of ordinary citizens in rural China. Based on a series of interviews with Liang’s extended family and other residents of her hometown (Liang Village in Henan Province, Central China, from which the author, a professor of literature in Beijing, had been largely absent for a decade), it was originally published in Chinese in 2010. With little largescale industry (and the infrastructure that comes with it), the region’s economy, such as it is, is largely agrarian, its fabric torn apart following 30 years of sometimes contradictory ‘reform and opening up policies’ (which saw the decollectivisation of agriculture and an opening up to foreign investment) set in motion by Deng Xiaoping during the late 1970s and stuttering through to the early 2000s. Liang summarises the government assessment of the area as economically underdeveloped, socially conservative and generally backward; and the more general status of the rural population in China, which once constituted the majority of its population and the primary focus of Communist Party policy, as a ‘large burden’ on society, both politically and culturally. Broadly anthropological, yet coloured by emotion, the book focuses on the lives of three

generations of villagers: grandparents dealing with the scars left by the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), their children (the author’s generation) who have left to find better-paid work in more-or-less distant cities (but continue to identify Liang Village as ‘home’ and to show off their wealth within it) and their children’s children, who consequently have little connection to either the town or the country. During the course of this history, the village has become part abandoned, part lavishly reconstructed, its arable soil drained of nutrients by brick factories and other extractive industries that have further damaged the irrigation systems and water quality. Children who moved to urban centres to seek employment rely on their parents to provide childcare services to grandchildren in a transactional relationship that extends the grandparents’ working lives and exploits traditional family structures. ‘In the future will these places [villages] really be their “hometowns”, these places characterised by loneliness, isolation, and contradiction? Lifeless and emotionless,’ Liang wonders in respect of younger generations. Yet part of the power of this book is the fact that Liang never allows it to become a straightforward sob story: ‘the problem of the underclasses isn’t a simple question of the oppressors and the oppressed; it’s a game of cultural power’, she writes, noting that villagers’ general apathy towards a sense of society outside of the family and village unit, their indifference to national politics and passive acceptance of their fate is partly responsible for their current situation. What makes Liang’s study so compelling is the way in which it offers a glimpse of a world in which personal problems – among them alcoholism, envy, domestic violence – exist on the same level as broader social and political problems – changes to collectivised structures, village and provincial finances, education and healthcare provision. Which, of course, aligns with Jiang’s conception of the history of China’s art. ‘Literary and artistic works explain life,’ the Rang County Committee Secretary informs Liang. But while China in One Village provides much of the additional contextualisation that Contemporary Art in China needs, how the former benefits from the context of the latter is rather less clear. Mark Rappolt

ArtReview Asia

24/05/2021 10:53

Ethical Portraits: In Search of Representational Justice by Hatty Nestor Zero Books, £10.99/$16.95 (softcover)

Hatty Nestor’s salient and sensitive investigation into the representation of individuals incarcerated in the us opens with a quote from Judith Butler’s Precarious Life (2006): ‘Those who gain representation… have a better chance of being humanized… those who have no chance to represent themselves run a greater risk of being treated as less than human’. Butler uses Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy about ‘the face’ and ‘the Other’ as a framework, writing that ‘to respond to the face… means to be awake to what is precarious in another life’. Nestor also takes a Levinasian approach to the ethics of looking and visibility, contending that when an artist documents an individual, they inherently enter ‘a position of accountability and responsibility… when a moral obligation to others, by default, should take priority over the so-called individual self’. Across six chapters, Nestor interrogates manifold depictions that include cctv footage, dna profiling and media images, in addition to conducting extensive interviews with artists who have made portraits of incarcerated, missing and wanted people in gestures of solidarity and resistance. Nestor’s essayistic, voice-driven narrative is an effective form of consciousness-raising, demonstrating an assertive, political urgency to the issues, rather than presenting an abstract debate. She is transparent about her anxieties surrounding the ‘ethical conundrum of portraying another person’, cognisant of ‘the fine line between

“research” and voyeurism’, questioning rather than didactic in her approach. In her foreword, Jackie Wang suggests that the practice of ethical portraiture requires ‘circulating images that counter the state’s representational repertoire’, thereby creating ‘counter-images’. The ‘counter-image’ brought to my mind James E. Young’s theory of the ‘counter-monument’, defined in The Texture of Memory (1993) as a rebuttal to the traditional, passive memorial. The counter-monument is active, it can ‘provoke’ and ‘demand interaction’. Nestor similarly defines an ethical portrait as ‘integral and empathetic, [challenging] marginalisation’, allowing individuals who have been dehumanised by the prison-industrial complex to regain control and demand agency. It is the counter-portrait to the mugshot, which demands subjects to ‘act as if they are already corpses’, or the courtroom sketch, where ‘subjects are given no voice, no say in how they are portrayed’. Forensic technology, such as facial recognition software, is shown to be an oppressive surveillance tool with historical roots in the pseudo-scientific nineteenth-century method of categorising criminals by their physiognomy. Two chapters are dedicated to artist portraits of the activist and whistleblower Chelsea Manning, by Alicia Neal and Heather DeweyHagborg respectively. Transgender inmates are subject to brutal mistreatment and violence within the carceral system. In 2014 Neal was commissioned by Manning’s Support Network

to paint a portrait that aligned with her chosen gender presentation, as her only media representation was a misgendered military photograph. This new image was circulated, acknowledging her selfhood and functioning as a form of reparative justice. In Radical Love (2015) DeweyHagborg created 3d-printed portraits with forensic methods of representation, using dna samples from swabs and hair clippings that Manning sent her. Nestor argues that this artwork liberates Manning’s image while also dismantling the hegemony of genetic data. People of colour, women and individuals from poorer backgrounds face lengthy sentences for minimal crimes, whereas large corporations avoid criminalisation. Jeff Greenspan and Andrew Tider’s 2016 activist project Captured: People in Prison Drawing People Who Should Be addressed these discrepancies, however ‘the inmate is only rendered through the portraits of those who are free’. Alyse Emdur’s Prison Landscape (2005–13) series fully engages with their visibility, photographing inmates in front of painted backdrops. These artificial scenes depict ‘imagined existences of nonconfinement’ (waterfalls, beaches, sunsets), enabling prisoners to assert ‘their individuality as a gesture towards freedom’. The power of their imagination can exceed the regulated space of the prison. Emdur’s work provokes Nestor to raise the importance of solidarity, ‘a position that demands to be revisited time and time again, until we find alternative avenues of representation for the marginalised’. Philomena Epps

Notes for the Future, Green Zeng: A Review 2010–2020 by Green Zeng self-published, S$45 (softcover) Singaporean artist-filmmaker Green Zeng’s works deal with the ways in which histories are written, disseminated and interpreted. This self-published monograph, which covers seven bodies of work made over the course of a decade, is a solid introduction to his practice, tracking his interest in still images and prints, such as when creating fictional banknotes with political exiles’ faces printed on them (Malayan Exchange, Studies of Notes of the Future, 2011). Later he concentrated on videos and film, notable works of which include the wide-ranging Television Confessions (2018) series, exploring televised confessions made by political detainees between the 1960s and 80s.

Accompanying the artwork plates are essays by academics, critics, artists and friends. Most are reprints of catalogue texts that provide exhaustive contextualising, so that a non-Singaporean reader would be able to understand the political nuances. This book also provides insights into the intersection between art and political commentary in Singapore. Art, being a relatively open-ended field, is less strictly disciplined by the state compared to public forums such as the mass media. Zeng’s work, like that of other politically engaged cultural workers, provides contrapuntal narratives to statesanctioned ones.

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There are places where the writing in Notes for the Future loosens up. Artist Gilles Massot responds to Shifting Dioramas (2016), comprising photographs of National Day billboards printed with politicians’ faces, and superimposed with lines demarcating constituency boundaries, in a meandering text that eventually ends in a comparison of the jagged outlines of these gerrymandered zones with Situationist dérives. But these are rare moments in what is overall a pensive tome. In his introduction Zeng says that he hopes that this book ‘serves as the closure of a chapter and a move towards new challenges’. This is a conscientious and loving send-off to a decade of work. Adeline Chia

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Words on the spine and on pages 15, 39 and 79 are by Joan Haslip, The Sultan: The Life of Abdul Hamid II (1958)

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First of all, let me just say that if you want proof of the benefits of colonialism, just look at what’s happened to Hong Kong now. A once proud, independent island reduced to a vassal state! It wasn’t like that when I was in charge. At thirty-five I was the youngest governor in Hong Kong’s history and I made it my business to empower the place. But I’m not here to provide you with empty boasts. Although I see you’re rather fond of that, if your elections of Donald, Boris and Narendra are anything to go by. Still, I know you doubt me. You’re somewhat to the left of those people we used to call Whigs, obsessed with the idea that everything to do with colonialism is a bad thing. Although, I venture to suggest, it’s ironic that the readers of a magazine about visual culture so often fail to open their eyes. What do you think about when you think about Hong Kong today? Money, that’s what. And, in all humility, it’s thanks to me. hsbc and Standard Chartered were both set up under my watch – and I think you’ll find that they are still printing banknotes today. It was me too who introduced labour reforms to the colony. To make money. In fact, I got a knighthood for that. For introducing coolie labourers to the territory. And I did that despite the fact that plantation owners in Ceylon were constantly whingeing that there weren’t enough coolies to go round. (That’s probably why I was sent to run Ceylon next – the tea must flow and all that.) It was me too who introduced the Hong Kong Cadet system to colonial bureaucracy. We trained Englishmen to speak Cantonese, so that we wouldn’t have to hire any natives, and a clear sense of order could stay in place. I would suggest to you, if I may be so bold, that one of the problems you living people seem to have is that none of you knows exactly where you belong, what station you occupy. When I was in charge no one wondered about that. With all modesty, I think you could say that I made Hong Kong great. Not ‘again’; great in the first place. I could never say that myself of course. I was happy directing things from the wings. A backstage kind of chap. Hiding my light under a bushel (the one and only instance in which I disobeyed Jesus, I might add). It tended to blind people, after all. But it was me that organised the annexation of Kowloon too.

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Postscript

In an ongoing series in which the great colonialists justify themselves, Hercules Robinson says ‘fair’s fair’

Hercules Robinson

To consolidate our needs for capital and freshwater, and to provide a buffer between the good people of the colony and the opium-addled Chinese. It’s because of things like that that I gained a reputation as a good administrator. I know you won’t believe my words, so I humbly submit for your perusal the reference I received in the Australian Town and Country Journal back in 1872, when it was announced that I was popping over to run New South Wales: ‘Sir Hercules is fond of power [not sure about that, I may have bought my commission in the army, but the rest just came naturally], a trained and admirable administrator of Crown colonies, an indefatigable worker, and one of the fairest distributors of patronage that ever held reins for Her Majesty anywhere. He is both sharp and clear in apprehension, a capital writer and speaker of formal set addresses, but not a ready man in public,—in fact, morbidly shy of public appearances in any shape,—fonder of the desk [I wasn’t quite so obsessed with furniture as this makes me out to be] and of real downright hard work in travelling, inspecting, and maturing schemes of improvement [I did sort out the Straits Colonies in my spare time while running Hong Kong]. He has effected wonders in Ceylon; and we should be fortunate, if he got another six years term of office here [and that’s before I’d even arrived, I’ll have you know]. Lady Robinson, daughter of Lord Valentia, is fond of gaiety and society, and is a majestic-looking woman [that’s why I married her – because of the latter part of the description, not the first – no one liked gaiety less then I did. Although it is true that having her there to be gay and sociable freed me up to get down to the serious business of running things].’ So, to conclude, ultimately my life was governed by a sense of duty and fairness. When I was helping to negotiate a rather unsavoury truce between the Empire and the Boers in the Transvaal, it was me, for instance, who suggested that, in the interests of equality, if the South African Republic had the right to exclude native races from its territory, it should extend that right of exclusion to Indian and Chinese coolie immigrants as well. And, I added, any other coloured immigrants who might be hanging around as well. Fair’s fair, after all.

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The Art Basel & UBS Global Art Market Report 2021 Download now on artbasel.com/TheArtMarket

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