MA QIUSHA, ANITA DUBE, DALE HARDING,

Contemporary Visual Culture

IZUMI KATO, GWANGJU BIENNALE

ISSUE 111 NOV/DEC 2018

 | NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111

Features

76 84
Ma Qiusha Anita Dube

Cutting Through Naked and

Histories Knife-Sharp
BY TOM MOUNA BY JYOTI DHAR

96 106
Young & Emerging Then and Now
BY THE EDITORS BY THE EDITORS

artasiapacific.com 9
 Departments

59
12 Essays
Editor’s Letter
16
Contributors 111
29 Inside Burger
Reports Collection
119
We Are Each One An Other
Reviews
61
Hopping on a Broken Bandwagon
63
Ladies and Gentlemen of Leisure

67
Profiles

29
One on One: 120-136
On Kawara Gwangju, TarraWarra, Tokyo, Busan,
30 Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, Singapore,
Dispatch: Hanoi Metro Manila, Jakarta, Ramallah,
London, New York, New York,
33
Minneapolis, Los Angeles
News
138
37
Book Reviews:
The Point:
The Art of Place, the Place of Art
Gana (Hear, Think, Understand)
140
39
Art Directory
Whispering Gallery
147
41
Where I Work:
People
Izumi Kato
45
152
Auction Report
68 The Sketch:
49
Dale Harding Keiichi Tanaami
Art Fair Report
52 70
Previews Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang
55 72
New Currents Khvay Samnang

10 | NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111

 Editor’s Letter
Us, You, #MeToo
It has been one year since the New York Times published a
report on the numerous allegations of sexual misconduct
against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. The article
unleashed the #MeToo movement that has swept across
the globe in almost every industry, profession and calling,
including art and publishing. To mark the anniversary of
this historic moment for women to speak out and share their
experiences of sexism and sexual harassment, in our Nov/Dec
issue of ArtAsiaPacific we focus on artists who, through their
work, highlight the challenges women face.
For our cover Feature, AAP Beijing desk editor Tom Mouna
met up with Ma Qiusha, an artist who came of age during China’s
massive social, cultural and economic transformation. Mouna
considers Ma’s diverse practice encompassing performance,
video, installation, photography and painting, all of which
revolve around personal and collective memories of growing up
in China in the 1980s and ’90s. Ma’s most visceral works look
at the familial and cultural expectations of children, such as in
the video From No. 4 Pingyuanli to No. 4 Tianqiaobeili (2007).
Here, the artist sits in front of the camera speaking calmly about
her childhood, specifically her intensely academic-focused
upbringing and her parents’ wishing she were a boy. Only at
the end does she appear to be in pain as she talks, and it is
revealed, through the blood spilling from her lips, that she has
spoken for more than seven minutes with a razor blade in her
mouth. Ma’s artworks looks at cultural phenomena beyond her
own life as well, from the shifting colors of women’s hosiery to
online automobile subcultures. Mouna reflects, “Perhaps not
surprisingly for an artist whose practice deals with the idea of
control or the lack of it—over one’s own agenda, over the female
body, over the larger societal shifts occurring in Beijing and
China—Ma likes to collect objects, as if to temporarily possess
narratives that they carry or for the purpose of allowing her to
process conjectured histories.”
In the second Feature, AAP contributing editor Jyoti Dhar
examines the career of Anita Dube, an artist, writer and
curator who has played a pivotal role in India’s tightly knit
art scenes since the early 1980s. Dhar looks back at Dube’s
interdisciplinary practice—from her involvement as the
leading spokesperson in the 1980s art group known as the
Radicals, who sought to incorporate the voices and perspectives
of marginalized groups (whether Dalit, tribal, queer or female),
to her critical art reviews in the progressive Indian newspaper
Economic Times. Dhar’s analysis offers some hints of what
to expect at the forthcoming Kochi-Muziris Biennale this
December, which Dube helms as curator.
This issue also concludes our two Feature series to mark
AAP’s 25th anniversary. Then and Now, a selection from our
archives of articles and images that capture the social, political
and cultural mood over the past two and half decades, revisits
Peter Robinson’s rise on the 1990s New Zealand art scene at
the time of the country’s debates on the return of land and
rights to indigenous peoples, and spotlights the emotionally
raw performances by Indonesia’s Melati Suryodarmo in the
late 2000s examining ideas of struggle, powerlessness,
resistance and loss. We continue our visual portfolio of five
up-and-coming artists in Young and Emerging, this time
with those whose practice utilizes new kinds of digital media:
Hayoun Kwon, Miao Ying, Jess Johnson, Refik Anadol and
Foundland Collective.
12 | NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111
For our special Feature Inside Burger Collection, Katharina
Amman, head of the Swiss Institute for Art Research, and
Christina Végh, director of the Kestner Gesellschaft in
Hannover, meet with artists Teresa Hubbard and Alexander
Birchler to discuss their project about the American artist Flora
Mayo, created for the Switzerland Pavilion at the 57th Venice
Biennale. Together they discuss feminism, power relations,
narrative structures and reframing history around a nearly
forgotten figure.
In Essays, two guest contributors examine recent trends
in their respective art scenes. With three art fairs—Art Stage
Singapore, SEA Focus and Art SG—lined up for 2019, critic
Reena Devi considers whether Singapore’s frenzied push for
these commercial events will actually benefit all involved in the
country’s arts ecology. From Shanghai, curator Danielle Shang
scrutinizes China’s new generation of private museums, asking
if it is time for the many collector-driven initiatives to adopt
institutional standards and social responsibilities. Rounding
out the essays, Joyce Wong, the winner of AAP’s inaugural
Young Writers Contest, examines cross-cultural themes in the
work of Shezad Dawood.
In Profiles, AAP reviews editor Ophelia Lai meets up with
Cambodian multidisciplinary artist Khvay Samnang during
his recent visit to Hong Kong. AAP Australia desk editor
Tim Walsh sits down with Brisbane-based artist Dale Harding
after a whirlwind year of exhibitions in TarraWarra, Liverpool
and Stockholm. Ink Society director Olivia Wang talks
with California couple-collectors Jerry Yang of Yahoo!
fame and Akiko Yamazaki about their shared love of both
traditional and contemporary art forms as well as their support
of cultural institutions.
Rounding out the issue, for Where I Work, AAP associate
editor Chloe Chu visits the Hong Kong studio of Japanese artist
Izumi Kato, whose solo show is currently on view at Beijing’s
Red Brick Art Museum. Do Truong Linh files a Dispatch from
Hanoi and reveals a still conservative yet growing art scene in
Vietnam’s capital. In One on One, New Zealand’s representative
artist for next year’s Venice Biennale, Dane Mitchell, explains
his admiration for the late On Kawara, particularly his date-
related works. For The Point, we invited Quandamooka artist
Megan Cope to elaborate on the importance of contributing to
the collective discourse of Indigenous Australian artists active
in the 1980s and ’90s. Working with similar concerns as Ma,
Dube, Hubbard and Birchler, Cope looks back and reflects on
her critical position in society, “Artists are often the first people
in society to carefully articulate their position in the world, in
ways that not only expand our visual literacy but also convey
what it feels like to be on the receiving end of injustice and
prejudice.” In the year since #MeToo, it seems more imperative
than ever to pursue discussions around issues of social justice,
and explore ways to fight inequality.
ELAINE W. NG
See our website for the Chinese version of this article.
EDITOR & PUBLISHER Elaine W. Ng
MANAGING EDITOR Ysabelle Cheung
SENIOR EDITOR Don J. Cohn
EDITOR AT LARGE HG Masters
ASSOCIATE EDITOR Chloe Chu
COPY EDITOR Michael Lacoy
REVIEWS EDITOR Ophelia Lai
ASSISTANT EDITOR Julee Woo Jin Chung
EDITORIAL INTERN Dennis Mao
CHINESE TRANSLATOR Esther Chan
ART DIRECTOR Yip Pak To
DESIGNER Tifany Tam
PHOTO EDITOR Esther Chan
EDITORIAL DESKS
Australia Tim Walsh
Cambodia Erin Gleeson
China (Beijing) Tom Mouna
China (Guangzhou) Brady Ng
China (Shanghai) Arthur Solway
Hong Kong Karen Cheung
India (Mumbai) Ranjit Hoskote
India (New Delhi) Deeksha Nath
Indonesia Hendro Wiyanto
Japan Kenichi Kondo
Korea Jayoon Choi
Lebanon Nadia al-Issa
Malaysia Lena Ng
New Zealand Vera Mey
Pakistan Durriya Kazi
Philippines Marlyne Sahakian
Singapore  Ho Rui An
Taiwan David Frazier
UAE (Dubai) Kevin Jones
Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh City) Ruben Luong
West & Central Asia Sara Raza
USA (New York) Paul Laster,
Christopher Y. Lew, Mimi Wong
USA (Los Angeles) Jennifer S. Li
USA (San Francisco) Hanae Ko, Jessica Kraft
Canada Joobin Bekhrad
Latin America Inti Guerrero
Mexico (Mexico City) Larisa Escobedo
France (Paris) Deepak Ananth
Germany (Berlin) Astrid Mania
Spain (Madrid) Rebecca Close
Switzerland Andrew Cohen
UK (London) Ned Carter Miles
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Fatima Bhutto, Ashley Bickerton, Doryun Chong,
Shinyoung Chung, Antony Dapiran, Jyoti Dhar,
Donald Dinwiddie, Ingrid Dudek, Riky Efendy,
Britta Erickson, Feng Boyi, Gregory Galligan,
Eliza Gluckman, Jonathan Goodman, Hou Hanru,
Isabella E. Hughes, Joan Kee, Olivier Krischer,
Cecelia Levin, Charles Merewether,
Ashley Rawlings, Eric C. Shiner, Reiko Tomii,
Eugenie Tsai, Murtaza Vali, Philippe Vergne,
Farah Wardani, Chin-Chin Yap, Michael Young
ArtAsiaPacific welcomes feedback from readers.
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ADVERTISING REPRESENTATIVES
Greater China MEGAN COPE DANE MITCHELL
Hsin-Yi Hung
Tel +886 922 935 870 Megan Cope is a Quandamooka Dane Mitchell is an Auckland-
hsinyi@aapmag.com
artist from North Stradbroke based artist who will represent
Hong Kong
Jeremy Orritt
Island, Queensland. Her works, New Zealand at the 58th Venice
Tel +852 2375 2311 which probe issues of identity, Biennale in 2019. In 2018, he held
Fax +852 2555 0841
jeremy@omjmedia.com the environment and mapping solo exhibitions at Mori Art
practices, have been exhibited in Museum, Tokyo; Institut d’Art
India
Faredoon Kuka
Tel +91 22 5570 3081/82 institutions such as the Chapter Contemporain, Lyon; and
Fax +91 22 2851 3735
kuka@rmamedia.com
Arts Centre, Cardiff; Musées de la Auckland Art Gallery Toi o
Korea
Civilisation, Québec; Al-Ma’mal Tāmaki. He has also participated
Jung-Won Suh Foundation for Contemporary in exhibitions at Bunkier Sztuki
Tel +82 2 785 8222
Fax +82 2 785 8225 Art, Jerusalem; National Gallery Gallery of Contemporary Art in
sinsegi-2@sinsegimedia.info
of Australia, Canberra; and Art Krakow; City Gallery in Wellington
UK & Europe
Edie Meyer Gallery of New South Wales, and Belgium’s citywide project
Tel +1 917 930 4028
edie@aapmag.com
Sydney. Cope received the PLAY Kortrijk, 2018.
Western Australian Indigenous (See ONE ON ONE)
The Americas, Middle East & Worldwide
Linda Da Cruz, Charles Wong Art Award in 2015.
Tel +852 2580 1210
Fax +852 2553 1199 (See THE POINT) TOM MOUNA
Tel +1 212 255 6003
linda@aapmag.com Tom Mouna is a freelance writer
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JYOTI DHAR DANIELLE SHANG
Copyright © 2018, ArtAsiaPacific Holdings Ltd.
All rights reserved. The opinions expressed are not Jyoti Dhar is an art critic based Danielle Shang is an
necessarily those of the publisher. Material in this
publication may not be reproduced in any form
between Colombo and New independent writer, exhibition
without permission. Requests for permission should Delhi. She is a contributing organizer and art consultant
be made in writing to:
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GPO 10084 regularly contributes to Artforum research focuses on issues
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Tel +852 2553 5586 and Sri Lanka’s The Sunday of urban renewal and social
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info@aapmag.com Times. She received the Forbes change, examining the impact
India Emerging Art Writer of of globalization on art in the
CORRECTION:
In the feature “Future Markets,” in issue 110, Pascal
the Year Award in 2014, and the global south. She has written for
de Sarthe of de Sarthe gallery is not credited to his International Awards for Art Artforum, Hyperallergic, Yishu,
contribution (photographed on the top right of page Criticism in 2017. LEAP and Randian.
109). In the same issue, there is a printing error on page
(See FEATURES) (See ESSAYS)
119 of the “Young & Emerging” feature, in which an image
of Pannaphan Yodmanee’s Aftermath (2016) is doubled
on the right-hand-side page.
DO TUONG LINH OLIVIA WANG
Do Tuong Linh is a researcher Olivia Wang is an independent
and curator based in Hanoi. writer and curator based in Hong
Since 2005, she has engaged Kong. She is the representative of
in diverse cultural scenes in the Ink Society and is also on the
Vietnam, collaborating with art panel of judges for the UOB Art
spaces, galleries and institutions. in Ink Award.
In 2013, she co-founded Six (See PROFILES)
Space, an artist-run space
in Hanoi. Currently she is a JOYCE WONG
researcher for Site and Space in Joyce Wong is a curator at the
Southeast Asia. Chantal Miller Gallery of Asia
(See DISPATCH) Society Hong Kong Center. She
holds a BA from the University of
Hong Kong in English Literature
and Fine Art. She is the winner
MA QIUSHA, Gift, 2009, digital of the 2018 ArtAsiaPacific Young
print, 25.5 x 37.6 cm. Courtesy the Writers Contest.
artist and Beijing Commune.
(See ESSAYS)
| NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111
MATTHEW DAY JACKSON Ḙ‫ץ‬zಀz๼‫ظ‬᭍
NEW LANDSCAPE ̿ෛᷚวኮ̀

2018.11.07 – 2019.01.21

IN COLLABORATION WITH
Ӥၹ૱எ࿤‫܄‬ὄᚸय़᭲‫ݩ‬
2555-5 LONG TENG AVENUE XUHUI DISTRICT, SHANGHAI

ON KAWARA
One Million Years (Reading)
1993–
Documentation of reading
performance, one month.
View of “One Million Years” exhibition
at David Zwirner, New York, 2009.
Courtesy David Zwirner, Hong
Kong/New York/London.
One on One
On Kawara
By Dane Mitchell
Typographic forms inscribed on
canvas, stamped on cards, printed
and bound in volumes, punched out
on telegrams, voiced over airwaves.
On Kawara’s date-related works
suggest a level of remoteness and
detachment in their use of data and
a set-based logic of numeric and
systematic languages. Abstract and
serial in nature, the works describe
time with a cool distance. However,
Kawara’s language-objects are
anything but hermetic codes: they
are warm and generous spells
that transport us through those
very inscriptions.
The devices that Kawara
subscribes to—the attempted
absenting of the hand in painting
the sans-serif type of those
beautifully endless tracts of dates;
the reliance on telecommunication
technologies to prescribe existence
but that arrive minutes, hours, days
late; the temporal nature of a voice
reading out loud the dates of a
calendar across the airwaves—all
point to something deeply elegiac,
sensitive and poetic. Moreover, his
practice implies, and encourages,
an exploration of the far reaches of
ontology. In their recounting of
time departed, the works send
signals from the past—a past
imprinted on us in the present and
competing for possession of the
future. This applies to Kawara’s
daily date paintings (the “Today”
Reports artasiapacific.com
series) that commenced in 1966, as
much as a work such as the reading
of One Million Years (1993– ).
Each canvas or utterance calls up
the past in the present, as words
conjoin with time itself over and to
form a reality within reality.
Post hoc, my project to be
presented at the 2019 Venice
Biennale for the New Zealand
national pavilion, connects with this
concept of duration in highlighting
what has become extinct, lost,
defunct, withdrawn or disappeared
over time. Lists of obsolete,
vanished, subtracted, extinct
and disappeared things will be
broadcast across the city through
a network of ersatz trees. These
past entities are recalled through
the act of speech when uttered
for transmission. The aesthetics
of the work requires an attentive,
listening subject to comprehend
its full (and partial) extent, as only
part of the lists will be visible at any
one time. The quality of duration,
so formative in experiencing
Kawara’s work, is foundational
to the relevant events, acts and
consequences that have amassed
over the era of humanity, and to
the experience of Post hoc.
As Kawara’s works summon
the past, they invite reflection
on what has been and what will
come. Each canvas, line in a
journal, or newspaper clipping
associated with the date paintings
highlights a subjective, personal
presence within objective reality.
The date paintings sit on an edge:
becoming history as soon as they
are created, like the phenomena
of yesterday’s news, as newsprint
(and newspapers) yellow (or close),
fade and disappear. The sense of
relativism in time at the center of
these works ripples outward.
In its strident minimalism, the
form of Kawara’s art consequently
also ofers the realms of the
abstract and immaterial. Each
date painting is similar to its
predecessor, varying only in its
background color, scale and slight
modifications in script. Exhibitions
of these canvases often have a
similar logic of selection (paintings
made on Sundays, during one
week, etcetera). Formal repetition
encourages concentration on the
work and what lies beyond it. Some
viewers find that a diferent order
of perception is required by the
paintings’ systematic call on seeing
and reading. Like a mantra, the
repeated dates allow Kawara’s work
to penetrate consciousness.
Sound also directly infiltrates
the mind without being distanced
by the codification of aesthetics.
While invisible, a speech-act can
be considered an artwork-as-signal
and sculpture-as-transmission, and
as a time for the inception of ideas.
Art historian George Kubler’s 1962
text The Shape of Time: Remarks
on the History of Things makes the
poetic suggestion that astronomers
and historians are both concerned
with appearances noted in the
present but occurring in the past
(as in the way light takes millions of
years to reach Earth, and in the way
historians deal with objects from
the past). He suggests that both
astronomers and historians collect
ancient “signals”—from objects
and starlight alike. Following Kubler,
the “signals” observed and re-
transmitted, for example, returning
time or a vanished species into
existence momentarily, as in Post
hoc, might be thought of as both an
“event” and an object: emanations
that are both real and metaphysical.
Flows of information seem to
have no beginning or end. Each
symbolizing 24 hours and existing
as material evidence of the time
they took to make, Kawara’s date
paintings insert a pause within a
field of constant change. I was here.
We were here. To mark time even
with the most minimal gesture is
to recognize mortality, to act as
memorial while encouraging us
to step into the event flow of the
artwork as signal.
*With thanks to Zara Stanhope.
*Visit our Digital Library at library.artasiapacific.com
for more articles on Dane Mitchell.
29
 Dispatch

Hanoi
BY DO TUONG LINH

For better or for worse

View of Hanoi in 2014.
Copyright and courtesy Flickr user Guerretto.
Hanoi prides itself on its 1,000-
year history and diverse mix of
Chinese, French and Soviet cultural
influences. It is much like a living
theater, with all aspects of life
played out in the streets, including
eating, drinking, talking, singing,
driving, dancing and fighting.
The city is full of national
museums, such as the Vietnam
National Fine Arts Museum, the
Vietnamese Women’s Museum and
the Vietnam National Museum
of History. However, these sites
seem to only attract foreign
visitors. Internationally, there is
curiosity and demand for arts
and culture from Vietnam and
historical information around the
Vietnam War, but the local people,
especially the younger generations,
are generally more interested
in the latest Korean fashion
trends or the next Hollywood
blockbuster. The exception to this
is the new, private Vincom Center
for Contemporary Art (VCCA),
situated inside a huge luxury
shopping mall in the Royal City
residence complex, which since
its debut last year has attracted
massive crowds of young people.
The popularity of the VCCA has
contributed to the mainstream
appeal of contemporary art, which
was once considered underground
and alternative.
Despite this shift in perception,
other nonprofit or independent
key players in the contemporary
art scene remain quiet, possibly
due to the lack of commercial
galleries and external funding
from foreign art foundations and
institutions, or a financially viable
art market. In December of last
year, the city saw the closure of
the temporary physical space of
Nha San Collective, one of the
most prominent arts organizations
in Hanoi and a second-generation
ofshoot of the historic Nha San
Studio, which opened in 1998 and
closed in 2011 due to government
pressure over its staging of a nude
performance piece. Nha San,
which means “stilt house” in
Vietnamese, was founded in the
private home of artist Nguyen
Manh Duc, who had converted two
traditional wooden houses built
by the ethnic tribes of Northwest
Vietnam. The very first art
happenings there in the late 1990s
manifested out of the founding
members’ personal desire to create
an alternative and open space for
young artists—eforts that helped
pave the way for contemporary
practitioners today.
Other major nonprofit spaces
include the alternative Manzi
café and art gallery, whose annual
public art project “Into Thin Air,”
initiated in 2016 to encourage
interaction and intervention of
public spaces, was presented for
the first time in September as a
virtual exhibition, a move by the
organizers to avoid the burden of
having to deal with the authorities
and censorship. The audience
can download an app and view
diferent locations as “occupied”
by various new artistic creations.
The nine-year-old independent
space for film and moving image,
DocLab, formerly funded by
the Goethe-Institut, moved
from its enclave in the Goethe-
Institut building and declared its
independence by relocating to
a space in a less busy location.
Newer, smaller initiatives operate
below the radar, like Puppets Café,
founded in 2017 and run by a group
of young artists and curators, and
A Space, which opened in 2018 and
is run by artist Tuan Mami, who
has been active in mentoring young
artists and ofering a truly playful
space for experimentation.
Although local, independent
art spaces are lowkey, some in
more deliberate ways than others,
public government-funded
projects are on the rise, aiming to
inject new life into the arts and
cultural heritage of Hanoi and to
foster cross-cultural relations. An
initiative supporting the creative
industry, established this year by
the Vietnam National Institute of
Culture and Arts Studies and the
British Council, has launched a
project focused on the revival of
the Vietnamese film archive and
traditional musical heritage. This
joins the eforts of two existing
exchange-program organizations:
Heritage Space, in Nam Tu Liem
district, and Six Space, located
in Hoan Kiem District. Heritage
Space runs MAP – Month of Arts
Practice, an annual residency
program that invites local and
international artists to collaborate
on a group show over a period of
one month. Six Space collaborates
with Barim, an arts venue in
Gwangju, to foster relationships
between South Korean and Hanoi
artists, which resulted in a series of
public events at this year’s Gwangju
Biennale. And to highlight the
little-known connection between
Hanoi and the Eastern Bloc, artist
and curator Tran Luong (also a
co-founder of Nha San Studio)
recently invited a group of local
performance artists, including
the Appendix Group, for a series
of public performances across
diferent Polish cities.
While international relations
are strong, local organizations are
struggling. Many artists from the
capital, as well as from the nearby
city, Hue, are now moving to Ho Chi
Minh City where they can connect
with international curators, gallerists
and collectors, and be supported by
local patrons and its burgeoning art
market. Whether this is for better or
worse, only time will tell.
See our website for the Chinese version of this article.

30 | NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111


Global Uproar Over Shahidul Alam’s Arrest
On September 30, a plane with a banner bearing SHAHIDUL ALAM’s portrait and the message “FREE OUR TEACHERS”
circled above New York in protest of Alam’s arrest and incarceration in Dhaka. Courtesy Wasfia Nazreen.
The esteemed 63-year-old photographer,
photojournalist, educator and activist Shahidul
Alam was arrested on August 5. Earlier that day,
Alam had appeared on Al Jazeera and openly
criticized Dhaka authorities’ excessive use of
force in breaking up student protests calling for
improved road safety.
At around 10pm on August 5, plainclothes
policemen arrested Alam at his Dhaka
residence. He has been charged with “spreading
propaganda and false information against the
government” under Section 57 of Bangladesh’s
Information and Communication Technology
(ICT) Act 2006, which criminalizes the
electronic dissemination of content that
“prejudices the image of the state” and may
cause “deterioration in law and order.”
When Alam appeared in court on August 6,
he was visibly bruised and stated that he was
tortured in jail, an allegation that the police
denied. If convicted, Alam faces up to 14 years
in prison. According to Al Jazeera, in 2017, at
least 25 journalists and hundreds of bloggers
and Facebook users were prosecuted under the
ICT Act.
Alam has been denied bail twice. On
October 7, the High Court gave the government
one week to explain his pre-trial detention.
The photographer’s incarceration sparked
outrage within and beyond Bangladesh. Protesters
from human-rights groups and journalist
associations gathered outside the United Nations
headquarters in New York on September 27,
during Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh
News
Hasina’s address to the UN General Assembly.
Several days later, on September 30, Bangladeshi
activist and National Geographic Explorer Wasfia
Nazreen and her pilot friend flew a private
plane over Manhattan, with a banner featuring
a portrait of Alam and the message “FREE OUR
TEACHERS” trailing behind.
Alam’s arrest hit a nerve among artistic
communities in South Asia. The Kochi
Biennale Foundation started a petition in
August demanding that Bangladesh authorities
“allow journalists to do their job.” Nepali
artist collective Photo.circle projected quotes
and photographs by Alam on buildings across
Kathmandu during a regional political summit in
late August.
Multiple open letters demanding Alam’s
immediate and unconditional release have
been signed by renowned artists including
Anish Kapoor, Lubaina Himid and Rasheed
Araeen; leading cultural figures such as Chair
of Arts Council England Sir Nicholas Serota
and Serpentine Galleries artistic director
Hans Ulrich Obrist; and more than ten Nobel
Prize laureates.
On October 4, Cuban artist Tania Bruguera
staged a performance in solidarity with Alam
at London’s Tate Modern. On the floor of the
Turbine Hall, Bruguera arranged prints from
Alam’s “Crossfire” (2010) series that captures
extrajudicial killings committed by Bangladesh’s
elite police task force, along with flashlights and
copies of the photographer’s book, My Journey
as a Witness (2011).
News artasiapacific.com
Awards
At Seoul’s National Museum of Modern and
Contemporary Art, multimedia artist Siren Eun
Young Jung was presented with the 2018 Korea
Artist Prize on September 19. Jung was selected
for her ongoing research project investigating
gender through the Korean all-female theater
genre Yeoseong Gukgeuk.
On September 25, Sydney-based painter
Natasha Walsh was awarded the AUD 50,000
(USD 35,430) Mosman Art Prize for her oil-on-
copper self portrait The Cicada (2018).
Portrait of NATASHA WALSH. Courtesy Art Gallery of New
South Wales, Sydney.
On October 3, at Frieze Art Fair in London,
artist and animator Wong Ping was announced
the inaugural winner of the Camden Arts
Centre Emerging Arts Prize. He will stage an
exhibition at the Centre within the next
18 months.
Filmmaker and performance artist Wu Tsang,
recognized for her explorations of marginalized
gender and racial identities, was named a 2018
MacArthur Fellow on October 4, receiving a
cash award of USD 625,000.
Obituaries
Multidisciplinary artist Shirin Aliabadi died on
October 1. She was acclaimed for her works
that examined the influence of consumerism
and globalization on popular culture and the
lives of women in Iran.
Portrait of SHIRIN ALIABADI. Courtesy The Third Line, Dubai.
33

Installation view of LUKE WILLIS THOMPSON’s Autoportrait, 2017, 35mm black-and-white silent film: 9 min 10 sec,
at the Turner Prize exhibition, Tate Britain, London, 2018–19. Photo by Matt Greenwood. Courtesy Tate Britain.
Controversy: Publicity Storms
Throughout 2018, the polarization of public
opinion on the ongoing, worldwide refugee crisis
has become increasingly apparent. In the United
Kingdom, Banu Cennetoğlu’s contribution to
the 2018 Liverpool Biennial, The List (2007– ),
a public display of the names of 34,361 refugees
who died while fleeing to Europe between 1993
and mid-2018, was vandalized three times.
On July 28 and August 15, the list was ripped
from public hoardings, where it was installed,
by yet-to-be identified perpetrators. On
September 7, the remnants of the display were
graitied with “INVADERS NOT REFUGEES!”
prompting Liverpool mayor Joe Anderson to
brand the vandals “fascist thugs,” while calling
on volunteers to protect the work.
As the UK grapples with rising xenophobia
and racism, issues of racial representation came
to a head on September 25, when members of
the collective BBZ London held a sit-in at Tate
Britain to protest Luke Willis Thompson’s
Turner Prize nomination for his video
Autoportrait (2017). The 35mm film depicts an
African-American woman, Diamond Reynolds,
as her chest rises and falls in measured
movements, presenting a deliberate contrast
to Reynold’s Facebook livestream of the police
shooting of her partner Philando Castile in
2016, which perpetuated the aesthetic of terror
and victimhood, according to the artist. The
protesters claimed that Thompson—who is of
mixed white and Fijian ancestry—is profiting
from “black pain” with the work. An essay by
BBZ member Rene Matić that was published in
May also decried Thompson’s frequent artistic
interrogations of the representation of black
identities due to his status as “a white-passing
male.” Thompson previously stated that he
worked closely with Reynolds for Autoportrait,
and that she approved the final piece.
As the #MeToo movement continues to
gather steam, more women have come forward
34
News
with sexual misconduct allegations. On July 19,
Choi Hyo-jun, director of the Seoul Museum
of Art, was suspended from his position
following a complaint filed by a female museum
employee, who reportedly claimed he had sent
an inappropriate, albeit not sexually explicit,
video to her. Choi had previously been warned
by the museum’s union not to contact female
colleagues at night via the Korean messaging
service KakaoTalk.
In Beijing, writer and curator Li Bowen
resigned from his position as associate editor
at Ocula on September 26 after an anonymous
cultural worker with the internet pseudonym
“qiaoqiao” accused him of “repeated patterns of
deceit, gaslighting and abuse” in a WeChat post,
which was then corroborated by other women
on social media. After AAP published the story
online, however, qiaoqiao sent a second, follow-
up statement, explaining that “the case does not
involve typical abuse of power, direct physical
harm, sexual harassment or non-consensual
sexual conduct,” and that her intent was for
power structures to be more widely discussed
in China.
Career Moves: International Transfers
On September 12, Bartomeu Marí announced
that he will be stepping down from his post as
director of the National Museum of Modern
and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Seoul this
December, when his three-year contract ends.
According to the Korea Herald, MMCA oicials
said that the South Korean Ministry of Culture,
Sports and Tourism decided not to renew Marí’s
term due to domestic pressure to steer the
museum toward a more Korean focus. Marí
became the first non-Korean to helm a public
cultural institution in South Korea when he joined
in 2015, and has been instrumental in expanding
the MMCA’s program to include international art.
In London, Yasufumi Nakamori was
appointed Tate Modern’s new senior curator of
| NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111
Portrait of YASUFUMI NAKAMORI. Photo by Dan Dennehy.
Courtesy Minneapolis Institute of Art.
international art (photography), commencing his
role in October. He has served as head of the
Minneapolis Institute of Art’s department
of photography and new media for the past
two years, and was curator of photography at
the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, from 2008
to 2016.
Public Domain: Creation/Destruction
On September 24, Do Ho Suh unveiled a public
artwork titled Bridging Home, London (2018), a
steel, timber and plywood replica of the artist’s
childhood home—a small house with a bamboo
garden in a traditional Korean architectural
style—installed on a footbridge in the City of
London. The work was co-commissioned by
public art initiatives Art Night and Sculpture
in the City, and reflected on the multicultural,
migrant histories of the neighborhood where it
was on display.
Ullens Center for Contemporary Art Dune opened in Beidaihe in
October. Photo by Ni Nan. Courtesy OPEN Architecture, Beijing.
Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art
(UCCA) opened UCCA Dune, its first permanent
exhibition space outside the Chinese capital,
on October 13. Located in the coastal resort of
Beidaihe in Hebei province, the new 930-square-
meter space is the first major contemporary art
institution in the district, and will hold two or
more exhibitions a year. The institution, which
was designed by OPEN Architecture, was named
for the surrounding mounds of sand, in which
parts of the museum’s cave-like structure are
submerged. The inaugural exhibition, titled
“After Nature,” presents works by international
artists that engage with urbanization in China,
and society’s shifting relationship with the
natural environment.
*For more news, see our website: artasiapacific.com/news.

Gana (Hear, Think, Understand)
In Australia, the white colonial settler
fantasy has historically positioned
Aboriginal people at the lowest rung of
society. The government maintained this
stance until the 1967 referendum, in which
Australians voted overwhelmingly to amend
the constitution in order to introduce laws
protecting Aboriginal people and to include
them in the census. This change in the
legislation saw a wave of community action
across the continent. Having finally been
given the chance to oversee our own affairs,
Aboriginal communities began to establish
housing co-ops, legal services, health
centers and vital community organizations.
Although we have managed to establish
basic infrastructure for ourselves, art is one
of the few spaces where Aboriginal people
have a true sense of autonomy, can practice
self-determined economic independence
and feel secure in the knowledge that our
work is respected.
The time of self-determination (post 1967
referendum) is critical for understanding
the complexities of Aboriginal identity in
Australia. This year in May, as we laid an
important Elder to rest, we were reminded
of the dramatic changes our Aunty Margaret
had experienced and the consequences
of government policies that she saw in
her lifetime.
Aunty Margaret was born under
“The Act” (Aboriginals Protection and
Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897),
which allowed appointed authorities to
govern Aboriginal communities, often
resulting in children being removed from
their families and forced to work. She
lived in the Myora Mission and was in her
prime by the time the 1967 referendum
occurred. Within this context of newfound
freedom, nothing was going to stop this
strong black woman from starting up every
important piece of infrastructure and
growing the organizations that a healthy
community needs.
My elders often talk about their identity
as black people and a time where everyone
was united in poverty. They say that, back
The Point
BY MEGAN COPE
in those days, Aboriginal people were keen
to support each other at every corner.
Blackfullas were keen to connect and
support each other in general. This support
took place often within the organizations
born in the time of self-determination.
My elders talk about this because there
has finally been enough black critical
discourse and dialogue—enough for us to be
able to move away from the anthropological
gaze and definitions of our cultures, and
into our own pedagogies.
I believe the role of art has absolutely
informed Aboriginal pedagogy in this
country. Artists are often the first people in
society to carefully articulate their position
in the world, in ways that not only expand
our visual literacy but also convey what it
feels like to be on the receiving end of legal
injustice and racist prejudice.
With this in mind, I’m often conflicted
about the notion of cultural identity being
“discovered or explored” in art. I believe
artists who create in this context are
problematic as their works often display
images and concepts that perpetuate white
and prescribed notions of otherness, thus
reinforcing the social barriers constructed
by the concept of race.
My practice always starts with my
identity: one that is firmly rooted in family,
Reports artasiapacific.com
culture, community and Saltwater Country.
When I create work about my cultural
identity as a Quandamooka woman, it is
critical that my Quandamooka community
also relates to these works, ideas and
histories. Our Quandamooka cultural
identity is communal and collective.
My practice is often centered around
our relationship with our traditional
language and concepts of ownership,
whether it be of our ancestral lands or
sovereign bodies, the role maps have
played in our dispossession or the effect
of mining in our economic systems.
These artworks and ideas move outward
from Quandamooka Country and across
many nations through the contemporary
art world. The hegemonic process of
colonization and collective experiences
endured by many Aboriginal people might
then translate into larger narratives and
national concepts of Aboriginal identity.
I like to think that my practice
contributes and adds to the broader
discourse and greater collection of visual
literacy that was founded by important
artists such as Trevor Nickolls, Robert
Campbell Jnr and Gordon Bennett in the
1980s and ’90s, whose works challenged
Australia’s construct of our individual and
shared identities as Aboriginal people in the
urban space.
I have found that through constant
art-making, my work has informed me just
as much as I have informed its materiality.
As this relationship grows, so does my
ability to articulate the issues that the art
relates to.
Over the past decade, I have witnessed an
increasing awareness and desire for diversity
in the arts. I believe that curators have to
start taking a greater responsibility for the
amount of cultural production that occurs
within institutions and practice rigor when
it comes to ensuring that the fetishization
of otherness that has always overshadowed
our autonomy does not precede critically
engaged artists and artworks.
ILLUSTRATION BY TENG YU
37

Spinning Up, Winding Down
As the autumn art season kicked
of in the northern hemisphere,
a cross section of the art world
ventured to the 2018 Gwangju
Biennale on their respective trains,
planes and automobiles. In typical
biennial fashion, there was plenty
of chaos to navigate, especially
with the appearance of Korea’s
first lady Kim Jung-sook and the
US ambassador for the opening
ceremony, all while VIPs and press
crisscrossed the city looking for art
by hundreds of artists, the majority
from Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia
and, yes, Finland. Despite this
overflowing abundance, something
seemed of-kilter at Asia’s longest-
running biennial, specifically the
lack of the Three Cs from China
and South Asia—the curators,
collectors and compradors. So
where were these cliques and
chattering classes during the crucial
first week of September?
Kim Ju
ng-
so
ok
The groupies attached to
Beijing-based digital darling Cao
Fei—from Ullens Center for
Contemporary Art’s Philip Tinari
to Cao’s longtime gallerists Zhang
Wei and Hu Fang—had made
their way south to Hong Kong to
celebrate the artist’s first major solo
show at Hong Kong Jockey Club-
backed Tai Kwun Contemporary.
Those who attended Cao’s opening
were impressed by her new, slickly
produced film. But where were all
the others from the Sino Sphere, if
not in South Korea’s politically left-
leaning city or the now-less-than
Fragrant Harbor?
Whispering Gallery
BY DT
Some speculated that the
China-heavy gallerists who signed
up for Beijing Contemporary Expo
were still licking their wounds
after subjecting themselves to a
financially flat art fair. This left
them unwilling to travel to yet
tt
h a n C ro c ke
nat
Jo
another “noncommercial” art
event—even if there were major
international museum trustees
in attendance. Some participants
who had made it to Korea noted
that the Beijing Contemporary
VIP preview was thronged with
the press—not exactly VIPs by
China standards—and that sales
slipped into debit territory. With
a notable drop in spending by
China’s new collectors, let’s see
how the mega galleries from Europe
and the US will fare in November
during the double whammy of the
West Bund and Art021 art fairs
in Shanghai. Western galleries
without many contacts on the
mainland have high expectations
for the event, but between the
oicial mandate against “fostering
money-worshiping tendencies” and
the government campaign to rein
in credit lending, many Chinese
art buyers are now thinking twice
about whether that pretty painting
is really worth it.
For the art world’s high rollers,
a Korean island other than Jeju
was the place to be in September.
Following the triple-billed biennial
week, gallerists and auctioneers
from all the major art markets—
New York, London, Hong Kong
and Shanghai—traveled to Incheon
Reports artasiapacific.com
to chill and bubble at Paradise
City Hotel’s new Paradise Art
Space, and attached, foreigners-
only casino. Known for their love
of contemporary art, Elizabeth
and Phillip Chun believe their
hotel—located one hour from
Seoul, but only five minutes from
Incheon Airport, is a winning bet
for jetlagged blackjack and DJ’ed
dance parties. The event was
an extravaganza even by casino
standards, with traditional Korean
dance performances followed by
Emmanuel Perrotin, Phillips’s
Jonathan Crockett and Art021’s
Kelly Ying gyrating to the sounds
of heartthrob K-pop boybands and
stars including Rain and Super
Junior’s Siwon Choi. The guest
of honor was American artist Jef
Koons, who unveiled one of his
“Gazing Ball” sculptures at the
site—a must-have for auction
punters. Perhaps the Paradise
owners felt they needed some good
ons
Ko
ff
Je
feng shui for their gambling den—
Jef Koons’s art seems to be a lucky
rabbit’s foot for American casino
mogul Steve Wynn.
Meanwhile, New York City was
the place to be for the South Asian
art world. India’s and Pakistan’s
most active collectors flew in for
the bash to celebrate Asia Society’s
exhibition “Progressive Revolution:
Modern Art for a New India,”
which featured some of the most
revered blue-chip artists from the
Subcontinent. Among those who
flocked to Manhattan’s Upper
East Side Asian jewel box were
Kiran Nadar, art patroness and
the wife of India’s sixth-richest
entrepreneur; London-based
hedge fund manager Taimur
Hassan; and fashion designer for
Karachi’s well-heeled socialites,
Sonya Battla. Also turning heads
with his golden Gandhi cap was
the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s
assistant curator for South Asian
art, Shanay Jhaveri, who was
recently voted best-dressed by
Vanity Fair for his elegant, Indian-
tailored pajamas.
Kira
n Nadar
South Asia, and the whole
MENASA region, has found
collectors to be ever rarer,
especially in the United Arab
Emirates, now that Arif Naqvi’s
private equity firm, the Abraaj
Group, is in liquidation. In 2008,
Naqvi signed up his company as
a major sponsor of the Art Dubai
fair, backed the Abraaj Group Art
Prize of USD 100,000, and was
even appointed honorary fellow
of the prestigious Royal College of
Art in London. As there’s a warrant
out for Naqvi’s arrest in the UAE
over writing bad checks (for a mere
USD 48 million), it seems the avid
art collector is holed up in London.
Art Dubai says the fair will continue
without its biggest supporter, but
many are placing their bets that
the prize saw its final days last
March. It’s anyone’s guess if the
Abraaj Group Art Prize Collection
of 30 major commissions by
artists including Kader Attia, Wael
Shawky and Nadia Kaabi-Linke, will
succumb to the winding-up process.
39
 People

Where Art Thou?

Hong Kong
Clockwise from immediate left: artist Wang Yuyang at the opening of his solo exhibition
“The Moon” at Massimo De Carlo; independent curator Tan Vatey with Phnom Penh’s Sa
Sa Bassac gallery manager Chum Chanveasna, president and founder of the Cambodian
Association of Hong Kong Ngo Ravindra, contemporary dance artist Nget Rady and
Cambodian artist Khvay Samnang at the opening of the group exhibition “Constructing
Mythologies” at Edouard Malingue Gallery; Tai Kwun’s head of arts Tobias Berger with
multimedia artist Cao Fei and director of Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art
Philip Tinari at the opening of Cao’s solo exhibition “A Hollow in a World Too Full” at Tai
Kwun Contemporary; American artist Hank Willis Thomas with Ben Brown, owner of Ben
Brown Fine Arts, at the opening of Thomas’ solo exhibition “My Life is Ours” at the gallery;
director of de Sarthe gallery Willem Molesworth with Hong Kong artist Carla Chan at
the opening of the group show “Black: Recategorize” at Galerie Ora Ora; multimedia and
installation artist Mona Hatoum at the opening of her first exhibition in Asia, “Remains of
the Day,” at White Cube gallery.

Manila
ArtAsiaPacific’s 25th anniversary party at Belles Artes Project Outpost, sponsored by Engkanto Brewery, Cibo di M and Las Casas Filipinas de Acuzar.
Front row (left to right): AAP’s editor at large HG Masters, Bellas Artes Projects (BAP) founder Jam Acuzar, collector Marcel Crespo, AAP’s editor and
publisher Elaine W. Ng, BAP’s artistic director Inti Guerrero, artist Judy Freya Sibayan, BAP’s deputy director Fatima Manalili, artist Patricia Perez
Eustaquio, artist Maria Taniguchi, and assistant to the director and manager of conservation at Lopez Museum and Library Marga Villanueva.
Middle row (left to right): BAP’s head of development Kaye Aboitiz, director and curator at Manila’s Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD)
Joselina Cruz, artist-in-residence Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, chairperson of the arts management program at Manila’s School of Design and Arts Geraldine B.
Araneta, artist and 2018 Manila Biennale executive producer Carlos Celdran, Silverlens gallerists Rachel Rillo and Isa Lorenzo, jewelry designer Macky Fah,
2018 Manila Biennale organizer Tesa Celdran, writer Mara Coson, curator of the Philippines Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale Tessa Guazon, Ateneo Art
Gallery curator Yael A. Buencamino.
Back row (left to right): Hacienda Macalauan’s head of marketing Sandra Soriano, BAP’s architect Teymour Benet and MCAD’s deputy director
Chris Green.

People artasiapacific.com 41
 People

Korea
Clockwise from top right: artist Suki Seokyeong
Kang at the Gwangju Biennale; artist Byron Kim
with San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s curator
of contemporary art Eungie Joo, Tate Modern’s
Daskalopoulos senior curator of international art
Clara Kim, chief curator of Mori Art Museum
Mami Kataoka, artist Zhu Jia and Tokyo-based artist
Taro Shinoda in Gwangju; the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art’s associate curator of contemporary
art Christine Y. Kim with LACMA’s curator and acting
contemporary art department head Rita Gonzales,
independent curator and art critic David Teh, Clara
Kim and artistic director of Bangkok’s Jim Thompson
Art Center Gridthiya Gaweewong (all of whom are also
curators of the 2018 Gwangju Biennale) at a Gwangju
Biennale party organized by Kukje Gallery in Seoul;
artists Kim Yong-ik, Minouk Lim and Chung Seoyong
at a makgeolli bar in Seoul; Dhaka-based photographer
Munem Wasif, artist Tom Nicholson, Amsterdam and
Chiang Mai-based artist Sawangwongse Yawnghwe
and Melbourne-based artist Rushdi Anwar with
artistic director of Ho Chi Minh City’s The Factory
Contemporary Arts Centre Zoe Butt at the Asia Cultural
Center in Gwangju; artist Seung Yul Oh at his solo
exhibition “View & Hide” at One and J. Gallery in Seoul.

Sydney
Left to right, all taken at the Sydney Contemporary art fair at
Carriageworks: Gallery directors Ursula Sullivan and Joanna
Strumpf pictured in front of a painting by Sydney Ball at the Sullivan
+ Strumpf booth; artist Patricia Piccinini in front of her multisensory
installation The Field (2018).

42 | NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111

 Auction Report
The Inevitable Descent
ZHANG DAQIAN
BRIDGE TO MOUNTAIN TEMPLE SHROUDED
BY PRISMATIC CLOUDS IN SPLASHED COLOR
1981
Ink and color on paper, 42 x 86.7 cm.
Courtesy Sotheby’s New York.
After the astonishing results of their
spring series, expectations were
high at Christie’s and Sotheby’s
New York and Hong Kong outposts
this fall. The Asia Week auctions
in New York achieved satisfactory
results that were nonetheless
underwhelming in comparison to the
March sales, proving that what goes
up must come down. Fall auction
earnings in Asia, on the other
hand, remained impressive, led by
oferings from the usual big names,
while emerging auction favorites
also enjoyed good sales.
New York
Christie’s New York Asian Art
Week—which took place from
September 11 to 14, and included
Chinese antiquities along with
classical Indian, Himalayan and
Southeast Asian art—marked a
lackluster start to the fall auction
season. The series earned a
combined total of USD 34.7 million;
Reports artasiapacific.com
though respectable, this sum pales
in comparison to the estimate-
busting results of the auctions held
in March 2018 and September 2017,
which raked in USD 56.6 million
and USD 43.5 million, respectively.
The fall South Asian Modern and
Contemporary Art (SAMCA)
sale also saw a dip in its sales
total, bringing in USD 8.3 million
across 70 lots, down from the
USD 10.3 million achieved in
the 61-lot March sale. The top
ofering that day was Tyeb Mehta’s
painting of truncated orange
figures, Diagonal XV (1975),
which fetched USD 1.39 million,
below its USD 1.5–2 million
estimate. It was the only lot to
exceed the USD one-million mark
in the auction—an unspectacular
result considering the top lots of
the previous two New York SAMCA
sales surpassed USD 4 million.
The cover lot, Akbar Padamsee’s
painting Rooftops (1959), a gray
cityscape punctuated with shades
of maroon, also sold under its
high estimate of USD 1.2 million,
hammering at USD 912,500.
A notable transaction was for
FN Souza’s oil-on-board Jesting
Pilate (1956), which was fresh to
the auction market. The angular,
bust-like portrayal of Pontius
Pilate against a corn-yellow
background tripled its
USD 200,000 high estimate to
hammer at USD 612,500.
Sotheby’s New York’s concurrent
Asia Week series brought in
USD 33.9 million over five auctions
spanning antiquities and fine
Chinese paintings—a considerably
smaller afair compared to the
March series, which grossed a
combined total of USD 75.6 million
over ten sales. Of the modern
works ofered this September,
Zhang Daqian’s Bridge to Mountain
Temple Shrouded by Prismatic Clouds
in Splashed Color (1981) led the
sale of Chinese paintings and
calligraphy from the collection
of Tang Hung and Fung Bi-Che,
former students of the Chinese ink
master. The landscape found takers
at USD 915,000, more than tripling
its USD 280,000 high estimate.
Shanghai
While New York auction results
this September were a comedown
after record highs in March, total
sales for Christie’s Shanghai fall
series have showed a steady climb.
45

SERGE POLIAKOFF
ROUGE BLEU JAUNE
1954
Oil on canvas, 97 x 130 cm.
Courtesy Christie’s Shanghai.
The two modern and contemporary
art sales made a combined total
of USD 17.9 million, up from
USD 13.5 million in 2017 and
USD 10.7 million in 2016. The
top lot was Zao Wou-ki’s abstract
painting 13.02.92 (1992), evoking
a cloudy mountain landscape,
which fetched USD 6.6 million,
exceeding its USD 3.8 million high
estimate. Lots by Western artists
were sold out, indicating their
continued popularity in China.
Salvador Dalí’s bronze sculpture
Piano Surréaliste (1954/84) sold
for USD 1.3 million against a
USD 510,000 estimate, while
Serge Poliakof’s abstract oil
painting Rouge Bleu Jaune (1954)
tripled its USD 349,400 estimate
to attain USD 1.1 million.
Hong Kong
It has been a good year for
Sotheby’s Hong Kong, which
netted a combined total of
USD 466.1 million over 20 auctions
from September 29 to October 3,
just shy of the USD 466.5 million
achieved in the spring series.
The modern and contemporary
art evening sales raked in
USD 200 million—the highest
total for an evening sale in Hong
Kong—led by Zao Wou-ki’s
46 | NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111
Juin-Octobre 1985 (1985). The
monumental ten-meter-wide
triptych, with a central sunset-
orange haze surrounded by deep
ultramarine and green, hammered
at USD 65 million, making it the
most expensive oil painting by an
Asian artist ever sold at auction.
The piece was last put on the
block at Christie’s Hong Kong
20th Century Chinese Art & Asian
Contemporary Art sale in 2005,
finding takers at USD 2.3 million,
which indicates a nearly 30-fold
increase in value over 13 years. The
same night, another work by Zao,
23.05.64 (1964), from his gestural
“Hurricane” series, sold for
USD 11.5 million, although below a
USD 15.3 million high estimate. In
line with the seemingly unending
hunger for Chinese-French modern
painters, Chu Teh-Chun’s No. 268
(1967–68)—a three-meter-wide
snowy mountain landscape,
and the largest single-canvas
work in his oeuvre—sold for
USD 9.66 million, inching above
its USD 8.93 high estimate, while
Sanyu’s oil-on-masonite painting
of white peonies Pot de Pivoines
(c. 1940s–50s) shot past its
WU GUANZHONG
FORGETFUL SNOW
1996
Oil on canvas, 91 x 100 cm.
Courtesy China Guardian Hong Kong.
USD 7 million high estimate to
attain USD 8.8 million. Chinese
modern master Wu Guanzhong’s
pastoral oil painting Sunshine After
Snow in the Mountain Village I (1964)
also exceeded its USD 1.9 million
estimate, selling for USD 2.9 million.
A dark-horse lot was Guan Liang’s
childlike oil-on-canvas portrayal
of Beijing opera characters, Monk
Tang and Wukong (1978), which
hammered at USD 1.27 million,
over eight times its USD 153,150
high estimate. Richard Lin, whose
geometric, abstract compositions
are steadily finding favor in the
secondary market, attained
USD 1.16 million with his mixed-
media work of white blocks, Painting
Relief 12.12.63 (1963), above a
USD 740,225 high estimate.
Ofered at Sotheby’s
contemporary art evening sale was
artist du jour Joan Mitchell, whose
gestural abstraction Syrtis (1961)
debuted at auction, and found
takers at USD 7.2 million, under a
USD 8.9 million high estimate. Jean-
Michel Basquiat’s oilstick, acrylic
and silkscreen on canvas, Logo
(1984), featuring an appropriated
Navy Cut tobacco logo within a
partially filled crimson background,
similarly dipped below its high
estimate of USD 4.85 million, selling
for USD 3.77 million. Nevertheless,
the work had last surfaced at auction
in 2010 at Sotheby’s Paris, where
it sold for USD 1.1 million; over the
last eight years, Logo has more than
tripled its value. Other works far
exceeded expectations, including
Yayoi Kusama’s black-and-yellow
painting of her iconic vegetal motif
Pumpkin (PLOE) (2013), measuring
162 centimeters wide, which sold
for USD 4.3 million against a
USD 2.55 million high estimate.
Liu Ye’s Red No. 3 (2003), depicting
a little girl who recurs throughout
his oeuvre, standing against a
scarlet background with a sword
in her hand, fetched USD 2.77
million, more than doubling its high
estimate. George Condo’s The Aztec
Cosmologist (2009), a portrait with
a cubist-style head in bright blues,
pinks and yellows, distinguished
by fine black-and-white lines
RICHARD LIN
JANUARY 1967
dissecting the composition, sold 1967
for USD 2.47 million, well above its Oil and aluminum on canvas, 127.7 x 127.7 cm.
Courtesy Poly Auction Hong Kong.
USD 893,375 high estimate. Wang
Xingwei’s referential painting Still
No A-Mark (1998)—depicting a (“The Villagers”) (1939), which USD 14.4 million across 119 lots—a
young boy being reprimanded for attained USD 781,100, quadrupling significant drop from its March sale,
low grades à la Fyodor Reshetnikov’s its USD 191,440 estimate, and Le which raked in USD 52.3 million over
Low Marks Again (1952), in a room Pho’s ink-and-gouache-on-silk 114 lots. The fall cover lot, Richard
with Allen Jones’s 1969 “furniture” portrayal of a mother and three Lin’s oil-and-aluminum-on-canvas
sculptures of women in leather children, La Famille (“The Family”), January 1967 (1967), hammered
fetish gear—more than tripled its which sold for USD 750,400 against at USD 979,000, above a
USD 382,875 estimate to hammer at a USD 319,000 high estimate. USD 830,000 high estimate,
USD 1.27 million. Sotheby’s appeared China Guardian Hong Kong’s further attesting to the artist’s
to be testing the market with Xu October series, including jade growing popularity. A notable
Zhen’s XUZHEN SUPERMARKET carvings, ceramics, jewels and contemporary work ofered at
(2016), the first conceptual piece fine art, made a total of USD 87.9 Poly’s October 1 Fine Chinese
ofered at auction in Asia. The right million, up from the USD 53.9 million Paintings and Calligraphy sale
to commission physical re-creations achieved by the spring series. Top was Wu Guanzhong’s Li Jiang
of the mock-Chinese convenience lots in the fine art sales were by the River (1982), spanning 140
store was sold for USD 255,250, usual heavy hitters. Zao Wou-ki’s centimeters across, which doubled
above a USD 191,440 high estimate. bronze and deep-brown gestural its USD 765,900 high estimate to
Southeast Asian art also fared abstraction 06.10.68 (1968) fetched fetch USD 1.58 million.
well at Sotheby’s fall series, with a USD 2.2 million; Wu Guanzhong’s Record-breaking sales totals in
100-percent sell-through rate for 1996 oil painting of a wintry the previous year have tended to
Vietnamese artists across fine art landscape, Forgetful Snow, sold for rest on a handful of eye-poppingly
auctions, and the dedicated Modern USD 2.07 million; and Yoshitomo expensive modern masterpieces
and Contemporary Southeast Asian Nara’s acrylic-on-canvas portrait by highly sought-after artists. As
Art sale bringing in USD 7.9 million, Submarines in Girl (1992) attained these types of works are snapped
up from USD 6.1 million in April, USD 1.56 million, all slightly below up and kept of the market until
suggesting that demand for works high estimates. their next flip at auction, one
from this region is growing. Notable Over at Poly Auction Hong Kong, can expect results to reach less
works were Nguyen Gia Tri’s the Modern and Contemporary astronomical heights.
lacquer-on-wood Les Villageois Art sale on September 30 attained *All prices include buyer’s premium.

Reports artasiapacific.com 47
 Art Fair Report

Survival Strategies

posted a record sales total of

View of the 2018 edition of Beijing
Contemporary, held at the National
Agriculture Exhibition Center.
Courtesy Beijing Contemporary.
New and veteran fairs alike are
continuously tinkering with their
formats and programs, trying
to maximize their chances of
securing high-quality works and,
more importantly, big-spending
collectors. Fairs in Beijing, Sydney,
London and Seoul presented a
range of strategies for helping the
bottom line.
Beijing
Art fair fatigue appears not to
alict the Chinese capital, which
saw the inauguration of yet another
fair this year, Beijing Contemporary
(August 30–September 2), after
JINGART launched in May. A total
of 32 Chinese and international
galleries participated in Beijing
Contemporary’s two gallery sectors,
while the other sectors highlighted
design, fashion and lead organizing
partner Cadillac’s new luxury SUV.
Beijing’s Ink Studio ofered works
by prominent ink artists Li Jin,
Yang Jiechang, Zheng Chongbin
and Li Huasheng, selling the latter’s
USD 205,000 large-scale grid
painting 9401 (1994) to a Chinese
buyer. Galerie Urs Meile (Beijing/
Lucerne) sold Xie Nanxing’s oil-
on-canvas triptych depicting wisps
of smoke, Elusive Literature (2018),
for USD 230,000. Boers-Li Gallery
(Beijing/New York) brought
an eclectic array of works, including
Ulay and Marina Abramović’s
video installation Relation in Space
(1976), priced at USD 200,000,
and Ou Jin’s wood, linen and acrylic
composition Untitled 125 (2018),
on ofer for USD 30,000. Beijing
Commune’s solo booth of Zhao Yao
focused on his 2018 photographs of
snowy mountains in Yushu, with a
number of them going to Chinese
private collectors for under
USD 10,000 each. Chambers
Fine Art (Beijing/New York) sold
Yan Shanchun’s mixed-media
depictions of natural landscapes
and Guo Hongwei’s watercolors
of diferent colored stones for
USD 3,000–6,000.
Beijing Contemporary was
a decent art showcase with a
respectable lineup of galleries, but
the focus on promoting art as part
of a trendy lifestyle suggested that
it was targeting wealthy Chinese
hipsters rather than international,
bona fide collectors.
Sydney
The fourth edition of Sydney
Contemporary (September 13–16)
brought more than 80 international
and regional galleries to the
Carriageworks arts precinct, and
USD 14.9 million.
Indigenous art proved popular,
with the USD 100,000 sale of
celebrated bark painter John
Mawurndjul’s Ngalyod – The
Rainbow Serpent (1999) at D’Lan
Davidson (Melbourne) setting a
record for the artist. Melbourne’s
Alcaston Gallery found a taker for
a USD 54,000 abstract painting
by the late Sally Gabori. Sullivan
+ Strumpf (Sydney/Singapore)
sold Tony Albert’s small collages
of Aboriginalia—kitsch items with
caricatures of Indigenous peoples—
from his “The Hand You’re Dealt”
series (2016) for USD 3,200 each.
The fair noted that emerging
artists did remarkably well. Yavuz
Gallery (Singapore), for instance,
placed 11 out of 13 works by
Abdul Abdullah from his series
of embroidered portraits with
superimposed smiley faces, “Call
Me By My Name” (2017), in
Australian private collections,
for prices between USD 6,500–
16,000. Melbourne-based Arc
One Gallery reported excellent
sales of photographs featuring
partly obscured women by artist
duo Honey Long and Prue Stent,
including Neptune’s Necklace (2018)
and Wind Form (2014) for
USD 4,700 each.
Notable transactions of works
by established artists included
Imants Tillers’s multipanel
paintings Fiction of Place (2018)
and Philosopher’s Conquest (2017),
snapped up for USD 144,000 and
USD 32,000, respectively, also at
Arc One. At Tolarno Galleries’s
(Melbourne) nearly-sold-out
solo booth of paintings by Ben
Quilty, the grotesque, oil-on-linen
The Easter Bunny (2018) and The
Biggest Bottom Feeder (2018) were
purchased by private collectors
from New York and London, for
USD 50,000 each.
Sydney Contemporary 2018 was
the first annual edition after its
organizers switched from a biannual
staging with the aim of becoming
bigger and better. It is too early to
gauge whether this will pay of in

Reports artasiapacific.com 49
the long run, but strong enough
sales provide reasons for optimism.
London
Frieze London (October 4–7)
returned to its usual Regent’s Park
location for its 16th edition, which
featured over 160 galleries.
Participants by and large stuck to
showcasing wall-based works in the
hopes of moving as many pieces as
possible. Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
(London/Paris/Salzburg) went
with its usual strategy of bringing
blue-chip works to the show,
selling Georg Baselitz’s oil painting
Schwarzes Pferd (Black Horse) (1986)
for USD 920,000—the highest
reported transaction at Frieze
London. Pace (London/New York/
Beijing/Hong Kong/Palo Alto/Seoul/
Geneva) sold two wall sculptures
including a porcelain work from
Yin Xiuzhen’s “Wall Instrument”
series (2016– ) for USD 86,000,
as well as a piece made of wooden
window frames from Song Dong’s
“Usefulness of Uselessness” series
(2013–17) for USD 65,000. Lisson
Gallery (London/New York) found
takers for Wael Shawky’s Cabaret
Crusades: Relief of the Siege of Antioch
1097–1098 (After Jean Colombe’s
‘After the Siege of Antioch’) (2018) for
USD 173,000, and placed Haroon
Mirza’s kinetic installation
Counterfeiting the Counter Fitters
(2018) in the collection of London’s
Fortress Contemporary Art
Foundation for USD 59,000.
IMANTS TILLERS, Fiction of Place (2018), displayed at Arc One Gallery’s booth at Sydney Contemporary
2018. Courtesy the artist and Arc One Gallery, Melbourne.
50
Cairo’s Gypsum Gallery sold two
untitled 1996 etchings by Ahmed
Morsi for USD 5,500–6,000; it also
ofered an installation of bricks
and dried flowers from destroyed
Palestinian villages by Basel Abbas
and Ruanne Abou-Rahme for
USD 16,000.
Of note was the curated
section “Social Work,” dedicated
to trailblazing female artists who
responded to contemporary
sociopolitical challenges in the 1980s
and ’90s. Galleries across the fair
noted good sales of works by female
artists. Kate MacGarry (London),
for instance, sold Rana Begum’s
colorful, geometric, mixed-media
compositions No. 794 and No. 800
L Fold (both 2018) for USD 52,400
and 37,000, respectively.
Frieze London 2018
demonstrated the viability of two
savvy strategies for recouping hefty
costs of fair participation: returning
to tried-and-tested market
favorites, and capitalizing on the
feminist zeitgeist by spotlighting
women artists.
Seoul
Sales at the 17th Korea International
Art Fair (KIAF) (October 4–7)
reportedly amounted to USD 24.7
million, up from USD 23.7 million
last year. Among the 174 galleries
were 43 international participants,
including David Zwirner (New York/
London/Hong Kong) and Pace.
Perrotin (Seoul/Hong Kong/Tokyo/
| NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111
Installation view of RANA BEGUM’s No. 794 (2018) at Kate MacGarry’s booth,
Frieze London, 2018. Courtesy the artist and Kate MacGarry, London.
Shanghai/Paris/New York), which
established its Seoul outpost in
2016, presented a solo booth of
Daniel Arsham’s cartoon character
sculptures, finding buyers from
Korea, Taiwan, Japan and China.
Of the Korean exhibitors,
Seoul-based Gallery Hyundai’s
booth included 2018 acrylic-on-
canvas gestural abstractions by
Lee Kang-So. A highlight at Johyun
Gallery (Seoul/Busan) was Kim
Chong Hak’s untitled, over-five-
meter-wide painted scroll from
2018, depicting dense, verdant
foliage. The gallery sold several
smaller untitled canvases by Kim,
priced at USD 54,000 each, as
well as two untitled monochrome
paintings by Lee Bae for
USD 40,000 and USD 85,000.
While the galleries that spoke
to ArtAsiaPacific were reportedly
pleased with sales, a common
remark was that KIAF remains a
homegrown afair, with exhibitors
and attendees mostly coming from
Korea, and that they would like to
see greater eforts on the part of
fair organizers to rope in art—and
buyers—from around the world.
Fair organizers and galleries
alike face the challenge of striking
the right balance between creative
and commercial interests; local and
global. As costs rise and markets
wobble, these choices can have
significant financial consequences.

Here and There
QIU ZHIJIE, People Who Claimed to be Messiah Crowding History, 2015, ink on paper
(detail), 245 x 126 cm. Courtesy Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing.
ULLENS CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART, BEIJING
Qiu Zhijie: Mappa Mundi
11/24–3/3/19
Politics, mythology and history come together in “Mappa Mundi” at
the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, a presentation of the large-
scale calligraphic works of Chinese artist Qiu Zhijie. Taking its title
from the Latin phrase meaning “chart of the world,” the exhibition
will foreground Qiu’s ongoing circular map series, which delineates
and condenses disparate ideas, objects and historical incidents into
a playfully schematic representation of mountains, rivers, islands and
seas. Probing topics of politics, religion and folklore, these drawings
provide insight into the artist’s research over the past decade. A
highlight of the show will be the six-panel ink painting Map of “Art
and China after 1989: Theater of the World” (2017), which traces the
sociopolitical events and movements that have shaped contemporary
Chinese art in the last three decades.
KHVAY SAMNANG, Rubber Man, 2014–15, still image of three-channel video installation
with color and sound: 4 min. Courtesy the artist and Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
TAIPEI FINE ARTS MUSEUM, TAIPEI
Taipei Biennial: Post-Nature – A
Museum as an Ecosystem
11/17–3/10/19
The 11th Taipei Biennial, “Post-Nature – A Museum as an Ecosystem,”
will bring together 41 artists, architects, filmmakers, activists and NGOs
from 19 countries and territories to explore the topic of ecosystems,
and how their dynamics can help us reassess the roles of museums in
the 21st century. Curated by Mali Wu and Francesco Manacorda, the
show will consider the museum as a social model, tackling notions of
community and structural interdependence. Highlights include Khvay
Samnang’s Rubber Man (2014/15), which looks at the displacement
and destruction of indigenous communities and places of spiritual
significance in northeast Cambodia, and Nicholas Mangan’s installation
Termite Economies (2018), which provides a sly critique on humankind’s
exploitation of nature for financial profit.
52
Previews
NADIM ABBAS, Camoufleur, 2017, installation with durational performance,
dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Power Station of Art, Shanghai.
POWER STATION OF ART, SHANGHAI
Shanghai Biennale: Proregress – Art in
an Age of Historical Ambivalence
11/10–3/10/19
“Nothing recedes like progress.” In this antithetical provocation of
modernist poet EE Cummings lies the crux of the 12th Shanghai
Biennale, curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina. Centered on the paradox
of progress, “Proregress,” or Yubu (the Chinese title, referring to a
Daoist dance technique in which the dancer appears to move forward
while actually moving backward), presents a topical examination of
contemporary anxieties and uncertainties. Sampling the works of
international artists—from Nadim Abbas to Amalia Pica, Yang Fudong
to Kader Attia—this biennial will examine subjective experiences of
recent geopolitical tensions and social change, while also exploring
relationships to the past and fears for the future.
MONIRA AL-QADIRI, DIVER, 2018, still image of four-channel video projection with color and
sound: 4 min 3 sec. Courtesy the artist and Queensland Arts Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.
QUEENSLAND ART GALLERY | GALLERY OF
MODERN ART, BRISBANE
The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of
Contemporary Art
11/24–4/28/19
The Asia Pacific Triennial returns for its ninth edition with a
remarkable range of works by 80 artists and collectives from more
than 30 countries, presented across the Queensland Art Gallery and
Gallery of Modern Art. Allowing for a broad view of contemporary
art from the region, established figures such as Cao Fei, Roberto
Chabet and Shilpa Gupta will be showcased alongside rising stars
like Waqas Khan and Joyce Ho. Highlights include a retrospective of
Australian Indigenous filmmakers Karrabing Film Collective; a new
site-specific cartographic ink painting by Qiu Zhijie; and Kuwaiti
artist Monira al-Qadiri’s new film DIVER (2018), which examines a
speculative future where petroleum drilling becomes obsolete in the
Middle East.
| NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111
 New Currents

In Between
Three artists explore contemporary urban environments
and social interactions in their installation works

Xuan Ye
IN BETWEEN () WE OSCILLATE, 2018, screenshot of website, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist.

Zhang Ruyi
Installation view of Mount, 2018, concrete, ceramic tiles, glass and
floor drain, dimensions variable, in “Walking on the Fade Out Lines”
at Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, 2018. Courtesy the artist.

Sam Samiee
Design for a Money Note #3, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 180 x 185 cm. Courtesy the artist.

Reports artasiapacific.com 55

1 Sam Samiee
Xuan Ye
TORONTO
Xuan Ye, born in 1989, is a Toronto-based
artist, but she would like people to think of
“Xuan Ye” as a “prototype of many objects.”
This distinction borrows from object-oriented
programming, a software design paradigm in
which code is organized into distinct objects
that can interact with one another. For Ye—one
of whose “objects” is the artistic persona also
known as A Pure Apparatus—this post-human,
pluralist approach to the many “dynamic,
networked roles” brought together in her
practice opens up possibilities for navigating
complexities in art as in life.
Ye’s deployment of digital media technologies
to investigate instability in contemporary
contexts is exemplified in the website work, IN
BETWEEN () WE OSCILLATE (2018). The work
presents the titular words in flickering neon
yellow over antonym pairs such as “bad/good”
and “bravery/cowardice,” which are presented in
color-changing font, scrolling horizontally across
a black background and alternating direction
at regular intervals. An accompanying looped
soundtrack was created by encoding the moving
pairs, visualized as a spectrogram, into audible
frequencies, generating an undulating, tinny
whine. The programmed, continuous fluctuation
of the antonym pairs from one end of the screen
to the other invalidates the fixed dichotomies
that they represent, literalizing the inherent
mutability of language. The source of the words,
an English textbook for non-native speakers,
additionally brings into sharp relief the power
dynamics embedded in language, questioning
another set of oppositions that have returned
with a vengeance in our post-globalization era:
native and foreign.
Similarly focused on language is Ye’s
“EveryLetterCyborg” (2017– ), a series of
web-application-based installations inspired by
computer-generated poetry that explores how
people filter information, and, in the artist’s
words, “how we perceive the topological textual
reality that is mediated by systematic generative
algorithms.” V 1.2 (2017–18), an iteration of this
project that was recently shown at the Goethe-
Institut in Beijing, involves a printer mounted
on a microphone stand that spews out texts
generated by Ye’s @qletrcyborg Twitterbot.
With such technological experiments, Ye is not
only developing unexpected tools with which to
process contemporary life, but also investigating
the multifaceted nature of creativity itself.
OPHELIA LAI
56
New Currents
2 AMSTERDAM / TEHRAN
Zhang Ruyi
SHANGHAI
In Pause (2016), a site-specific work by
Zhang Ruyi, cement-cast electrical sockets
inconspicuously dot tree trunks at Goodwood,
a woodland park near the southern coast of
England. Commissioned by Cass Sculpture
Foundation, the work is a perfect example of
how Zhang juxtaposes industrialized and organic
forms, shifting the familiar into the realm of the
uncanny and commenting on human’s growing
alienation in the sprawl of globalization.
As a post-1980s generation Chinese artist
and a witness to the meteoric reconstruction
of China’s metropolitan spaces surrounding
the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Zhang draws upon
the vocabulary of China’s urban environment
to question the country’s hasty nation-
building approach and to highlight the spatial
consequences of such development. In her
seemingly austere installations, comprising
construction materials like concrete and steel,
and square ceramic tiles, she explores the mind-
numbing homogeneity and translocalization of
architecture that has grown alongside China’s
explosive urban growth, sometimes transforming
entire rooms or tunnels into an immersive
Cartesian matrix that feels simultaneously
placeless and curiously familiar.
In Potted Plants (2016), a thick, waxy cactus
stands erect and immobile, sandwiched between
two identical, nondescript architectural models
cast in cement, and aixed to a wall of glossy
white tiles—a mundane and ubiquitous object
identified by the artist as a significant agent
of urban transformation, and evoking local
subjectivities of home. The cactus is recurrent
in the artist’s practice, standing in as a self-
portrait and a metaphor for a hard-boiled figure
stifled within the postindustrialized society;
since 2011, Zhang has sketched these plant
shapes on gridded graph paper, which she draws
herself. Her latest floor-to-ceiling ceramic-tiled
installations, featuring door fragments cast from
cement and petrified cacti, is a continuation of
these seemingly limitless gridlines. Shown at the
2018 group exhibition “Walking on the Fade Out
Lines” at Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum,
the works encapsulate Zhang’s meditative and
rational approach in organizing an undefined
ambiguous space, underscoring the artificiality
of constructed environments and providing a
nuanced critique of the changing relationship
between a city and its inhabitants.
JULEE WOO JIN CHUNG
| NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111
Sam Samiee experiments with the thresholds
of painting. His treatment of two- and three-
dimensional forms directly correlates to his
research into the medium’s significance in our
evolving understanding of human culture. The
idea of art-as-currency, for example, is the
focus of Samiee’s series of painting-installations,
“Design for a Money Note” (2018). In these
abstract paintings, which he drapes from walls,
the Tehran-born artist simultaneously mocks,
and attempts to revise, our crude, capitalist
obsessions with object valuation, suggesting that
these canvases of fuzzy-edged, peach, blush
and cerulean markings on similarly pastel-hued
backgrounds—which are ultimately meaningless
gestures—can be stand-ins for cold, hard cash.
Based in Amsterdam, Samiee synthesizes
Western and Persian art histories and cultures
in his paintings, installations, essays and poems,
reinventing traditions for the post-binary age.
In his multipiece installation work Bedroom
Posters (2015–16) Samiee aligned portraits of
young men sleeping, sitting or standing in relaxed
postures—in the style of a teenage youth’s
chamber of crushes, or a hall of devotional
imagery—alongside readymade objects such
as a yellow couch that he painted on, as a way
to explore the versatility of the medium and its
art-historical use in religious representation,
symbolism and abstract expressionism. A similar
display of installations and paintings, titled “The
Unfinished Copernican Revolution” (2018), at
the 10th Berlin Biennale, featured new prints
of abstract, narrative-less iPad “paintings” as
an ironic, contemporary take on critic Clement
Greenberg’s exultation of flatness in modern
painting. As part of the same work, he re-created
a ceramic-tiled shower stall, inside of which he
tacked up A4-size printouts of psychoanalytic
books, and images of a nude man posing in the
style of a classical sculpture in front of his own
abstract paintings—perhaps a tongue-in-cheek
reference to closeted queer individuals as well as
a further probing of art-historical tropes.
Samiee’s most recent exhibition at the
Gemeentemuseum in The Hague rifs on the
philosophical question of love’s relationship
to intellect. By showing a mix of his early and
new pieces alongside works from the museum’s
collection by three artists who have inspired his
practice—Constant Nieuwenhuys, Paul Thek and
Emo Verkerk—Samiee attempts to demonstrate
how contemporary painters are constantly
contextualizing and recontextualizing past,
present and future art histories.
YSABELLE CHEUNG

We Are Each One An Other
The winner of ArtAsiaPacific’s Young Writers Contest 2018 examines
cross-cultural themes in the works of Shezad Dawood
SHEZAD DAWOOD, Towards the Possible Film, 2014, still of single-channel HD video: 19 min 29 sec. All images courtesy the artist and Timothy Taylor, London/New York.
Rarely are artists as expansive as Shezad
Dawood, in their subject matter and
methodology, and in probing the fault lines
in contemporary society. For nearly two
decades, the London-based artist of Indo-
Pakistani descent has grappled with themes
of cultural identity, migration, displacement,
systems of power and structures of belief
through diverse contexts and histories using a
spectrum of media.
Given Dawood’s South Asian heritage
and diasporic experience of growing up in
Britain, exploring the idea of otherness has
figured prominently in his work since the
start of his career. In his notable early project,
Make It Big (2002–03), Dawood attempted
to destabilize the binary of East and West
by restaging film stills of Michelangelo
Antonioni’s classic mystery thriller
Blow-Up (1966) using Pakistani actresses,
with himself as the director, and by hiring a
Karachi billboard-painter to create variations
on canvas of the original film poster. Through
Essays
BY JOYCE WONG
appropriation and mimicry—mainstays in
Dawood’s strategy to this day—he created
what Sara Raza called, in a 2005 article
for ArtAsiaPacific, “a new hybridized
vocabulary,” to expose how similarities can
exist between ostensibly opposing cultures,
and to argue that the notion of otherness is a
matter of perspective.
Dawood favors juxtaposing different
contexts to reveal unexpected commonalities.
This exploration of otherness through
multiple perspectives distinguishes his
approach from conventional identity politics.
In a series of sculptures he produced starting
in 2007, for instance, he considers Islam and
early American frontier culture as ideologies
that each sprang from desolate environments.
The objects themselves merge aspects from
both doctrines, such as The Judge (2007),
a tumbleweed-coiled neon sign that spells
out one of the 99 names attributed to Allah.
Coming at a time when many Western
governments had declared a “War on Terror”
Essays artasiapacific.com
in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in the United
States and subsequent attacks in the United
Kingdom, the series rejected the “clash of
civilizations” cliché. This excavation of
cultural convergence and empathy propels
Dawood’s projects and is especially necessary
amid the current rise of right-wing populism
fueling xenophobia, racism and separatist
thinking in the Euro-American sphere.
Tracing Dawood’s evolving interest
in deconstructing traditional readings of
otherness, we can see that he has developed
upon early works stemming from his own
cultural specificity to wider narratives.
Towards the Possible Film (2014) is a self-
proclaimed turning point for Dawood. The
20-minute film follows two blue-skinned
aliens emerging from the sea who encounter
violent indigenous land dwellers. While the
aliens appear futuristic in their spacesuits,
their green- or blue-colored skin alludes to
ancient archetypes of deities or holy figures
such as the Egyptian god Osiris or Krishna
59
from Hindu mythology. In comparison,
the indigenous people seem premodern,
yet could also be postapocalyptic. The film’s
nonlinear temporality and ambiguous
Martian-esque landscape create a “context-
less context” that allows the narrative
to become symbolic of alienation and
antagonism in our shared human condition,
as Dawood explained in a 2014 interview with
Stephanie Bailey in Yishu.
SHEZAD DAWOOD, Fragment of a Carton of Cigarettes,
2017, mixed media on Fortuny textile, 193 x 154 cm.
Installation view of SHEZAD DAWOOD’s Leviathan, 2017– , ten-part film cycle, dimensions variable, at “Leviathan,” Palazzina Canonica / Fortuny Factory, Venice, 2017.
60
Moving beyond cultural specificity,
however, is not a renunciation of world
affairs. Far from it—Dawood is embracing
the whole world as context. This is evident
in his latest, most ambitious project to date,
Leviathan. Debuted last year, the ten-
part film cycle and related sculptures and
paintings are to be completed in 2020, and
the work’s unfolding chapters tackle pressing
issues such as the European refugee crisis,
climate change, resource inequity, mental
health and their potential interconnections.
In his practice, Dawood has often created
projects through collaboration, whether with
other artists, academics or communities,
to make seemingly disparate discourses
speak to each other. In its four chapters
to date, Leviathan is his most extensive
collaboration yet, involving marine biologists,
SHEZAD DAWOOD, Life Jacket, 2017, mixed media on Fortuny
oceanographers, political scientists, textile, 195 x 146 cm.
neurologists and many more to come.
Equaling his collaborative spirit is to those living. Dawood’s end goal in his
his increasing community engagement. art practice, he told Bailey, is to move away
Just as Dawood’s postapocalyptic, from specificity to speak to humanity’s
quasi-documentary created in New York, “illusion of cultural difference and
It was a time that was a time (2015), was otherness.” Leviathan chronicles his leaps
cathartic for the victims of Hurricane Sandy toward this goal in an epic film cycle
whom he involved as actors, the textile pertinent to our times and prescient of
paintings that are also a part of the Leviathan our collective future.
project depict actual personal items lost by *Visit our Digital Library at library.artasiapacific.com for more articles
refugees at sea, and project a hope for closure on Shezad Dawood.
| NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111

Hopping on a Broken Bandwagon
Singapore’s confused art fair-industrial complex
Image of Marina Bay Sands Hotel and Casino, taken from Merlion Park, Singapore, 2015. Photo by Sasin Tipchai.
Despite evidence to the contrary, a network
of fair organizers, galleries, so-called
tastemakers, and even government bodies in
Singapore continue to cultivate an art fair-
industrial complex under the assumption
that introducing more art fairs is a winning
strategy for the local economy and art scene
alike. The individuals and organizations in
this network will do anything to impress
the cool kids of the art world—namely
mega galleries, mega fairs and mega-rich
buyers—social and financial consequences
be damned.
Recently, it was announced that the
inaugural edition of SEA Focus, a commercial
showcase of around 30 galleries featuring
Southeast Asian art, will be held in the gallery
enclave Gillman Barracks, during Singapore
Art Week next January. Soon afterwards, it
was revealed that MCH Group, the owner of
the Art Basel brand, will launch a new art
Essays
BY REENA DEVI
fair in Singapore called Art SG, slated for
November 2019. These newcomers join a
landscape already filled with fairs that have
tried to make their mark in Singapore over
the last few years, with little to no success.
Art fairs in Singapore have struggled
since 2016 as the country’s art market has
floundered. In 2018, mainstay fair Art Stage
Singapore shrank from 170 galleries in 2016
to just 84. This followed the surprise move
by Affordable Art Fair to revert to hosting its
Singapore iteration just once per year after
four years of biannual editions, while the
Singapore Contemporary Art Show, after two
editions, quietly folded in early 2018.
And then there’s the issue of cost.
According to Gil Schneider, consultant for
a regional rival, Art Jakarta: “Singapore as
a fair venue is expensive. The Marina Bay
Sands venue is expensive. Show-building is
expensive. The Southeast Asian galleries who
Essays artasiapacific.com
come to Singapore have to factor all the costs
of shipping, booth rental, show building,
etcetera . . . What sense does it make for an
Indonesian gallery to come to Singapore
to sell to their Indonesian collectors? They
would rather go to an art fair where they can
be assured they will recover their costs.”
Yet, almost everyone in the local scene
is supportive of the proliferation of art fairs
in Singapore. These events are perceived as
opportunities to draw new international and
regional collectors, which could be beneficial
to all involved in the Singapore arts scene.
Why does this mindset persist despite high
costs and shaky prospects?
One factor is the agenda of the Singapore
state. The future Art SG is supported by
the National Arts Council, Singapore
Tourism Board and the Singapore Economic
Development Board, the same government
agencies that have been supporting Gillman
61
Barracks and Art Stage Singapore since their
development. As Khairuddin Hori, newly
appointed president of the Art Galleries
Association Singapore, told ArtAsiaPacific,
the explosion of art fairs in Singapore
has been mainly driven by government-
led ambitions to “industrialize” the arts,
presumably in the lofty hope that the sector
will eventually sustain itself.
Whether the commercial arts scene in
Singapore is self-sustainable without these
ventures is debatable, but the economic
imperative behind the country’s ambitions
to become a regional and international art
powerhouse is quite obvious. Over the last
decade, the government has channeled more
money and support toward the visual arts
with the SGD 532 million National Gallery
Singapore, the ongoing SGD 90 million
revamp of the Singapore Art Museum and
the SGD 10 million makeover of Gillman
Barracks. This is most likely because a single
piece of art sold makes far more money than
a book, cinema pass or theater-performance
ticket. The hope is that the global and
regional ultra-rich coming to buy and sell
art in Singapore could be a potential source
of economic wealth via extended touristic
activities as well as dining, shopping,
gambling and so on.
It would therefore be easy to mistake
the Singapore government’s push for
art fairs as part of a national economic
agenda, but that would ignore how the
art fair–industrial complex has become a
global affliction. A growing international
backlash against art fairs is hardly news. In
a Vulture article published in May, art critic
Jerry Saltz eviscerated today’s global mega
fairs, characterizing them as “great malls
curated to lure people in without focusing
on business, employing a stagecraft of
entertainments, fine foods, wine-tastings,
valet parking, VIP lounges . . . [and] panel
discussions . . . with a rotating few of the
same 55 movers-and-shakers providing self-
congratulatory, self-flagellating gravitas to
the traveling caravan.”
Earlier this year, New York gallerist Jose
Freire publicly announced that he would
never participate in another fair again, after
a final showing at Art Basel Hong Kong,
stating that people would be better off
scrolling through Instagram to view works
of art on sale, rather than trudging through a
fair. In an interview with Artnet, he claimed
that he hadn’t met a single new person at
various editions of Frieze or Art Basel in the
past decade and that there is no longer a
curatorial presence at fairs. Most crucially,
his gallery suffered its biggest losses at art
fairs due to booth costs, exchange rates,
fabrication costs, and shipping. For Freire,
at least, fairs aren’t the moneymakers they
purport to be.
Back in Singapore, Khairuddin, who also
serves as curatorial director at Chan+Hori
62
Contemporary gallery, told AAP that art fairs
are “trading grounds and offer the public
a glimpse into the celebrity of art. They
are not museums, art centers, biennales
or similar events or institutions that are
consequential to the essence of art and
being of artists.”
So why do we continue this charade of
blowout events that do not seem to bring
any real innovation, development and
sustainable financial benefits to the scene?
Why do we keep returning to the same tired
format of showcasing art?
Saltz argued that the Basels of the art
world will continue because these events
benefit those at the very top—high-end
galleries, big-name artists and their
clientele—more than anyone else. Art Stage
Singapore director Lorenzo Rudolf sees the
arrival of Art SG as an attempt by MCH to
provide “direct and exclusive access to the
extremely potent economic elite of one of
the world’s fastest-growing regions.” Gaining
“total market control over the ever-more
professional and self-confident Southeast
Asian art world,” Rudolf says, is particularly
pertinent given the emerging market
competition in major Chinese cities like
Shanghai, Beijing and Chengdu, which have
been welcoming both a growing number of
fairs and high-net-worth individuals looking
to invest in art. While commending it as a
smart step from the perspective of a global
player aiming to dominate and control the
international art market, he questioned
whether the global art market would benefit
from diversity rather than the “complete
and comprehensive orientation of a global
luxury market.”
Sandy Angus, chairman of Montgomery
Arts, which is also one of the organizers of
Art SG, spoke openly with AAP about the
new fair’s objective to reach out to the richest
collectors and highest-quality galleries.
Angus pointed out that there are a lot of
high-net-worth individuals in Singapore
who have yet to venture into art collecting;
these individuals comprise the key target
demographic for Art SG. Moreover, it intends
to tap major collectors in the region from
Installation view of Art Stage Singapore at Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre, 2017. Courtesy Art Stage Singapore.
| NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111
countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia,
Australia and India, citing Singapore as
an accessible hotspot for them. As for the
struggling fairs, Angus asserted that any
fair is susceptible to being judged by its
lowest-quality galleries. In his view, Art Stage
Singapore was successful until it allowed
these lesser-quality galleries in, causing the
initial support from collectors to plummet.
This is not a mistake Art SG intends to make.
However, the idea of the wealthiest in the
region making Singapore their playground
for arts, shopping and entertainment
might be a tad whimsical. While the city-
state is a destination for some members
of the global rich, most expats tend to use
Singapore as a place to work and live while
traveling across the region and playing
elsewhere. Expats whom I’ve spoken to have
described Singapore as “quiet” in terms
of entertainment and nightlife. Tellingly,
Marina Bay Sands, Singapore’s luxury
integrated resort and the venue for Art Stage
and Art SG, reported a four percent drop
in convention, retail and other business as
well as a 4.2 percent drop in room revenue
in 2017, despite growing casino revenue at 16
percent. Senior executives also “lamented”
the fall in VIP turnover. One of the reasons
cited for this dip was competition from other
places in the region, such as the Philippines,
Thailand and Macau.
So why is Singapore doubling down on
an outmoded spectacle like the art fair to
attract a demographic that is not really into
the locale? It smacks of the naive behavior of
a desperate trend-follower. Singapore could
invigorate the art scene by shifting taste-
making and art appreciation from cultural
traders and dealers to local and regional
artists, educators and cultural managers.
Instead, it chooses to keep up with the global
status quo and succumb to post modern
vulnerabilities currently faced across
affluent cities. Attracting the ultra-rich to our
shores could be a happy by-product rather
than a primary objective; originality and
vision are bound to draw attention. But it
looks like Singapore has some growing up to
do before it learns that lesson.

Ladies and Gentlemen of Leisure
Looking at the priorities of Shanghai’s private museums
Installation view of “Art Patrons” at Qiao Space, Shanghai, 2018. Courtesy Qiao Collection, Shanghai .
Earlier this year, club owner and
entrepreneur Qiao Zhibing invited 36
fellow art collectors from the greater
China region to submit works from their
private inventories for a group exhibition
in Shanghai. Out of these proposals, Qiao
handpicked around 50 artworks—of which
approximately 40 were by men and fewer
than 10 by female artists—for the exhibition,
entitled “Art Patrons,” which was on display
at the two initiatives he founded in the
West Bund Culture Corridor: Qiao Space,
and the 60,000-square-meter cultural
hub Tank Shanghai. The show opened in
late March, catering to the international
museum directors, curators, collectors
and art professionals who might have
stopped in Shanghai on their way to Art
Basel Hong Kong.
It was revealing that the exhibition
invitation listed all 36 contributing
collectors and collections, yet not a single
artist was mentioned. The emphasis was
Essays
BY DANIELLE SHANG
clearly on those who had acquired the art,
rather than those who had produced it.
Qiao elaborated on his perspective in the
press release:
Aside from a collector, whose ultimate
purpose is to promote contemporary
art, they have gradually taken on more
roles and public responsibilities—not
content with merely collecting, but
also through establishing museums,
alternative spaces, art foundations
and fairs; in the meantime, actively
supporting the art education programs,
exhibitions and institutions.
The exhibition will also make a
survey of art patronage from a historical
viewpoint. Art patrons with their larger-
than-life character and cutting-edge
vision have always played a pivotal role
throughout history, across ancient China,
Renaissance Italy and 20th Century
America. It is also a complicated but
Essays artasiapacific.com
fascinating progression which will allow
art patrons and artists alike to influence
and complete each other, and eventually,
to shape the future of art.
After I read such a blatantly self-serving
statement, the resounding questions of
performance artist, educator and writer
Andrea Fraser came to mind. In her 2011
essay “L’1%, C’est Moi,” she asks: “How
do the world’s leading collectors earn
their money? How do their philanthropic
activities relate to their economic
operations? And what does collecting art
mean to them and how does it affect the art
world?” The last question, in particular, is
pertinent to the situation in China today.
In an academic paper co-published in
2009, economists William N. Goetzmann,
Luc Renneboog and Christophe Spaenjer
concluded, “Art booms whenever income
inequality rises quickly.” As China’s
economy has grown, increasingly favoring
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big business and the super-wealthy, the
country has also been at the forefront of
art prosperity. Prices for art are as high
as ever at the moment. But as Sotheby’s
former principal auctioneer Tobias Meyer
once explained in an interview with Vanity
Fair magazine: “The prices [for art] are not
prices, they’re relationships to individual
worth.” It is important to consider that
not all wealthy Chinese are automatically
granted entry into high-society circles. It
depends crucially on which families they
were born or married into, and how they
make their money. Therefore, art patronage
is a way for many to signify their cultural
superiority and mark a position of privilege,
in the hope of climbing the social ladder. So,
as the rich are rapidly getting much richer
in China, as elsewhere in the world, Qiao’s
exhibition “Art Patrons” extolled the virtues
of philanthropy. Yet, it also ostentatiously
celebrated the trophy-hunting practices
of an elite group of 15 women and 22 men
who are constituents, and competitors,
in a hierarchy of prestige built on the
conspicuous consumption of luxury goods,
including fine art.
Many of Qiao’s fellow collectors have
established their own museums and private
spaces. Several of these are now located
in West Bund, the riverfront property
founded in 2012 with an investment of
RMB 660 million (USD 96 million) from
the government. This state-guided and
market-based initiative of establishing an
outsize arts district aims to put Shanghai on
the international culture map and stimulate
China’s soft power. The local authorities
have taken various measures, including
inviting the well-respected artist Zhou
Portrait of QIAO ZHIBING. Courtesy Qiao Collection, Shanghai.
64
Tiehai to spearhead the West Bund Art and
Design fair, supporting private institutions
such as the Tank and the Yuz Museum,
and encouraging galleries to relocate to
the corridor. The municipal government is
responsible for the success of the area, but,
as art historian Xing Zhao observed in a
recent issue of Yishu magazine, West Bund’s
allure is largely enhanced by the efforts of
“individual collectors, entrepreneurs and
foreign investors at their own initiative and
for various reasons.”
Indeed, nearly all contemporary art
museums and alternative spaces in China
are privately owned or administered, and
are dependent on patrons to fund the
programming and keep the staff on payroll.
But unfortunately, when money is the
determinant, the person who funds the
program often becomes its self-appointed
author, turning the institution into a circus
in which the patron performs as producer,
director, connoisseur, curator, head of
acquisitions and even docent. Artists,
their artworks, curators and other
art professionals become disposable
accessories, garnishing the patron’s ego.
Most private museums in China do
not meet the qualifications and code of
ethics of the International Council of
Museums, established in 1946. Some appear
to reduce the notion of serving the public to
merely giving a guided walk-through at the
opening. Institutional exchange might be
no more than having dinner with a highly
publicized museum director from the West.
I’m not aware of any Chinese museums
fulfilling the responsibility of keeping
complete records of the removals of objects
from the collection. Though it opened in
2014, the Yuz Museum, for example, does
not yet have a curatorial team to take care of
the collection and organize exhibitions.
In the press release for the “Art Patrons”
exhibition, Qiao delves into the history
of the practice of patronage, in an attempt
to align himself with the Medicis of
Florence and the Yangzhou merchant-
patrons in the Ming and Qing dynasties.
But those benefactors lived in times when
private collections stayed in private or
exclusive spaces. The concept of a modern
museum, as a secular space for public
engagement through the presentation
of objects to educate the masses in areas
of cultural refinement, began in Europe
in the 18th century. The Louvre Museum
in Paris, opened in 1793, was the first
institution to provide free access for
people regardless of their social status.
In the 19th century, academically trained
professionals emerged to oversee the
institution, specializing in acquisition,
curation, research and conservation. By
not only providing content for exhibitions
but also contributing to the academic field
of art, professionals help broaden topics,
| NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111
elevate institutions and cultivate a healthy
infrastructure. Concurrently, the emerging
art market, sustained by the upper classes,
was gradually replacing royal and religious
patronage in supporting artists and
their artworks. As a result, art since then
has been evaluated through the lens of
economics, as art critic Boris Groys has
written: “Aesthetics, as a philosophical
tradition and academic discipline, relates
to and reflects on art from the perspective
of the art consumer.”
When private collections enter the
public domain, the relationships change.
Aside from enhancing the patron’s legacy
and attracting tourists, private museums
need to adopt institutional and social
responsibilities. While their owners’ role
as actors in the market is crucial for the
art ecosystem, private institutions have
the potential to offer enjoyment for
visitors no less than public ones. They
can also provide intimate viewing
experiences not possible in heavily
didactic public institutions. But when
standards of research, conservation,
design, management, education and
collection are disregarded, especially
when curatorial values are repudiated, the
typical grandiosity of these physical spaces
becomes the magnified manifestation of
intellectual poverty, undercutting any
possible sociopolitical agency in art. For
instance, when the collector Wang Wei put
together a show of women artists at her
own Long Museum, not only did she fail to
articulate the extraordinary contributions
of those women to the field of contemporary
art, but she also completely overlooked the
historical and social contexts in which the
art was made.
As a freelance writer, consultant and
exhibition organizer, I am very aware of
the risk of biting the hand that feeds me.
However, my critique is a matter of sincere
conscience and urgency. This is not a
personal attack on individual collectors.
Rather, it is my constructive attempt, as
a member of the art community, to evaluate
the current state of private museums
and spaces, and to confront our willing
participation in a system that perpetuates
economic inequality.
The art world has always been dependent
on and in close contact with the leisure
class. However, a healthy autonomy from
it has been shown historically to be
crucial for art’s critical and discursive
development, as well as for institutional
sustainability. It is precisely in this spirit
that I am scrutinizing the institution of
art against, in the words of Andrea
Fraser, from her 2012 essay “There’s No
Place Like Home,” “the critical claims
of its legitimizing discourses, its self-
representation as a site of contestation and
its narratives of radicality and revolution.”
Profiles

68
Dale Harding
ALWAYS PAINTING, ALWAYS SCULPTING
BY TIM WALSH

70
Akiko Yamazaki
and Jerry Yang 72
UNDERSTATED VISIONARIES
BY OLIVIA WANG Khvay Samnang
THE LONG WAY HOME
BY OPHELIA LAI

Profiles artasiapacific.com 67
 Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane.
Portrait of Dale Harding. Photo by Karen Lawton.

BY TIM WALSH
DALE HARDING

Always Painting, Always Sculpting

Installation view of DALE HARDING and JORDAN UPKETT’s Wall Compositions from Memory, 2018,
ochre pigment, dimensions variable, at TarraWarra Biennial, TarraWarra Museum of Art,
2018. Photo by Andrew Curtis. Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane.

Carnarvon Gorge, a nearly 20-mile canyon
situated in Central Queensland, Australia,
is a space uniquely defined by its rock
art paintings and by the sculpting of its
landscapes, the cliffs forged by the coursing
of creeks and springs. The place carries the
ongoing histories of communities including
the Garingbal and Bidjara people of Central
Queensland who have maintained their
stories in the region for at least 20,000 years,
one descendant of which—Brisbane-based
Dale Harding—has made it his mission
not only to sustain these narratives but to
articulate their futures through his own
painting and sculpting.
At the two-city Documenta 14 in 2017,
Harding presented different bodies of work
that opened up streams of discourse between
these dual mediums. For Athens’ EMST-
National Museum of Contemporary Art,
Harding, who descends from the Ghungalu
people, installed the sculptural Body of
Objects (2017), comprised of black silicone
replicas of ceremonial spears, boomerangs,
throwing sticks, nulla nulla (hunting clubs)
and other tools re-created with permission
from his communities’ elders.
In Kassel’s Ottoneum, three white,
freestanding walls became “canvases”
for a large-scale painting, created using
ancestral techniques of ocher blowing and
stenciling. As a derivation of Aboriginal
pictographs, typically painted in naturally
occurring clay pigments of red, brown,
white and black, Composite Wall Panel:
Reckitt’s Blue (2017) includes a vibrant, blue
powder, as a reference to the hue mixed by
French artist Yves Klein. This particular
synthetic powder was developed as a popular
whitening agent for laundry in the mid-
19th century and was used domestically
across colonial settlements. In the context
of Harding’s family history, however,
Reckitt’s Blue conveys contrasting, complex
narratives. Harding’s grandmother and
great-grandmother both worked as domestic
servants and, like many Aboriginal women
and girls at the time, were indentured under
the control of the Queensland Government
through the Aboriginals Protection and
Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act of
1897. Reckitt’s Blue was also utilized,
unconventionally, by Harding’s matrilineal
ancestors to decorate their shields.
As Harding noted, “‘Doing’ and ‘being’
culture was always something very natural
growing up for me. I’ve been learning
processes of communicating culture since
I was around ten years old.” His early years
Profiles
were spent in Moranbah, more than 250
miles north of the Gorge, a small town “built
out of necessity, for the two coal mines there”
and which exuded “a pervasive 1990s grunge
and griminess. It felt like a slow-moving
adolescence for multiple generations who
lived within the town.” His cultural points
of reference came from his mother, a highly
skilled artisan, and his father, a respected
cattle farmer—both of whom were involved
in the broader Aboriginal community in
Central Queensland. In 2001, Harding
moved to the Sunshine Coast, north of the
Queensland capital of Brisbane, to continue
developing his practice and to broaden his
cultural horizons—he recalled a period of
obsession around Anglo-Australian artist
Brett Whiteley’s paintings of birds, with a
particular focus on the Fijian fruit dove.
In 2009, at the age of 27, Harding enrolled
in the Queensland College of Art’s renowned
Contemporary Australian Indigenous
Art program, where he began to examine
sculpture on a more academic level. His
first solo exhibition in 2012, “Colour by
Number” at Brisbane’s Metro Arts, featured
a body of work with a strong sculptural bent
that referenced his matrilineal family’s
experience of the Queensland Government’s
brutal laws. In No Blame Rests with
Them (2012), a suspended wooden fighting
stick rests its narrow point on top of a
“plinth” carved and painted to look like a
tin of the chocolate-malt powder drink Milo
(albeit without the signature green label),
the rod pointing downward at a graceful but
threatening angle. Its poise and elegance,
coupled with the subtle detail of scalloped
edges on an upper section of wood, alludes
to the relationship, in Harding’s mind,
between the works of iconic modernist
sculptor Constantin Brancusi and the
traditional nulla nulla: “Brancusi’s tapered
bird forms were the same forms I grew up
with and look just like the nulla nulla made
by my grandfather. So when I saw Brancusi’s
works, in a sense, I knew them already.”
In the years since then, Harding has
developed his material exploration of his
family’s history through works that describe
trauma, tinged, in marked contrast, with
tenderness. For example, for Bright Eyed
Little Dormitory Girls (2013), Harding made
small, raw hessian-sack shirts embroidered
with the Crown of England symbol, recalling
the young Aboriginal dormitory workers
typically forced to wear the rough garments
as punishment for resisting their employers.
Intervening in a reparative fashion, Harding
Profiles artasiapacific.com
sewed in soft, mohair wool collars—under
his mother’s tutelage—around the neckline,
tempering the abrasive material. Yet his
recent practice—especially since his
presentation in Documenta 14—has been
guided by a desire to deliberately pivot
away from “urgent histories of abuse and
suffering of previous generations in the
[earlier] work,” a conscious decision made
by himself and his family once they felt that
these issues had been properly addressed.
“Presenting Indigenous suffering had
begun to feel like a convention to me—
beyond historical redress. It was time to
offer myself some notes to future bodies
of work,” he explained. “I am an artist,
and I’d been longing to return from the
political arenas of contemporary art to the
studio, where I could work at dreaming up
futures through visual culture.” His 2017
solo exhibition, at Brisbane’s Milani Gallery,
represents this shift: the formally engaged
work incorporated the same technique of
pigment-blowing used in the wall paintings,
but this time the paint was sprayed across
pieces of glass, scaled to the human body
and installed so that some would catch rays
of natural light from the space’s skylights.
The central piece, Blue Rest (2017), is coated
on one side with a uniform layer of Reckitt’s
Blue. When struck by a sunbeam, the work’s
color throws a subtle blue light across the
floor—revealing a soft radiance that exudes
a sense of optimism.
This future appears bright for Harding,
with an upcoming survey at the Institute
of Modern Art, Brisbane, opening in early
2019, as well as a major, multi-venue
public commission for the University of
Sydney. His sources of creative energy—
the cultural knowledge of his people and
art historical references in rock art sites,
ceremonial objects, avant-garde works by
Klein, Brancusi, Whiteley and Harding’s
contemporary peers, along with constant
inspiration from his wider family—remain
a consistently renewing fount. In the recent
TarraWarra Biennial, Harding and his cousin
Jordan Upkett presented a vast 30-meter-
wide wall painting, Wall Compositions from
Memory (2018) using earth from Harding’s
grandmother’s country, which they blew
from their mouths and rubbed into the
structure of the gallery. Among this red
ocher painterly composition, incisions were
made by Harding and Upkett, referencing
their communities’ important stories and
songlines. Even when painting, Harding’s
sculptural instincts persist.
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 Photo by Angela DeCenzo.
Portrait of Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang.

BY OLIVIA WANG
Understated Visionaries
AKIKO YAMAZAKI AND JERRY YANG

IRENE CHOU, Untitled, 1995, ink on paper, 152.4 x 106.7 cm. Courtesy Akiko Yamazaki
and Jerry Yang, and Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford.

“When I first started to think about
collecting, I really had no basis for judging
what was good or bad,” the ever-humble
Jerry Yang said when I asked him about the
beginnings of his journey as a collector. Yet
after getting married in 1997 and settling
down together in California, he and his wife
Akiko Yamazaki agreed that they would
focus on “collecting works that reflect
[their East-Asian] heritage.” They have
since built a three-tiered collection, which
comprises traditional calligraphy, overseen
solely by Yang, Song-dynasty ceramics—
Yamazaki’s pursuit—and their joint passion,
contemporary Chinese ink paintings.
Yang’s penchant for traditional calligraphy
might be surprising to some given his
profession. He holds undergraduate and
postgraduate degrees from Stanford in
electrical engineering, and co-founded
Yahoo—an acronym for the ironic phrase
“Yet Another Hierarchical Officious
Oracle”—in 1994 with his friend David Filo
while he was still a doctoral candidate. With
the official job title “Chief Yahoo,” he was
propelled to dot-com billionaire status within
two years of the company’s launch.
His exposure to art, however, can be traced
to his childhood in Taiwan, where he was
born and raised before moving to the United
States with his family at the age of ten. He
practiced calligraphy as a student in Taipei,
and when he made his first acquisition, in
1998, it was a piece by Ming-dynasty master
calligrapher Dong Qichang. Calligraphy
struck a chord, Yang said, because of his
familiarity with the medium. He has since
put together an impressive collection of more
than 300 calligraphy works dating from the
13th to 19th centuries.
While Yang cultivated his eye for
calligraphy, Yamazaki directed her attention
to Song-dynasty ceramics. Yamazaki was
raised in Costa Rica, where her father was a
Japanese expatriate, and earned an
undergraduate degree in industrial
engineering from Stanford in 1990. Though
she took painting and calligraphy classes at
her school in Costa Rica, her passion for art
and collecting ceramics was sparked only
after she joined the San Francisco’s Asian
Art Museum as a board member in 1997.
Gradually taking on a more active role in the
museum’s leadership, she was elected chair
of the board in 2014. Yamazaki explained that
over the years, with the advice of Hao Sheng,
former curator of Chinese art at Boston’s
Museum of Fine Arts, she has taken an
increasingly critical and disciplined approach
to collecting ceramics, giving considerable
Profiles
thought to criteria such as provenance,
beauty, condition and rarity. The couple now
own 50 antique ceramic pieces.
Though Yang and Yamazaki developed
different passions, their interests converge
when it comes to collecting contemporary
Chinese ink paintings. They made their first
purchase in 2001, and have since amassed
more than 100 works, focusing initially on
works by artists whom they came to know
personally through specialists in the worlds
of calligraphy and traditional painting,
such as Li Huayi, Gu Wenda and Wang
Tiande. “It was more like relationship-
based collecting, but obviously with
good guidance from [experts such as]
Michael Knight [who is also consulting
curator of the couple’s collection] and
Mee-Seen Loong,” Yang explained. At the
time, these artists were still in the early
to mid-stages of their careers; some have
become leading figures in the genre—a
testament to the couple’s discerning eye.
Many of the paintings were acquired from
the artists directly, but there are also a
portion that were commissioned for special
occasions. To celebrate their 20th wedding
anniversary, for example, Yang and
Yamazaki asked Zheng Chongbin—known
for fusing Western principles of abstraction
with Chinese ink traditions—to create a
work. The result was a large-scale, abstract
collage spanning over two meters in height,
composed of overlapping and folded paper
fragments painted with ink and white
acrylic. Zheng is extensively represented
in their collection, with roughly 12 works
dating from 1995 to the present. Liu Dan
is another artist whose oeuvre the couple
has followed closely. They own six of Liu’s
works, including his monumental 1991
painting of an open Chinese dictionary
bearing traditional characters—as opposed
to the simplified characters that emerged
from the Maoist era—illustrating Liu’s
reverence for traditional culture. To provide
historical context for the contemporary
ink works in their collection, the duo have
also acquired paintings by pioneers of the
genre who were active in Hong Kong in
the 1960s and ’70s, such as Lui Shou-kwan,
Liu Kuo-sung and Irene Chou.
Given the couple’s deliberate approach
toward collecting, I was curious to know
if they had ever made an impulse purchase.
Yamazaki spoke with enthusiasm as
she told me about a 17th-century Rinpa-
style flower painting by Takashi Murakami
that she unexpectedly acquired after
a recent visit to the artist’s studio in
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New York. “There is something just so
compelling about his art,” she explained.
In the pair’s characteristically understated
manner, they approach their roles as
collectors with reverence. “As for the art
we collect, we own it for now, but we’re
ultimately passing it down to the next
generation of collectors, whether it is ours or
someone else,” Yang said. “The contemporary
artworks we collect are a reflection of the past
and present, and hopefully will be around
in the future.” Yet they have no plans to
establish a private museum to house their
collection. “I prefer the model of lending,”
explained Yamazaki, “whereby institutions
can curate their exhibitions according to
their audiences.” Yang continued, “There’s
the goal with those who want to establish a
private museum to leave their legacy in art. I
don’t know if we feel that strongly about that
being our legacy. But who knows, check back
with us in the future!”
Beyond collecting, the pair have
donated generously. In 2017, they pledged
USD 25 million toward an architectural
and programming revamp at the Asian
Art Museum—the largest donation in the
institution’s history. “We’re relatively private
people, but when it comes to art and loaning
our art to exhibitions, we feel it is important
to use art to initiate cultural dialogue,” Yang
said. “China, Japan and Korea are involved
in so many facets in the world today,
particularly politically, economically and
geopolitically. I think having art encourage
such a dialogue is very important.”
For the couple, engaging with art starts
at home. Yamazaki recounted having a
mini-version of Yayoi Kusama’s Obliteration
Room (2002– )—an interactive installation
where viewers are invited to cover a space
with brightly colored dot-shaped stickers—
constructed for their younger daughter’s
eighth birthday party a few years ago. Their
daughter and friends primed the installation
first with white paint, so they could
understand that artists have to work very
hard physically, before affixing the stickers
anywhere they wished. Their daughter’s fete
indicates the couple’s earnest and genuine
efforts to share their passion for the arts
with others. With all the attention-seeking
collectors that exist in the contemporary art
world today, it is inspiring and refreshing
to see those who approach collecting
and patronage with as much respect and
deliberation as Yang and Yamazaki.
See our website for the Chinese version of this article.
71
 Courtesy Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong/Shanghai.
Portrait of Khvay Samnang.

BY OPHELIA LAI
KHVAY SAMNANG

The Long Way Home

KHVAY SAMNANG, Preah Kunlong,, 2016–17, detail of still from two-channel HD video:
18 min 43 sec. Courtesy the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong/Shanghai.

“If I hear there are protests in an area, I
go there. I want to know what happened,
and I want to show it through art,” Khvay
Samnang said to me. He was explaining his
artistic process, which has involved dumping
buckets of sand over himself in a series of
performance-protests, or filming a dancer
embodying rainforest animal spirits. The
bucolic settings and humorous antics often
belie the seriousness of the subject matter,
as his works are urgent, if unexpected,
responses to contemporary issues such as
environmental degradation. At the same
time, he tries to steer clear of didacticism,
instead conveying empathy, compassion and
spiritual wonder.
Born in Svay Rieng province, Cambodia,
the artist studied painting at the Royal
University of Fine Arts (RUFA) in Phnom
Penh, where he is still based, though his
practice has largely encompassed everything
but painting. “There weren’t many mediums
I could choose [at university],” he explained.
He had also trained in photography while
a student at RUFA, but it was a trip in 2009
to Japan for a residency at Tokyo Wonder
Site that opened his eyes to a wealth of
artistic possibilities. “I saw something that
Cambodia didn’t have. It made me think that
it’s not only painting that can show what I
want to say; there’s also photography, video
and my body.” The residency culminated in
an early performance work, Samnang Cow
Taxi at Asakusa (2010), in which he donned a
headpiece resembling buffalo horns and gave
free rickshaw rides to strangers as a gesture
of thanks to his host city. The horns had been
crafted from hair collected at Phnom Penh’s
roadside hairdressers, bringing a slice of the
artist’s native country to Japan.
Home is an important theme in Khvay’s
work, and it’s at the heart of the photographic
series “Human Nature” (2010–11), initiated
upon his return to Phnom Penh. “I try to
follow what’s happening in my environment:
land issues, human-rights violations.” At
the time, the pressing problem was the
impending demolition of the historic Bassac
Riverfront municipal housing complex
after the government had sold the land to
a property developer. The issue was also
personal: the nonprofit Sa Sa Art Projects,
which Khvay had helped to establish in 2009
as part of Stiev Selapak, or “art rebels”—a
collective he co-founded with fellow artists
Lim Sokchanlina, Vuth Lyno and (now
ex-member) Vandy Rattana—was located
in the building. Wanting to document the
place before its demise, Khvay photographed
residents in their homes. They wore colorful
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masks he had created for them after they
voiced their fears of repercussions for
participating in what could be construed as
anti-government dissent. The masks became
emblematic of the government’s erasure
of lower-income social groups from the
increasingly privatized urban landscape, as
well as representing the hidden anxieties of
those being forced from their homes.
Similarly concerned with the struggle
over property is Khvay’s iconic 2011
performance-based series, in which the artist
poured a bucket of sand over himself while
standing in various lakes across Phnom
Penh. A protest against land reclamation
and the displacement of residents, these
performances arose after Khvay saw a family
refusing to leave their stilt house, an act
which construction workers ignored as they
dumped sand into the water. “It really hurt to
imagine how it would feel to try to escape the
mud, the sand,” he explained.
The gesture of tipping a bucket over
himself became a way to interrogate
relationships between humans and the
environments they inhabit. Khvay traveled
to Fukushima only months after the
earthquake and tsunami that led to the
Daiichi nuclear accident. There, standing in
front of picturesque orchards and forests,
clad only in black boxer briefs, he “poured”
air over himself for a series of images titled
“Air” (2011). “Everyone was scared to go to
Fukushima,” he explained. “I just wanted to
test myself. What if it had happened to me?”
In Rubber Man (2014), the emptying
of buckets appears again, though Khvay’s
environmental concerns take a mystical
turn. During a trip to the forests of Northern
Cambodia to investigate controversial
government concessions of indigenous-
occupied land for commercial interests, such
as the rubber industry, he dreamed of a white
figure. When he saw how the rubber was
collected from the trees, he felt a strong desire
to pour the substance over himself. Later,
when he viewed the footage, he was struck by
how his rubber-coated self looked identical to
the man in his dream, making him wonder if
it had been a displaced tree spirit: “Maybe it
came to me in my dream to ask for help.”
Khvay’s solo exhibition, “Footprints of
Yantra Man” (2015), at the Berlin residency
space Künstlerhaus Bethanien, marked
a major shift in subject matter away from
geographically specific issues to historical
relations between Europe and Cambodia.
After visiting the German Historical Museum
in Berlin, the artist began to think about the
Cambodian soldiers who fought in the two
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World Wars as a result of French colonial
rule. In the installation Yantra Man (2015),
pieces of medieval-looking metal armor
are scattered on the floor. Each is engraved
with designs inspired by sacred yantra
drawings and tattoos traditionally believed
to offer protection, asserting the cultural
identities of Cambodian soldiers who have
been whitewashed in history books. The
arrangement recalls body parts dispersed
after an explosion, emphasizing the tragedy
of dying for a foreign cause, but Khvay
offered a sweeter interpretation: the yantra
engravings symbolize victories clinched with
the help of “magical Cambodia.”
For his two-channel film installation,
Preah Kunlong (The Way of the Spirit)
(2016–17), commissioned for Documenta 14,
Khvay returned to more familiar territory,
hearing of the Cambodian government’s
plans to allow a Chinese company to build
a dam in a patch of rainforest inhabited by
the indigenous Chong community. After
gaining the trust of the Chong villagers, he
learned of the indigenous spiritual belief of
honoring animals who assisted them, and,
collaborating with local weavers, crafted
vine masks of various revered animals. He
then invited his frequent collaborator, the
dancer and choreographer Nget Rady, to put
on the masks and to embody these creatures
through improvised dance. Juxtaposing
close-ups of Nget’s writhing body as he
transitions to animal form with wider shots
of him reveling in nature, reclining at the
base of a waterfall as a crocodile or running
through a field as a peacock, Preah Kunlong
simultaneously captures the survivalist
struggle and breathtaking beauty of nature—
and existence within it—in equal measure.
This dualism pervades Khvay’s work,
which so often is centered on hardship and
destruction but maintains a lightness
of touch, a willingness to see humor
and beauty in difficult or even hopeless
situations. Responding to this observation,
he said: “I think this is life in the work. This
is what I see.”
Khvay is busy these days balancing
his teaching duties at Sa Sa Art Projects,
which has an education program, and is
preparing for an upcoming show in 2019
at Munich’s Haus der Kunst, where he will
again tackle subjects of land rights and
the new colonizing forces in Cambodia.
Khvay may move on to a different area of
contention each time, but he always circles
back to a theme with universal resonance:
his deep-seated commitment to the place
called home.
73
 84
Anita Dube
NAKED AND
KNIFE-SHARP
76 BY JYOTI DHAR

Ma Qiusha
CUTTING THROUGH
HISTORIES
BY TOM MOUNA
Features

96
106
YOUNG & EMERGING
BY THE EDITORS
THEN AND NOW
BY THE EDITORS

Features artasiapacific.com 75
C U T T I N G

T H RO U G H

HISTORIES
Ma Qiusha

By Tom Mouna
(Previous spread)
FROM NO. 4 PINGYUANLI TO NO. 4 TIANQIAOBEILI,
2007, single-channel video with color and sound: 7 min 54
sec. All images courtesy the artist and Beijing Commune.

(This page)
FOG NO. 6, 2012, watercolor on paper, 98.5 x 152 cm.

(Opposite page)
STORY OF SPACE – MY GRANDMA’S LIVING
ROOM NO. 1, 2007–08, digital print from the
series “Story of Space,” 86.5 x 118 cm.

78 | NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111

Beijing traffic flows around six concentric ring roads.
Demarcating the megacity and carrying its infamous traffic, these
quadrilateral highways are in many ways markers of growth.
Much like the layers of a tree trunk, Beijing’s rings have expanded
with age as the city’s population has surged, and the need for
living space has increased.
Although Ma Quisha works out of a studio situated just inside
the sixth ring road, her early childhood was spent in the city’s
core. Born in 1982, Ma lived with her mother, father and great-
grandmother in Shijing hutong, located a kilometer and a half south
of Tiananmen Square, for the first three years of her life. These
narrow alleyways, framed by clusters of courtyards found within
the second ring road and laid out within the ruins of a demolished
Ming-dynasty city wall, were traditionally occupied by single
extended families dating back to the Yuan dynasty. With the arrival
of socialism in the mid-20th century, many were divided up and are
now mostly inhabited by dozens of intergenerational families, giving
these complexes their compacted, swirling energy.
Academics and critics of Chinese modern and contemporary art
often emphasize the massive impact of generational differences on
artists’ output, categorizing those who were born before 1980, during
the 1980s, and after 1990. Distinguishing the various generations
can seem logical, particularly because of the seismic social, political
and cultural shifts that have taken place in post-1949 China, which
are often reflected in artists’ works—beginning with the Cultural
Revolution (1966–76) and continuing with the period of “reform and
opening-up” starting from 1978; the more than tenfold increase in
asset valuation since the late-1990s; the official beginning and end of
the one-child policy (1979–2015); and the contentious 2008 Beijing
Olympics, which catalyzed a massive urban renewal of the capital
and attempted to usher in a new era of soft power.
Ma does not shy away from highlighting these sociocultural
transformations in her installations and videos that are understated
yet deeply complex in their mining of personal and collective
memories, offering audiences insights into lived, human
experiences. Revolving around her and her family’s experiences
as well as wider networks of collective cultural memories and
experiences, her practice demonstrates an acute awareness of
intergenerational differences.
Much of Ma’s work focuses on her hometown. The watercolor-on-
paper series “Fog” (2012) draws on Ma’s repository of early memories
of living in Shijing hutong. One of the works from the series, Fog
Features artasiapacific.com
No. 6 (2012), appears to be a minimalist painting of a dark-blue
background, with a single thread of white paint worming through the
darkness. On closer inspection, one can see a textured, floral pattern
in the dark backdrop, the result of Ma affixing a thin gauze over the
surface and painting over the fabrics with watercolor. For this project,
Ma had returned to the area around her childhood hutong, and asked
residents to swap their old net curtains—which she planned to use
for the series—with new ones. This type of curtain, Ma explained
to me, is essential to hutong life. With space so tight and lives
overlapping, the thin material provides privacy while allowing light
through. It is this semi-opaqueness that Ma wants to highlight in Fog
No. 6, with the white line hesitantly drawn across the canvas serving
as an exaggerated signifier of suffused light passing through her
great-grandmother’s net curtains—one of her earliest memories.
An earlier photographic series, “Story of Space” (2007–08)
is a study of two places familiar to Ma: Beijing and the exurban
community around Alfred, New York, where she completed an
MFA program at Alfred University. For each artwork in the series,
Ma photographed the interiors of spaces such as a public toilet, a
laundromat and a church, with a piecemeal focus on the entirety
of the spaces. She then took these individual, zoomed-in parts
and stitched them into a collage, creating a flat, two-dimensional
representation of the space.
For the photographs she took in Beijing, one of the things that
Ma wanted to highlight was the city’s flux, as it appears at both an
individual and an aggregate scale. For example, in Story of Space:
Shoe Shop (2007–08), Ma captured an unadorned, utilitarian shop
crammed with hastily stacked piles of shoeboxes, as a metaphor for
the constant and rapid changes in proprietorship seen in similar
locations across the city. She explained: “I’d seen the shop, like
many in Beijing at this time, switching owners and transforming its
stock on an almost monthly basis.” In contrast, Story of Space – My
Grandma’s Living Room No. 1 (2007–08) depicts, in close-up detail,
79
Much like a historian
and anthropologist,
Ma has a fascination
with looking at niche
cultures in China with
fresh eyes.
(This page)
Installation view of WONDERLAND,
2016, cement, nylon stocking, plywood,
iron and resin, 980 x 615 cm, at
“Wonderland,” Beijing Commune, 2016.
(Opposite page)
TWILIGHT ZONE, 2017–18, digital print,
240 x 420 cm.
80
a room filled with simple necessities like worn-out cooking pots,
wooden furniture and family photographs, emphasizing stasis and
history. Although these interiors function differently, as depicted
in these carefully constructed compositions, Ma reveals that each
space plays a significant role in making up the city.
For Ma, Beijing’s structures contain narratives about society
and its histories, which can be unpacked and examined for new
resonances and associations. Ma found this was the case with the
never-completed “Luxury Brand Outlet Mall and Eco-Resort,”
optimistically named Wonderland, which symbolizes the rapid
consumer transformation and rising middle class of the late
1980s and 1990s. These same driving factors, Ma believes,
were responsible for shifts in taste and demand for women’s
apparel and products. This association between the two social
phenomena became the subject of Ma’s installation series
“Wonderland” (2016–18), in which she explores different kinds
of nylon tights, from the 1980s to the present day, while evoking
the period’s unpredictable economic fluctuations. For her solo
show at Beijing Commune in 2016, Ma took a ten-by-six-meter
slab of concrete, smashed it into chunks, and then wrapped these
shards in sheer, nude tights of varying shades, before piecing the
concrete back into its original rectangular shape. As Ma explained
to me, “Shattering and reassembling the concrete reflects those
same powerful forces that both brought to life and halted the
‘Wonderland’ project, signaling unfulfilled dreams and the fractures
that occurred in society as a result of rapid change at this time.”
The series had also been prompted by the birth of Ma’s first
child, an event that led her to study her own mother’s generation,
in an attempt to understand societal trends and habits of that time.
| NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111
In one particular memory, Ma was walking to school with her
mother when, while waiting at a crossroad, she was struck by
the women’s tights that surrounded her. She realized later that
the simple act of wearing different colored tights might be read
as evidence of wider societal changes and began collecting
vintage stockings for use in her works, in the process initiating
conversations with wearers in order to contextualize the various
hues and textures. She surmised that the bland, tan-colored
tights, prevalent in the 1980s, represented a sense of conservative
collectivism. In the 1990s, bronze shades were more popular, a
result, Ma suggested, of “imported American pop culture arriving
after the ‘reform and opening-up,’” and a reflection of American
society’s belief that tanned skin represents good health and wealth.
By the 2000s, black tights had become dominant on the market,
giving figures a slickness and supporting feminine beauty ideals at
the time. After 2007, Ma noticed that “tights became more colorful
and had a thinner texture, signaling more freedom and autonomy.”
Much like a historian and anthropologist, Ma has a fascination
with looking at niche cultures in China with fresh eyes. This has led
to projects that search for patterns within a sea of information. One
of her recent projects, Twilight Zone (2017–18), conveys the same
fastidious approach to research as in “Wonderland,” but instead of
assessing society through the metaphor of variegated stockings, she
looked at car models. On one of my visits to her studio, the subjects
of the series—usually shown as panoramic photographs—were
unmissable: roughly 100 model cars, fashioned out of stiff paper,
covered the floor in long rows. Each measuring about ten by 20
centimeters, the individual models were created from photographs
of cars—all brand-new and mostly luxury models—that Ma had
printed flat and then folded into the vehicle’s shape. The inspiration
for this project came about when Ma noticed a family member
scrolling through a forum on the website autohome.com.cn, where
people submit photographs of their cars for others to comment on,
Features artasiapacific.com
often as an act of grandiose self-presentation. Ma subsequently
became hooked on the website’s forum, following threads and
reading posts. Along the way, she spotted many common visual
tropes, and probed the forum’s distinctive slang, unwritten rules
and underlying meanings of this internet subculture. She explained
that she noticed how users interwove introductions to their vehicles
with biographical information and personal stories, highlighting a
deep-seated association between car and owner as a commercialized
vessel for signaling prosperity—a phenomenon that has occurred
during Beijing’s recent transformation, in the first decade of the 21st
century, from the city of the bicycle to a city clogged with cars. She
was especially fascinated by how additional elements, such as young
women posing in the car or backdrops of beautiful green landscapes
and big houses in expensive gated compounds, helped users to
receive the most comments and positive affirmations online.
The material of these model cars is also symbolic. In traditional
Chinese culture, paper often implies sacrifice, acting as a kind
of conduit between life and death: on special holidays dedicated
to these acts, paper money and objects are burned as an offering
to ancestors, and at funerals it is common to see a burning pyre
of paper money as part of a ritual to secure a full afterlife for
the deceased. The uniform rows of paper cars already occupy a
threshold between virtual and real, since the images are gleaned
from the internet. Due to their likeness to paper offerings, the cars
are additionally infused with a sense of liminality between life and
death, referring to a traditional cultural act that is now inflected with
a modern, perhaps excessive, form of consumerism.
Ma’s work is often explicitly biographical and hyper-specific
in its context. For example, From No. 4 Pingyuanli to No. 4
Tianqiaobeili (2007) is a seven-plus-minute-long video showing
Ma calmly and purposefully speaking, in Mandarin, to the
camera. In one stark and simple take, she talks about her own
childhood. She recalls her parent’s desire for a boy and their belief
81
 These anecdotes
convey a strong,
collective desire for
social advancement
and how families and
individuals will go to
great lengths to realize
these dreams.

that if she specialized in one particular field she would not starve,
and describes her regimented upbringing, from the intense focus
on mastering a musical instrument to learning how to draw (the
multidisciplinary artist Song Dong was her first art teacher). As the
video progresses, Ma has difficulty speaking, occasionally stopping,
seemingly with pain written across her face. Near the video’s end, it
seems as if there is something darkening between her lips, and in the
last half minute Ma opens her mouth and extracts a razor blade, her
bloodied tongue and palate now visible.
These anecdotes convey a strong, collective desire for social
advancement and how families and individuals will go to great
lengths to realize these dreams. The photographic work Gift (2009)
approaches this theme from the perspective of a slightly older Ma.
In the image, we see Ma’s mouth, chin and upper chest area, as well
as the necklace she wears that was crafted from her grandmother’s
false teeth. Functioning as a kind of visceral heirloom, the artificial
teeth-necklace is an enduring reminder of pressurizing familial
expectations, which, like a piece of jewelry, can shape one’s identity.
The video Embrace (2011) similarly focuses on the control that
authority figures, whether parents, instructors or governmental
forces, maintain over the lives and bodies of Chinese youths. The
work is a two-minute-long clip of dozens of young female divers
performing pikes, tucks and somersaults in the air, captured
in the split-seconds of free fall. Ma slowed the frame rate in
postproduction, elongating each half turn or partial twist by several
seconds so as to highlight this pivotal moment in which the athletes
appear to have maximum autonomy over their own bodies. It’s
telling that Ma captured these brief moments of youthful freedom
in falling, perhaps revealing her own personal search for such
experiences. In fact, the footage was taken at a China national team
training facility, where athletes as young as eight years old train in a
high-pressure environment, much like the artist’s own upbringing.
Perhaps not surprisingly for an artist whose practice deals with
the idea of control or a lack of it—over one’s own agenda, over the
female body, over the larger societal shifts occurring in Beijing
and China—Ma likes to collect objects, as if to temporarily possess
the narratives that they carry or for the purpose of allowing
her to process conjectured histories. Her collection includes
calendars from the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, as well as idiosyncratic
Chinese magazines from the 1980s and ’90s of nude photography.
The photograph books are curious relics; not least because of
how their contents are at odds with current, conservative Chinese

82 | NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111

government regulations on nudity. Ma told me how these kinds (Opposite page)
EMBRACE, 2011, stills from single-channel
of photobooks came about with the emergence of the socialist video: 2 min.
market economy in the 1980s, which was accompanied by an
(This page, left)
awakening of increasingly liberal consciousness of individuality
PAGE 23, 2017–18, cyanotype print, 76 x 56 cm.
and internationalism—all topics that were generally elided in
the previous era of Mao suits for all. As Ma told me, those born in (This page, right)
PAGE 39, 2017–18, cyanotype print, 76 x 56 cm.
the 1980s grew up in a post-socialist period, where partially nude
female bodies in magazines were acceptable, contrary to
the environment of earlier generations where such images
were contraband.
Ma makes use of her magazine collection in one of her latest
series, “Page” (2017–18), wherein she takes a photograph from a
magazine and exposes it using the cyanotype process, producing
a scratchy blue-and-white image that resembles a ballpoint
drawing. Ma emphasized that the color blue was closely associated
with the clothes worn by the working class in China, and that
she wanted to illustrate the contrast between this conservative
association and the connection to the more liberal time of the
magazines of nude bodies. The cyanotype process itself involves
exposing objects or images to a mixture of chemicals to create
silhouettes on paper, allowing Ma to raise questions of appearance
and disappearance, and of the truth or mistruth of history,
especially regarding perceptions and understandings of different
generations across time.
In Ma’s studio, there was a pile of drawings made by her daughter
on her worktable. I saw these on my last visit and imagined Ma
collecting these as materials for use in her work, in which she brings
together relationships, objects, structures and stories as a way to
subvert dominant readings of their histories. With China taking
up a greater international presence and as Beijing’s ring roads
continue to swell outward, Ma’s works stand out as increasingly
crucial documents of the country’s tensions and its political and
social shifts—worthy of the same careful study that brought them
into existence.
*Visit our Digital Library at library.artasiapacific.com for more articles on Ma Qiusha.

Features artasiapacific.com 83
NAKED
AND
KNIFE-
SHARP

A NI TA DU BE
By Jyoti Dhar
I. Love and Politics
Noor Mohammed, a lower-class Muslim businessman—the
alter-ego of Anita Dube, who could be identified as a middle-
class Hindu woman artist, but whose life and practice seeks to
blur such boundaries—tells us that it’s his lucky day; he’s been
given 15 minutes of fame. “What can I say about myself?” he asks,
looking quizzically at the camera, deciding how best to introduce
himself. “Noor is a loving human being, who places a great onus on
friendship,” he begins. “Love is the highest form of worship. This is
my religion.” Over the next 15 minutes, Dube-as-Noor addresses a
mix of personal, political and philosophical thoughts to two of her/
his closest friends, artists Anita Dube and CK Rajan. Confessing
to these unseen figures in flowing Urdu enriched with Sufi poetry,
Dube’s alter-ego weaves the fictional with the factual, telling them
about his love of literature, his childhood in Lucknow, and his male
and female lovers in Delhi. In these dark times, he laments, power
has become a religion, politics is practiced like an art form, and love
transformed into a commodity.
The impromptu script contains profound and candid lines,
such as, “If you had understood me, if your desire was not double,
it may not have come to this.” Throughout her performance on
camera, Dube appears amused, heartfelt and forlorn, in what is a
rare insertion of herself in her work. Shot over the course of one
evening, Kissa-e-Noor Mohammed (Garam Hawa) (2004) is the
only film-work Dube has ever made, and reveals much about her
instinctual and intellectual approach. The queering of subjectivities
we see on screen confronts nationalist and patriarchal rhetoric,
simultaneously rupturing traditional notions of gender, class,
religion and sexuality. This is particularly significant given the film’s
fraught context, coming in the aftermath of the 2002 communal
riots in Gujarat and amid the temporarily successful campaign in the
2000s to amend the law (Section 377) to decriminalize homosexual
activity in India.
Dube’s film also connects to other seminal cultural works in
important ways. Its title echoes Garam Hawa (1973), a critically
acclaimed film about Hindu-Muslim relations after Partition, lost
loves and being split by two worlds, and its subtext of forbidden
desire and heartbreak resonates with Fire (1996), a film that became
a key moment in galvanizing the LGBTQ movement in India
after protests by right-wing Hindu groups. Though these cross-
connections point to the contemporary relevance of Dube’s work,
her own suggestion in the film that “the values I stand on are
old” reminds us that her concerns are not reactionary but are
rooted in deep preoccupations with syncretism and pluralism,
the fluidity of gender and sexuality, pathos and eros. The latter of
these, particularly eros and politics, or “love as a way of thinking
through politics” (as activist Ponni Arasu spoke about in a recent
discussion on “Histories of Queer Feminisms in South Asia: Love
and Resistance,” in Sri Lanka), or the radical potential of love,
forms a central thread through Dube’s work.
II. Culture in Currency
Dube’s own path to art, love and politics was prefaced, originally,
by a desire to escape what she called “the provincial, middle-class
way of life” that she experienced in the relatively conservative
social landscape in Lucknow. “I knew that the only way to get
out of this place was to do well,” she said. Her parents, who
were both doctors, suggested that she prepare for the Indian
Administrative Service exams. Rather than follow that path, she
surprised everyone when she achieved the highest results in the
state in the field of arts. This, she said, paved the way for her to
move to the capital, where she first enrolled in a history degree at
the University of Delhi (1975–79). Within a year she found herself
immersed in a rich cultural scene, where she was part of a poetry
circle with artist Jatin Das and writer Aman Nath, and this led her
to decide to apply for further studies in art history.
Dube still remembers her interview with the eminent
painter and professor Gulam Mohammed Sheikh—who was
impressed with her reading of what were considered to be “poets
in currency” at the time, such as Anna Akhmatova and Aimé
Césaire—and offered her a place on the art criticism Master’s
course at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. Here, from
1979 to 1982, she was part of an intimate and inspiring class of just
five students taught by Sheikh. Ever the keen thinker, Dube chose
to extend her Master’s by a year, so that she could attend every
theory course available, on subjects ranging from the European
Renaissance to the Indian miniaturists. Tellingly, outside of class
she was happiest among artists, observing them making work.
On one of her trips back to Baroda after she had graduated, she
encountered artist Alex Mathew, whom she would go on to briefly
Her concerns are not
reactionary but are rooted
in deep preoccupations with
syncretism and pluralism,
the fluidity of gender and
sexuality, pathos and eros.

(Previous spread)
SILENCE (BLOOD WEDDING), 1997, human
bones covered in red velvet, dimensions variable.
Courtesy the artist and Devi Art Foundation,
Gurugram.

(This page)
KISSA-E-NOOR MOHAMMED (GARAM
HAWA), 2004, stills from video with color
and sound: 15 min. Courtesy Nature Morte,
New Delhi.
marry. “I saw some of his wood carvings and I liked him because of
his sculpture,” she said.
Unbeknownst to her, this meeting with Mathew and several other
artists originally from Trivandrum studying at Baroda, including KP
Krishnakumar, NN Rimzon and KM Madhusudhanan, would spark
a pivotal moment in her own critical trajectory as well as within
Indian contemporary art. “We were reading Kafka and Dostoevsky,
discussing Marxism and egalitarianism, all in a very bohemian
milieu,” she said. “It was a wonderful world that had not been
opened up to me before.” By the time the group graduated in 1984,
Dube, who was lecturing at an architecture college in the nearby city
of Ahmedabad at the time, suggested that they apply to the newly
opened postgraduate studio Kanoria Centre for Arts there. This,
she explained, was to be one of the origins of the Indian Radical
Painters and Sculptors Association (IRPSA, or better known as the
Radicals). Yet their residency didn’t last long. There was a dispute
with management at the center, with Dube tasked as the group’s
spokesperson, and they collectively resigned.

III. A Radical Medium

The edginess of the Radicals captured the attention of artists such
as Nalini Malani and Vivan Sundaram. “Coming from Kerala, they
were leftists of a certain kind,” Malani told me. “As they were the
next generation, I admired their ideology, energy and dynamism.”
Sundaram invited them to take part in an artists’ camp at Kasauli
Art Centre, led by German sculptor Siegfried Neuenhausen, in
North India. Dube was invited as a critic and recalls how the
work produced there by the group broke away from traditions of
Indian sculpture, which was then dominated by totemic forms in
bronze, stone and wood. The Radicals saw German Expressionism
as closer to the “language of the underclass” than, say, miniature
painting from the subcontinent, which they felt did not carry the
same emotionality, contemporaneity or charge. Dube recalled her
impressions when she encountered the Radicals’ works: “They
were using wire, cloth, plaster, aluminum tubes and constructing
an installation-like language. It had a spatiality, rawness and
spontaneity that was forward-looking.”
These innovative works were shown at the exhibition titled
“Seven Young Sculptors” (1985) in New Delhi, curated by Sundaram,
who subsequently offered Krishnakumar a studio workspace in
Kasauli. “But Krishnakumar was a rebel,” Dube recounted. “And
he never felt equal.” This feeling of inequality, stemming from
ideological and class differences between artists notionally divided
along a north/south axis within India, was to manifest in potent
ways. Sundaram, along with his critic-partner Geeta Kapur and
artists such as Sheikh and Malani, were part of the so-called Baroda
School, a narrative movement of painting that sought to address
more localized and grounded concerns than their predecessors, the
Progressives. “The narrative group were speaking for people, but
they were not the people,” Dube said. “The Radicals felt that this was
top-down; that they were from the working classes, and that people
should speak for themselves.” Krishnakumar and his peers decided
to band together and “fight the hegemony.” (This page, top)
Archival image of Anita Dube and Ranjana
On March 25, 1987, a group of 13 artists—KP Krishnakumar, Thapleyal working at the Kasauli Art Centre
Alex Mathew, CK Rajan, VN Jyothi Basu, K. Prabhakaran, Sculpture Workshop, 1984. Photo by Vivan
K. Madhusudhanan, Pushkin EH, TK Hareendran, C. Pradeep, Sundaram. Courtesy Vivan Sundaram
and Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong.
K. Raghunandan, Anoop B., D. Alexander, KR Karunakaran and
Dube herself—staged an exhibition at the Faculty of Fine Arts, (Opposite page, bottom)
Archival image of Anita Dube (front, center)
Baroda, called “Questions and Dialogue.” Dube’s sharp and incisive
at an evening gathering with the participating
catalog text channeled the Radical’s critique of the Baroda narrative artists of Kasauli Art Centre Sculpture
movement, calling out their “pseudo historical depth,” “false- Workshop, 1984. The artists included K.
Madhusudhan, KP Krishnakumar, Alex Mathew,
humanism,” “colonized consciousness,” “bourgeois aesthetic” and Khushbash Shehrawat, Ashokan Poduval,
all kinds of kitsch perceived in their works. “This critical act turns NN Rimzon, Prithpal Singh Sehdev Ladi,
the compound questioning eye onto everything, seizes the present Seigfried Neuenhausen, Vivan Sundaram,
N. Pushpamala and Ranjana Thapleyal.
moment, stands crude, naked and knife-sharp and will not allow Photo by Vivan Sundaram. Courtesy Vivan
anyone to pass,” she wrote. While immediate responses to this Sundaram and Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong.

88 | NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111

Features artasiapacific.com 89
(This page)
SILENCE (BLOOD WEDDING), 1997,
human bones covered in red velvet,
dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist
and Devi Art Foundation, Gurugram.

90 | NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111

“anarchist bomb”—as Kapur referred to the exhibition then—were
personal and passionate, this moment of “ideological unrest,” as
Kapur refers to it now, arguably generated important debates among
artists in Baroda.
IV. Porous Architecture
“I think it certainly had an impact on my practice,” Malani recalled.
“Around this time I looked for new tools and materials, like wall
drawings and theater, to extend my work to a larger public . . . But
sadly the movement had a very short breath.” While the “Questions
and Dialogue” moment fueled certain shifts, whether in artists’
practices (namely Malani’s and Sundaram’s) or in “creating a
hegemonic dent” as Dube puts it, it also lost its support structure,
and many of the Radicals had to retreat back to Kerala in the years
after the show. Alluding to why the group were unable to sustain
their position of challenge, Dube said: “Hegemonic battles can
only be fought on firm and equal ground.” Though some of the
Radicals went on to exhibit artworks, and run village art camps,
Krishnakumar in particular found that he could no longer identify
with the values or positions of the bourgeoisie or proletariat. During
this moment, complicated by several other personal and health
factors, Krishnakumar’s existential crisis began to intensify, and in
December 1989, he committed suicide.
The group dispersed. Dube went home to Lucknow. Here, still in
shock, she went back to wood carving, which she had experimented
with previously, this time more intensely, making sculptures as a
way of working through the trauma of what had taken place. “Art is
amazingly therapeutic, and after this episode, I gave it that value,”
she said. “Coming from a family of doctors, I think that’s what the
role of the artist is—to heal yourself and heal the wounds of the
social system.” As Dube was emerging from this period of grief and
vulnerability, she set herself a test. In 1991, she made a set of 20
single-line, anatomical drawings in pencil depicting women—to see
if she was indeed an artist. “I felt I had a sense of form and anatomy
despite having no training. That gave me confidence, and there was
no looking back.”
Art-making turned out to be a restorative, gratifying and
liberating experience for Dube. A year later, she decided to stage
a solo show called “Desire Garden” (1992) of her drawings and
sculptures. “Her earliest sculptural works started with a carved
wooden element, then usually added more elements in other
materials,” said Peter Nagy, founder of Nature Morte gallery who
has worked with Dube for two decades. “[They] were continuing
a language she had inherited from the Kerala Radicals and trying
to bring the found object to that.” As the show was not in a formal
gallery, but in a semi-outdoor space within a Charles Correa
apartment building, it is said to have captivated the audience,
including art-world peers Sundaram and Kapur. An exhibition she
later curated in the lobby and forecourt of the Kamani Auditorium in
1996—which Nagy attended and said he found “very impressive”—
also disrupted conventional curatorial architectures, this time
foregrounding the processual, visceral and material. “I juxtaposed
contemporary art with objects from the street, like a pyramid of
oranges or a large broom,” Dube said of the show.
V. Between Language and Art
Whether in writing, curating or art, there is an edge of criticality
that has stayed with Dube from her experience with the Radicals,
which she has since expanded upon in multiple ways. Along with
an interest in contemporaneous critics like John Berger, Dube was
similarly interested in the ideas of postmodern scholars such as
Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek and Noam Chomsky, all of whom came
to speak in Delhi in the 1990s. While making art, she began writing
a series of robust critiques in the relatively progressive newspaper,
the Economic Times, then under the editorship of Sadanand Menon.
Features artasiapacific.com
“There was a softness in the cultural scene [at the time], where they
never examined economies or class positions,” Dube remarked. Her
review of Raja Ravi Varma’s retrospective, at the National Museum
in 1993, not only sought to address such blind spots but also boldly
positioned Varma’s upper-caste, male, Hindu construction of
nationhood and women within a dangerous lineage of right-wing
cultural propaganda.
The impetus for such writing is revealed in her column “A Show
of Closed Gestures,” from 1994, where she reviewed an exhibition
curated by her long-standing interlocutor Kapur and questioned
the conceptual and dialectical pairing of works, inconsistencies
and tokenism of certain inclusions, as well as the premise and
expectations of the entire endeavor. This rigorous reading was
bookended by a call to “shed off our intellectual sloth” toward
a healthier culture of critique. “It is with this hope, that many
such questions and counter questions, from multiple directions
will dance, on all our forums, to internally enliven and deepen
our ‘making’ and ‘thinking,’ and toward more fearless and open
practices, that I write.” However, it was in her passionate piece for
the Economic Times on Francis Bacon, in 1995, that her flair for the
literary met her deep interest in the body—and in this evocation of
flesh, desire, blood, violence, beauty and banality we see a glimpse
of what is yet to come. She wrote, “Nothing could be abandoned
here and this was the anxiety, the struggle, among others, this was
the violence and horror, and not any other as seen in the most ‘real’
eyes, and the most tender lips, almost living, and perhaps the best
flesh, painted in this century, even as the desire was too much to
remain on the surface, and so then broke through to lie amongst
the ruins, in the gore, as was possible only in painting.”
Despite her facility as a critic, Dube thought a lot about the
constraints of writing as a medium, and felt that art may have
a better way of reaching people and cutting across social strata.
“One of the reasons I started to make art was to get away from the
limitations of language,” she explained. In 1995, after a hiatus of
productivity, and feeling that wood carving was reaching its limits,
she went on a residency to Namibia. It was her first trip abroad,
and she carried with her some blue velvet and silver thread. “I fell
in love with the material. Velvet has a body to it, it has little hairs,
it’s human-skin-like, the way it absorbs light. It’s lush and has
this exaggerated beauty that counters the terrible things we see
every day.” Made on her trip, Desert Queen (1996) combines the
sumptuous and the cadaverous, with its headless, female, animal
hide stitched in silver and blue. It was strung up with black rope for
Nature Morte gallery’s first exhibition in Delhi, “Nirguna/Saguna,”
held in 1997. “People thought it was quite macabre,” Nagy said.
“But Desert Queen was the beginning of something new for her—
certainly a condensation of multiple elements into a single, unified
whole that clicked.”
VI. Embodied Performance
Feminist scholar Peggy Phelan, in her essay in the anthology Art
and Feminism (2001), reminds us that “rationality gives us ways
to make categories, while art gives us ways to resist them.” For
Dube, Desert Queen not only allowed for a breakthrough in formal
language, but it also unraveled a new set of creative and conceptual
possibilities. During another traumatic period, when her father was
terminally ill with cancer, she happened upon a sack of bones that
her brother was using to study anatomy in their Lucknow family
home. Disturbed and in despair, Dube was also contemplating “the
collapse of romantic idealism toward relationships as an ideal.” In
this frame of mind, Dube began to soak the bones in formaldehyde
and cover them in velvet. The theatrical installation Silence (Blood
Wedding) (1997)—consisting of a bright-red velvet-covered, stone-
studded and lace-dripping pelvic bone, rib cage and spinal cord set
of “wedding jewelry”—conjures up fantastical realities, and battles
against the impossibility of permanence, in her love and life.
91
Beyond eros and death, this work also employs motifs of the medico-
erótico to reflect upon ills within the social corpus.
Dube’s pull toward the body and its politics might seem
inevitable in retrospect, as a feminist engagement with ideas of
embodiment allows for many social categories to be played with
and simultaneously destabilized. “Women have always been asking
whether something feels real or not, and this often comes to them
through the body,” she said. One of Dube’s most critically celebrated
works, Keywords (2005), acts as a triangulation of her core concepts,
connecting up language and art; art and the body; and the body
and language. Performed in front of a small audience at Khoj
International Artists’ Association in Delhi (and with her alter-ego
being that of a Muslim man) the artist took huge slabs of bloody beef
and painstakingly carved out phrases using her father’s scalpel. With
each letter taking up to 15 minutes to carve, she surgically sculpted
the words “Permanent Revolution,” “Avant-Garde,” “Sexual Love”
and “About Ethics,” over a few hours, in a bid to reveal their inherent
instability and mutability.
From initially writing about objects and ideas, she physically
turned words into objects and doubted their fixity of meaning.
(She would explore this abstraction of language further in
subsequent works such as Three Texts, 2009, in which she takes
white velvet and uses black ink to write three texts over one another,
leaving us to seek alternative and new meanings from them.) In
addition to this, Dube assumed multiple roles in Keywords, as an
agent of criticality, the daughter of a surgeon and her performative
alter-ego. In the book South Asian Feminisms (2012), scholar Ratna
Kapur talks about the agency of such mixed subjectivities as being
located “in the relationship of these identities and performances
with the subject’s interior disposition.” Aptly, Kapur cites the idea
of “revolution” as ultimately being “within the subject.” Dube
continued her exploration of performing many parts in A Touch of
Moon (2012), this time more overtly as a blind mendicant, dapper
dandy and social medium. Wearing silver contact lenses and a gray
suit, and holding out a silver begging bowl, she walked the streets—
stopping to connect with individuals who held her hands and saw
their reflections in her eyes. With these gestures, she sought
to privilege intimacy, embody ethical questions and overcome
cultural boundaries.

92 | NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111

 “With curating, working,
(Opposite page)
KEYWORDS, 2005, documentation of
performance at Khoj Studios, New Delhi, 2005.
Courtesy Khoj International Artists’ Association.

(This page)
everything, I hate being
THREE TEXTS, 2009, Ink on velvet, 401.32 x
518.16 cm. Courtesy Nature Morte, New Delhi.
trapped or fixed . . . I’m very
comfortable in my body but
I like exploring diferent modes.
It’s all about attitude, and
identification in terms
of eros.”

Features artasiapacific.com 93
VII. The Artist-Critic-Curator
This idea of remaining fluid, between genders and roles,
is extremely important to Dube. “With curating, working,
everything, I hate being trapped or fixed,” she told me. “I’m
very comfortable in my body but I like exploring different
modes. It’s all about attitude and identification in terms of
eros.” In many conversations and artworks, Dube circles back
to the notion of eros and the erotic as a source of revelation
and knowledge. For example, she cites the installation,
Erotics/Politics (2014) in which we see the word “politics”
written in elongated black capitals on the wall underneath the
word “erotics,” slanting as if it were its shadow, as one of her
most important works. “I’ve always thought that both these
things are motors or engines that drive this world. Eroticism
drives us as human beings, our individual subjectivity, while
politics drives us collectively. Both fascinate me as a duo in
which either erotics is dominant and politics is its shadow or
vice versa. Like wrestlers or conjoined twins.” The twinning of
these concepts also reminds us that pleasure, love and desire
are often left out of the discourse of feminist politics. Dube’s
foregrounding of feminism was rather organic, however, and
developed over time, as oddly enough the otherwise liberal
Radicals viewed feminism as an import. “How can you be
truly radical without feminism?” she asks now.
In her recent critique of the group, and the ideas that they
tried to live by, she said that some of them still ring true,
but not all of it stands the test of time. “As you get older you
realize these ideas are all great, but revolution is far away—
that’s the slow, painful part of growing up,” she explained.
“Now I see it as a moment, like when you light a firecracker;
an action or radical burst. It shakes up a few things . . .
‘Questions and Dialogue’ was essentially a set of propositions.
Some of these questions can still be addressed and are still
alive.” As Dube approaches her next critical challenge, as
curator of the fourth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale,
she said that she will employ many of these concepts, from
the initial questions set by the Radicals in the 1980s, to her
early curatorial endeavors in the 1990s, within the exhibition.
For example, she told me there will be an open pavilion
at the Biennale where she hopes for “people and ideas to
float through, like wind flows through space,” in a very similar
way to her “Desire Garden” exhibition. Another aspect
where she returns to the notion of letting people, or the
subaltern, speak for themselves comes with the Biennale’s
focus on inclusivity—particularly Dalit, tribal, queer and
older woman artists. She reiterated her hope for “those
pushed to the margins of dominant narratives” to speak, “not
as victims, but as futurisms’ cunning and sentient sentinels”
in her curatorial note for the exhibition, incidentally
published a day after the historical judgment in which the
Supreme Court finally overturned Section 377 decriminalizing
homosexual activity.
Given India’s current political positions, the evocation
of Dube’s continuous and prescient themes, including the
politics of friendship, love, dialogue, social action and even
the ideas of solidarity and equality that Krishnakumar tried to
promote, remind us of what makes her work “ahistorical,” or
always relevant, as curator and long-standing friend Arshiya
Lokhandwala said when we spoke. Whether a focus on the
sensory, sociological or sensual, what we can expect is that
Dube will construct narratives via objects and allow forms
to communicate freely for themselves. “The Biennale will
be a reflection of her and the way she looks at the world,”
explained Lokhandwala. “She’s really committed to what art
means, reproduces and says. It will be intense, like her.”
*Visit our Digital Library at library.artasiapacific.com for more articles on Anita Dube.

94 | NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111

(This page)
EROTICS/POLITICS, 2014, Steel wire
covered in black velvet, 167.64 x 233.68 cm.
Courtesy Nature Morte, New Delhi.

Features artasiapacific.com 95
Y O U N G
& EMERGING
NEW DIGITALS
By Ysabelle Cheung, Julee Woo Jin Chung, Chloe Chu, Ophelia Lai and HG Masters

THE BIRD LADY, 2017, still of HD

video with color: 6 min 47 sec. Courtesy
the artist and Galerie Sator, Paris.
H A Y O U N
K W O N

How deep into the unknowable can art take us? Using digital animation and virtual reality, Seoul-born artist Hayoun Kwon leads
viewers into physical locales that we cannot otherwise access. Her early works explored a site central to the collective imagination
of South Korean society that is nonetheless forbidden: the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the two warring halves of Korea. Her
interest in portraying this bufer area started with the project Panmunjom (2013), when she was refused permission to record the Joint
Security Area where soldiers from the two sides face each other. Instead, she created an animation that initially simulates filming with
a thermal-imaging camera, appearing to show soldiers on their patrols, before becoming an absurdist choreography of marching that
blurs real and imagined, and one side and the other. Her interest in the DMZ carried over into 489 Years (2015–16), which was based
on the testimony of a South Korean soldier known only as Mr. Kim, who had conducted covert nighttime patrols inside the DMZ.
Rendering Kim’s descriptions in a CGI animation viewable on virtual-reality headsets, Kwon opens the barbed-wire gates of the DMZ
and guides viewers inside this forbidden zone that is paradoxically a wondrous nature preserve, and deadly military hunting ground
littered with mines.
In her latest work, Kwon uses virtual reality to access the visually rich but inaccessible space of memory. The animation The Bird
Lady (2017) is based on a story told to Kwon by her drawing professor (Daniel Nadaud) who recalled visiting an incredible-looking
Parisian apartment that was akin to stepping into another world, filled with antique cages and exotic birds in flight. The work unlocks
the doors of an interior that has surely disappeared in reality, but has survived, not only in Nadaud’s memory but also now for those
who experience Kwon’s work. HGM
M I A O
Y I N G

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 FLOWERS ALL FALLEN, BIRDS FAR GONE,
2015, screenshot of GIF animation from series
“LAN Love Poem.gif,” dimensions variable.
Courtesy the artist and MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai.

“Do we live in the real world, or is it all in our minds?” booms actor Morgan
Freeman in his low-pitched Southern drawl, a trademark baritone voice
stereotypically cast, in Hollywood productions, as the voice of god. His
existential monologue, from the popular science television show Through
the Wormhole, is asynchronously remixed with clips featuring hosts from the
Chinese live-streaming video platform Douyu, who perform acts ranging
from the mundane to the absurd, such as eating hotpot, singing karaoke,
roasting a rat, and selling Viagra on Taobao. In Post Commentary, Monetary
Likes and Morgan Freeman’s Advice on Reality (2016), and other new-media
works, Miao Ying reveals glimpses into Chinternet (Chinese Internet)
culture and aesthetics developing within the Great Firewall of China
(GFW)—an internet-censorship apparatus enforced by the government
to block foreign websites and regulate domestic internet content. For
example, “LAN Love Poem.gif” (2014–15) is a series of visual poems that
combines phrases found online with screenshots of banned websites,
as a way to visualize the desire and nostalgia for access. For example, in
Flowers All Fallen, Birds Far Gone (2015), the “birds” reference the social-
media platform Twitter, which was scrubbed from the Chinternet in 2009.
Mining expressions written by Chinese netizens, who employ the tactic of
homophones to circumvent the country’s censorship algorithms, the artist
documents a parallel reality where public opinion and social criticism exists
in the form of obscure, viral memes, images, GIFs and videos.
Miao’s ongoing online project Chinternet Plus (2016), which parodies
the Chinese prime minister Li Keqiang’s 2015 “Internet Plus” initiative
promoting technological progress, questions the party’s vigilant politispeak
that, at times, talks big and says little. The work humorously promotes
a “shanzhai (counterfeit) ideology” through a campaign that comprises
outlandish homemade GIFs and grandiose statements that mimic political
rhetoric. Through satire and wit, Miao dissects the social, cultural and
linguistic aspects of the Chinternet, and uncovers an underground public
sphere that is quick to find the holes in the ever-rising firewall. WJC

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J E S S
J O H N S O N

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 IXIAN GATE, 2015, VR animation created with
Simon Ward and soundtrack by Andrew Clarke:
5 min 35 sec. Courtesy the artists.

Psychonauts will tell you that the most potent hallucinogenic experiences are typically driven by an explosive,
fuzzy spiraling of visual efects. In Jess Johnson’s virtual reality (VR) animations and installations, these apparitions
are isolated, stripped from their kinship with drug use and recontextualized in a white-cube gallery setting.
Tessellating, grid-like patterns of squares, zigzags and rotating columns are backdrops for abstract, science-fiction
scenes, which are inspired by varied, era-spanning interests including traditional Pacific quilt-making, horror films,
video games and medieval architecture. In one work, a salmon-hued human form cleaves in two and then reforms
itself; in another, monstrous scaly worms fly through a pitch-black sky.
Johnson initially began exploring the alternate, speculative universe through two-dimensional drawing before
meeting animator Simon Ward, who, since 2014, has been a close collaborator. For their five-part VR installation
Terminus (2018), Johnson painstakingly hand-drew hundreds of cosmic-mythological scenes, which were then
animated by Ward—the act of digitization itself a commentary on warped translations across media—and
transposed into Oculus Rift headsets. When viewers put on the headsets, they activate winged creatures, a giant
ouroboros, wriggling tube-like figures winding out from pools of red liquid, and reveal New Age temples and
architecture that lie beneath the floor and above the ceiling of a space in which the work is installed. The time-
and space-traveling experience is presented as narrative-free, positioning viewers as protagonists of their own
journey, while at the same time forcing them to surrender their bodies and minds to a terrifying imagined past,
present and future. YC

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R E F I K
A N A D O L
102 | NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111
 ENGRAM / SYNTHETIC MEMORY, 2018, from
the series “Melting Memories,” LED media wall,
custom software by Kyle McLean and sound
by Kerim Karaoglu, 5.1 x 6 x 0.1 m. Courtesy
the artist and Pilevneli Gallery, Istanbul.

A memory is often seen as an intangible, ephemeral thing that can be manipulated, invented or simply lost over time in the mysterious annals
of the mind. But what if we see human memories as data? And how would such data be given material form? These questions are at the heart of
new-media artist Refik Anadol’s “Melting Memories” (2018) series of “data paintings and sculptures” that explore the materiality of the human mind.
For this series, Anadol gathered data from electroencephalograms on the neural activity of people instructed to focus on long-term memories, and
then applied various algorithms to visualize the data as elevation models. The resulting CNC-machined sculptures transpose the brain’s electrical
activity into a physical terrain of cavernous hollows and winding ridges. These forms are animated on monumental screens, with the seething swirls
rising and receding to reveal the topography of the mind.
Anadol takes his investigations into human consciousness further with the installation Pladis: Data Universe (2018), using open-source NASA data
to create an immersive virtual environment aimed at altering viewers’ perceptions of self and physical space. Clustered constellations, beams of light
and incandescent numerals create kaleidoscopic moving patterns when projected into a darkened room with strategically placed mirrors, creating the
illusion of an unbounded space.
Whether through translating mental processes into objects or experimenting with the architectonics of virtual environments, Anadol illustrates the
endless versatility of the digital realm, and its ability to expand the frontiers of reality. OL

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FOUNDLAND
COLLECTIVE
During the 2010–11 Arab Spring protests that spread across North Africa and the Middle East, social media played a critical role, with
protesters using online platforms to coordinate and record gatherings. Governments realized that in addition to physical suppression,
they needed to infiltrate and censor these virtual networks in order to quash the unrest, enlisting the help of groups such as the Syrian
Electronic Army (SEA), which targeted opposition groups to President Bashar al-Assad’s regime with malware and spam.
Exploring these online spaces of conflict, Foundland Collective—comprised of Damascus-born Ghalia Elsrakbi and Cape Town native
Lauren Alexander—created the publication Simba, The Last Prince of Ba’ath Country (2012). The work compares and contrasts the digital
materials—including photoshopped propaganda images and staged videos—produced by SEA and opposition camps, examining the
internet as a pivotal archive of Syria’s political history. Since then, Foundland have attempted to reclaim virtual territories to situate
the accounts of displaced peoples. The video The New World, Episode One (2017), revolves around the travels of Lebanese musicians
Amer and Sana Khaddaj, who left Palestine for the United States in 1947 and subsequently toured the country performing Arabic songs.
Three-dimensional renderings re-creating the places that the couple passed through are juxtaposed with archival photographs as well
as re-staged performances of their songs. As political turmoil rages on, Foundland navigate the spillages of the real world into the digital
and vice versa, piecing together firsthand narratives that are under fire in both domains. CC

THE NEW WORLD, EPISODE ONE, 2017,

stills of HD video with color and sound: 11 min.
Courtesy the artists and Centre Pompidou, Paris.

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Features artasiapacific.com 105
 T H E N
A N D
N O W
A look back through our archives, from 1993 to 2017
By Ysabelle Cheung, Chloe Chu, Ophelia Lai, HG Masters, Elaine W. Ng

106 | NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111

(Opposite page)

PETER ROBINSON
Untitled
AAP 37: “Shilpa Gupta,” by Johan Pijnappel
1996
Oil stick on crate, dimensions variable. Cassette recordings of people expressing joy, paintings made from clothes stained by menstrual blood, canvases
Courtesy the artist. blessed by holy men—these are some of the projects that Shilpa Gupta created in the 1990s and early 2000s. In
(This page)
an Essay on the Mumbai-based artist’s practice, curator Johan Pijnappel contextualized Gupta’s works as critical
takes on India’s new consumerist society, one in the throes of globalization and in thrall to the new fast lanes of
SHILPA GUPTA
www.sentiment-express.com
the worldwide web. Gupta’s technological savvy and humorous satire coalesce in the love-letter ordering service
2001 with deliveries by mermaids or hostesses, sentiment-express.com (2001), typically shown in the exhibition context
Installation and website, dimensions variable.
on a single desktop computer. Pijnappel also explored Gupta’s perspectives around the place of women in society,
Courtesy the artist.
noting that the sectarian violence of 1992–93 in Mumbai took place during the artist’s student days at the Sir JJ
School of Art, and cited Rummana Hussain and Nalini Malani as established artists whose works of the time made
powerful feminist statements. In one untitled installation work from 2001, Gupta fashioned together clothing that
women had used, at the artist’s request, to absorb menstrual blood. Wrestling with the flux of Indian society and
art-making itself, at the time Gupta embodied a post-conceptual, post-studio and post-national position as an
artist—even if those terms hadn’t come into being just yet. HGM

200
2

19
97

AAP 16: “Peter Robinson’s Strategic Plan,”

by Robert Leonard
In the mid-1990s, Peter Robinson caught the attention of curators and collectors alike in New Zealand. One
of the reasons, curator Robert Leonard explained, was Robinson’s explorations of his Māori heritage, which
coincided with the country’s debates on the return of lands and economic rights that had been forcibly taken from
indigenous peoples under British colonial rule. In an Essay published in 1997, Leonard explored the idea of Māoris
existing in a “double bind”—disempowered yet idealized—and observed how, in that context, Robinson’s creative
approach difered radically from more commercialized forms of Māori art. For example, in an untitled oilstick-
on-wooden-crate work from 1996, Robinson made a naively painted checkerboard composition of black and
white squares that resemble bargain sale signs, with scrawled declarations such as, “Blacks Ltd. We Pay For Your
Interest,” “Buy Now, Pay Later” and “Quiet Island Retreat. Friendly Atmosphere.” Leonard posited, “These works
seem to comment at once on the economic, political and cultural plight of Māori through history and the current
market success enjoyed by contemporary Māori artists, for whom cultural values are stock-in-trade.” EWN

Features artasiapacific.com 107

 AAP 55: “The Case of the Readymade Mountain,”
by Chin-Chin Yap
20 One day in 1995, a group of artists stripped naked and stacked their bodies horizontally on a mountaintop, in an

07 experiment that aimed to, metaphorically, alter the topography of a fixed landscape. The resulting photograph
To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain (1995), is by now an iconic work in Chinese contemporary art
history. However, the legal authority of the ten artists—which include Zhang Huan and Cang Xin—over ensuing
sales of the photograph, as contributor Chin-Chin Yap argues in her Essay, presents a conundrum. The image
cannot be logically divided into ten equal parts and thus, under the Copyright Law of the People’s Republic of
China, the rights are jointly held. Using hypothetical scenarios, she illustrates real-life tensions in ownership and
intellectual property that form the mercurial terrain of Chinese contemporary art: “Duchamp might have relished
the unresolved case of the Mountain copyright as a true artistic coup: a conceptual gambit that, unwittingly but
brilliantly, subverted the very legal structures that society enacted for the autonomy of artists.” YC

210
2
AAP 78: “Kim Beom: Open the Most with the
Least,” by Han Keum Hyun
From the late 1980s to the early ’90s, South Korean multimedia artist Kim Beom was studying and living in New York.
His early paintings, produced during this period, were playful pokes at the artifices of the two-dimensional plane;
later, investigating how images are understood through their contexts, he began to deconstruct videos, such as in the
well-known Untitled (News) (2002), where he pieced together fictional 100-second stories from actual news clips. In
a Feature on Kim, independent curator and critic Han Keum Hyun traced the many ways in which the mischievous
artist toys with visual and textual semiotics. The installation Objects Being Taught They Are Nothing But Tools (2010)
features dozens of household items “watching” a video lecture by a male figure about how they need not aspire to
be more than simple devices. Here, Kim highlights how we have been taught to aix certain meanings and values to
objects through traditional education systems, prompting viewers to question—in Han’s words—“What is involved in
what we see? And after all is said and done: what is it that we actually see?” CC

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(Opposite page, top)

SHI XINNING
At the Anonymous Mountain
2006
Oil on canvas, 179 x 359 cm.
Courtesy Beijing East-8 Strategic
Consulting Company.

(Opposite page, bottom)

KIM BEOM
Objects Being Taught They Are Nothing But Tools
2010
Installation with daily objects, miniature
wooden chairs, chalkboard, television
monitor and video: 21 min 8 sec.
Courtesy the artist.

(This page)

MELATI SURYODARMO
I Love You
2007
Photo documentation of performance at
eBent 07 Festival, Barcelona, 2007.
Photo by Angel Vilà.
Courtesy the artist.

20 AAP 106: “Melati Suryodarmo: The

17 World Within,” by Eva McGovern-Basa
Melati Suryodarmo’s often wordless performances gradually reveal their emotional power
through the absurdity of futile actions repeated over long durations. As independent curator
Eva McGovern-Basa explains in her Feature, the artist’s body is a focal point in her practice, a
vessel expressing notions of struggle, powerlessness, resistance and loss. In I Love You (2007),
Suryodarmo, dressed in a black suit and high heels, carries a large pane of glass around a
red-painted room, intermittently repeating “I love you” to no one in particular. When first
performed, I Love You conveyed the emotional fragility of a woman in love, and the limits of
language in human relationships. A decade later, AAP selected an image of this performance
for the cover of the November/December issue to illustrate the accomplishments of women
in the arts, just as the #MeToo movement was coalescing, with the public disclosure of the
burdens that women carry bringing new and darker interpretations to the work. OL

See our website for the Chinese version of this article.

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 INSIDE BURGER COLLECTION

GI V I NG VOIC E ,
FOR M I NG B ODY
A Conversation between Christina Végh,
Alexander Birchler and Teresa Hubbard

2 7
Features artasiapacific.com 111
In late August 2017, Katharina Amman, head of the Swiss Institute for
Art Research (SIK-ISEA) and Christina Végh, director of the Kestner
Gesellschaft, Hanover, gathered in Zurich for a public dialogue with artists
Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler at Villa Bleuler, the headquarters of
SIK-ISEA. The event explored Hubbard and Birchler’s contribution to the
Swiss Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, cited by audiences and critics as
one of the most meaningful, outstanding works in the Biennale. Continuing
the initial dialogue, the artists and Végh further explored ideas about
feminism, storytelling and re-framing history in the following conversation.
Christina Végh: I would like to start with Flora (2017), the film
installation you developed for the Swiss Pavilion at the 57th Venice
Biennale, in which you provide a multilayered, kaleidoscopic view of artist
Flora Mayo, previously only mentioned in passing in studies on her lover
Alberto Giacometti. Various narrative lines emanate from the work: the
story of an American woman living in Paris, passionate about becoming
an artist; a romance between two young people; an exploration of the
relationship between a mother and son; a discussion on storytelling itself,
and how our identities, experiences and opportunities in life are affected
by the narratives that we tell or are told to us; and finally a critique on
art history and historiography in general, making it visible how women
are often neglected in research. After all, you “simply” detected some
mistakes of former art historians and corrected them!
Your work is providing new critical insights into the art historical
domain, but obviously you work from the standpoint of artists rather than
art historians. How does your “artistic research” differ, and how do you
view this term within your own practice? Can you elaborate on the issues
connected to definitions of “research,” and describe the working modes
you are interested in?
Alexander Birchler: Rather than thinking of “correcting,” we think about
“re-framing.” We start from a place of questions and these questions lead
us to other questions as part of the journey that’s fueled by our interest
in storytelling and strategic digression. We allow ourselves to get lost and
we allow for a place of unknowing. We think of our work as action-based
112
research, propelled by our interest in narrative structures—how to unpack
a story, how a story is told and who is telling it. In our collaboration, we are
searching for a third place—collective authorship—a third voice.
Teresa Hubbard: It leads all the way back to when we were studying at
the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in Halifax, Canada.
It was very early on in our collaboration—we were the first artists in North
America to be accepted into an MFA program as a collaborative team.
Artistic collaboration is significantly more accepted now, but at the time, the
school took a bold stance to make an experiment with us. We were fortunate
that our attempts in finding a language and ground to work together were
nurtured in an environment that embraced trial and error as a defining
responsibility for an artistic practice. The discourse at NSCAD, well known
for their legacy in conceptual art and early video art, provided a generative,
critical challenge to our interests in storytelling.
The dichotomy between absence and presence is crucial to Flora (and
other of your works) and also happened to be the point of departure for
Philipp Kaiser’s curatorial approach to the Swiss Pavilion, in reference to
the fact that Giacometti had repeatedly rejected invitations to represent
Switzerland at the Venice Biennale.
AB: I think it really started when we began talking about ideas of absence.
Philipp [Kaiser] had closely followed our Sound Speed Marker trilogy (2009–
14), which is focused on ideas of absence and obsolescence and where we
experimented with hybrid forms of storytelling, combining documentary
and narrative forms. For the Venice Biennale, Philipp asked us to consider
the 1952 and Giacometti’s refusal to show in the Swiss Pavilion as a way to
think about absence. We spent a lot of time finding a point of departure,
researching the history of the Swiss Pavilion and Giacometti’s life. Eventually
we came across Mayo through a biography of Giacometti by James Lord.
Mayo is but a brief mention in this biography, but she stuck with us.
TH: Lord’s entries about Mayo are sexist. His biography about Giacometti
was very popular yet fiercely criticized by art historians and Giacometti
| NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111
scholars but, curiously, it has never been specifically criticized for how Lord (Opening page)
Exhibition view, detail of TERESA HUBBARD /
writes about women. Reproduced in Lord’s book is a photograph of Mayo ALEXANDER BIRCHLER’s Bust, 2017
and Giacometti, and this image has since been circulated and reprinted in Flora Mayo and Alberto Giacometti, with the bust
she made of him, circa 1927. Photographer
other books about Giacometti. In the image, the two young lovers sit on unknown. Original photograph belonging to Flora
either side of a clay bust that she has made of Giacometti. Mayo, kept under her mattress, lost. Film
negative missing. Reproduction from only known
duplicate print, archive of Fotostiftung
Schweiz, Winterthur. Original clay bust portrait
AB: That was a very exciting point of departure for us. There is a lot of of Alberto Giacometti by Flora Mayo, lost.
existing scholarship about Giacometti’s models (indeed, Lord also wrote Reconstructed and cast in brass.
Framed silver gelatin print, 89 x 72 cm;
about this); however, very little consideration has been made of Giacometti brass sculpture with concrete base, 154 x 47.9 x
sitting as a model for another artist. In the moment that this photograph 53.3 cm. Photo by Ugo Carmeni. Courtesy the
artists and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/
was taken, Mayo is the artist and Giacometti is the model. This image was Los Angeles and Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin.
the initial trigger that started our journey: Who was Flora? What happened
(Opposite page)
to her? Exhibition view of TERESA HUBBARD
/ ALEXANDER BIRCHLER’s Flora, 2017,
synchronized double-sided film installation
TH: The photograph of Mayo and Giacometti, like all photographs, with shared soundtrack, 30 min, loop, at
ofers a surface, a complicated terrain that is ripe for use, misuse and “Women of Venice,” Swiss Pavilion, 57th
Venice Biennale, 2017. Photo by Ugo Carmeni.
interpretation. It was our entryway into the consideration of absence—the Copyright Teresa Hubbard and Alexander
specific absence of Mayo, but more so absence in an extended sense in Birchler. Courtesy the artists and Tanya
Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles; and
terms of the systemic, historical exclusion of women artists. Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin.

I presume most people who saw Flora at the Swiss Pavilion must have (This page)
been struck by the double projection. The orchestration of image and Exhibition view of “Women of Venice,” Swiss
Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale, 2017. Photo by
sound lures the viewer into the knot of stories instantly. However, the Ugo Carmeni. Copyright Teresa Hubbard and
Alexander Birchler. Courtesy the artists and
longer I reflect on the work, the more I think the bust—standing in for the
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles
lost original made by Mayo of Giacometti—which was included as part of and Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin.
your Venice Biennale presentation, can almost be seen as the culmination
point of your project. You commissioned the bust to be made after a
found photograph. What seems to be a portrait of a famous artist turns
out to be much more about the materialized reconstitution of another
artist, namely Mayo, who in her time was underestimated, dismissed as
a woman artist in both her professional and private context. You have
given her form and weight, literally in a bronze cast, as an artist and as
a person. Understanding the backdrop of the bust, it receives a ghostly
quality. How do you see this? Can you tell us about the procedure?

AB: Bust (2017) is such a meta-object or meta-image. As an object,

you can touch it, it’s solid and heavy compared to the ephemerality of
projection and sound of Flora. However, Bust is equally ephemeral—it
has an expression of presence but actually it’s a hollow shell of presence;
everything about the piece exudes absence. Even today, we can’t fully grasp
what it is, and we like that uncomfortable quality about it. It makes a lot of
sense when you describe it as having or receiving a ghostly quality. This is
really a rich and provocative insight.

TH: When we first saw the reproduction of Mayo and Giacometti in Lord’s
book, all of our questions began to emerge. Who was the photographer?
Where was the negative? Where was the positive? Part of the trail of our
research eventually became embedded in the lengthy title of the work:

Bust 2017
Flora Mayo and Alberto Giacometti, with the bust she made of him, circa
1927. Photographer unknown. Original photograph belonging to Flora Mayo,
kept under her mattress, lost. Film negative missing. Reproduction from only
known duplicate print, archive of Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur. Original
clay bust portrait of Alberto Giacometti by Flora Mayo, lost. Reconstructed
and cast in brass.

Trying to give form to experience of the image meant for us to rebuild,

reconstruct it, have it as a character in the film, and ultimately finish it
by casting it. We see a direct and generative relationship between the
reproduction process of casting a sculpture and the process of photography:
both employ casting on a negative and using the negative to create a positive.
From the very first moment, working on Bust was a physical process in which
a number of diferent hands, a collective voice, were working on it. As part of
the sculpting process, we were looking to other photographs of Giacometti,
who was photographed and filmed often. We were working around an
impossibility—rendering his “likeness” and finishing Mayo’s sculpture.

Features artasiapacific.com 113

 How were you able to find more information about Mayo?

TH: What was known about Mayo before we started this work was
very little: she is only a side note in Lord’s book. She has survived in art
history until now only because at the same time Mayo was working on
her sculpture of Giacometti, he was also sculpting her. His work survived:
Tête de femme (Flora Mayo) (1926) is in the collection of the Giacometti
Foundation, Paris. Mayo’s portrait bust of him—indeed, we do not know if it
was ever finished, as all we have is a blurry, poor-quality reproduction—has
not survived.

AB: We scoured through hundreds of books about Giacometti trying to

find mentions of Mayo. She was hidden—extremely hard to find. Even
Giacometti, when he was writing to his mother about Mayo, didn’t ever
use her name; he only referred to her as “the American.” We also searched
for the source of the image that has been reproduced again and again
in many publications. We discovered that none of the publishers who
have reproduced this image have information on the copyright or are in
possession of a negative or print of the photograph. We went all the way
back to the 1980s, when the image was first published in Lord’s book by
Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
After a number of months working along these lines of research, we
came across an essay by Véronique Wiesinger, a renowned Giacometti
scholar and former director of the Giacometti Foundation. In an exhibition
catalog, The Women of Giacometti, published by Pace Wildenstein in 2005,
which accompanied a Giacometti exhibition at Pace New York in 2005
and the Nasher Sculpture Center in 2006, Wiesinger contributed an essay
titled, “On Women in Giacometti’s Work (and Some Women in Particular).”

TH: Wiesinger presents the reproduction of Giacometti and Mayo and

asserts that there has been a misidentification—that the woman in the
photograph is not Flora Mayo, it is Marguerite Cossaceanu. We hit a wall
with our research when we came across this article and her findings.

AB: If the woman depicted in the image is not Mayo, then the artwork
depicted in the image is also not made by Mayo. With Wiesinger’s
published pronouncement, Flora Mayo as an artist becomes efectively
erased a second time. We set about making contact with Wiesinger to
ask her more about her research and how she came to her conclusion.
Wiesinger generously gave us her time and notes. By retracing the steps of
her research, we discovered that there were some leaps in her conclusions.
We realized that in order to fully verify the identity of the woman in the
photograph next to Giacometti, we needed to find other photographs, other
traces of Mayo. In order to find more photographs, we needed to find her
family. This took us on an incredible journey searching for possible family
members, ultimately leading us to find Flora’s only surviving child, David
Mayo, a son no one knew existed.

TH: With the help of David and the numerous photographs he has of his
mother, we were able to correctly identify that the woman in the image
(This page)
Detail of TERESA HUBBARD / ALEXANDER
with Giacometti is indeed Flora Mayo.
BIRCHLER’s Bust, 2017
Flora Mayo and Alberto Giacometti, with the bust
she made of him, circa 1927. Photographer
AB: We discovered a most amazing error: that in another photograph
unknown. Original photograph belonging to Flora Wiesinger had used as part of her “proof” that Mayo was not the person in
Mayo, kept under her mattress, lost. Film
negative missing. Reproduction from only known the picture with Giacometti, Mayo is indeed present; however, she’s not the
duplicate print, archive of Fotostiftung woman in the foreground standing next to her mentor Antoine Bourdelle,
Schweiz, Winterthur. Original clay bust portrait of
Alberto Giacometti by Flora Mayo, lost. as Wiesinger asserted. Mayo is actually standing in the background, at the
Reconstructed and cast in brass.  edge of the frame. That position—the figure at edge of the frame—says so
Framed silver gelatin print, 89 x 72cm;
brass sculpture with concrete base, 154 x 47.9 much about our agency and how we approach storytelling. What eventually
x 53.3 cm. turned out to be an art historical error by Wiesinger forced us to dig
Photo by Ugo Carmeni. Courtesy the artists and
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles deeper. Wiesinger’s finding was an immensely disruptive stumbling block,
and Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin. yet it became an extraordinarily generative moment for us.
(Opposite page)
TERESA HUBBARD / ALEXANDER It is such an amazing outcome! The discovery of Mayo’s still-living son
BIRCHLER, House with Pool, 2004, high
definition single-channel film installation, David enabled you to focus on existential questions manifest in a mother-
20 min 39 sec., loop. Copyright Teresa Hubbard
son relationship, and what it meant to be a single parent in those days.
and Alexander Birchler. Courtesy Burger
Collection, Hong Kong. More importantly, you gained an important voice for Mayo. David’s

114 | NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111

memories of his mother are antagonistic to what authoritative art history
had to say about her. How did you end up finding David and how did you
deal with the responsibility you gained for his personal insights?
AB: It wasn’t mentioned in any published material that Mayo had given
birth to children—only that she had been married and divorced. I began
a painstaking search using ancestry, travel and newspaper records. While
Teresa was researching, she came across a brief mention of Mayo’s first
child, a daughter named Joan. Then I came across a strange notation
entered by Mayo in a Los Angeles lodger’s ledger book, where she leaves
a record of being accompanied by a person named David, but does not
identify this person as her child. There are a number of very good possible
reasons why, as a single mother, she wouldn’t have made mention of her
child, as she was trying to find a job and a decent place to live at the same
time. These two findings about Mayo’s children were the first threads. The
way we were then able to find David in the end is an interview all in itself!
TH: When we found David, to our complete amazement, we realized he
had never been contacted by any Giacometti researchers or art historians.
No one had ever asked him about his mother. In a trunk in David’s garage,
we found never-before-publicly-seen photographs, notes and letters
detailing Mayo’s life with Giacometti. David didn’t realize what he had kept
in his garage. Giacometti meant nothing to him—he had simply kept the
photographs of the “guy with the funny hair” because his mother was in the
images.
Ultimately, you helped David to see his mother in a new light. I think this
is one of the reasons why a lot of people were so deeply touched by your
work; every viewer can identify with those existential aspects that you
built in by focusing on the mother-son relationship. The construction of
the self is complex; it may also depend on our understanding of where
we come from, of our parents, for instance. In other works, such as Single
Wide (2002), House with Pool (2004) or Eight (2001) and Eighteen (2013),
the formation of subjectivity and identity is traced too, though I wouldn’t
see you as contemporary portraitists at all, but quite the opposite—as
artists describing the fluidity and uncertainty of things that seem stable
and firm, deconstructing histories in which people are enmeshed.
In Flora, the same story is simultaneously told in different ways, across
two channels. Flora’s story focuses on cinematographic style, whereas
David’s takes a strictly documentary approach. For the viewer, this leads to
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a visceral understanding that each story unfolds in a very different
way, depending on who speaks. We all know this, but we collectively
forget with a multitude of systems or structures that spread all sorts
of “claims of truth.” In fact, you gave David a seemingly more objective
voice with the documentary language. The viewer’s bodily experience
of flipping from one side to the other triggers the critical analysis of
powerful individual versus institutional perspectives on art history. What
were the challenges, conceptual and technical, that you ran into while
developing this installation? How did the physical body of the viewer factor
into the process?
AB: We consider Flora a film installation and we are interested in creating a
hybrid space that uses and subverts dominant cinematic language. We are
dedicated to a process of forcing the conventions of mainstream cinematic
language into a structure that is highly experimental. Flora consists of
two diferent sides, with each side unfolding a completely diferent story
using a diferent genre—one side is David’s space and the other side is
Flora’s. Both sides share the same soundtrack, with the source of sound
emanating from the closed gap between the screens. We want our viewers
to be active and physically engaged—it is not possible to experience both
sides at once—so the idea of a complete experience is an impossibility;
it must be pieced together by the viewer. The installation is structured as
an impossible conversation between mother and son. We think about this
choreography as a collapsed cinema—two cinemas in one. We have been
obsessed with the idea of a collapsed cinema for a number of years.
The majority of protagonists in your film installations and photography
are women. Even when you were invited to play off the curatorial line
of the persistent absence of Alberto Giacometti, you ended up with a
woman, Flora Mayo, at the forefront. May I ask somewhat provocatively:
what makes women so interesting? On a very general level, art enables
us to see or learn about the previously unknown, and historically, it is
indisputable that women have always been less visible and heard in the
public sphere, which is connected automatically to power and influence. Is
it these blind spots and how they possibly manifest themselves in female
figures that interests you?
TH: As a feminist working for many years primarily in a lens-based
practice, I have always questioned coded functions of spectatorship and
the blind spot. I am drawn to examine it like a moth to the flame. Why?
115
Because of my own personal, politically lived experience. On screen, women
have navigated, and continue to navigate, through such complicated and
biased power structures of being a prop, being background versus foreground,
being on display in a state of “being looked-at-ness,” to borrow the term
from Laura Mulvey’s essay, “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema.” When we
first began developing Flora, it was triggered by an image of a woman—a
reproduction of a lost photograph from the 1920s depicting Mayo and her
lover, Giacometti. Written records only described Mayo by her physical
appearance, as a “pretty blonde.” It was striking but not surprising that in
most notes and letters referring to her, Mayo was described by how she
looked, rather than by her level of education, intelligence or ambitions. In
Lord’s book, he describes Mayo as “attractive, but not beautiful, and there is
something weak in her face.”

Your approach enables us to escape the double-bind situation that

occurs so often when trying to subvert systems of power relations. By
this I mean that at first glance, your piece in Venice could have seemed
highly problematic: here we are, once again talking about women only
because of men; after all, Giacometti is the reason we know of Mayo. By
revealing how Mayo, under the circumstances she lived in, never could
have obtained resonance as an acclaimed sculptor, you shed light on
the discussion about who speaks, how, and for whom. Following Flora’s
narrative, we increasingly forget about Giacometti; in fact, he becomes
the ghost, just like Flora was! Furthermore, the work poses questions
about how subjectivity or identity is constructed, how a story is lived or
experienced, and how art history (and history in general) is evolving as a
discipline and being written. So, in the end, your piece allows Giacometti to
be absent from the Swiss Pavilion once again and, more importantly, raises
questions about how power and value is passed on and is played out. Even
though the piece refers to the past, it reaches out to contemporary issues
surrounding the voices of the marginalized, which, in these days, are even
more apparent against a backdrop of conservative backlashes. How do you
view this situation? Were there particular issues of our times that were as
formative for the work as your historical findings?

TH: Yes! Flora and Bust refer to the past but are an indictment of the
present: of how women and the work women produce is framed and valued.

AB: We are not interested in the question of whether Mayo was a

good artist or not; rather, our work revolves around questions of social
convention and Mayo’s struggles and strength to defy prescribed roles of
motherhood. It asks questions about a mother and son, and Mayo’s ability
to survive in light of making some very diicult choices within a limited set
of choices available to her. We want to give voice to these questions, which
continue to resonate with urgency within the current social, economic and
political climate.

CHRISTINA VÉGH is the director of the Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover,

since 2015. She studied art history, ethnology and philosophy in Zurich and
Santa Cruz. She was curator at the Kunsthalle Basel from 2000 to 2004
and director of the Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, from 2004 to 2014. She has
worked with artists such as Monika Baer, John Baldessari, Rita McBride,
Haegue Yang, Charline von Heyl, James Richards, Franz Erhard Walther and
Christopher Williams, among others. Since 2000, she has written extensively
on art and is involved in numerous juries, such as for Art Biennials grants for
Pro Helvetia (2015-18) and for the Wolfgang Hahn Prize (2017/18).

TERESA HUBBARD and ALEXANDER BIRCHLER are a Swiss-American

duo who have been working collaboratively since 1992. They are both
professors in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of
Texas in Austin. In 2017, they were awarded honorary Doctorates in Fine
Arts in recognition of their outstanding achievements to art and culture by
the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University, Halifax, Canada. They
TERESA HUBBARD / ALEXANDER
divide their time between Austin and Berlin. BIRCHLER, Flora, 2017, stills from synchronized
double-sided film installation with shared
soundtrack, 30 min, loop. Courtesy the artists
Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler’s upcoming exhibition “Flora” will open at the Los
and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los
Angeles County Museum of Art on January 20, 2019, and run through April 7, 2019. Angeles and Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin.

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 120 130
Gwangju Jakarta

126
Beijing

INDONESIA, SPIRIT
OF THE WORLD
GWANGJU SHOJI UEDA National Gallery of Indonesia
BIENNALE 2018 Three Shadows Photography Art Centre
Various locations

132
Reviews
London
133
New York
135
Minneapolis

THE PROGRESSIVE
FIVE HEADS (TAVAN REVOLUTION: MODERN
TOLGOI) – ART, ART FOR A NEW INDIA SIAH ARMAJANI
ANTHROPOLOGY AND Asia Society Walker Art Center
MONGOL FUTURISM
Greengrassi Gallery and Corvi-Mora

artasiapacific.com 119
 GWANGJU
Various locations
GWANGJU BIENNALE 2018
IMAGINED BORDERS
Political scientist Benedict Anderson proposed
in his 1983 book Imagined Communities that
nationalism was a modern, global phenomenon
created by standardization of printed information
systems and liberal market economies (what he
termed “print capitalism”). What then is driving
the resurgence of nationalism in this era of
de-territorialization with digital technologies,
neoliberal capitalism and great flows of migrants
and refugees? These questions propelled the 2018
edition of the Gwangju Biennale, which was titled
“Imagined Borders” and sought to re-address
what constitutes individual and collective identity
today, as well as to delve into the Biennale’s own
history with these topics.
The inaugural Gwangju Biennale was held in
1995 during South Korea’s “Year of Art” to celebrate
the country’s new globalization agenda. As GB
Foundation president Sunjung Kim explained
in her essay introducing the 2018 show, that first
edition was titled “Beyond the Borders” and
had seven sections, each examining a different
geographical region, as well as special exhibitions
focusing on “info art,” 1990s Korean art and
Gwangju’s May 18th Democratic Uprising in 1980.
In a return to the institution’s original “distributed
curatorial structure,” there were seven sections at
Gwangju Biennale 2018, focusing not on regions
but topics that define the world today.
The Biennale began with a historical
perspective in curator Clara Kim’s chapter,
“Imagined Nations / Modern Utopias,” which
showcased how postwar architecture in the
global south was also “a powerful instrument to
create imaginations of modern societies.” The
fraught role international modernism played in
nation-building in non-European contexts was
established by Lais Myrrha’s sculpture comprising
120 | NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111
a one-to-one scale replica of a wing-like Oscar
Niemeyer column from the Alvorada Palace in
Brasilia propped up by a replica of a neoclassical,
colonial-era column. Postwar modernism was
also the style favored by postwar dictatorships.
Pio Abad’s installation Oh! Oh! Oh! (A Universal
History of Iniquity) (2013) combined kaleidoscopic
wallpaper depicting a chandelier at the Philippine
Plaza Hotel (part of Imelda Marcos’s “New Society”
vision) with gilded objects representing the
country’s exported labor to the Middle East. Ala
Younis’s ongoing project about Baghdad’s urban
transformation by modern architects focuses in
this iteration on female protagonists, while Tanya
Goel marked the demise of the modernist legacy
in her “Frescos” series (2018), minimal paintings
rendered on pieces of demolished Nehru-era
complexes in New Delhi.
The second chapter, “Facing Phantom Borders,”
curated by Gridthiya Gaweewong, illustrated
how Anderson’s paradigm of the “imagined
community” has been radically altered by both
a new global cosmopolitanism and influxes of
migrants, yet remains haunted by traumas of
the past. Tom Nicholson’s project I Was Born
in Indonesia (2017) looked at the country that
Anderson studied most closely in ten video
interviews with Hazara refugees seeking asylum
in Australia but who are stuck in Indonesia,
juxtaposed with 110 resin figurines (made in
collaboration with curator Grace Samboh) modeled
on the dioramas at Indonesia’s independence
memorial, the Monumen Nasional. Sawangwongse
Yawnghwe’s paintings explored the conflict
between Shan State and Burma through his family
archives, echoing ongoing hostility to ethnic
minorities such as the Rohingya.
Christine Y. Kim and Rita Gonzalez’s exhibition,
“The Ends: The Politics of Participation in the
Post-Internet Age,” addressed the era’s new,
chaotic and often disruptive, and disrupted, flows
of information. Kim Heecheon’s video Every
Smooth Thing Through Mesher (2018) portrays
the psychic fragmentation of a digital existence
through banal conversations about topics such as
Pokémon Go. Shu Lea Cheang’s video installation
UKI Virus Rising (2018) is a captivating animated
display with a sci-fi-surrealist plot. Crossing over to
the real world was Mark Lofty’s video revisiting the
role of Facebook in Egypt’s 2011 revolution, Route
to Dangerous Profiles (2018), which told a dark tale
of thwarted idealism.
The Biennale’s second primary venue was the
Asia Cultural Center (ACC), which housed two
more chapters. In “Faultlines,” co-curators Yeon
Shim Chung and Yeewan Koon focused on the
violent ruptures in individual and community
identity when shared values are threatened. Shilpa
Gupta’s installation Altered Inheritances – 100

Opposite page, top
TOM NICHOLSON
I Was Born in Indonesia
2017
110 resin-cast diorama figurines on trestle
table with vinyl text and ten unsynchronized
HD videos, dimensions variable.
Installation view at Gwangju Biennale, 2018.
Photo by HG Masters for ArtAsiaPacific.
This page, top
KIM IN SOK
Rain Shower at the Bus Stop
2018
Ink on hanji rice paper, 217 x 433 cm.
Courtesy the artist and Gwangju Biennale.
This page, bottom
KADER ATTIA
Eternal Now
2018
Wooden beams from traditional
Korean houses, metal staples and metal
plinths, dimensions variable.
Installation view at the Former Armed Forces
Military Hospital, Gwangju Biennale, 2018.
Courtesy Gwangju Biennale.
(Last Name) Stories (2012–14) was a room of dozens
of framed images cut horizontally and captioned
with stories of individuals who changed their
names out of embarrassment, fear of persecution
or for personal aspiration. Byron Kim’s series of
“Bruise” paintings (2016– ) are made by boiling
and dyeing linen or canvas, and reflect a new era
of intra-society antagonism, particularly in the
United States.
Situated within “Faultlines” were several works
shown at the first Gwangju Biennale, including
John Pule’s distinctive paintings using Niuean
motifs, The Pulenoa Triptych and Prototype: Site
of Old Myths, along with Kcho’s sculpture of a
rowboat resting on 2,000 beer bottles, Para Olvidar
(all 1995), inspired by colonial and modern traumas
in the Pacific and Caribbean, respectively. While
they connected to the themes of “Faultlines,” the
works were part of curator David Teh’s project
“Returns,” which revisited the festival’s history
and the mid-1990s Asian art context with talks,
performances and displays of archival material in
the lower level of the Biennale Exhibition Hall.
Elsewhere in the ACC, Teh’s “Returns”
included Yeongyun Kang’s 1995 installation of
painted funereal streamers, Between Heaven and
Land, made for an anti-Biennale event called
the Gwangju Unification Art Festival, staged by
artists of the Minjung movement. That project was
inserted into the Biennale’s weakest section, “The
Art of Survival: Assembly, Sustainability, Shift,”
which had three male curators (Man Seok Kim,
Sung woo Kim, Chong-Ok Paek), 32 South Korean
artists and three more sub-themes (“Symmetrical
Imagination,” “Momentum Temporary” and
“Assembly Place and Non-Place”) that were
linked “through the lens of techne” and energy—
concepts that would connect almost any kind
of artwork. “Momentum Temporary” featured
the most interesting projects, including Suki
Seokyeong Kang’s three-channel video Black Mat
Oriole (2016–17) of minimalist forms based on
Joseon-dynasty royal dance.
In the final chapter at the ACC, “Paradoxical
Realism,” scholar BG Muhn presented a selection
of North Korean chosonhwa (ink wash) paintings.
Divided into four sections (ideological, landscape,
literati and animals), the works were mesmerizing
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in their technical prowess, and poignantly
shattered preconceptions of official regime
art with their underlying intensity of feeling.
Kim In Sok’s night scene, Rain Shower at the
Bus Stop (2018), for instance, was a romantic,
humanizing depiction of what could have been
any East Asian city mid-deluge.
Additionally, there were several newly
commissioned works located throughout the
Biennale. At the ACC, Adrián Villar Rojas’s
massive two-channel film installation, War of
the Stars (2018), featured a film-within-a-film
as part of his “eternal” engagement with
Yangji-ri, a village of elderly residents located in
the demilitarized zone. Kader Attia’s The Repair
(2018) in “Facing Phantom Borders” at the Gwangju
Biennale Hall looked at the healing of wounds and
trauma through interviews with mystics, shamans
and other healers in North Africa and Southeast
Asia. Other pieces were installed at the former
Armed Forces Gwangju Hospital, where doctors
had defied orders and treated wounded citizens
during the 1980 Uprising. It is a haunted place, and
Mike Nelson’s installation of hanging mirrors in a
chapel and Kader Attia’s installation of totem-like
wooden boards attempted to capture that history.
(Apichatpong Weerasethakul had not been able to
realize his film installation by the opening.)
As if seven exhibitions by 11 curators, with
165 artists from 43 countries, were not enough,
new to this edition were three “collateral”
pavilions organized by third parties: Palais de
Tokyo, Helsinki International Artist Program
and Philippine Contemporary Art Network.
Altogether, the 2018 Gwangju Biennale felt like an
anachronistic return to earlier forms of art-world
festivals, prioritizing quantity and breadth of
representation. Yet as the Biennale’s revisiting of
Anderson’s “imagined communities” revealed, the
old world order of architecture, borders, identity,
media, and community is crumbling. So while it
is perhaps easier to convene many multitudes of
people (even in the newly imagined community of
the “art world”), with so many competing digital
and economic demands on time and attention, it is
also harder to keep them together.
HG MASTERS
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Gwangju Biennale.
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 TARRAWARRA
TarraWarra Museum of Art

TARRAWARRA BIENNIAL
FROM WILL TO FORM

Curated by Emily Cormack, the 2018 TarraWarra

Biennial was based on a curatorial premise free
from theoretical impositions to do with “the
global” (a persistent trope in biennial frameworks),
and offered artworks interconnected and enriched
by an expansive theme. By tracing the creative
determinations of 24 Australia-based artists
through the material and immaterial outcomes
of their diverse and sometimes collaborative
practices, “From Will to Form” overturned the role
of the artist as an egocentric creative genius and
positioned them rather as transmitters of will,
thus creating space for the works to be understood
in their own right. Following this notion, the
Biennial artists presented will as a fluid force,
their works loosely exploring will in relation to the
body, material world, the psyche, its ontology and
states of release.
The show opened at the TarraWarra Museum
of Art with Mike Parr’s Whistle White (all works
2018), a performance featuring six young
Melbourne artists who whistled together for three
consecutive days. Just as the exhibition began
with this collective breath, one slowly understood
while journeying through the gallery spaces that
the force of these exhalations (a metaphor for will
itself) expanded all the way up to and beyond the
architectural edges of the museum. In this way,
will revealed itself through conceptual gesture as
much as material form.
Lindy Lee’s installation of abstract metal
shapes, Neither Choice, Nor Chance—made by
flinging molten bronze—best encapsulated the
cross-elemental path of will as it materializes into
form. Lee’s process is one of risk, and the outcome
is elating; each hardened splash of bronze renders
her gestures finite, retaining the dynamism of the
pour. And yet, the arrangement of these forms—
spread across two large walls and arranged in a
circular form on the ground—evoked infinity.
Positioned in the end space of the museum, facing
a large northern window, the work situated the
viewer within a spatially poetic continuum where
will, understood in the work as a transmission
of energy, could be imagined to flow into the
atmosphere beyond the museum itself.
Contrastively, Isadora Vaughan’s multipart
sculpture Canker Sore saw physical matter
extend from the gallery. With an alchemical
mix of earthy ceramics, glass fragments, epoxy,
sand and crushed rock, Vaughan hand-molded a
group of textured and colorful slabs, which were
precariously assembled onto scaffolds taking
the partial form of a giant ulcer, referencing
her experiences with bodily discomfort and her
antagonistic relationship with materials. Though
the piece was originally conceived as a closed
structure, Vaughan allowed the assemblage to
break free from its constraints, which resulted in
some of its components spilling onto the outer
ledge of the northern window.
Matter was transported into the space as well.
Dale Harding—in collaboration with his cousin,
Jordan Upkett—brought red Garingbal earth
pigment from central Queensland, mixing it
with the pair’s saliva to create Wall Compositions
from Memory. With this 30-meter wall drawing, a
composition of painterly gestures and referential
markings, the duo elevate the idea that the earth
is an art object in and of itself, in the same manner
that American Abstract Expressionists revered the
materiality of paint. Their action intimates the
Indigenous recognition of the land as having its
own inexorable direction, weight and will.
A series of windows along the outer wall
opposite to Harding’s work allowed sunlight from
the west to shine in. As this occurred at certain
moments in the day, Agatha Gothe-Snape’s
window-based text piece The Five Unknowables
materialized as a secondary shadow-form, cast
in front and on top of Harding’s wall drawing.
Relying on contingent conditions of natural
sunlight, Gothe-Snape’s paragraphs of prose—
discussing formlessness and flux—were at times
difficult to read, thereby prompting meditations
on the unstable nature of form.
It was in the liminal spaces of the museum
that “From Will to Form” most aptly gifted
viewers with quietly metaphoric articulations of
“will”—a concept familiar to us all. In tenderly
repositioning the artist as the nurturer of will, the
art was left to speak for itself. The overall effect of
this, to continue in the poetic spirit of the biennial,
was akin to a breath of fresh air.
ELOISE BRESKVAR

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 TOKYO
Tokyo Photographic Art Museum
KUNIÉ SUGIURA
ASPIRING EXPERIMENTS / NEW YORK IN 50 YEARS
Opposite page New York-based artist Kunié Sugiura’s first major
ISADORA VAUGHAN retrospective in her birth country, “Aspiring
Canker Sore Experiments / New York in 50 Years,” presented at
2018
Ceramic, epoxy, synthetic polymer
the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, was a five-
sheet, steel, glass, silicon, crushed rock part, chronological showcase of her multimedia
and sand, dimensions variable. practice, beginning with her graduation work at
Installation view at “From Will
to Form,” TarraWarra Biennial, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and
TarraWarra Museum of Art, 2018. ending with her latest digitally printed photo-
Photo by Andrew Curtis.
canvas series shot in Japan.
Courtesy the artist and Station
Gallery, Melbourne. In 1963, cynical about what the future held for
her as a woman in Japan, Sugiura decided to move
This page
from Tokyo, where she was a physics student,
KUNIÉ SUGIURA to study photography in Chicago. There, taking
Hoppings A Positive
1996 the advice of her tutor, Sugiura initially pursued
Gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 cm. photojournalism. Immediately realizing that was
Courtesy Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo/New York.
not for her, she retreated to her studio, where she
aimed to push the possibilities of the photographic
medium. Her spirit of innovation was evident in
her graduation series “Cko” (1966–67), displayed
in the first section of the retrospective. The
voyeuristic, surreal images featuring nudes
distorted by strange perspectives, interiors of
rooms and abstract patterns, were manipulated
chemically via different photographic processing
and printing techniques, and evoke feelings
of suffocation and alienation, as reinforced by
the series’ title, which means solitude. “Cko”
was a fitting point to begin the exhibition as it
became clear that isolation as well as alchemical
experimentation are palpable even in Sugiura’s
most recent works.
The show’s second section was centered around
the decade after Sugiura’s relocation to New York
in 1967. During this time, Sugiura continued to
work in a solitary environment. Playing with
the application of photo emulsions on various
materials, where monochrome images could
then be exposed, Sugiura eventually settled with
canvas as the ground of her works. For a brief
period thereafter, she worked exclusively on
abstract paintings. It was through an accident that
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she discovered the captivating effect of pairing
paintings with photographic images and pursued
making diptychs, as in Tree Trunk 2 (1971). The
distorted tree bark, framed in a close-up shot,
and the accompanying minimalist canvas,
interchangeably present reality and fiction,
abstraction and representation.
Sugiura’s full return to photography came in
the early 1980s in the form of photograms. Starting
with flowers, she elaborated the photogram-
making process—involving placing objects
over surfaces coated in photo emulsion, which
are then exposed to light—to include living
creatures from her neighborhood. The Kitten
Papers (1992), for example, features a variety
of marks as a result. Ephemerality, playfulness
and a lack of total control are important factors
in Sugiura’s photograms, and the instantaneous
decision-making in her process freed her from the
heaviness of painting—a comparatively time-
consuming mode of creation. Sugiura continued
to work with the photogram format. One of the
latest examples included in the show was the
life-size “Artists and Scientists” (1999– ) portrait
series in the fourth section. From fellow New York
artists Ushio Shinohara and Jasper Johns to the
Nobel Prize-winning scientist James D. Watson,
the works mark Sugiura’s foray into depicting
people in carefully crafted moments, as opposed
to animals and aleatoric instances. Despite the
collaborative process between Sugiura and her
sitters, however, the images from these one-on-
one sessions emphasize individuality rather than
unity; and a sense of isolation, too, is apparent.
Sugiura’s photograms straddle the boundary
between photography and painting. They are
created with photographic techniques, yet all the
end products are unique. The three works drawn
from her “DG Photocanvas” series (2009– ), which
concluded the exhibition, further complicated
notions of originality and reproducibility as
pertaining to photography and painting by
involving film, digital scanning and pigment
printing on canvas. The three abstract, close-up
images of rocky mountains in Japan were printed
back in her New York studio. In this way, Sugiura
probes the limitations of photography, as well as
her conflicting desires to be alone and connected,
in this case to her homeland, which she left
behind half a century ago.
As evidenced in the exhibition, the uniqueness
of Sugiura’s practice lies in the very coexistence of
seemingly opposing elements: boundary-breaking
explorations supported by the enclosure of a
space; science and everyday life; and treasuring
solitude while enjoying collaboration.
MAKI NISHIDA
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Kunié Sugiura.
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 BUSAN
Museum of Contemporary Art Busan and Bank of Korea Building
BUSAN BIENNALE
DIVIDED WE STAND
History is a recurring nightmare. Renewed
tensions between NATO allies and Russia and
China have plunged the world into a second
Cold War. It was fitting then that the 2018 Busan
Biennale, hosted in the only corner of the Korean
peninsula not captured by the communist forces
during the Korean War (1950–53), examined
the postwar legacy of divisions, from ill-fated
partitions made in the process of decolonization
to the enduring material and cultural borders
cleaved between the first, second and third worlds.
Organized by artistic director Cristina Ricupero
and curator Jörg Heiser, with Gahee Park serving
as guest curator for projects by younger artists
from Asia, “Divided We Stand” featured 66 artists
and collectives from 34 countries still affected by
divisions and conflicts in the wake of the Second
World War.
The Biennale’s strength and weakness was
its clarity. From the outset at the Museum of
Contemporary Art Busan, there was a well-defined
historical perspective. Chin Cheng-Te’s collection
of historical documents and press clippings,
titled American Pie (2016), relays Taiwan’s Cold
War experience of military dictatorship and
the deleterious influence of American military
culture while Chantal Akerman’s film D’Est
(From the East) (1993) portrays life in Poland
and Russia just after the Soviet Union’s collapse
through long, sobering takes. In a similar vein,
Henrike Naumann’s immersive installation of
cheap 1980s postmodern furniture was dotted
with videos detailing the disaffected youth
culture, following the dissolution of the German
Democratic Republic (East Germany), which in
turn gave rise to the economically disadvantaged
region’s current budding neofascism. A forceful
and dramatic memorial to the ghosts of history,
Minouk Lim’s installation On Air (2017) resembles
a television studio populated by ghoulish
mannequins and taxidermy animals, with
camera cranes made from tree branches and old
car headlights. In an adjacent room, Lim’s new
video and blacked-out wall of signs, It’s a Name
I Gave Myself (2018), draws from the 1983 Korean
television show Finding Dispersed Families, in
which people wore signs around their necks with
question marks standing in for the biographical
information erased by the war.
Though the Biennale was thematically coherent
and geographically comprehensive, covering the
partitions of Ireland, Palestine and Punjab, as well
as the division of Sudan, at times the thematic
focus on the Cold War felt overelaborated.
There were a handful of works that were eye-roll
inducing in their overtness, such as Dora Longo
Bahia’s two paintings in reds and oranges of
abandoned-looking amusement parks scribbled
with the names “Fukushima” and “Chernobyl,” or
124
absurdly dramatic, like the sculpture of a gigantic,
dead black crow by Laura Lima and Zé Carlos
Garcia, both at the Biennale’s second venue, the
former Bank of Korea building.
Elsewhere at the Bank of Korea, artists delved
into the sinister, occult and weird—and possibly
queer—facets of Cold War-era culture. Im
Youngzoo’s essayistic video Guest Star (2018)
looked at historical misunderstandings, from the
message sent by the United States to the Soviet
Union in 1963 to test a new joint emergency
hotline that prompted the Kremlin to hire
cryptographers to decipher its meaning, to a
lip-reader trying to decode footage of leaders’
conversations at the recent North-South Korean
summit in April 2018. Oscar Chan Yik Long’s
maximalist wall paintings in ink and hanging
banners of crazed-looking animals and skeletons
grafted Chinese mythology into the Christian
apocalypse narrative. Musician Minwhee Lee
and artist Yun Choi’s collaborative six-part
music-video series Viral Lingua (2018) delved
into the recurrence of Cold War trauma in South
Korean society through imagery such as a crying
woman with eyes painted like sunsets singing
about leaving her country behind. The curators
concluded the Biennale on a dystopic note with
Phil Collins’s room-sized installation Delete
Beach (2016), comprising mounds of sand, oil
drums, tires, bubbling pits of black liquid and
a screen playing an anime about a schoolgirl
who joins an anti-capitalist resistance group
in a carbon-less future society. The collective
indifference of the world’s superpowers to the
planet’s impending ecological catastrophe
suggests that, on this point, “united we fall.”
HG MASTERS
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on the Busan Biennale.
| NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111

Opposite page
MINOUK LIM
On Air
2017
Various objects including gourd, feather,
infrared lamp, fake hair, incense, car headlight,
speaker and camera, dimensions variable.
Installation view of “Busan Biennale:
Divided We Stand,” Museum of
Contemporary Art Busan, 2018.
Courtesy Busan Biennale Organizing Committee.
This page
CHENG RAN
Ascending Image (front)
The Lament: Mountain Ghost (back)
Both 2018
LED tube, lamp, hot glue and metal,
388 x 95 x 9 cm; single-channel video
with color and sound: 25 min.
Installation view of “The Lament: Mountain
Ghost” at Ota Fine Arts, Shanghai, 2018.
Photo by Zhang Hong.
Courtesy the artist and Ota Fine Arts,
Tokyo/Singapore/Shanghai.
SHANGHAI
Ota Fine Arts
CHENG RAN
THE LAMENT: MOUNTAIN GHOST
As one of China’s foremost new media and video
artists, Cheng Ran has, since the beginning of
his career, made videos and films that address a
world of private feelings or hermetic thoughts, but
that skirt any direct or obvious autobiographical
references. In recent years, however, a curious
kind of gravitas, one that speaks to the ethos and
ennui of his generation—born in the 1980s—has
emerged in his works.
With numerous accolades, including a
Best Director Award, which he received at the
Madrid International Film Festival in 2017, and
a growing roster of international exhibitions at
such distinguished venues as New York’s New
Museum, Cheng’s ambitions have been high
from the outset. His exhibition at Ota Fine Arts
in Shanghai, “The Lament: Mountain Ghost,”
marked the debut of the artist’s latest series of
works, inspired by a classical poem called The
Lament (or, Encountering Sorrow) by poet Qu
Yuan. Considered one of the oldest if not longest
epic poems in the history of Chinese literature, it
was composed during the Warring States period
(475–221 BCE), which marked the transition from
ancient to imperial China, and the establishment
of the Qin dynasty. The verses embody Confucian
political ideals, recount brutal warfare and exile,
and make a case for bureaucratic and military
reform—and though Qu was considered a patriotic
writer, the poem was also heavily influenced by
shamanism and otherworldly, spiritual journeys.
It was this heady blend of the metaphysical
with social commentary that Cheng aimed to
extract from the classical poem and extrapolate in
his own works. The centerpiece of his exhibition
Reviews artasiapacific.com
was a single-channel 25-minute video, with the
same title as the show, in which the face and
tattooed body of a lean male figure, wearing
only a skimpy and ragged loin cloth, are painted
with abstract patterns and a translucent layer
of white. Standing against a stark-white backdrop
with an unflinching gaze aimed directly at the
viewer, as if in a trance, he begins making slow,
writhing movements to a droning, discordant
soundtrack composed by Cheng, guitarist Wang
Wen Wei and electronic musician Gao Jia Feng.
Images are then superimposed on the patches
of pattern on the figure’s body, as the markings
become an augmented digital surface revealing
multiple sequences featuring the guitarist and the
confines of his recording studio. Much like Qu’s
lament, Cheng’s ghostly, native figure seems to be
searching, sorrowful and disillusioned by his own
sense of entrapment—caged within the infinite
depths of a deep white nowhere he no longer fully
recognizes or understands, let alone negotiate.
The scene effectively encapsulates these lines
from Qu: Alas! all joy has vanished from my life /
Alone beside the hill / Never to follow fashion will I
stoop / Then must live lonely still.
The other works in the show didn’t quite
measure up to the potent narrative of alienation
presented in The Lament: Mountain Ghost (all
works 2018). It was clear that Cheng hasn’t yet
developed a compelling knack for generating
three-dimensional objects. For example, the
slender, tree-like light sculpture Ascending Image,
measuring more than three meters in height and
inspired directly by Warring State bronzes, felt
more like something designed for a stage set or
theater. The same applies to Leopard’s Dream
Image, a light box with multicolored crystal resins
that form random, self-generating compositions,
which dry and set within 24 hours. These objects,
though cleverly experimental, felt extraneous
and unnecessary.
To his credit, Cheng has never shied away from
taking risks—Qu encapsulates this attitude in his
poem: “Never to follow fashion will I stoop”—but
his strengths and weaknesses remain distinct.
Cheng is most adept at telling stories via moving
images, at once poetic and oblique. Allowing
for agile narratives and images to guide viewers
toward meaning, whether real or imagined, he is
more than capable of making every frame count.
ARTHUR SOLWAY
125
 BEIJING
Three Shadows Photography Art Centre

SHOJI UEDA

Spread across the Three Shadows Photography Art

Centre in Beijing’s Caochangdi art district, the first
exhibition in China of the Japanese photographer
Shoji Ueda (1913–2000) was an understated
showcase of the joy that the artist found in
his photography. For Ueda’s retrospective,
Three Shadows—founded by well-known
photographers Rong Rong and Inri—collaborated
with the recently opened Shoji Ueda Museum of
Photography in the artist’s hometown of Tottori,
borrowing 141 original photographs selected by
curator Masako Sato.
From the show’s outset, there was an emphasis
on the immutable presence of Ueda’s family and
Tottori in his images, with the majority of the
early works from the 1940s and ’50s portraying
his family and close friends in the local sand
dunes, his trademark setting. The black-and-white
Papa, Mama and Children (1949) shows Ueda and
his wife flanking their four children, the whole
family perched atop an almost perfectly straight
shelf of sand against a plain gray background,
while each individual is caught in what appears
to be a free moment of expression, whether walk through. Functioning in a similar way was
shooting a toy gun, sitting on a bicycle, or strolling the simple curatorial gesture of projecting three
forward, umbrella in hand. The image is filled subtly illuminating Ueda quotes—one example:
with a sense of play, and it was easy to imagine “Awake or asleep, I always found myself thinking
Ueda and his family spending the day at the of photography”—at different points on the walls.
dunes frolicking among the mounds of sand, as Following Ueda’s early works and a set of three
much as posing for Ueda. Formally, the dunes videos, including footage recorded by Ueda of
offered Ueda a vast blank canvas on which he daily life in Tottori, the exhibition shifted to more
could direct his subjects, with expanses of sky surreal photographs. Gitanes (1992) shows a troupe
creating a weighty formlessness that he utilized of figures scattered across the sand, each a small
for pictorial balance. Ueda’s careful approach to silhouette dwarfed by the orange moon and dark
his compositions was further demonstrated in ocher sky with Ueda’s processing giving the image
the thoughtfully included, figureless photograph painterly, mysterious and abstruse qualities.
The Sea and the Dune (1950), which illustrated a In 1983, Ueda’s wife died and the photographer
measured balancing of the forms and planes of didn’t work again until the end of that year, when
the sky, ocean and sand. The indistinct plainness the fashion designer Takeo Kikuchi invited him
of the backdrops also felt otherworldly, producing to do some commercial fashion photography.
a sense of the subjects being momentarily Presented in the show’s last section, these
dislocated from earth, perhaps a hint at a more commercial advertisements were initially
abstract, existential reason for Ueda’s interest in surprising because of Ueda’s return to the dunes-
the dunes. —a place that the exhibition had earlier strongly
Ueda was less prolific in and less known for related to his family and friends. Yet images like
his color photographs, but the few presented at a 1983 work from the series “Dune,” portraying an
the exhibition showed an innovative approach to immaculately suited man—common in fashion
photographic techniques. The pictures from the photography, but with the addition of a perturbing
series “White Wind” (1981), mostly of his children mask of exaggerated features and a levitating top
in locations around Tottori, are marked by an hat—served to emphasize this exhibition’s view
indistinct haziness, and despite being away from that Ueda delighted in the surreal potentials of the
the sand dunes, proliferate a similar dreamy, medium but also in the constant interrelation of
ethereal space. his photography and his life.
The sea and sand around Ueda’s hometown, a TOM MOUNA
place he rarely left and constantly captured, were
referenced in the show by exhibition designer See our website for the Chinese version of this article.
Osamu Ouchi’s placement of blue and yellow
partitions throughout the space. These interrupted
what could have been an uneventful chronological

126 | NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111

 HONG KONG
Tai Kwun Contemporary
CAO FEI
A HOLLOW IN A WORLD TOO FULL
Opposite page In a dank, moss-covered concrete room, a Guan
SHOJI UEDA Yu statue sat in webs of dust in a shrine. Moody
Papa, Mama and Children twangs of 1980s Cantopop played; mangoes spilled
1949
Gelatin silver print, 20 x 28 cm.
out of a basket onto the floor; and a portrait of
Courtesy Shoji Ueda Oice and Three Queen Elizabeth II hung crookedly over a desk
Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing. littered with papers detailing the case of an
This page imprisoned poet. This scene, like many others
in the works Cao Fei has produced since the
CAO FEI
Rumba mid-1990s, was wholly constructed: the mold
2015–18 was artificial, the mangoes a hard plastic and
Wooden stage and cleaning
robots, dimensions variable.
the prisoner a fictional character in a new film,
Installation view of “A Hollow in a World Too Full” Prison Architect (2018), commissioned for “A
at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong, 2018–19. Hollow in a World Too Full,” the artist’s first solo
Courtesy Tai Kwun.
institutional exhibition in Asia, housed at Tai
Kwun Contemporary.
Shown on the exhibition’s top floor, the new
film is an hour-long, magical-realist tale that
follows two characters: a modern-day architect,
played by actress Valerie Chow, of Chungking
Express (1994) fame—tasked with converting
an art center into a correctional facility—and
an incarcerated poet in the 1960s, sensitively
brought to life on screen by the Hong Kong artist
Kwan Sheung Chi. The two characters converse
across time and eventually meet after Chow,
tortured by conflicting thoughts on the criminal-
justice system, releases Kwan and fellow inmates
from confinement. Although the premise of the
film—ultimately an inverse of Tai Kwun’s own
history—is intriguing, its plot is mostly powered
by saccharine, pseudo-philosophical ruminating
(“So what kind of prison do you want to live in?”
“How [sic] does your ideal prison look like?”)
with inclusions of quotes by Albert Camus, clips
of past riots in Hong Kong and even sly in-jokes
about contemporary art. (In one scene, Kwan-as-
poet visits “Dismantling the Scaffold,” a group
show mounted at Tai Kwun earlier in the year,
Reviews artasiapacific.com
and weeps while watching Kwan-the-artist’s own
video piece.) Another reading of the film, with its
profuse footage of Tai Kwun’s grounds, is as an
advertisement, thinly veiled as a documentary, on
the complex’s history as a colonial police station,
court and jail.
Curated by Ullens Center for Contemporary
Art director Philip Tinari in association with Tai
Kwun’s Xue Tan, the three-floor exhibition framed
older installations and videos that demonstrated
Cao Fei’s practice of orchestrating mini universes,
with film stills and installations of props related
to Prison Architect (2018), as a way to investigate
themes of captivity and freedom. On the first floor
was the installation Rumba (2015–18), comprising
several robotic, autonomous cleaning devices that
circulate endlessly on several platform “islands,”
evoking the conditions of a city such as Hong
Kong, or a jail. This obvious metaphor was further
pronounced through a large color photograph
pinned up nearby showing an actual prison cell
from Tai Kwun. Similarly, La Town (2014), a tale
of ex-lovers fixating on their domestic trials in a
now-decimated country (portrayed with miniature
figurines), investigates elements of liberation in
the purging of memory and the past. The second
floor featured installations of Cao Fei’s lauded
machinima works, i.Mirror and RMB City: A
Second Life City Planning (both 2007), representing
her interests in entrapment or radical escapism via
virtual, digital worlds.
Despite this considered curation, the exhibition
didn’t offer visitors any orientation or guiding
information, or the important disclaimer that
it was vital to view Prison Architect first, before
attempting to understand the new installations
and photographs. For example, the plastic green
mangoes hanging in the building’s circular
staircase remained abstract unless one sat through
the entire film, which revealed that, for the artist,
the fruit symbolizes freedom.
Ultimately, the film and exhibition did little to
reveal a progression in Cao Fei’s practice. If the
themes of captivity and freedom were already
prevalent in older works such as i.Mirror and
La Town, what purpose was there to produce
this film, except to make rampant use of, and to
promote, Tai Kwun’s newly restored grounds? The
show’s final work, Coming Soon: Hong Kong (2018),
featured two swinging performers attempting
to beat their feet against vertically installed
drum sets, signaling, perhaps, the artist’s struggle,
and that there is something more substantial
still to come.
YSABELLE CHEUNG
See our website for the Chinese version of this article.
127
 SINGAPORE
Sullivan + Strumpf
FX HARSONO
REMINISCENCE
FX Harsono’s solo exhibition, “Reminiscence,”
presented by Singapore’s Sullivan + Strumpf, was
focused on the artist’s investigation of the genocide
of ethnic Chinese-Indonesians in Java, Indonesia,
from 1947 to ’49. Widely recognized for his prolific
practice, which addresses the plight of minorities
and the socially underprivileged, particularly in the
context of Indonesia’s history of political turmoil,
the show reaffirmed Harsono’s ability to powerfully
convey narratives of pain and upheaval.
It may be hard to grasp the heart of violent
conflicts from the plethora of media that surrounds
us today, but it was nearly impossible to avoid the
sense of personal loss expressed in Harsono’s
iconic installation The Spirit of Light (2016).
A single tombstone, bearing a handful of names,
replicates a marked gravesite and commemorates
the victims—the actual number of which remains
uncertain—murdered during the two-year
genocide in Java. The concrete slab basks
in a blood-red light, cast by a chandelier
suspended above it, and is one example of
how Harsono draws attention to the presence
of people subsumed by the dark shadow of
historical narratives.
Beside the arresting installation was Harsono’s
new charcoal drawing, titled Memorandum
of Inhumane Act No. 3 (2017), inspired by
documentary photographs taken by the artist’s
father in the 1950s that depict exhumations of
known mass-graves. Closer inspection reveals
that the charcoal portrait of Chinese-Indonesian
people holding human skulls is superimposed on
copies of an official memorandum outlining the
acts of violence perpetrated by Indonesian forces
on the country’s Chinese population before and
after Dutch Police intervention, which Harsono
uncovered during his research at the National
Archives of the Netherlands. The overlaying of
text and image amplifies the horrors of lives lost,
while bringing together personal and authoritative
accounts of the events.
Nearby, and playing on a monitor, was the
new video Taking Nothing But Pictures (2018),
centered on a female genocide survivor praying
to the dead. On a partition wall across from the
screen, the same female figure appeared in The
Survivor Story (2016), a series of five paper works,
including a black-and-white still from the video
with “My name Tjoa Er Ries” and “The Survivor
Story” scrawled beneath the subject’s image.
Among the other components were archival
government documents, a black-and-white photo
of a ceremony with people holding flags, and
a list of people’s names possibly from a grave
marker, embossed in red. The artist unmistakably
communicates history and the weight of his past,
which he shares with his community, bound by
ties of blood and loss.
128
Behind the partition was another of Harsono’s
well-known installations, Memory of the
Survivor (2016), a living room featuring a
wheelchair and period furniture with white,
three-dimensional models of tombstones placed
in various vintage cabinets and tables, as well as
found photographs hanging on the walls. An old
Dutch radio sat below these photographs, playing
broadcasts related to Indonesian political history.
The living room setting effectively humanized the
period of troubling history—it is as if genocide
inhabits what could be a viewer’s home. Yet, there
is no anger or bitterness in the work, just quiet
acknowledgment of facts and faces.
Harsono’s artist statement reinforces this
position: “I am not angry . . . It has never been
my intention to place blame with anyone. Rather
this is a call to everyone to accept the truth of
history, however wretched it is, for a stronger
nation.” Genocide is far more relevant today
than we care to admit. There are quite a number
of us, even among the millennial generation,
who have had our connections to our lands
of origin—where our great-grandparents or
grandparents came from—suppressed or erased
because of political upheavals and displacement.
Harsono’s body of work in “Reminiscence” dares
to acknowledge this.
In a time when global powers continue to
commit or turn blind eyes to past and present
acts of violence against minorities in favor of
political control and economic growth, examining
the pains of those who have been marginalized,
without inciting retaliation, is all the more
relevant and necessary.
REENA DEVI
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on FX Harsono.
| NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111

Opposite page
FX HARSONO
Memorandum of Inhumane Act No. 3
2017
33 pigment-based digital print and
charcoal on paper, 137.5 x 355.5 cm.
Installation view of “Reminiscence” at
Sullivan + Strumpf, Singapore, 2018.
Photo by Ng Wu Gang.
Courtesy the artist and Sullivan +
Strumpf, Singapore/Sydney.
This page
AMANDA HENG
Singirls Objects
2009–11
Modified batik and military uniforms,
dimensions variable.
Installation view of “Ties of History: Art
in Southeast Asia” at the Metropolitan
Museum of Manila, 2018.
Photo by AG De Mesa.
Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Manila;
University of the Philippines Vargas Museum,
Manila; and Yuchengco Museum, Manila.
METRO MANILA
Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Yuchengco Museum and Vargas Museum
TIES OF HISTORY
“Ties of History” took its name from the 1967
founding declaration of the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which describes
the region as being “bound together by ties of
history and culture.” On the occasion of ASEAN’s
50th anniversary, the exhibition, curated by Patrick
D. Flores, brought together ten artists—one from
each of ASEAN’s member countries—to survey the
variegated artistic inquiries brewing in the region,
while endeavoring to offer in-depth views of each of
the artist’s practices.
To see the totality of “Ties of History,” visitors
had to journey through Metro Manila. Each artist
was represented by three works, distributed
between the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, the
Yuchengco Museum and the Vargas Museum.
The different locations allowed the artists to
show a range of projects that differed in material
and size. Large-scale, sculptural pieces were
displayed at the capacious Metropolitan Museum,
wall-mounted works were housed at the smaller
Yuchengco Museum, while Vargas showed mostly
videos. There were no markers distinguishing
the artists in terms of their nationalities. Instead,
viewers were encouraged to consider the works
and their meanings in terms of the region’s
shared history, broken down into themes of labor,
memory, identity and migration, intermixed at all
three venues.
Given Southeast Asia’s history of turmoil, the
topic that had the most weight was the examination
of the past and its relation to national identity-
formation. Among the most poignant artworks
that tackled this issue was Roberto Feleo’s series of
sculptural relics, encased in glass domes or wooden
boxes, that retell colonial and mythological stories.
At Vargas, through the translucent glass exterior of
Urn of the First Coming (1988), for example, viewers
Reviews artasiapacific.com
could glean the hazy outlines of a tableau featuring
the elongated heads of European soldiers in a
tropical forest with clouds. While this could be a
textbook illustration of the Spanish colonial era,
the container, which obscures the scene, makes the
viewing of history uncanny—the formerly
colonized Asian is asked to unravel what is an
unreliably rendered narrative. Questioning views
of cultural identity was Amanda Heng’s Singirls
Objects (2009–11), displayed at the Metropolitan
Museum. The installation is composed of three sets
of clothing: a military uniform and two kebaya (a
blouse and skirt traditional to multiple countries
in Southeast Asia). On the military uniform,
Heng paints fragments of patterns drawn from
the kebaya. On one of the kebaya she renders
camouflage patches, while the other is made
entirely of camouflage cloth and is lined with a
batik trim. The effect is that it appears as if the
patterns have infected each other, giving way to
denotations of hybridity, mixing influences to
create new cloth, new identities.
Other works showed how our perceptions of
places intersect with politics. For example, Yasmin
Jaidin’s Field Series (2018), a grass, wood and soil
sculpture placed on the porch of Vargas, remaps
the islands near Brunei Bay, two of which are left
undeveloped while the third, Pulau Muara Besar,
is mined by a Chinese company for oil. Through
her examination of the archipelago, Jaidin
suggests that places are never neutral; they shape
and reflect politics and contain rules of social
engagement. Adding another dimension to the
work was the fact that weeds were sprouting on
the living installation throughout the exhibition’s
run, thus challenging notions of growth—what
is included or pruned when progress is pursued?
Also at Vargas was Jedsada Tangtrakulwong’s floor
installation Border (2014), made of ribbed orange
carpets stacked at varying heights in a reimagined
map of the provinces of Thailand, Myanmar
and Cambodia. In the work, boundaries are
obliterated, suggesting fluidity. This also brought
to mind the seas that have both bridged and
been a source of dispute among Southeast Asian
nations and their neighbors.
By highlighting works that explore metaphors
of place and identity, “Ties of History” succeeded
in articulating the ambiguities and tensions
felt in Southeast Asia, while suggesting nuanced
and complex ways to understand regional unity
and diversity.
JOSEPHINE V. ROQUE
129
 JAKARTA
National Gallery of Indonesia

INDONESIA, SPIRIT OF THE WORLD

Although “Indonesia, Spirit of the World,” curated in independence-era artwork, as well as from
by Amir Sidharta and Watie Moerany, coincided dominant depictions of exoticized bodies in
with the Jakarta Palembang 2018 Asian Games, modern and contemporary artworks about
it was far from a mere diplomatic exercise. In Indonesia—although such archetypal imagery
its selection of artworks from the collection of was still present in the collection. In one corner of
Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, the show the room, independent women depicted by Djaya
offered a rare view of paintings and sculptures and Batara Lubis stand looking out, challenging a
created and collected from the 1930s to the 1960s. problematic 1961 Basoeki Abdullah painting hung
These works express a collective optimism in on the opposite wall, which illustrates the capture
Indonesia at the time and the forging of a new of the beautiful, mythological Sinta.
identity fueled by independence and rising As reflected in his collection of international
internationalism. Here, the theme of colonization artists, Sukarno had a worldview of non-aligned
was boldly explored through images of resistance, inclusivity and solidarity with the global south.
revealing a shared, global vision of unity aided by To illustrate the former president’s forward-
intercountry friendship and artistic exchange—a thinking vision, curators paired a 1964 painting
far cry from the tightening of borders and of a Balinese dancer dressed in Japanese-inspired
racialization that we are seeing today. block colors, by Shinsui Ito, with Abdullah’s
The cleverly curated exhibition showcased how portrait of Sukarno’s Japanese wife, Ratna Sari
Sukarno’s collection dovetailed with his vision for Dewi, in an Indian sari. While the exhibition
an independent Indonesia. The painting Shooting carried many excellent individual pieces, its
an Arrow (1944) by Hendrik Ngantung, a political true strength was in forming a portrait of an
affiliate of Sukarno and the former governor extraordinary statesman who combined a bold
of Jakarta, depicts an archer aiming an arrow, national vision with a strong cultural agenda.
with ghostly figures in the background alluding In the spirit of the Asian Games, it was a timely
to Javanese shadow puppetry. Next to this was reflection on how Indonesia progressed from
archival footage of the president Sukarno its colonial past, how it was primed as an
meeting with his cabinet in front of the painting, international world player, and most importantly,
revealing the artwork’s role as witness to the raised questions of the future: Where are we now?
proclamation of independence. Sukarno clearly Whose side are we on? Who do we want to win?
had a penchant for figures in motion, emphasizing VERA MEY
a celebration of the victorious body—perhaps as a
metaphor for the strength of the nation. Greeting
visitors at the entrance to the exhibition was
The Harpooner (1959) by Argentine artist Roberto
Juan Capurro, a bronze, not-quite-life-size
sculpture of a male figure poised to strike with
a spear, which the president had commissioned
after seeing the original while on an official visit
to Latin America. A small archival section also
revealed Sukarno’s favorite sculptor as Edhi
Sunarso, responsible for many of the public
and grand monuments around Jakarta, such as
the Tugu Pancoran and the Selamat Datang, or
“welcome” monument, which features two figures
with their arms thrown up to the sky in a gesture
of openness.
The section “A Nation’s Struggle United
in Diversity,” which focused on portraiture,
presented a nostalgic look at a time that cultivated
national heroes such as the 19th-century anti-
colonial leader Harijadi Sumadidjaja. Within this
selection was a smaller group of works dedicated to
local figures. These included portraits of modern
women, such as in Otto Djaya’s Rochani (1949),
where the figures, shrouded in decorative elements
of dress, stare directly at the viewer, rejecting
instrumentalization or objectification. Here, the
works presented an intelligent diversion from the
visual trope of male bodies in battle, common

130 | NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111

 RAMALLAH
AM Qattan Foundation
SUBCONTRACTED NATIONS
It’s more common than most of us would like
to admit for people to have a nation—a binding
identity based on culture, heritage and language—
but no state of their own and no hold over their
destinies. That pain is felt daily in the Palestinian
Territories. In the West Bank, much of the land is
under Israeli control, with jurisdiction of the rest
shared by Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
Movement is restricted. Profiling and baseless
arrests are commonplace. The roads are rife with
military checkpoints.
When the AM Qattan Foundation and curator
Yazid Anani organized the group exhibition
“Subcontracted Nations” with 62 artists and
collectives to inaugurate the Foundation’s
new headquarters in Ramallah, critique was
pointed even before the show opened: are new
comforts such as the Foundation’s building mere
distractions? How far off is the establishment of
a true Palestinian state, and what is stopping
its attainment?
There are no good answers to those questions,
but the artists participating in the exhibition
addressed the ills they witness or experience
every day. Ramallah native Majdi Hadid’s
sculpture Notarised (2018), an oversized stamp
Opposite page bearing the Palestinian Authority’s seal, primed
HENDRIK NGANTUNG the exhibition’s commentary on nationhood.
Shooting an Arrow Bureaucracies in the region are notorious for their
1944
Oil on board, 152 x 152 cm. inefficiency, and the path to approval for even the
Courtesy National Gallery of Indonesia, Jakarta. most mundane requests can be arduous. Before
continuing on in the exhibition, one couldn’t help
This page
but think of the many hoops that the Foundation
MAJDI HADID
Notarised
jumped through to erect the gallery that housed
2018 “Subcontracted Nations.”
Oversized rubber stamp, 150 x 230 cm. The amplitude of the dysfunction so prevalent
Installation view of “Subcontracted Nations”
at AM Qattan Foundation, Ramallah, 2018. in the Palestinian Territories is also referenced
Courtesy AM Qattan Foundation. by Khaled Jarrar, a one-time Ramallah resident
Reviews artasiapacific.com
now based in Tucson, Arizona. His video Boots
and Beret (2017) features objects that are familiar
to him: as one of Yasser Arafat’s bodyguards for
eight years until the Palestinian leader’s death
in 2004, Jarrar regularly cloaked himself in the
gear of militarization. In the footage, which
shows the artist wearing a maroon beret and
streaks of face paint, with boots laced together
and dangling from his neck, Jarrar criticizes the
use of security services. Governments around
the world are becoming increasingly militarized,
leaning on armed strength to maintain control.
The Palestinian Authority is no exception, at
times even collaborating with Israel to suppress its
own populace. The goal of attaining nationhood
has become secondary to powerplays, with
oppositional figures becoming targets of those
favored by the oppressor.
Bisan Abu-Eisheh invokes the failure to
develop a functional Palestinian economy in
the installation Neo-Value (2014), which consists
of stacks of a banknote designed by the artist.
On one side of the (il)legal tender, we find an
excerpt from the Declaration of Independence of
Palestine penned by Mahmoud Darwish, who is
considered to be the national poet. On the other,
we see Yasser Arafat looking tired and confused,
his image lifted from a photograph taken on
July 22, 2003, by photojournalist Jamal Aruri—a
depiction departing from the typical heroic
portrait of the political leader, revolutionary and
Nobel Peace Prize winner. The Palestinian pound
was in circulation until 1952; leaders such as
Arafat, despite paying lip service to independent
statehood, have felt no urgency in supplanting the
Israeli shekel as their people’s de facto currency.
In fact, military occupation benefits a small sliver
of the Palestinian population, which hinders the
birth of a fair and sustainable economy.
Other artworks addressed the prerequisites
of nationhood or conditions on the ground by
drawing upon collective memory, long-standing
traditions, or further elaborating on physical and
institutional hindrances. Zooming out, the status
of AM Qattan Foundation’s headquarters itself
was a testament to the obstacles that cultural
institutions—and many others—must face when
operating within the wall that separates Israel and
the West Bank. Even in September, months after
“Subcontracted Nations” opened, construction
remained incomplete. But at the moment, the
Foundation’s facility is Ramallah’s newest cultural
center, offering a rare platform for local artists,
curators and other cultural figures to practice
their craft, or look at their own history and
sociopolitical structures in a critical light.
BRADY NG
131
 LONDON
Greengrassi Gallery and Corvi-Mora

FIVE HEADS (TAVAN TOLGOI) – ART,

ANTHROPOLOGY AND MONGOL FUTURISM
“Five Heads (Tavan Tolgoi) – Art, Anthropology
and Mongol Futurism” at London’s Greengrassi
Gallery and Corvi-Mora was, as the title suggests,
concerned with the future, but what made it such
a solid, compelling show was how firmly rooted
it was in the immediate present. Curated by
Hermione Spriggs, the exhibition featured works
by ten artists, collectives and researchers deeply
concerned with the land and exploitation of its
resources (“Tavan Tolgoi” refers to one of the
world’s largest untapped thermal coal deposits in
southern Mongolia). The idea of roots, minerals—
things that rest beneath the soil—predominated,
and the promise of future deracinations, whether
for positive or negative ends, loomed throughout
the show.
In Yuri Pattison’s Pick, Press, Fang Feng (The
New Economy) (2018), a manual pill-press sits atop
an LCD monitor, laid flat on the floor. Playing on
the screen was footage of Mongolians picking the
medicinal fang feng root. Brown, powdered fang
feng was in the funnel of the press, and scattered
on the monitor was its product in pill form.
The piece draws from anthropologist Hedwig
Waters’s research on salvage economies along
the Mongolian-Chinese border, and has at its core
a double meaning that highlights a number of
issues. “Fang feng,” in Chinese, can
be translated as “guard against wind,” and
one of its uses in Chinese medicine is to treat
flatulence and stomach disorders. On the other
side of the border in Mongolia, however, the
root serves another purpose, holding soil in
place and preventing wind erosion. One of the
consequences of the informal harvesting of fang
feng in Mongolia—which cannot be processed
into medicine locally due to lack of the requisite
technology and infrastructure—is that the land
itself changes. Considering that fang feng’s value
increases 20 fold once in China, the root’s name
effectively suggests how something as simple
as a plant can have dual purposes, and
wide-reaching economic, geographical and
human consequences.
The pressing theme of exploited resources was
broached again in Baatarzorig Batjargal’s diptych
MGL (2018), which borrows from a traditional
style of Mongolian painting to tell tales in a
contemporary context. In the pictures, we see
heroic, horse-bound figures in the style of Genghis
Khan, a ceremony to cleanse the spirit of a prime
minister who allowed international mining
conglomerates access to the country’s mineral
wealth, as well as marauding figures of the new
neoliberal economy. While the consequences
of the events depicted are highly significant to
the immediate future, this painterly method of
compacting a variety of moments into a single,
psychedelic frame is, again, situated in the present.
Elsewhere, Tuguldur Yondonjamts’s 78-291,
875-953, 3006-3106 (Mirror Princess) (2018), of coal
pigment and digital printing on strips of mylar,
bears crisp images that reference the artist’s
white, mattress-like fabric sculptures planted
nearby in the gallery. On the same mylar surface
are arresting geometric etchings, such that the
work displays a shiny, futuristic aesthetic while
simultaneously evoking more traditional crafts
and materials, and natural resources. Dolgor
Ser Od and Marc Schmitz presented a selection
of objets trouvés dedicated to the Danish-
Greenlandic “father of Eskimology” Knud Johan
Victor Rasmussen in North of the North Pole (in
Memory of Rasmussen) (2018): small pictures, a
pair of boots, gold rocks and more are placed so
as to evoke a realm “north of the North Pole”—
that is, an oblique reality with culturally specific
references to shamanism.
As a kind of centerpiece for the show, Deborah
Tchoudjinoff’s virtual-reality work Baigala (2018)
allowed users to visit various Mongolian sites
impacted by mineral extraction. Like Pattison’s
Pick, Press, Fang Feng, Baigala gives visual and
emotive presence to obscure economic and
geological processes. VR “experiences” like this
one are becoming increasingly commonplace
at exhibitions, and artists have a way to go
with the medium before we can talk about
VR-based projects in terms of innovation and
originality rather than novelty. However, in
the context of “Five Heads,” Tchoudjinoff’s
piece effectively bound together a collection of
sometimes inaccessible works, grounding them
in an awareness of the land with which each is
fundamentally concerned.
NED CARTER MILES

132 | NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111

 NEW YORK
Asia Society
THE PROGRESSIVE REVOLUTION:
MODERN ART FOR A NEW INDIA
Opposite page “The Progressive Revolution: Modern Art for a
DEBORAH TCHOUDJINOFF New India,” organized by guest curator Zehra
Baigala (front) Jumabhoy and Boon Hui Tan, director of New
2018
York’s Asia Society Museum, was centered around
VR, steel and plywood, dimensions variable.
the Progressive Artists’ Group, a collective of
BAATARZORIG BATJARGAL men that formed in Mumbai following India’s
MGL (back)
2018
independence from Britain in 1947. At the time,
Acrylic on canvas, 150 x 200 cm. the young artists, mostly painters, saw themselves
as rebels, passionate about their country’s
Installation view of “Five Heads (Tavan
Tolgoi) – Art, Anthropology and Mongol potential. They envisioned an egalitarian society
Futurism” at Greengrassi Gallery and attuned to the avant-garde and broad-minded
Corvi-Mora, London, 2018.
values. Their works reflect this burgeoning sense
Photos by Brett Dee.
Courtesy Hermione Spriggs. of hope while critiquing the nation’s postcolonial
reality, revealing a forward-looking yet unsettled
This page
country seeking to establish its place in the world.
KRISHEN KHANNA Comprising 80 exhibits divided into three
The Anatomy Lesson
1972 sections and occupying the two upper floors
Oil on canvas, 91.4 x 175.3 cm. of the Asia Society Museum, the show began
Courtesy Kavita Singh and Asia
with “The Progressives in Their Time: People
Society, New York.
of the New India.” Goa-born FN Souza gestures
to the nostalgic through pastoral watercolors of
his home state. In the idyllic Village Scene from
Goa, India (1946), water buffalo soak in the river
against a backdrop of oversized palm trees and
a pink mountain peak, while Woman Carrying
Soil (1944) and Picking Raw Mangoes, Salting
and Drying (1944) highlight female subjects
gathering and working together to evoke a sense
of communal harmony. These works, completed
before the group’s establishment, lay the
groundwork for the project of nation-building.
Vibrant images of the countryside contrasted
sharply with grim representations of urban life,
where economic inequality and poverty came
into focus. An emaciated child lies helplessly
on the ground surrounded by naked figures
in Souza’s Beggars (1944). The disabled and
dispossessed crowd the frame in Untitled
(Beggars) (1940s) by KH Ara, while the gloomy
expressions of the gaunt, suited young men in
Unemployed Graduates (1956) by Ram Kumar
aptly convey the anxieties of the lower-middle
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class desperately seeking opportunities in the
city. In Souza’s Tycoon and the Tramp (1955), the
light-skinned, clean-shaven businessman and the
darker-skinned, bearded vagrant are presented as
caricatures of class stratification.
Many of the painters revisited the female
body as a site to simultaneously explore India’s
cultural essence and modernity. The woman
in Ara’s Untitled (Large Nude) (1965), with her
luminous skin and hand placed suggestively on her
hip, resembles a pin-up girl, while the geometric
shapes in Mohan Samant’s Untitled (Woman) (1946)
recall a cubist style. Displayed alongside the female
nudes, a 10th-century sandstone sculpture of a
voluptuous Celestial Entertainer emphasized the
motif’s provenance. Souza’s Temple Dancer (1957)
and Pregnant Nude (1954) appear as secular
reinterpretations of divine beings associated with
femininity and fertility.
After local authorities labeled his work
“obscene,” Souza departed for London in 1949,
with contemporaries such as SH Raza following
suit to Paris shortly after. The exhibition’s second
section, “National/International,” sought to
extrapolate the confluence of Indian and Western
references within the Progressives’ conception of
modernism. This portion of the show included
Catholic-raised Souza’s Untitled (Flagellation of
Christ) (1965), which he painted while abroad,
alongside Raza’s cubist and expressionistic
landscapes. Later in his life, Raza returned to his
spiritual roots, exemplified by the meditative
Bindu (c. 1980s), in which a large, black circle
representative of a “primal,” unifying force engulfs
the canvas.
Upstairs, the final section, “Masters of the
Game,” showcased the most iconic works from
members of the group. MF Husain’s Peasant
Couple (1950), featuring a bare-chested, muscular
man accompanied by a colorfully adorned
woman, champions the rural masses as the future
of India. Though “Masters” clearly refers to the
artists themselves who continued to have careers
after the group disbanded in 1956, the “Game”
can dually refer to a darker aspect of history.
Depicting military generals conferring around
a table, Krishen Khanna’s The Game 1 (c. 1978)
alludes to the geopolitical maneuverings that
resulted in the partition of India and Pakistan in
1947 and Bangladesh’s subsequent independence
in 1971. His painting The Anatomy Lesson (1972)
figuratively illustrates this cutting and dividing
up of the Indian subcontinent via generals
overlooking a cadaver obscured by a white sheet.
These last two works serve as heavy reminders of
British colonialism’s far-reaching legacy and the
unfulfilled promises that continue to haunt India
long after the Progressives’ heyday.
MIMI WONG
133
 NEW YORK
Albertz Benda

TADANORI YOKOO
DEATH AND DREAMS

Best known for his psychedelic collages
channeling 1960s pop culture, Japanese artist
and graphic designer Tadanori Yokoo has
dedicated himself to a new medium since
renouncing commercial work in the 1980s.
The pieces the octogenarian produces in his
now preferred medium of painting present
a noticeable departure from his signature,
iconoclastic posters. At the same time, he
continues to play with highly stylized, vintage
imagery. Yokoo’s solo exhibition “Death and
Dreams” at Albertz Benda gallery in New York
focused on his portraits of women drawn from
three different series, beginning with more
impressionistic works and concluding with the
surreal. The female subject loosely tied together
the otherwise disparate paintings in oil, acrylic
and watercolor, the majority of which were shown
for the first time outside of Japan.
A lone, untitled oil painting (c. 1980) of
a woman with her naked back turned to the
viewer—displaying a head of glossy chestnut hair
cascading around her shoulders—introduced
Yokoo’s “Back of Head” series (1980), which was
hanging in uniform rows on a nearby wall. The
tidy arrangement of the 21 watercolors served
to emphasize the interchangeability of the
subjects. Though their hair color and texture may
vary, and the palette ranges from sunny yellow
to rosy pinks to moody blues, the women’s pose
never alters. The series can be regarded as a
study of sorts, offering a glimpse of Yokoo’s then
budding practice on paper and eventually canvas.
Yokoo further explored the feminine figure
in his three-portrait series “The Falling Woman”
(2010). Again, the subjects’ visage remains hidden
here under either a blue veil or a short, wavy
blonde bob. Contrasting with their protectively
covered faces, the women unabashedly pull open
the top of their blouse, baring their breasts. An
enigmatic quality pervades the resulting images.
A disquieting atmosphere similarly comes
through in the “Mystery Woman” series (2017–18),
in which Yokoo layers surreal elements onto his
portraiture. Here, he partially obscures glamorous
women’s faces, except for their painted red lips,
with quotidian objects, as in Women with Toilet
Paper (2017) and Woman with Cabbage (2017).
The perturbing yet sensual depictions recall
the notorious nudes of French painter Francis
Picabia, who drew from 1930s erotic magazines.
Predominantly Western-styled and white, the
models featured in Yokoo’s compositions are
reminiscent of vintage advertisements from the
1930s and ’40s. He has attributed his penchant
for kitsch to growing up with an adoptive father
who worked as a kimono-fabric wholesaler and
admiring the fabric labels that blended Western
and Japanese motifs.
The other “Mystery Woman” paintings
resemble film-noir posters, pairing femmes fatales
with men who don’t appear quite human. In
Cavern of Love (2018), the male lover has a sickly,
green complexion. Meanwhile, a gaping black
hole, evoking the damage left by an object that had
been thrown through a glass window, mars the
woman’s head. The villain in Looted Lady (2018)
is even more ghoulish in form. Faceless with two
craters where eyes should be, he wraps one arm
around a smiling, blonde woman, as the other
points a gun at her disembodied torso. Indeed,
Yokoo’s latest series gives off the feeling of a
morbid reverie from which one struggles to
awake. A skull hovering over a woman’s face in
the exhibition’s titular work Death and Dreams
(Part I) (2017) invokes an art historical trope that
depicts women with the skeletal figure of death.
By not only deploying the male gaze but
also casting death as something nostalgic,
“Mystery Woman” revels in the seductive nature
of contemplating mortality. The presence of a
grim reaper indirectly lingers in Black, Red,
Blue (2017), which shows a book with the word
“Faust” on the cover imposed over the woman’s
face. The artist frequently referenced the afterlife
in his early graphic design, such as in a 1970
photo project inspired by Dante Alighieri’s The
Divine Comedy and later through painting ravaged
landscapes, reminiscent of the underworld, in
his “Red” series, begun in 1996. “Death and
Dreams” suggested that Yokoo is not yet done
with this ever-present theme, or with his devotion
to painting.
MIMI WONG
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on Tadanori Yokoo.

134 | NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111


Opposite page
TADANORI YOKOO
“Back of Head” series
1980
21 watercolor works on paper, 69 x 54.5 cm each.
Installation view of “Death and Dreams”
at Albertz Benda, New York, 2018.
Photo by Casey Kelbaugh.
Courtesy the artist and Albertz Benda.
This page
SIAH ARMAJANI
Room for Deportees
2017
From the series “Seven Rooms of Hospitality,”
2017. Metal, wood, barbed wire, mailbox,
hat and purse, 243.8 x 305.4 x 111.1 cm.
Installation view of “Follow This Line” at
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2018.
Courtesy the artist, Rossi & Rossi, London/
Hong Kong, and Walker Art Center.
MINNEAPOLIS
Walker Art Center
SIAH ARMAJANI
FOLLOW THIS LINE
The last few years have been a time of reflection
on past and present glories for Iranian modern
artists. In 2018, New York’s MoMA PS1 staged
a posthumous retrospective for director and
playwright Reza Abdoh, and London’s Mosaic
Rooms surveyed the career of abstract painter
Behjat Sadr. In Minneapolis, the Walker Art Center
cast the spotlight on septuagenarian artist and
architect Siah Armajani, who has been living and
working in the city since 1960.
The sprawling retrospective of more than
100 works traced Armajani’s six-decade-long
career. Considering its scale, as well as Armajani’s
ravenous appetite for experimenting with,
and blending, different forms and disciplines,
the show’s title, “Follow This Line,” could be
interpreted as ironic. Far from being linear, the
path the retrospective took viewers down was
circuitous and at times endless. In this sense,
the exhibition could be seen as an Armajani
piece in its own right: a macrocosm of disorder
within order.
If there was anything that could be followed,
it was the artist on his journey from Tehran to
the United States. A number of works produced
in the 1950s, while Armajani was still in Tehran,
stood out on account of their themes, medium
and aesthetic. Works on paper such as Book,
Taranee and Dictionary of Numbers (both 1957)
employ visual elements from medieval Persian
manuscripts, as well as talismans. Produced
during the same period, Shirt #1 (1958) features
calligraphy inscribed on a traditional Iranian
tunic belonging to Armajani’s father. Although he
would create similar Iran-centric pieces during
his first year away from home—most notably
Letters Home (1960) and Letter #6 (1961), poignant
documentations of exile and longing that he
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would draw on decades later in the pen-on-mylar
scrolls Written Minneapolis (The Last Tomb) (2014)
and Written Iran (2015–16)—his new surroundings
would drastically alter his artistic career.
The late 1960s was one of Armajani’s most
experimental periods. Works like Effaced
Dictionary (1968)—in which the definitions are
all blacked out—and the stenciled television
installation Moon Landing (1969), as well as the
vinyl record A Fairly Large Number (1969), are
instances of forays into readymade art, and, in
the case of the latter, sound recordings. The works
that brought Armajani acclaim in the 1970s were
his architectural sculptures. “Follow This Line”
featured many models for bridges and houses he
imagined (and in some cases realized), including
more than 150 small maquettes for the “Dictionary
for Building” series (1974–75). It’s not so much the
models themselves that are interesting, but rather
their underlying ideas. His House to Work; Work
to House Bridge (1969) is endearing in its idealism
in the face of practical impossibility—an effect
echoed in later models such as House Under the
Bridge (1974).
Above all, the show’s focal point was Armajani’s
“Seven Rooms of Hospitality” series (2017),
especially in light of the current sociopolitical
climate in the US. With its conspicuous reference
to poet Nizami Ganjavi’s epic Seven Beauties
(in which the Iranian monarch Bahram V visits
seven women in seven pavilions), “Seven Rooms”
follows up on Armajani’s installation critical of
the Iraq War, Fallujah (2004–05), which Armajani
initially struggled to exhibit in the US. Just as
politically charged, if not more so, the group
of works provide palpable commentary on the
Trump administration’s immigration policies as
well as the global refugee crisis. The 3D-printed
food truck Room for Asylum Seekers aside, the
six other installations—reflecting the spirit of
Russian Constructivism—present audiences with
various episodes in the experience of a modern-
day refugee in the US. There’s a life-size Room for
Deportees, complete with barbed wire; austere
looking rooms for detainees and migrant workers;
a room for refugees; and downright draconian-
looking rooms for exiles and the displaced. The
inclusion of these critical works elevated “Follow
This Line” from being purely a celebration of
former triumphs. Where does this line lead?
Toward some deserved approbation, surely—but
hopefully also toward an earnest discussion about
the ills plaguing the US and the world at large.
JOOBIN BEKHRAD
135
 LOS ANGELES
Blum & Poe

TOMOO GOKITA

If the face is the mirror of the mind and the eyes is the astute sensibility of Gokita—though the TOMOO GOKITA
Replicant J.B.
the window to the soul, what happens when visual information is incomplete, off-kilter or
2018
visages are obscured? Displayed at Blum & Poe in discomfiting, the viewing experience is deeply Acrylic gouache on canvas, 130.2 x 130.2 x 2.5 cm.
Los Angeles, Tokyo-based artist Tomoo Gokita’s satisfying due to the richness and fluidity of his Courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe,
Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo.
latest body of work comprises single, double and painted surface.
group portraits. However, the information central Often, Gokita’s compositions appear as if they
to a typical portrait—the subject’s likeness—is are family snapshots that have been burned in a
made to be bizarre, jarring or missing completely. fire or otherwise compromised. House of Terror
As such, meanings in the black-and-white features a standing man and a seated couple in
paintings are diffuse and dependent on the formal wear against a backdrop that suggests a
viewer—the blobs and smears covering the faces domestic space. Their stoic stance and the interior
appear like Rorschach inkblots. Replicant J.B. (all details of the floor and chairs are reminiscent of
works 2018), for example, takes a jovial image of David Hockney’s double portraits of the late
deceased African-American musical icon James 1960s and early ’70s, except that no faces are
Brown and turns it into something ghastly. Where depicted and one of the woman’s hands is
his face should be is a cavity, as if someone ripped monstrously disfigured. Living Together pictures
off his skin, revealing his nasal skeleton and teeth. a possibly vacationing couple posing for a photo
Is the death mask in Replicant J.B. perhaps a in their swimwear. We see the woman’s smile but
comment on the flamboyant performer’s brushes the rest of her face is smeared away. In place of the
with the law, including charges for drugs, domestic man’s face is an outline of a horseshoe, the center
violence and two police chases? Pop-culture of which looks as if it leads to a deep black hole
references are also found in Minor Apprehension, of nothingness.
a painting of Marilyn Monroe and Muhammad Gokita has been quoted as saying that he
Ali in an embrace. Instead of the bombshell’s doesn’t intend for his paintings to mean anything.
beauty, however, we see a caricatured, exaggerated However, it was apparent in this exhibition that,
expression as she glances sideways at her male purposefully or not, his canvases require us to
companion, who has tiny close-set cartoon eyes. interrogate the images and stories we surround
It is pertinent to consider not only the meanings ourselves with, from photographs to paintings,
of these images to the individual psyche, but magazines and social-media posts. Without
also their cultural significance depending on the faces, we are forced to attempt to look beyond
country in which they are viewed. Considering the surface.
current racial tensions in the United States, these JENNIFER S. LI
images were layered with contention in the Los
*Visit our Digital Library at library.artasiapacific.com for more articles
Angeles gallery. on Tomoo Gokita.
Music has always been a big influence on
Gokita, and several of the pieces are named after
song titles, though the phrases do less to explicate
than to confuse. Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams,
the title of a whimsically melancholic Bing
Crosby tune, shows a group of men and women
drinking and socializing. The central woman is
the only person whose face is fully visible, and
yet her expression is inscrutable. A couple of the
images appear to stem from Gokita’s fondness for
1960s and ’70s soft-core pornography magazines
(his father did advertising for Playboy and as a
young boy Gokita frequently flipped through the
magazine’s pages in the family’s living room).
Among them is a painting of a seated woman
draped in a towel, named Bongo Nyah, Jamaican
Creole slang for “gangster Rastafarian” and the
title of a song covered by several reggae artists.
Her face and part of the backdrop are melting
away, as if burned or waterlogged. Bemsha Swing,
also a jazz standard by Thelonious Monk and
Denzil Best, shows a fleshy woman reclining
seductively. Where her right hand should be
is a fluid swath of white paint, contrasting
with the deep black of the background. This

136 | NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111

 Book Reviews

The Art of Place, the Place of Art

Witty wordplay and expressions of
diaspora identities resist the status quo

The two provocateurs who populate Slavs and
Tatars keep a low profile. Their real names don’t
appear in their works or their writings, and as proper
philosopher-nomads they don’t advertise where they’re
based in. They describe themselves as a “faction of
polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of
the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of
China known as Eurasia.” This vast canvas gives them
ample space to roam; but rather than flailing with all-
encompassing brushstrokes—they confess that they
“are not painters, but polemicists”—they build complex,
even absurd, structures from the minutiae of
history, language, geography, ethnicity and the everyday.
In so doing, they ride the rails of two major worlds of
thought and action that have galvanized conflict in the
past and present centuries: Islam and communism.
Perhaps not coincidentally, they emerged on the art
scene in 2006, around the time of Gary Shteyngart’s
post-Soviet satirical novel Absurdistan and Sacha Baron
Cohen’s mockumentary film on Kazakhstan, Borat.
Their installations, lectures and performances,
divided into “cycles,” are documented in excellent
publications, whose digital versions are free to
download. The writing is clear, elegant and often
humorous; didactic, yet academic-lite and scintillating,
transporting the reader to the faraway worlds they
inhabit. In fact, the key to understanding their practice
lies in these texts, which contain the essence of their
works. Reading the cogent texts alone is also a rare
pleasure in a world of mega-syllabic art writing. It’s
refreshing to see language, linguistics and especially
puns, both verbal and visual, raised to the realm of art.
By comparison, many of the ready-mades, plaques,
banners and maps they display seem almost like banal
afterthoughts, requiring little to no craftsmanship.
The book Slavs and Tatars: Mouth to Mouth is a
retrospective compilation of highlights, in the form of
texts and on-site photographs, from the duo’s eight
multimedia cycles completed between 2006 and
2017. (A subsequent cycle, “Wripped Scripped,” was

138 | NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111


CIRCLES AND CIRCUITS:
CHINESE CARIBBEAN ART
By Alexandra Chang, Evelyn Hu-DeHart,
Julia P. Herzberg, Mar Hollingsworth,
Walton Look Lai, Sean Metzger, Patricia
Mohammed, Lok Siu and Steven Y. Wong
Published by the Chinese
American Museum, 2018
Softcover, 230 pages.
SLAVS AND TATARS: MOUTH TO MOUTH
By Sussan Babaie, Jörg Heiser,
David Joselit and Pablo Larios
Published by Koenig Books, London, 2017.
Hardcover, 231 pages.
Photos by Esther Chan for ArtAsiaPacific.
actualized in 2018, too late for inclusion in this book.)
A biblical adage could well serve as a preface: In the
beginning was the word. The bright orange-red cover
bears the group’s logo, the collective’s name in gold,
with an elongated cartoonish tongue snaking its way
in and out of the letters. In this Genesis setting, the
clownish tongue is a stark reminder that language
distinguishes human from beast, and ipso facto, that it
is through the medium of linguistics that we are often
bestial. Slavs and Tatars thrives on alphabets and builds
monuments from individual letters: besides English, we
find Arabic, Greek, Turkish (in Arabic and Latin/Roman
script), French, German, Polish (in Cyrillic and Roman
script), Hebrew, Chinese, Georgian, Boxori (Persian
dialect, Hebrew script) and, of course, Russian, in this
book. When these scripts converge in their works, they
illuminate historical acts of imperialism, colonialism,
racism and nationalism attached to the people who use
and abuse them.
Photographs of the group’s installations capture their
restlessly evolving antics, and essays by four European
critics tease out the messages in the works. The book
is fact and imagination at its best. For example, in the
cycle “Pickle Politics,” politically charged wordplay
(“Give peace a chance: bomb ayran”) and incongruous
imagery (such as a pickle paired with a torpedo with a
nipple) is woven into rugs, which are placed on basic
US Army cots. The central theme of this particular
installation cycle, part of the final multimedia project
presented in this book, is fermentation, and the
protagonist is the microbe: “The original foreigner or
Other.” Another element of this cycle is illustrated in
an ofset print titled Ogórek Trocki (2016), a sly play on
the phallic nature of the cucumber (“ogórek” in Polish)
and post-Solidarity politics. “Trocki” is evidently a pun
on the Trakai cucumber, a gourd ideal for pickling that
is indigenous to the city of that name in Lithuania. As
the accompanying text explains, the plant was brought
north in the 14th century by Crimean Karaites, an anti-
rabbinical Jewish sect that historically enjoyed a close
relationship to Islam, and, through their unorthodox
approach to their faith, managed to avoid a Tsarist
tax on the Jews and survive both pogroms and the
Holocaust. (Incidentally, “Trocki” is Trotsky in Polish—a
factoid I stumbled across on Google Translator, in the
Slav-Tatar manner.)
In the cycle “Not Moscow Not Mecca” (2011–17),
the combine delves into the syncretism of Central
Asia, seeking to illustrate the confrontation between
Islam and communism, embodied, for example, in
Han-Uighur friction in Xinjiang, China; first, through an
installation of plastic reproductions of fruits native to
the region, and second, via contradictory viewpoints, set
out in a text regarding the Qianlong emperor’s (reigned
1735–96) pursuit of a Uighur princess. In the Han
Chinese version, a modern creation, the emperor won
her over in a triumph of ethnic unity; in the Uighur, she
refused his blandishments, “never giving up the fruit,”
thus becoming a symbol of Uighur resistance.
A smaller, maritime but equally diverse part of the
world, the Caribbean, is the field of play for Circles
and Circuits: Chinese Caribbean Art, the catalog for an
exhibition held jointly at the California African American
Museum and the Chinese American Museum, both in
Los Angeles. The anthology contains the work of 39
artists with connections to China and the Caribbean,
ranging from the direct to the tenuous. The historical,
Reviews artasiapacific.com
geographical and biographical information in this book
rivals the art in terms of interest and variety. Walton
Look Lai’s “A Historical Context for Chinese Migration,”
Julia Herzberg’s “Past-Present: Conversations with Maria
P. Lau and Katarina Wong,” Sean Metzger’s “Caribbean
Art and Chinese Imaginaries” and Lok Siu’s “Diasporic
Afect: Circulating Art, Producing Relationality” provide
theoretical and personal background for this heretofore
unexplored subject.
Beginning in the mid-19th century, as editor and
co-curator of the exhibition Alexandra Chang writes
in her introduction, Chinese men, mostly from Fujian
and Guangdong, traveled to the Caribbean as contract
laborers or merchants. By the end of the century,
almost 7.5 million Chinese had arrived in Cuba, the
British West Indies and Panama. Their escape from
war, political unrest and poverty coincided neatly with
the abolition of African slavery, which led to Chinese
employment in the sugar and tobacco industries. From
there, the Chinese population dispersed further into
Chinese mestizo (the term “creole” for the artists is
inappropriate here, but may be applied to the art) or
Chinese-hyphenated communities in North and Central
America and Europe.
In the book and exhibition, we see how the Chinese
identities of these artists wane with intermarriage,
migration and time. For example, Wifredo Lam (1902–
82), born in Cuba to a Chinese father and Afro-Cuban
mother, and raised in a family that practiced Catholicism
and Santeria, identified as Afro-Cuban. He studied art
in Spain, and was influenced by Cubism, Surrealism and
Picasso, and collaborated with André Breton.
Somewhat confusingly, and possibly due to a
dearth of talent or inventory, at least ten of the artists
mentioned have no Chinese blood, but were born
or lived in the Caribbean. As there was also a strong
Indian (South Asian) influence in the arts and literature
in the region, the scholar Patricia Mohammed, in her
essay, “Intersecting Trajectories,” wisely uses “Asian” to
describe both Chinese and Indian immigrants and their
descendants, an approach that disconnects notions of
art and national origin.
An overemphasis on history, genealogy and ethnicity
should not deter the reader from appreciating the works
illustrated here. Dated from the early 20th century
to the present decade, the genres run from works on
paper and canvas to photography, sculpture, video
and installation. Sybil Atteck (1911–1975), who studied
with German Expressionist Max Beckmann, is well
represented; her salutary influence is seen in the works
of several other Trinidadian artists, including Carlisle
Chang—who helped design the coat of arms and flag
of Trinidad and Tobago when it became independent in
1962—and Willi Chen. Cuban artist Flora Fong takes the
triviality out of the palm tree trope, rendering them in
Chinese-calligraphy-style strokes, in her paintings.
Circles and Circuits and Slavs and Tatars are entirely
diferent kinds of books, which deal with the art of
seemingly autochthonous parts of the world. But
if they convey a single message, it might be that
compared to human lives and nationalities that morph
over time and space, art, even in its most inscrutably
squirming performances, remains static: a vital mirror to
destructive and creative acts of dispersion.
DON J. COHN
*Visit our Digital Library at library.artasiapacific.com for more articles
on Slavs and Tatars.
139
 AUSTRALIA CHINA GALERIE URS MEILE, PACE BEIJING

A C
BEIJING-LUCERNE 798 Art District, No. 2 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang
District, Beijing 100015
104 Caochangdi Cun, Cui Gezhuang Xiang, » www.pacegallery.com
Chaoyang District, Beijing 100015 » info@pacebeijing.com
» galerieursmeile.com » (tel)+86.10.5978.9781
» galerie@galerieursmeile.com » (fax)+86.10.5978.9781 - 818
» (tel)+86.10.6433.3393 » 10am–6pm (Tues–Sat)
» (fax)+86.10.6433.0203 Pace Beijing was founded in 2008, becoming the first
» 11am–6.30pm (Tues–Sun) major Manhattan art gallery to open in Beijing.
Ai Weiwei, Chen Hui, Cheng Ran, Wim Delvoye, Andreas
Golder, Hu Qingyan, L/B, Li Dafang, Li Gang, Li Zhanyang,
Liu Ding, Meng Huang, Qiu Shihua, Christian Schoeler,
Shan Fan, Shao Fan, Anatoly Shuravlev, Julia Steiner, Not
Vital, Wang Xingwei, Xia Xiaowan, Xie Nanxing, Yan Xing.

4A CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ARARIO GALLERY SHANGHAI GALLERIA CONTINUA PÉKIN FINE ARTS
ASIAN ART 1F, No. 2879 Longteng Avenue, Xuhui District, Dashanzi, 798 Art District No. 8503, 2 Jiuxianqiao
No. 241 Cao Changdi Village, Cui Gezhuang Xiang,
Chaoyang District, Beijing 100015
181–187 Hay Street, Haymarket, NSW 2000 Shanghai Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100015 » www.pekinfinearts.com
» www.4a.com.au » info@ararioshanghai.com » galleriacontinua.com » info@pekinfinearts.com
» info@4a.com.au » (tel)+86.21.5424.9220 » beijing@galleriacontinua.com.cn » (tel)+86.10.5127.3220
» (tel)+61.02.9212.0380 » 10am–7pm (Tues–Sun) » (tel)+86.10.5978.9505 » (fax)+86.10.5127.3223
» (fax)+61.02.9281.0873 » (fax)+86.10.6436.4464 » 10am–6pm (Tues–Fri), 11am–6pm (Sat)
» 11am–6pm (Tues–Sat) » 11am–6pm (Tues–Sun) » Sun and Mon by appointment only
» Closed on Public Holidays Pékin Fine Arts is a Beijing-based contemporary art gallery
We are a non-profit organisation. Our program of exhibitions, representing international artists, focusing primarily on
talks and lectures is dedicated to the contemporary art of the artists from China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Hong Kong
Asia-Pacific and Australian and Asian cultural dialogue. and Taiwan.

ANNA SCHWARTZ GALLERY POWER STATION OF ART

No. 200, Huayuangang Road, Huangpu District,
245 Wilson Street, Darlington, NSW 2008 Shanghai
» annaschwartzgallery.com » www.powerstationofart.org
» mail@annaschwartzgallery.com » info@powerstationofart.com
» (tel)+61.2.8580.7002 » (tel)+86.21.3110.8550
» 10am–6pm (Tues–Fri) » 11am–7pm (Tues–Sun. Last entry at 6pm)
» 11am–5pm (Sat) » Open on all national holidays
185 Flinders Lane, Melbourne 3000 Established on Oct. 1st, 2012, the Power Station of
» (tel)+61.3.9654.6131 Art (PSA) is the first state-run museum dedicated to
» 12pm–6pm (Tues–Fri)

ART
contemporary art in mainland China and home to the
» 1pm–5pm (Sat) Shanghai Biennale.

INSTITUTE OF MODERN ART

420 Brunswick Street, Brisbane, QLD 4006
» www.ima.org.au
DIRECTORY SPRINGS CENTER OF ART
797 Street, 798 Art District, No. 2 Jiuxiangqiao Road,
Chaoyang District, Beijing 100015 [Opposite car park]
» ima@ima.org.au » www.springsart.com

111
» (tel)+61.732.525.750 » info@springsart.com
» (fax)+61.732.525.072 » (tel)+86.10.5762.6373
» 12pm–6pm (Tues, Wed, Fri and Sat) » (fax)+86.10.5762.6372
» 12pm–8pm (Thurs) » 10am–6pm (Tues–Sun)
Since its establishment in 1975, the Institute of Modern Art Springs Center of Art is located inside Factory 798, Beijing’s
has been a leading venue for the production, presentation, most vibrant art district. The Center has a spectacular
and circulation of art in Australia. Bauhaus-style showroom measuring 2,300 square meters.

A comprehensive guide to the

SHERMAN CONTEMPORARY TANG CONTEMPORARY ART
ART FOUNDATION contemporary arts in Asia, the Middle East, 798 Art District, 2 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang
16–20 Goodhope Street, Paddington, NSW 2021
» sherman-scaf.org.au
the Pacific and around the world. District, Beijing 100015
» tangcontemporary.com
» info@sherman-scaf.org.au » info@tangcontemporary.com
» (tel)+61.2.9331.1112 » (tel)+86.10.5978.9610
» 11am–5pm (Wed–Sat) » (fax)+86.10.5978.9379
» 11am–6.30pm (Tues–Sun)
A not-for-profit organization providing a platform
» Closed on Mondays & Public Holidays
for visual artists, research, education and exhibitions of
significant and innovative contemporary art primarily
from Asia, Australia and the Pacific Rim.

BELGIUM ARTMIA INK STUDIO FRANCE

B F
261 Caochangdi Airport Service Road, Red No. 1-B1, Caochangdi, Chaoyang District,
Chaoyang District, Beijing 100015 Beijing 100015
» artmia.net » www.inkstudio.com.cn
» artmia.info@artmia.net » info@inkstudio.com.cn
» (tel)+86.8457.4550 » (tel)+86.10.5127.3143
» (fax)+86.8457.3782 » (fax)+86.10.5127.3143
» 9.30am to 6pm (Tues-Sun) » 10am–6pm (Tues–Sun)
» Closed on Mondays and Public Holidays Ink Studio is a Beijing-based gallery and experimental art
space devoted to documenting and responding to new and
exciting developments in the media of ink painting currently
emanating from China.

AXEL VERVOORDT GALLERY BEIJING COMMUNE MAGICIAN SPACE GALERIE EMMANUEL PERROTIN
Vlaeykensgang – Oude Koornmarkt 16 Art Zone, No.4 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, 798 East Road, 798 Art Zone, 2 Jiuxianqiao Road, 76 Rue de Turenne, 75003 Paris
2000 Antwerp Beijing 100015 Chaoyang District, Beijing 100015 10 Impasse Saint Claude, 75003 Paris
» www.axelvervoordtgallery.com » www.beijingcommune.com » www.magician-space.com » galerieperrotin.com
» info@axelvervoordtgallery.com » info@beijingcommune.com » info@magician-space.com » info-paris@galerieperrotin.com
» (tel)+32.477.88.80.60 » (tel)+86.10.8456.2862 » (tel)+86.10.5840.5117 » (tel)+33.1.4216.7979
» 2pm–6pm (Wed–Sat) or by appointment » 10am–6pm (Tues–Sat) » (fax)+86.10.5978.9635 » (fax)+33.1.4216.7974
From its inception in 2011 the gallery has been a strong Founded in 2004, where the most influential figures » 10.30am–6.30pm (Tues–Sun) » 11am–7pm (Tues–Sat)
supporter of Zero and Gutai art. Our vision has gradually in the Chinese art scene launched their watershed solo Founded in 2008, Magician Space seeks to challenge,
evolved into contemporary art with a special interest in exhibitions, and simultaneously serving as the incubator stimulate, and address the blind spots in the development
the concept of the void, space, and time. for emerging artists. of contemporary art in China.

140 | NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111

PALAIS DE TOKYO ALISAN FINE ARTS EMPTY GALLERY PÉKIN FINE ARTS (HONG KONG)
13, Avenue du President Wilson, 75116 Paris 21/F Lyndhurst Tower, 1 Lyndhurst Terrace, Central 18 & 19/F Grand Marine Centre, 3 Yue Fung Street, 16F, Union Industrial Building, 48 Wong Chuk Hang
» www.palaisdetokyo.com » (tel)+825.2526.1091 Tin Wan Road, Aberdeen
» accueil@palaisdetokyo.com » 10am–6pm (Mon–Sat) » www.theemptygallery.com » www.pekinfinearts.com
» (tel)+33.0.1.4723.5401 » alisan.com.hk » contact@theemptygallery.com » info@pekinfinearts.com
» 12pm–12am (Wed–Mon) » info@alisan.com.hk » (tel)+852.2563.3396 » (tel)+852.2177.6190
» Jan 1 / May 1 and Dec 25 (Closed annually) » 11am–7pm (Tue–Sat) » 10am–6pm (Tues–Fri), 11am–6pm (Sat)
Founded in 1981, it is the first professionally run gallery
» Dec 24 and 31 (Special closing) Empty Gallery showcases art with a special commitment » Sun and Mon by appointment only
in Hong Kong to promote contemporary Chinese artists
Founded in 2002, Palais de Tokyo is dedicated to bringing including: Chao Chung-hsiang, Chu Teh-chun, Gao to ephemeral time-based, and non-object-orientated Pékin Fine Arts is a Beijing-based contemporary art gallery
the public close to the best French and international Xingjian, Zao Wou-ki. practices, alongside a program of pioneering multimedia representing international artists, focusing primarily on
contemporary creative work within a 4000-square-meter commissions, performances and music. artists from China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Hong Kong
space. With more than 300,000 visitors a year, it is one of and Taiwan.
the most widely visited art centers in Europe.

GERMANY ASIA ART ARCHIVE HANART TZ GALLERY POLY AUCTION HONG KONG

G
11/F, Hollywood Centre, 401 Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central Suites 701-708, 7/F, One Pacific Place 88 Queensway,
233 Hollywood Road, Sheung Wan » hanart.com Admiralty
» aaa.org.hk » hanart@hanart.com » www.polyauction.com.hk
» info@aaa.org.hk » (tel)+852.2526.9019 » info@polyauction.com.hk
» (tel)+852.2815.1112 » (fax)+852.2521.2001 » (tel)+852.2303.9857
» (fax)+852.2815.0032 » 10am–6.30pm (Mon–Fri) » (fax)+852.2303.9888
» 10am–6pm (Sat) » 9am–6pm (Mon–Fri)
Hanart TZ Gallery represents contemporary artists from Established in 2012, a young but remarkable auction house
Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. in Hong Kong and the Asia Pacific region.

A3 ARNDT ART AGENCY AXEL VERVOORDT GALLERY HANART SQUARE RAVENEL INTERNATIONAL ART
Fasanenstraße 28, 10719 Berlin Unit 15D, Entertainment Building, 30 Queen’s Road, 2/F, Mai On Industrial Building, 19 Kung Yip Street,
GROUP
» www.arndtartagency.com Central Kwai Chung Room 1307A, 13/F, Kodak House II, 39 Healthy Street
» contact@arndtartagency.com » www.axelvervoordtgallery.com.hk » hanart.com East, North Point
» (tel)+49.30.88.71.34.43 » info@axelvervoordtgallery.com.hk » hanart@hanart.com » www.ravenelart.com
» 10am–6pm (Mon–Fri) » (tel)+852.5937.8098 » (tel)+852.2526.9019 » enquiries@ravenel.com
A3 Arndt Art Agency presents curated exhibitions in » 11am–7pm (Tues–Sat) » (fax)+852.2521.2001 » (tel)+852.2889.0859
collaboration with international artists, museums, and As the first overseas exhibition venue of the Axel » 10am–6.30pm (Mon–Fri) » (fax)+852.2889.0850
private collections while staging temporary projects in Vervoordt Gallery in Antwerp, the gallery continues to » 10am–6pm (Sat)
Asia and Australia. bridge artistic expressions between the east and the west Hanart Square represents contemporary artists from
presenting modern and contemporary artists, some of Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
them lesser known to the Hong Kong audience.

NOME BLINDSPOT GALLERY HONG KONG ARTS CENTRE ROSSI & ROSSI (HONG KONG)
Glogauer str. 17 – 10999 - Berlin 15/F, Po Chai Industrial Building, 28 Wong Chuk 2 Harbour Road, Wan Chai Yally Industrial Building, Unit 3C,
» www.nomegallery.com Hang Road, Wong Chuk Hang » www.hkac.org.hk 6 Yip Fat Street, Wong Chuk Hang
» info@nomegallery.com » www.blindspotgallery.com » hkac@hkac.org.hk » www.rossirossi.com
» (tel)+030 92283788 » info@blindspotgallery.com » (tel)+852.2582.0200 » info@rossirossi.com
» 3 pm - 7 pm (Tuesday - Saturday) » (tel)+852.2517.6238 » (fax)+852.2802.0798 » (tel)+852.3575.9417
Founded in 2015, NOME presents a curated program » 10am–6pm (Tues–Sat) » 8am–11pm (Mon–Sun) » 11am–6pm (Tues–Sat) or by appointment
developed with international artists whose practices » (Sun and Mon) by appointment only A self-financed and non-profit organisation. For the past Rossi & Rossi stands at the forefront of the global Asian art
engage diverse disciplines and involve a broad range of » Closed on Public Holidays 37 years, HKAC has been promoting contemporary art and market, pioneering its development in the West. The new
media. culture through a wide range of programmes. Its education industrial space in Hong Kong gives the perfect opportunity
arm, the Hong Kong Art School, is an accredited institute to develop ambitious contemporary projects while
established in 2000. HKAC is also the Main Operator of continuing to showcase classical Himalayan masterpieces.
“Comix Home Base”.

HONG CHRISTIE’S MASSIMO DE CARLO SIN SIN FINE ART

H
KONG 22nd Floor, Alexandra House
18 Chater Road, Central
3F Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central
» www.massimodecarlo.com
52 & 54 Sai Street, Central
» sinsinfineart.com
» christies.com » hongkong@massimodecarlo.com » info@sinsinfineart.com
» enquiryhk@christies.com » (tel)+852.2613.8062 » (tel)+852.2858.5072
» (tel)+852.2760.1766 » 10.30am–7pm (Mon–Sat) » 9.30am–6.30pm (Tues–Sat)
» (fax)+852.2760.1767 Massimo De Carlo (MDC) gallery was founded in Milan in Sin Sin Fine Art is the first and main force in Hong Kong
» 9.30am–6pm (Mon–Fri) 1987 with galleries in Milan, London and Hong Kong. to bring Indonesian artworks to Hong Kong and open new
Christie’s, the world’s leading art business, a name that windows for them to the international art scene. Sin Sin
speaks of extraordinary art, unparalleled service and Fine Art focuses on contemporary art from all over the
expertise, a showcase for the unique and the beautiful. world that is spiritual and inspiring, cultivating a collection
of works by selected international artists.

10 CHANCERY LANE DE SARTHE GALLERY PACE HONG KONG SOTHEBY’S

G/F, 10 Chancery Lane, Central 20/F, Global Trade Square, No. 21 Wong Chuk Hang 15C Entertainment Building, 30 Queens Road Central Suites 3101–3106, 31/F, 1 Pacific Place,
» 10chancerylanegallery.com Road » www.pacegallery.com/hongkong 88 Queensway, Admiralty
» info@10chancerylanegallery.com » desarthe.com » info@pacehongkong.com » sothebys.com
» (tel)+852.2810.0065 » hongkong@desarthe.com » (tel)+852.2608.5065 » (tel)+852.2524.8121
» 10am–6pm (Tues–Sat) » (tel)+852.2167.8896 » (fax)+852.2608.5064 » (fax)+852.2810.6238
Since 2001, 10 Chancery Lane Gallery has been a driving » (fax)+852.2167.8893 » 11am–7pm (Tues–Sat)
force in visual arts in Hong Kong and is one of Asia’s leading » 11am–7pm (Mon–Fri), 1pm–6pm (Sat) » Closed on public holidays.
contemporary art galleries. Covering a broad range of 19th- and 20th-century masters’ paintings and sculptures: Pace is a leading contemporary art gallery representing
Pan-Asia Pacific artists of culturally diverse backgrounds, Degas, Monet, Rodin, Calder, Giacometti, Miro, Picasso, many of the most significant international artists and
the gallery focuses on emerging movements as well as Chu Teh Chun, de Kooning, Mitchell, Warhol, Zao Wou-Ki, estates of the 20th and 21st centuries.
historically important established artists. Kruger, Chen Zhen, Hirst, Kapoor, LaChapelle, Mori, Venet.

AFFINITY FOR ART EDOUARD MALINGUE GALLERY PARA SITE ART SPACE SOTHEBY’S HONG KONG GALLERY
1/F, 1 Queen’s Road West, Sheung Wan 1/F, 8 Queen’s Road, Central » para-site.org.hk 5/F, One Pacific Place, 88 Queensway, Admiralty
» www.ainityforART.com » edouardmalingue.com » info@para-site.org.hk » sothebys.com
» info@ainityforART.com » mail@edouardmalingue.com » (tel)+852.2517.4620 » HKgallery@sothebys.com
» (tel)+825.3173.8626 » (tel)+852.2810.0317 » (fax)+852.2517.6850 » (tel)+852.2822.5566
» 12pm–6pm (Tues–Sat) or by appointment » (fax)+852.2810.0311 » 12pm–7pm (Wed–Sun)
Affinity for ART represents emerging and established » 10am–7pm (Mon–Sat)
contemporary artists in Asia - primarily from Southeast Edouard Malingue Gallery presents emerging and
Asia, Taiwan and China. established contemporary artists with a multicultural
perspective. Occasionally, the gallery shows modern art
in collaboration with Galerie Malingue, Paris.

Art Directory artasiapacific.com 141

WHITESTONE GALLERY ITALY TOKYO WONDER SITE GALLERY HYUNDAI, GANGNAM
7-8/F, H Queen’s, 80 Queen’s Road, Central 7-3-5 Toyo, Koto-ku, Tokyo 135-0016 (Located in MOT
SPACE
» www.whitestone.hk Temporary Office) Art Tower 640-6 Sinsa-dong, Gangnam-gu,
» info@whitestone.hk » www.tokyo-ws.org Seoul 135-896
» (tel)+852.2523.8001 » (tel)+81.3.5633.6373 » galleryhyundai.com
» (fax)+852.2623.8005 » (fax)+81.3.5633.6374 » info@galleryhyundai.com
» 11am–7pm (Tues–Sun) With venues at Hongo, Shibuya and a residency, Tokyo » (tel)+82.2.519.0800
Whitestone Gallery specializes in Japanese Post-War Wonder Site is an art center dedicated to the generation » (fax)+82.2.519.0880
and Contemporary Art. We have spaces in Tokyo and and promotion of new art and culture from the heart of » 10am–6pm (Tues–Sun)
Hong Kong. Tokyo. The center supports and nurtures young talent
in all fields, as well as taking a role as a hub in a global
cultural network of affiliated cultural facilities in Japan
and abroad.

INDIA GALLERIA CONTINUA TOMIO KOYAMA GALLERY GALLERY HYUNDAI, MAIN SPACE

I
Via del Castello 11, San Gimignano (SI) 53037 3-10-11 Sendagaya, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 151-0051 122 Sagan-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul 110-190
» galleriacontinua.com » tomioyokoyamagallery.com » galleryhyundai.com
» info@galleriacontinua.com » info@tomiokoyamagallery.com » info@galleryhyundai.com
» (tel)+39.057.794.3134 » (tel)+81.3.6434.7225 » (tel)+82.2.2287.3591
» (fax)+39.057.794.0484 » (fax)+81.3.6434.7226 » (fax)+82.2.2287.3590
» 2pm–7pm (Tues–Sat) » 11am–7pm (Tues–Sat) » 10am–6pm (Tues–Sun)
» Closed on Sundays, Mondays and National Holidays

NATURE MORTE MASSIMO DE CARLO OTA FINE ARTS GALLERY HYUNDAI, NEW SPACE
» www.massimodecarlo.com
A-1 Neeti Bagh, New Delhi 110049 » (fax)+39.02.7492.135 Piramide Bldg. 3F, 6-6-9 Roppongi, Minato-ku, 80 Sagan-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul 110-190
» naturemorte.com Tokyo 106-0032 » galleryhyundai.com
» info@naturemorte.com Piazza Belgioioso 2, 20121 Milano » otafinearts.com » info@galleryhyundai.com
» (tel)+91.11.4174.0215 » belgioioso@massimodecarlo.com » info@otafinearts.com » (tel)+82.2.2287.3500
» (fax)+91.11.4176.4608 » (tel)+39.02.366.36.990 » (tel)+81.3.6447.1123 » (fax)+82.2.2287.3580
» 11am–7pm (Mon–Sat) » 11.30am–7pm (Tue–Sat) » (fax)+81.3.6447.1124 » 10am–6pm (Tues–Sun)
Exhibiting a wide range of contemporary art by Indian » 11am–7pm (Tues–Sat)
Via Giovanni Ventura 5, 20134 Milano » Closed on Sundays, Mondays and Public Holidays
artists including Anita Dube, Subodh Gupta, Jitish Kallat,
» milano@massimodecarlo.com
Bharti Kher, Pushpamala N., and Dayanita Singh, with
» (tel)+39.02.7000.3987
special appearances by international artists.
» 10am–6pm (Tue–Sat)
Massimo De Carlo (MDC) gallery was founded in Milan in
1987 with galleries in Milan, London and Hong Kong.

TALWAR GALLERY PRIMO MARELLA GALLERY KOREA JOHYUN GALLERY

K
C-84 Neeti Bagh, New Delhi 110049 Viale Stelvio 66 (cross via Valtellina), Milano 20159 171, Dalmaji-gil 65beon-gil, Haeundae-gu,
» talwargallery.com » primomarellagallery.com Busan 48117
» tg@talwargallery.com » info@primomarellagallery.com » johyungallery.com
» (tel)+91.11.4605.0307 » (tel)+39.02.8738.4885 » (tel)+82.51.747.8853
» 11am–7pm (Mon–Sat) » (fax)+39.02.8738.4892 » (fax)+82.51.742.8852
Primo Marella Gallery Represented Artists: » 11am–7pm (Tues–Sun)
From China: Liu Ding Chen Ke, Shi Jinsong, Shi Xinning,
Li Wei
From Southeast Asia: Ronald Ventura, Jigger Cruz, Jon
Jaylo, Entang Wiharso, Donna Ong
From Africa: Abdoulaye Konaté, Joel Andrianomearisoa,
Cameron Platter, Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo

ARARIO GALLERY CHEONAN KUKJE GALLERY

INDONESIA JAPAN

J
43, Mannam-ro, Dongnam-gu, Cheonan-si, 54 Samchong-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul 110-200
Chungcheongnam-do 330-160 » kukjegallery.com
» arariogallery.com » (tel)+82.2.735.8449
» (tel)+82.41.551.5100 » (fax)+82.2.733.4879
» (fax)+82.41.551.5102 » 10am–6pm (Mon–Sat)
» 11am–7pm (Mon–Sun) » 10am–5pm (Sun)

CEMETI ART HOUSE MIZUMA ART GALLERY ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL ONE AND J. GALLERY
Jl. D.I. Panjaitan No. 41, Yogyakarta 55143 2F Kagura Bldg., 3-13 Ichigayatamachi Shinjuku-ku, 84 Bukchon-ro 5-gil, Jongno-gu, Seoul 110-200 130-1 Gahoe Dong, Jongro-gu, Seoul 110-260
» cemetiarthouse.com Tokyo 162-0843 » arariogallery.com » oneandj.com
» cemetiah@indosat.net.id » mizuma-art.co.jp » (tel)+82.541.5701 » (tel)+82.2.745.1644
» (tel)+62.274.371015 » info@mizuma-art.co.jp » (fax)+82.541.5704 » (fax)+82.2.745.1642
Since 1988, Cemeti Art House has been actively » (tel) +81.3.3268.2500 » 10am–7pm (Tues–Sun) » Exhibition Hours 11am–6pm (Tues–Sun)
promoting and stimulating practices in the » (fax)+81.3.3268.8844 » Non-Exhibition Hours 10am–6pm (Mon–Fri)
contemporary Indonesian art scene and art practices » 11am - 7pm (Tues-Sat)
on a wider international platform. » Closed on Sundays, Mondays, and Public Holidays
Executive Director Sueo Mizuma opened Mizuma
Art Gallery in Tokyo in 1994. Since then the gallery
has continuously presented artists from Japan and,
increasingly, the surrounding region, whose works
possess distinctive sensibilities unaffected by fleeting
stylistic trends.

VIVI YIP ART ROOM MORI ART MUSEUM ARARIO MUSEUM IN SPACE THE PAGE GALLERY
Lot 2–3 The Promenade, Jalan Warung Buncit Raya 98, Roppongi Hills Mori Tower, 6-10-1 Roppongi, 83 Yulgok-ro, Jongnon-gu, Seoul 110-280 B2 Galleria Foret, 85 Wangsimni-ro, Seongdong-gu,
Pejaten Barat, Jakarta Selatan 12510 Minato-ku, Tokyo 106-6150 » arariomuseum.org Seoul
» viviyipartroom.com » mori.art.museum » (tel)+82.2.736.5700 » www.thepage-gallery.com
» vivi@viviyipartroom.com » info@mori.art.museum » (fax)+82.2.747.6039 » info@thepage-gallery.com
» (tel)+62.21.790.0480 » (tel)+81.3.5777.8600 » 10am–7pm (Tues–Sun) » (tel)+82.2.3447.0049
» 12pm–7pm (Mon–Sun) except public holidays » (fax)+81.3.6406.9351 » (fax)+82.2.3447.0050
We try to probe the art world and its various elements, » 10am–10pm (Wed–Mon) » 10.30am–6pm (Tues–Sun)
taking them as they are, to go with the flow with honesty » 10am–5pm (Tues)
and openness. To exist, just as it is without dwelling too Providing programs to stimulate the public’s intellectual
much upon defining our position. We simply want to “be curiosity, the Mori Art Museum promotes its vision of “art
present and glide.” and life in the 21st century.”

142 | NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111

 LEBANON SILVERLENS NATIONAL GALLERY SINGAPORE SASKIA FERNANDO GALLERY

L
2263 Don Chino Roces Avenue Ext., Makati City 1231
» www.silverlensgalleries.com
» info@silverlensgalleries.com
» (tel/fax)+63.2.816.0044, (mobile)+63917.587.4011
» 10am–7pm (Tues–Fri)
» 10pm–6pm (Sat)
Through artist representation, institutional collaborations,
and exhibition programming, SILVERLENS places its
artists within the broader framework of contemporary art.
Its continuing efforts to transcend borders across art
communities in Asia have earned it a reputation as a leading
contemporary art gallery in Southeast Asia. SILVERLENS
was founded by Isa Lorenzo and Rachel Rillo in 2004.
St. Andrew’s Road, # 01-01 Singapore 178957
» www.nationalgallery.sg
» info@nationalgallery.sg
» (tel)+65.6271.7000
» 10am–7pm (Mon–Thurs)
» 10am–10pm (Fri–Sun)
Opening 24 November 2015, the National Gallery Singapore
is a brand new visual arts museum that engages, excites
and inspires with the art of Singapore, Southeast Asia and
the world. The Gallery will contribute to Singapore’s ambition
to become a global city for the arts.
61 Dharmapala Mawatha, Colombo 7a
» saskiafernandogallery.com
» info@saskiafernandogallery.com
» (tel)+94.11.742.9010
» 10am–7pm (Mon–Fri)
Established in early 2009, the gallery organizes and
curates exhibitions for contemporary artists working
in multiple mediums including painting, sculpture,
photography, video and new media. It is inspired and
motivated by the creativity and determination of a new
wave of artists wishing to be exposed to, and accepted
by, the world.

ASHKAL ALWAN QATAR NTU CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY SWITZERLAND

Q
Jisr el Wati, Street 90, Building 110, 1st Floor,
ART SINGAPORE
Beirut 2066 8421 Block 43 Malan Road, Gillman Barracks,
» ashkalalwan.org Singapore 109443
» info@ashkalalwan.org » ntu.ccasingapore.org
» (tel/fax)+961.1.423.879 » ntuccaexhibitions@ntu.edu.sg
» By appointment only » (tel)+65.6339.6503
Ashkal Alwan, the Lebanese association for plastic arts, » 12am–7pm (Tues–Sun), 12am-9pm (Fri)
is a platform for the creation and exchange of artistic » Open on Public Holidays
practices. As a non-profit, the association is committed to » Free admission to exhibitions and public programmes
education, production, support and circulation of creative The NTU CCA Singapore positions itself as a space for
and intellectual endeavors rooted in an engagement with critical discourse and encourages new ways of thinking
civil society. about Spaces of the Curatorial in Southeast Asia
and beyond.

MATHAF: ARAB MUSEUM OF OTA FINE ARTS GALERIE URS MEILE,

MALAYSIA

M
MODERN ART 7 Lock Road, #02-13 Gillman Barracks,
BEIJING-LUCERNE
Education City, off Al-Luqta Street, Doha Singapore 108935 Rosenberghöhe 4, Lucerne 6004, Lucerne
» mathaf.org.qa » otafinearts.com » galerieursmeile.com
» (tel)+974.4487.6662 » sg@otafinearts.com » galerie@galerieursmeile.com
» 11am–6pm (Sat–Thurs) » (tel)+65.8611.7556 » (tel)+41.4.1420.3318
» 3pm–9pm (Fri) » 11am–8pm (Tues–Sat) » (fax)+41.4.1420.2169
» 10am–6pm (Sun) » 10am–6pm (Tues–Fri), upon request (Sat)
Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art invites you to look
at the thriving art production of the Arab world, Iran Founded in 1994 in Tokyo, Ota Fine Arts opened a new Ai Weiwei, Chen Hui, Cheng Ran, Wim Delvoye, Andreas
and Turkey. space in Gillman Barracks in September 2012. Golder, Hu Qingyan, L/B, Li Dafang, Li Gang, Li Zhanyang,
Liu Ding, Meng Huang, Qiu Shihua, Christian Schoeler,
Shan Fan, Shao Fan, Anatoly Shuravlev, Julia Steiner, Not
Vital, Wang Xingwei, Xia Xiaowan, Xie Nanxing, Yan Xing

HOUSE OF MATAHATI SINGAPORE SILVERLENS TAIWAN

S T
6A Jalan Cempaka, 16 Taman Cempaka, Ampang, Gillman Barracks, Block 47, Malan Road, #01-25,
Selangor 68000 Singapore 109444
» homarttrans.blogspot.hk » www.silverlensgalleries.com
» homarttrans@gmail.com » neil@silverlensgalleries.com, info@silversgalleries.com
» (tel)+6.012.373.6004 » (tel/fax)+65.6694.4077
» (fax)+6.03.9285.6004 » 12pm–7pm (Tues–Sat)
» 11am–6pm (Mon–Fri), 1pm–6pm (Sat) » 12pm–6pm (Sun)
» By appointment (Sun) Through artist representation, art fairs, exhibitions and
» Closed on Public Holidays museum collaborations, SILVERLENS artists participate
House of Matahati (HOM) is an independent art space in the global contemporary art dialogue. In Manila and
comprising a gallery and studio facilities. A core objective Singapore, it is the only Philippine gallery accepted
being to promote and nuture emerging artists through the into Art Basel.
Matahati Art Residency programme.

RICHARD KOH FINE ART ELEMENT ART SPACE SINGAPORE ART MUSEUM CHI-WEN GALLERY
229 Jalan Maarof, Bukit Bandaraya, Bangsar, 22 Lock Road #01-35, Gillman Barracks, 71 Bras Basah Road, Singapore 189555 1/F, No. 32, Lane 2, Zhongshan North Road Sec 6,
59100 Kuala Lumpur Singapore 108939 » singaporeartmuseum.sg Shilin District, Taipei 11155
» rkfineart.com » elementartspace.com » (tel)+65.6332.3222 » www.chiwengallery.com
» info@rkfineart.com » info@elementartspace.com » (fax)+65.6334.7919 » info@chi-wen.com
» (tel)+60.03.2095.3300 » (tel)+65.6694.2827 » 10am–7pm (Mon–Sat), 10am–9pm (Fri) » (tel)+886.2.2837.0237
» 10am–7pm (Tues-Sat) » 11am–7pm (Tue–Sat), 1pm–6pm (Sun) Opened in January 1996, the mission of the Singapore » (fax)+886.2.8771.3421
» By appointment only » Closed on Mondays and Public Holidays Art Museum (SAM) is to preserve and present the art » 1pm–6pm (Tues–Sat)
histories and contemporary art practices of Singapore and Founded in 2004 by Chi-Wen Huang, Chi-Wen Gallery
the Southeast Asian region. To date, SAM has amassed is one of Taiwan’s leading galleries, showing the best
one of the world’s largest public collections of modern and of contemporary Taiwanese art with a focus on video
contemporary Southeast Asian artworks, with a growing and photography.
component in international contemporary art.

PHILIPPINES GAJAH GALLERY SINGAPORE TYLER DOUBLE SQUARE GALLERY

P
39 Keppel Road, Tanjong Pagar Distripark,
PRINT INSTITUTE No.28, Lane 770, Beian Road, Zhongshan District,
#03-04, Singapore 089065 41 Robertson Quay, Singapore 238236 Taipei 104
» gajahgallery.com » stpi.com.sg » www.doublesquare.com.tw
» art@gajahgallery.com » (tel)+65.6336.3663 » info@doublesquare.com.tw
» (tel)+65.6737.4202 » (fax)+65.3663.3553 » (tel)+886.2.8501.2138
» 11am–7pm (Mon–Fri) » 10am–6pm (Tues–Sat) » (fax)+886.2.8501.2338
» 12pm–6pm (Sat, Sun and Public Holidays) » By appointment (Mon) » 10.30am–6.30pm (Tues–Sun)
Founded in 2015. Emphasis on the promotion of
Taiwanese contemporary artists, curatorial practice,
publishing, research and art collection services as its
core values.

THE DRAWING ROOM MIZUMA GALLERY SRI LANKA LIANG GALLERY

1007 Metropolitan Avenue, Metrostar Building, 22 Lock Road # 01-34, Gillman Barracks, No.366, Ruiguang Rd., Neihu District, Taipei 11492
Makati City, 1205 Singapore 108939 » www.lianggallery.com
» drawingroomgallery.com » www.mizuma.sg » info@lianggallery.com
» drawings@pldtdsl.net » info@mizuma.sg » (tel)+886.2.2797.1100
» (tel)+63.2.897.7877, +63.2.897.6990 » (tel)+65.6570.2505 » (fax)+886.2.2656.0033
» (fax)+63.2.890.7455 » (fax)+65.6570.2506 » 11am–6pm (Tues–Sat)
» 11am–7pm (Tues–Sat) Founded in 1993, based in a space of 2,000 square meters,
» 11am–6pm (Sun) Liang Gallery engages in promoting Taiwanese modern
Mizuma Gallery was established in Tokyo by Sueo Muzuma in masters and emerging contemporary artists and academic
1994. Its mission is promoting Asian and Japanese artists both research.
on the local and international contemporary art scenes.

Art Directory artasiapacific.com 143

MICHAEL KU GALLERY UNITED UNITED STATES NEW MUSEUM

U
4F-2, No. 21, Sec. 1, Dunhua South Road
» www.michaelkugallery.com
ARAB OF AMERICA 235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002
» newmuseum.org
» ku.gallery@msa.hinet.net EMIRATES » info@newmuseum.org
» (tel)+886.2.2577.5601 » (tel)+1.212.219.1222
» (fax)+886.2.2577.5601 » 11am–6pm (Wed)
Michael Ku Gallery was founded in 2008 in Taipei as one » 11am–9pm (Thurs)
of a few galleries with solid art history background. Mr. » 11am–6pm (Fri–Sun)
Ku curates the exhibitions and also composes related texts. » Closed on Mon and Tues

MIND SET ART CENTER BARJEEL ART FOUNDATION AICON GALLERY PACE GALLERY
7F, No. 180, Sec. 1, Heping E. Road, Da’an District, Maraya Art Centre, Al Qasba, Sharjah 36 Great Jones Street, New York, NY 10012 32 East 57th Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10022
Taipei City 106 » barjeelartfoundation.com » www.aicongallery.com » thepacegallery.com
» www.art-msac.com » info@barjeelartfoundation.com » newyork@aicongallery.com » (tel)+1.212.421.3292
» info@art-msac.com » (tel)+971.65.566.555 » (tel)+1.212.725.6092 » (fax)+1.212.421.0835
» (tel)+886.2.2365.6008 » 10am–8pm (Sat–Thurs), 4pm–10pm (Fri) » 10am–6pm (Tues–Sat) » 9.30am–6pm (Tues–Fri), 10am–6pm (Sat)
» (fax)+886.2.2365.6028 The Barjeel Art Foundation manages the collection With critical exhibitions of work by emerging and
» 11pm–6pm (Tues–Sat, or by appointment) contemporary South Asian artists, one of Aicon Gallery’s 534 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001
of Sultan Sooud al-Qassemi and features artworks of
primary goals is to create a space for dialog and cross- » (tel)+1.212.929.7000
Mind Set Art Center is a trustworthy contemporary contemporary Arab artists living in the region and
collaboration between the arts of India, Pakistan and » (fax)+1.212.929.7001
art platform with strong background of art abroad. Each work represents an intercultural story of
consulting, dedicating to innovative programming and Arab identity and underpins how this identity is shaped the west.
545 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
collaborative projects of cultural exchange. within changing social, political and cultural contexts. » (tel)+1.212.989.4258
The foundation seeks to circulate its pieces regionally » (fax)+1.212.989.4263
and globally. » 10am–6pm (Tues–Sat)

PROJECT FULFILL ART SPACE UNITED KINGDOM CHAMBERS FINE ART SOTHEBY’S
1/F, No. 2, Alley 45, Lane 147, Sec. 3, Sinyi Road, 522 West 19th Street, New York, NY 10011 1334 York Avenue at 72nd Street,
Taipei 10658 » chambersfineart.com New York, NY 10021
» www.pfarts.com » cfa@chambersfineart.com » sothebys.com
» infopfarts@gmail.com » (tel)+1.212.414.1169 » (tel)+1.212.606.7000
» (tel)+886.2.2707.6942 » (fax)+1.212.414.1192 » (fax)+1.212.606.7107
» (fax)+886.2.2755.7679 » 10am–6pm (Tues–Sat)
» 1pm–7pm (Tues–Sun)

TAIPEI FINE ARTS MUSEUM CHRISTINE PARK GALLERY JANE LOMBARD GALLERY TALWAR GALLERY
181 Zhongshan North Road, Section 3, Taipei 104 35 Riding House St., London W1W 7EA 518 West 19th Street, New York, NY 10011 108 East 16th Street, New York, NY 10003
» tfam.museum » www.christinepark.net » janelombardgallery.com » talwargallery.com
» info@tfam.gov.tw » info@christinepark.net » info@janelombardgallery.com » tg@talwargallery.com
» (tel)+886.2.259.57656 » (tel)+44.20.7930.9865 » (tel)+1.212.967.8040 » (tel)+1.212.673.3096
» (fax)+886.2.259.44104 » 11am–6pm (Tues–Sat and by appointment) » (fax)+1.212.967.0669 » 10am–6pm (Tues–Sat)
Aiming to build a fresh and dynamic platform for
contemporary art, the Gallery encourages cross-cultural
exchange with its audience, in addition to being a commercial
space that artists can use as a canvas to realise their projects
and present new works to the public.

RICH ART GALLERY MASSIMO DE CARLO CHRISTIE’S TINA KIM GALLERY

No. 489, Huiwen Road, Nantun District., Taichung 55 South Audley Street, London W1K 2QH 20 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10020 545 West 25th Street, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10001
City 40867 » www.massimodecarlo.com » christies.com » tinakimgallery.com
» www.dajunart.com » london@massimodecarlo.com » (tel)+1.212.636.2000 » info@tinakimgallery.com
» dajungallery@gmail.com » (tel)+44.0.20.7287.2005 » (fax)+1.212.636.2399 » (tel)+1.212.716.1100
» (tel)+886.4.2382.3786 » 10am–6pm (Tues–Sat) » (fax)+1.212.716.1250
» (fax)+886.4.2382.3783 Massimo De Carlo (MDC) gallery was founded in Milan in
» 12am-8pm (Tues-Sun) 1987 with galleries in Milan, London and Hong Kong.
Rich Art has long paid attention to creative artistic life in
the world and transformed them into the presentation and
display of art creations here as an international platform
for rising artists.

THAILAND ROSSI & ROSSI DAVID ZWIRNER TYLER ROLLINS FINE ART
21 Georgian House, 10 Bury Street, London SW1Y 6AA 525 West 19th Street, New York, NY 10001 529 West 20th Street, 10W, New York, NY 10011
» rossirossi.com » davidzwirner.com » trfineart.com
» info@rossirossi.com » (tel)+212.727.2070 » info@trfineart.com
» (tel)+44.20.7629.6888 » (fax)+212.727.7072 » (tel)+1.212.229.9100
» 10am–6pm (Mon–Fri) » (fax)+1.212.229.9104
» 11am–4pm (Sat) 519 West 19th Street, New York, NY 10001 » 10am–6pm (Tues–Sat)
» (tel)+212.517.8677
Rossi & Rossi stands at the forefront of the global Asian art Specializing in cutting-edge contemporary art from
» (fax)+212.517.8959
market, with 40 years of experience in classical Himalayan Southeast Asia.
» 10am–6pm (Tues–Sat, Mon by appointment)
masterpieces. The only internationally renowned gallery
specializing in both classical and contemporary Asian art,
it has pioneered the development of Asian art in the West,
representing significant artists from Asia and the Middle
East and attracting major museums and private collectors.

100 TONSON GALLERY GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM

100 Soi Tonson, Ploenchit Road, Lumpini, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10128
Pathumwan, Bangkok 10330 » guggenheim.org
» 100tonsongallery.com » visitorinfo@guggenheim.org
» info@100tonsongallery.com » (tel)+1.212.423.3500
» (tel)+66.2.010.5813 » 10am–5.45pm (Sun–Fri, Closed on Thurs)
Exhibits cutting-edge contemporary art by Thai and » 10am–7.45pm (Sat)
ARTASIAPACIFIC
international artists and makes successful debuts in
GPO Box 10084
Thailand. The gallery launches the development of visual
Hong Kong
culture with no media boundaries (video, photography,
installation, paintings and sculpture). » DUWDVLDSDFLÀFFRP
» LQIR#DDSPDJFRP
» WHO
» ID[

144 | NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111


In the artist’s Hong Kong studio, wide-eyed extraterrestrial beings
Izumi Kato in his Hong Kong studio. On the
right is an untitled painting, which he had just
completed on the day of ArtAsiaPacific’s visit.
Where I Work
Izumi Kato
PHOTOGRAPHS AND TEXT BY CHLOE CHU
and primordial deities stare back
To find Japanese multimedia artist
Izumi Kato’s Hong Kong studio,
I had to walk along a circuitous
white corridor past a seemingly
endless stretch of identical
metal doors. This disorienting
passageway, coiled inside an
industrial building on the isolated
southern tip of Hong Kong Island,
could have easily been the movie
set for a psychological thriller, and,
admittedly, I began to feel the
onset of panic as I attempted to
locate the number two, supposedly
marked above one of these
otherwise indistinguishable entries.
Thankfully, I found the correct door
and rang the bell. Kato greeted
me, dressed casually in a T-shirt
and loose shorts—his standard
attire that he wears even to his
exhibition openings and on stage
with his rock band Tetorapotz.
His wife Tomoko Aratani, who is
much more put together, appeared
behind him and presented a pair
Where I Work artasiapacific.com
of house slippers—as is Japanese
custom—which I stepped into
before proceeding farther beyond
the threshold.
At first I was baled that an
artist such as Kato, who often
asserts the importance of one’s
individuality—whether in reference
to the way he creates his art,
or how he hopes audiences will
interpret his images in their own
way—chose to situate himself
in what appeared to me an eerie
visual metaphor for the endless
simulacra that we navigate in our
lives. But the studio’s arresting view
immediately dispelled that thought.
The only windows are directly
opposite the entrance—beyond
Kato’s modest, white-cube-like
work area and the couple’s living
room—and a soft light poured
in. Outside were the glimmering
waters of Luk Chau Bay, ruled
occasionally by the wake of
crisscrossing boats. The green,
undulating hills of Lamma Island lay
where the sky and sea met. It was
a scene that could lend itself well
to introspection, and to feeling at
peace with oneself.
I imagined that the landscape
also ofered a sense of familiarity
to Kato, who was born and grew up
in the quiet prefecture of Shimane
on the western coast of Japan,
surrounded similarly by vast waters
and hills. Though, upon graduating
from Tokyo’s Musashino Art
University in 1992, Kato decided
to settle down permanently in the
Japanese capital, where he still
spends roughly three quarters of
the year. Through an interpreter,
the artist confirmed that the view
was largely what convinced him
to choose this particular industrial
building in Ap Lei Chau—yet I was
curious as to what made him want
to work from Hong Kong in the first
place. He explained that three years
ago, after more than two decades
of creating both two- and three-
dimensional works of enigmatic
figures who have been likened to
extraterrestrial beings, primordial
gods and goddesses, and totems,
he started to realize that he had
grown too comfortable in his home
country, and that his creative drive
had become stagnant. Hong Kong,
by contrast, spoke of boundless
energy and dynamism to him; and
so, with the help of friends and
his gallery, Perrotin, he made the
leap, renting his current quarters
in 2015.
Just as Kato had suspected,
Hong Kong rekindled his playful
experimentations with materials.
Downstairs from his studio is a
seawall and rocky beach, where
Kato, a keen fisherman, likes to
spend his downtime. There, in
2016, he noticed stones of various
shapes and sizes, which sparked a
new series of works. Kato arranged
a group of the rocks, roughly the
size of newborn babies, in an
147
over-one-meter line on his studio
floor, such that the overall contour
evoked a body curled in a fetal
position. He then detailed this
character—with widespread, gaping
eyes and a nose that bleeds into
the mouth—by painting over parts
of the rocks with acrylic.
The untitled sculpture
demonstrates Kato’s relationship to
Shinto animist beliefs, according
to which spirits live in mountains,
lakes, waterfalls and rocks.
Working intuitively and without
prior sketches, Kato channels
and unearths the deities in the
stones. He has since been adding
spontaneously to the series in
diferent cities, each time using
local materials, taking care to
keep the unique qualities of the
rocks apparent, as they reflect
their places of origin. In 2018, for
instance, he was commissioned to
create two of these pieces for Hong
Kong’s Tai Kwun contemporary art
center, where he used old stone
bricks from the former prison. At
his debut solo show in China, which
opened in August at Beijing’s Red
Brick Art Museum, he made his
first vertical iteration, stacking an
egg-shaped boulder, the size of a
medicine ball, on a granite block for
what became the head and body of
a multicolored humanoid creature
that stands at almost three meters
148
tall. When I visited his studio, one
of the walls was lined with pebbles,
which Kato had just gathered from
the seawall, in preparation for
another composition.
Besides his collection of
geological samples, his work space
was nearly empty. Kato explained
that most of his projects had been
transported to Beijing for his Red
Brick retrospective. The exhibition,
featuring a host of his strangely
endearing figures rendered in
vibrant acrylics, camphor wood,
vinyl, stitched pieces of fabric, prints
and sketches, made tangible the
evolution of the artist’s practice over
the past decade as he zigzagged
between various materials.
When I asked if seeing his works
gathered in such an extensive
showcase impacted his artistic
goals for the future, Kato answered
without hesitation: no. He clarified
that his aim is simple and steadfast.
Painting has always been the
most captivating medium for him,
as it involves a two-dimensional
surface that is artificial in our
three-dimensional world. What he
wants is to push the possibilities of
this interface, and in the process,
leave his own distinctive mark in
the history of painting. All of the
other components of his practice
feed back into his innovations with
painting. In his three-dimensional
| NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111
(Opposite page, top)
The only windows in the studio
are directly opposite the door,
past Kato’s pristine, white work
area and the living space that he
shares with his wife. Outside is Luk
Chau Bay and Lamma Island.

(Opposite page, bottom)

Kato likes to fish near the seawall
downstairs from his studio. This
was also where he came up with the
idea for his rock sculptures in 2016.

(This page, top)

Hanging on the studio wall was
another recently completed painting
by Kato. He will use the rocks lined
up on the floor for a sculpture.

(This page, bottom)

A 2016 drawing by Kato, picked
out by his wife, hangs in their
living space. Leaving no doubt for
where the studio is, the key tag
on the left reads: Ap Lei Chau.

Where I Work artasiapacific.com 149

works, for example, he takes note
of details that make the forms
more intricate and aesthetically
intriguing, such as the miniature
figurines in his latest series of
sculptures, which he attached to
the ears of, or placed on top of, a
larger, central statue. This imagery
is then transposed to his canvases,
which depict similar creatures
with heads sprouting from various
parts of their bodies. In the same
way, while creating his 2017 vinyl
sculptures, which saw him joining
together disparate components to
form a final Frankenstein-esque
figure, Kato took inspiration from
the clearly visible seams of the
mutant, and incorporated this into
his paintings, depicting a single
body across multiple panels, with
contrasting background colors.
When it comes to who the
subjects are, exactly, and the
meanings of their actions or
expressions, Kato is deliberately
elusive. His characters typically
assume poses such as lying on the
floor, sitting, or with their arms
150
spread out, precisely because these
actions are meaningless without
context, which Kato also omits,
always filling in flat fields of colors
as backdrops. Kato emphasized
that there is no correct or incorrect
way to understand his images—
viewers should relate to them
however they want.
In an age where we prize
logic over intuition, and
predictability over spontaneity,
there is an obvious sense of
rebellion behind Kato’s refusal
to aix meaning to his images.
So much about the artist is
rule-breaking. His iconic, surreal
painting style grew out
of his disdain for the lessons
taught at art school, which
prioritized students learning
to accurately depict a subject.
Freeing himself from that pressure,
Kato turned to the raw styles of
untrained or “outsider” artists,
unencumbered by logic or
narrative. Kato showed me one of
his early canvases from 2004 that
he had in the Hong Kong studio,
| NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111
of four flat and oddly staggered (Bottom)
Kato had brought out a 2014 work to
alien-looking babies against a touch up, as well as a canvas from
gradient background. His ainity 2004 to show me the evolution
of his style. The two trolleys are
for childlike paintings with no where he keeps his tools.
immediately detectable storylines
was apparent.
He has also developed his
own painting techniques. Below
the 2004 work were two packed
trolleys with, among more
traditional painting tools, plastic
gloves—crucial for Kato, who
prefers to apply pigments with
his fingers—and rubber spatulas,
which create contrasting textures.
On the day of our meeting, he
had just completed two portraits,
one for his solo exhibition opening
at Perrotin Seoul in October,
and one that will be presented
at the Shanghai art fair Art021
in November. Kato had also
hung a 2014 work that he was
touching up. Looking back at
the painting, he said, he felt that
it needed something more. It
happens, he added nonchalantly.
For Kato, it’s all an ongoing process
toward making his own rules.
 The Sketch

Keiichi Tanaami
In our next regular issue, we look at how the visual acuity of
Japanese pop-art icon Keiichi Tanaami fuses personal history
with riotous visions and still influences artists today

For over five decades, Keiichi Tanaami has blended references to pop culture, Hollywood films, imagery from
traditional Japanese ink paintings and myths from various civilizations. His creations—paintings, sculptures,
prints and experimental films—unpack a traumatic childhood spent in Tokyo during the Second World War,
with distorted contours of bodily horror and looming, vacant eyes articulating the overwhelming mental shock
that the artist felt as a young boy witnessing incendiary air raids. Simultaneously, Tanaami’s works express his
anti-war convictions and allude to his philosophy of humanity’s interconnectedness, through forms and symbols
taken from Edo-period scroll paintings, ancient Greek lore and Christianity. Guangzhou desk editor Brady Ng
looks at how Tanaami constantly revisits moments of terror and agony in his work, finding flashes of beauty in
blinding flames that were ignited 74 years ago.

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