ArtReview Asia Summer 2024 by ArtReview

Of Ghosts and Shells Kawita Vatanajyankur Art Labor Bouchra Khalili Cheng Xinhao

Celebrating 20th Anniversary

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ArtReview Asia

Summer 2024

Robert Longo Presented by Pace Gallery at Tokyo Gendai PACIFICO Yokohama July 5–7

Coming to Tokyo Pace Gallery at Azabudai Hills Opening 2024

Calder: Un effet du japonais Organized in collaboration with Pace Gallery Azabudai Hills Gallery May 30 – September 6

pacegallery.com Alexander Calder, Un eﬀet du japonais, japonais 1941, sheet metal, rod, wire, and paint, 203.2 × 203.2 × 121.9 cm © 2024 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Robert Longo, Study of Split Roaring Tiger, 2023, ink and charcoal on vellum, 107.3 × 109.9 × 3.8 cm, framed © Robert Longo / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

ArtReview Asia vol 12 no 2 Summer 2024

Labour, labour, labour ArtReview Asia, as you well know, is not one to bang on about themes. Sometimes they are useful, but sometimes, in a world of multiplying art histories and a continent that’s marked as much by cultural difference as it is by geographical connection, it’s not. This issue, however, does happen to contain an ongoing riff about labour and its relation to art; labour both as a subject and a practice, and both in terms of the range of disciplines (and the many forms labour can take) entangled in art, as well as physical and mental labour itself. The first (the range) would seem to indicate that artists are jacks of all trades and masters of none (except art, obviously, although what art actually is, in common-sense terms, is something that can then become a little confusing – but that’s the way of our post-truth world anyhow, so perhaps we could say that that’s just keeping it real). But there are advantages to that (the jack bit): it allows us to forge connections in an increasingly disconnected world (you’ll find some reading about collectivised practice later on in this issue too), to think more holistically (which might be one of the only benefits of a globalised world – except for ArtReview Asia, of course!). As for the labour-itself bit, that’s just like the range bit, involving issues of gender, migration, technology and recognition. And the art bit? That’s always been about stimulating free and independent thought. Reminding us that we’re not simply the robots our political masters want us to be. And for that reason we need to protect and preserve spaces for art, which is perhaps what ArtReview Asia is always banging on about on a fundamental level. ArtReview Asia

Art bits

Art Previewed

Previews by ArtReview Asia 18

The Interview Tenzing Dakpa by Mark Rappolt 34

Popular Music Suraj Yengde 46

Assimilation Deepa Bhasthi 44

Art Featured

Kawita Vatanajyankur by Mark Rappolt 52

Cheng Xinhao by Max Crosbie-Jones 58

Liu Chuang by Mark Rappolt 70

Art Labor by Adeline Chia 64

page 34 Tenzing Dakpa, Prowl, 2014 (from the series The Hotel, various dates). Courtesy the artist

Art Reviewed

exhibitions & books 84 Le Contre-Ciel, by Ophelia Lai 8th Yokohama Triennale, by Chris Fite-Wassilak Wong Ping, by Stephanie Bailey Farah Al Qasimi, by Elise Morton Qian Qian, by Cindy Ziyun Huang Living Another Future, by Max Crosbie-Jones Timeless Curiosities, by Alfonse Chiu Marisa Srijunpleang, by Max Crosbie-Jones Tamiko Nishimura, by Sophia Stewart Figuring a Scene, by Stephanie Yeap

The Unruly Archive, by Stephanie Syjuco, reviewed by Varun Nayar The Book of Elsewhere, by China Miéville and Keanu Reeves, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth The Art Institution of Tomorrow, by Fatoş Üstek, reviewed by Mark Rappolt Like Love, by Maggie Nelson, reviewed by Chris Fite-Wassilak The Swinging ’70s : Stars, Style and Substance in Hindi Cinema, edited by Nirupama Kotru & Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri, reviewed by Deepa Bhasthi Knife, by Salman Rushdie, reviewed by Nirmala Devi aftertaste 106

page 88 Wong Ping, anus whisper, 2024, video installation, 1:1 colour video, silicone mono speakers, 17 min. Photo: South Ho. Courtesy Kiang Malingue, Hong Kong

Koak, The Beholden, 2024. Flashe, acrylic, and liquid charcoal on linen. 218.4 × 174.6 × 4.4 cm | 86 × 68 3/4 × 1.75 in. Courtesy of the artist, Perrotin, and Altman Siegel, San Francisco.

KOAK

AUGUST 31 — OCTOBER 5, 2024

Anselm Kiefer, Anselm fuit hic (detail), 2023 Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf and sediment of electrolysis © Anselm Kiefer. Photo: Georges Poncet

Anselm Kiefer Mein Rhein Salzburg July—August 2024

Art Observed

Quick cooling effect 17

18 Wataru Tominaga, Alphée, Boris, Elisa, Henri, Irène, Jake, Masaki, Matthieu, Raphaël on chairs in the living room of Argenteuil, wearing creations by Wataru Tominaga and fabrics from the market, 2018, digital photograph, dimensions variable. Photo: Hubert Crabières. Courtesy the artist

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Previewed 1 Nana Funo Tomio Koyama Gallery Tennoz, Tokyo Through 29 June

6 Space Elevator mmca Seoul Through 23 February

2 Mariko Mori scai the Bathhouse, Tokyo Through 27 July Palazzo Corner della Ca’ Grande, Venice Through 7 October

7 Jeongsu Woo Art Sonje Center, Seoul Through 30 June

3 Katsuro Yoshida Museum of Modern Art, Saitama 13 July – 23 September Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo Through 10 August 4 Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale Various venues, Nigata Prefecture 13 July – 10 November 5 Lines – Aligning your consciousness with the flow 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa 22 June – 14 October

8 Sawangwongse Yawnghwe tkg+, Taipei Through 3 August 9 study ii: Natural History, Alternative Knowledge and Deep Learning ShanghArt Beijing Through 30 June 10 Photographic Geomancy Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou 13 July – 7 October 11 Tetsumi Kudo Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong Through 31 August 12 Viê̇t Lê Sàn Art, Ho Chi Minh City August – 31 October

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13 Ming Wong Singtel Waterfront Theatre at Esplanade, Singapore 16 and 17 August 14 Orbital Nova Contemporary, Bangkok Through 2 July 15 People of Bengal: Coloured Etchings by F. Baltazard Solvyns Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum Through 29 June 16 The Blak Infinite Various venues, Melbourne Through 16 June 17 Joshua Serafin Theater Frascati, Amsterdam 11 and 12 June 18 Refashioning: cfgny & Wataru Tominaga Hammer Museum, Los Angeles Through 4 August

Maidens meet beasts and beasts eat maidens in the acrylic paintings and charcoal drawings 1 of Nana Funo. At times, in these delicate compositions, the maiden is even the beast itself. Drawing her subject matter from fairytales she was told during childhood, as well as from her own imagination, her previous, mostly monochrome works (in sepia and hues of grey) combine muted colour palettes and highly detailed, etchinglike figuration. From afar, depictions of flora and fauna appear to have been scratched into the surface of each painting. Funo, in fact, applies a delicate impasto to her canvases that gives the works a sculptural quality. Emerging from richly patterned backdrops are crystals, female figures, pine cones, dandelions, wolves, moths, birds and mushrooms, appearing like oneiric images that can’t quite be pieced together. New works shown here, in a solo exhibition

titled Born for This, offer brighter colours and a stronger focus on geometries, including Stars I Saw in Kawanehoncho (2024) – an acrylic painting that features silver stars bursting against a yellow field. (fc) Mariko Mori’s sculpture Peace Crystal 2 (2016–24) is currently installed in Venice (at the Palazzo Corner della Ca’ Grande). Scaled to mimic the height of the average human while upright, the work is symbolic of the artist’s interest in bipedalism: movement by foot, which is understood as a major component of evolution. Such mobility, it is thought, led to intelligence, followed by spirituality, which is reflected by the sphere positioned at the centre of Mori’s transparent structure. Following its display, Peace Crystal will be donated to an institution in Ethiopia (‘the land of origin’), which plans to install the work in a cave. Taking a similarly broad sweep

with regards to what it means to be human, Mori’s latest exhibition, Kojiki, takes its title from an early collection of Japanese myths and oral histories about ancient deities that were later incorporated into Shinto practice. The works in the show extend the artist’s investigation into multiple dimensions. At its centre is a mixed-reality work, Kojiki Installation (2019–24), an acrylic sculpture surrounded by a circle of stones (referencing iwakura) that draws inspiration from a ritual site in Okinoshima. Using a HoloLens (a mixed-reality headset), viewers can access other elements of the work in which the artist herself appears as a kind of priestess activating the iwakura. If the work looks back in time for its inspiration, it also looks back to the artist’s own career, specifically referencing early works such as Pure Land (1998), in which Mori appears as a type of goddess or visitor from the future. What’s left between

1 Nana Funo, Stars I Saw in Kawanehoncho, 2024, acrylic on panel, 21 × 40 cm (two pieces, detail). Photo: Kenji Takahashi. © the artist. Courtesy Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo

2 Mariko Mori, Genesis x, 2023, uv cured pigment, Dibond and aluminium, 161 × 161 × 8 cm. Courtesy the artist

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3 Katsuro Yoshida, Cut-off (Paper Weight), 1969, paper and stone, 250 × 210 cm. © Estate of Katsuro Yoshida. Courtesy Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo

past and future? Our present. Although any truth of what that is in this cosmology must be decided by the viewer. (nd) Saitama native Katsuro Yoshida was a key 3 member of Japan’s Mono-ha movement from 1968 through to the mid-1970s. During this time he became known for his sculptural works composed from wood, sheet iron, stones and paper that echoed the group’s commitment to exploring the properties of materials rather than the technological ‘progress’ that was driving Japan’s rapid industrialisation and modernisation. Yoshida died in 1999, just before Mono-ha and the works its artists produced became fashionable to Western art markets. The rising popularity of this art was partly due to its relevance in the face of late-twentiethcentury notions of change, in the postinternet, postglobal era, and the promise of a new world to come. Touching Things, Landscapes, and the World

Ma Yansong / mad Architects, Ephemeral Bubble, 2024, Tokamachi City. Courtesy Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale

(which was presented earlier this year at the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama) offers a broad view of Yoshida’s oeuvre, highlighting his continuous commitment to printmaking (often using the medium to figure out the many ways in which objects are perceived and consumed by humans) and photography, as well as his embrace of painting and drawing later on. The latter led to the artist placing greater emphasis on the human body (the 1980s Heat Haze series of paintings combine landscapes with abstracted bodies, while the late-1980s Touch drawings were made from powdered graphite that Yoshida had rubbed onto the canvas with his hands). The exhibition, then, is both a homecoming and a chance to trace the ways in which Mono-ha evolved. Meanwhile, over in Tokyo, there is a chance to see more of Yoshida’s work in a monographic show at Yumiko Chiba Associates. (nd)

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One of the biggest art festivals in Japan, 4 Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale has been going since 2000, taking place across Niigata Prefecture, on the west coast of Honshu. It’s an outdoorsy event, spread across the 760sqkm of the ‘Echigo-Tsumari Art Field’, six regions of this mountainous prefecture, on both sides of the Shinano River, hence its ongoing commitment to art that reflects on its relationship to the natural environment. For this edition, work by over 275 artists and groups from 41 countries, including 100 new commissions, will be present. It’s a project that has steadily built up a permanent collection of sited works, such as the refurbishment and reinvention, by Beijing’s mad Architects, of the Kiyotsu Gorge Tunnel, turning the old concrete footway into a meditation on colour, light and space, with mirror pools opening onto views of the gorge. In 2024 mad Architects return with a strange

5 Nami Yokoyama, Shape of Your Words [in India 2023/8.1-8.19], 2024. Photo: Ito Tetsuo. © the artist. Courtesy Kenji Taki Gallery, Tokyo 5 Detail of 2015 work by El Anatsui. Photo: Kioku Keizo. © the artist

6 Apichatpong Weerasethakul, A Conversation with the Sun (vr), 2023 (installation view, Theater der Welt, Offenbach). Photo: Jörg Baumann. Courtesy mmca Seoul

membranous bubble that will allow visitors to stay ‘inside’ the festival’s China House venue while going ‘outside’ it; British artist Antony Gormley will be adding a new work from his Man Rock series (carved boulders resembling human figures curled up or wrapped into the rock); and Turkey’s Ayşe Erkmen will reconstruct the remnants of a dwelling collapsed in the 2004 Niigata Chuetsu earthquake, suspended in a mesh of wire. Definitely an event for those who like touring and walking, so make sure to bring hiking boots. And maybe a snow shovel. (jjc) During the 1970s, through to the mid1980s, there was an Italian tv animation titled La Linea. It followed the ‘adventures’ of Mr Linea, whose presence emerged, in outline, from a single, seemingly infinite line drawn across the screen. The obstacles that blocked his ‘progress’ emerged in the same way;

sometimes the line would suddenly stop altocomplexity, fluidity and… well… art history gether, causing Mr Linea to complain to the itself. As a form that has the potential to act as cartoonist (Osvaldo Cavandoli) about his lama connector, lines can establish agency within entable (and dangerous) failure to connect a network of things. Consequently, through its everything together. After all, a line has the handling of one of the basic components of art, potential to go anywhere. On the face of it, you the show also tackles what is perhaps one of the basic requirements of exhibition-making: 5 would think that Lines – Aligning your consciousness with the flow, which takes such a fundademonstrating that art is both relevant and mental element of art as its core theme, might important. Even if the truth may be otherwise have a similar issue: it could cover anything. in practice. (nd) 6 Space Elevator, this year’s iteration of the Instead, it focuses on 15 artists, ranging from mmca’s annual ‘Performing Arts’ series (ongoing El Anatsui and Marguerite Humeau to Mark since 2017), takes its inspiration from pioneerManders and Nami Yokoyama, and argues that ing rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s the line, as a form, is much more complex and 1895 proposal for a space station, in geosynmalleable than it looks or than we might think: chronous orbit, tethered by a cable to Earth it functions as the basis of both art and life. Consequently, the works on display trace the and accessed by elevators; a concept that has since been adopted in numerous sci-fi role of rules, bars, strokes, stripes and slashes in the fields of language, ecology and nature, novels. The exhibition itself is preoccupied with asking why humans would want to leave as well as their presence in issues of simplicity,

ArtReview Asia

7 Jeongsu Woo, Three Devils by the Bedside #8, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 160 × 160 cm. Courtesy the artist

6 Toshiki Okada, The Window of Spaceship ‘In-Between’, 2023 (performance view, Kichijoji Theatre, Tokyo). Photo: © Hideto Maezawa. Courtesy the artist

Earth in the first place and how they might approach this venture, via a cross-disciplinary programme that mixes performance (obviously) and practitioners who are better known for their contributions to the visual arts. Apichatpong Weerasethakul will present his first vr performance work, A Conversation with the Sun (vr) (2022), alongside a screening of his first English-language film, Memoria (2021), while visual artists Mire Lee (who will take over Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall this October) and Yuko Mohri (whose work is currently included as part of the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale) will both debut new performance pieces. Jacob Fabricius, curator of this year’s Korean Pavilion at Venice, will present a performance programme that includes four Korean and four Danish artists who contemplate ‘the world through their own bodies’. Space Elevator kicks off with a theatre

work by Japanese director Toshiki Okada, known for his deployment of Japanese dialect and innovative choreography (The Window of Spaceship ‘In-Between’ [2023] portrays an interstellar journey – In-Between is the name of the spacecraft – undertaken by four astronauts and a robot). Space Elevator presents more as a festival than an exhibition, with the programme unfolding gradually, with installations (by Kimchee and Chips among others) popping up (and down) at various stages and different performances (both inside and outside the museum) staggered throughout its run. In short, it’s a meditation on time and space. (nd) 7 Jeongsu Woo’s paintings feature colourful woodblocklike images – ranging from medieval monsters and 1950s comicbook superheroes to what look like scenes from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Summer 2024

(1870) – superimposed over a background of broad brushstrokes or what seem like textile patterns. Obsessively layered and always fragmenting, Woo’s compositions conjure glitching picture books or a static noise of representation. At Art Sonje Center the artist, inspired by the medieval story of a sleepless knight plagued by devils, takes the format to aptly explore insomnia. Titled Three Devils by the Bedside, this exhibition pieces together scenes from a man’s life across eight canvases, mixing temptations offered by the devils, illustrations from Goethe’s adaptation of Faust (1808, 1832) and elements of Goya’s ‘Black Paintings’ (1819–23), fractured narratives that allow infinite stories of desire and failure to unfold, tales of victory and frustration to be recountedand retold – the whole is like a mental whirlwind keeping a good knight from sleeping and us from having a good night’s sleep. (yj)

8 Sawangwongse Yawnghwe, Studying the Detritus, 2023, acrylic on linen, 95 × 75 cm. Courtesy tkg+, Taipei

9 Chen Zhe, Labour and Research #1, 2020–24, archive files and magnetic glass board. Courtesy the artist

Burmese artist Sawangwongse Yawnghwe’s of a chaotic mind-map that’s hard to make previous series of cartographic works have sense of; countries are named but given no often focused on the political and cultural context, and an incomplete legend gives tensions between the Shan State (located meaning to some of the many symbols that in Myanmar) and the Burmese government feature in the work, including ‘Navy’, ‘War (he is descended from the Yawnghwe royal crimes’, ‘Ethnic cleansing’ and ‘Extrajudicial family of Shan, and has lived in exile since killings’. But perhaps that’s exactly the point: 1972). For his latest exhibition, The Idiot’s Manual, there is no handbook for decoding the complexities of tangled international politics Yawngwhe broadens his outlook by pointor the horrors of war. (fc) ing to the global politics influencing – for better or worse – Myanmar’s domestic unrest. Housed within ShanghArt’s newly rede9 signed Caochangdi gallery, study ii features While the exhibition presents a series of the work of eight contemporary artists or brightly coloured abstract paintings that collectives, styles itself as an ‘experimental art includes phrases from his late father’s project’ and is curated by artist Shi Qing. Its title notebooks (‘Studying the detritus’, ‘Most is a reference to contemporary art’s recent turn ominously’), neither these nor other new as a site of knowledge production rather than works on show seem anything like idiotproof. For example, The Prince’s Manual or: aesthetic display, and to study, an exhibition The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Burma Post Coup that took place at the gallery’s Shanghai hq Revolution (2024) is a 2.2 × 1.5-metre painting three years ago and focused on individual and

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collective learning. This time ‘natural history, alternative knowledge and deep learning’ are on the menu, dressed with a focus on ecology and the impact of technology. The works themselves encompass video, installation, text, archival materials and painting – so mainly forms that are familiar to anyone into latetwentieth-century art production – and are presented as ‘a state of work in progress; a site that reveals the backend of practice… a mechanism for collaborative learning and reporting’. Back to school then. (nd) A specifically Chinese approach to landscape photography, according to art-historian Wu Hung, started with picturesque photomontages of misty mountains aping shanshui paintings of mythical landscapes. These photomontages came half a century after the photographic surveys commissioned by Western companies and militaries to

establish trade routes or conquer geography This exhibition, billed as Japanese artist 11 Tetsumi Kudo’s first show in ‘Greater China’, through documentation – think Philip Egerton’s expedition through the Himalayas brings together a selection of his sculptures and Felice Beato’s panoramic shots of Dalian’s made between 1966 and 1980. Kudo moved to coastline. Fiction and truth mingled in both Paris from Tokyo in 1962 and began to experiment with cages (the type used to keep domestic 10 these representations of the country. Photopets such as rodents and birds). He used the graphic Geomancy, curated by Yining He, delves into contemporary photographic objects for nearly 20 years as a readymade sculppractices in picturing landscape – in which tural framework, as well as a means to explore historical conceptions of space meet infrathe systems that governed Western culture. structural development, geopolitics and Some of the works on display feature pupae ecology – and challenges the way traditional and pharmaceutical pills (placed in the cages’ feeders); others feature plenty of hamster geographical imagination informs cultural wheels, which, together with the pharmaceutiand historical identity. In Wenxin Zhang’s photography series of Karst caverns, for example, cals, allude to the work of philosophers such the effect of geological time takes on physical, as Byung-Chul Han writing on the topics of even corporeal shape, making the site an unduexhaustion, alienation and contemporary lating, aspiring agent, its deep, mysterious work culture. Others feature prowling (but tunnelways growing beyond territorial, unconnected) penises. One instance is a bright anthropocentric imaginations. (yj) pink cage labelled ‘Coelacanth’, suggesting a

parallel between the male sex organ and the lobe-finned fish species, as well as an overlap between human and animal orders. Many of the cages are manipulated in one way or another by casts of human hands (both inside and outside the cages). The artist himself is not exempt from observation: Portrait of Artist, Buddha in Paris (Méditation entre futur programmé et mémoire enregistrée) (1976) features a cast of the artist’s face (and hands) with an open eye of consciousness carved into the centre of its forehead. Above it is a small colourful bird surrounded by what might either be several nests or balls of twine. On the cage’s floor is what looks to be an egg. All of these elements are encased in a house-shaped cage painted a lurid green. Indeed, Kudo’s colour schemes frequently suggest the carnivalesque rather than the scientific, a combination that, in itself, seems an appropriate reflection of

11 Tetsumi Kudo, Portrait of Artist, Buddha in Paris (Méditation entre futur programmé et mémoire enregistrée), 1976, painted cage, cotton, plastic, polyester, resin, artificial bird with feathers, yarn, sand, filament, wood, 42 × 36 × 20 cm. Courtesy the artist and ShanghArt, Shanghai

10 Wenxin Zhang, Eye of the Cavern, 2021, photograph, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

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contemporary life that is, in general, governed by entertainment and mediation. (nd) As part of a residency last year at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, 12 California, Viê̇t Lê had a ‘coming-out party’ as a shaman-priest of Vietnam’s oldest religion, Mother Goddess, or Ðȧo Mẫu. Staging an energetic hầu bóng ceremony in which participants channel spiritual figures and deities to cure ailments, Lê called this performance a ‘spiritual drag show’ in celebration of queer Vietnamese rituals . Lê’s forthcoming solo exhibition, d̄ê´n | d̄ền | d̄en, at Sàn Art (an institution cofounded by the deceased artist Dinh Q. Lê) will build upon this research and performance practice; Lê has described the latter as a way of putting the ‘“trans” in transcendence’. Their multimedia practice has long considered the fluidity of trauma, spirituality and queerness in Vietnamese culture.

Lê frequently injects exuberance and vitality in their explorations of these topics in which joy and celebration are seemingly used as remedies for healing. (mvr) Jointly presented by Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay and the Singapore Art Museum, 13 Ming Wong’s Rhapsody in Yellow: A Lecture Performance with Two Pianos (2022) is a lectureperformance centred around us president Richard Nixon’s meeting with ccp chairman Mao Zedong in 1972, following years of silence: the result of conflicting decisions made by America and China during the Korean War. The momentous gathering had been facilitated by a visit from the us table tennis team to China a year earlier, marking the beginning of what came to be known as ping-pong diplomacy. Wong’s performance could be understood as taking the form of a ‘ping pong’ piano concerto in which two pianists perform together as part

of a ‘competitive conversation’ (part improvised, part scored) that explores the rise of the two nations through the twentieth century – and their potential for (sonic) harmony. Singapore, of course, is caught in a hazy zone between both spheres of influence (check out the TikTok videos of Chinese nationals complaining about the city-state not being Chinese enough). The music is accompanied by archival moving-image and audio recordings that ‘explore the role of European classical music, modernism and mythmaking in the rise of these two nations in the twentieth century: from table tennis and television to tanks and trade wars’. While Wong’s performance is laced with humour and irony, it nevertheless describes a type of warfare to which we are seemingly drawn ever closer today. (nd) No, not an exhibition about the British band who manufactured a series of rave-culture

12 Viê̇t Lê, Charlie’s Angels, from the love bang! series (2012–21), mixed media installation. Courtesy the artist

12 Viê̇t Lê, construct, from the love bang! series (2012–21), mixed media installation. Courtesy the artist

12 Viê̇t Lê, lonely heartsclub band(aid), 2017, digital c-print. Courtesy the artist

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bangers from the late 1980s through to the turn of the millennium. Rather, a ten-artist group exhibition featuring painters ranging from American Dana Powell and Londonbased Korean Anna Jung Seo, to China’s Xiao Hanqiu and hometown favourite Prae Pupityastaporn. The moon already influences Earth’s axis, the length of its days, the changes of its season and its tides. Now it’s time to reveal its influence on Earth’s 14 art. Orbital revolves around the phases of the Moon, expressed here, in the gallery’s words, as ‘a constellation of paintings’. In the works on show the Moon is both an object and a symbol, physical and conceptual. As such, expect the exhibition to be a launchpad for conversations about eternal returns, seasonal change and the various ways in which paint can be deployed and handled (from practices that favour realism to those

favouring forms of expressionism). Or just a display of lunacy. (nd) Mumbai’s Dr. Bhau Daji Lad City Museum (named after the physician, Sanskrit scholar and antiquarian, who was sheriff of Bombay during the third quarter of the nineteenth century) was formerly known as the Victoria & Albert Museum, Bombay, upon its opening in 1872. It’s back to the colonial era we trot 15 by way of People of Bengal, an exhibition of late-eighteenth-century etchings by Flemish marine painter and ‘ethnographer’ François Baltazard Solvyns, which document the ‘daily life’ of the people of Bengal (Solvyns lived in Calcutta for a decade, having arrived in 1791). After having the etchings ‘touched up’ on his return to Europe, they were published in four volumes between 1808 and 1812. Featuring 288 coloured plates in total, they were collectively titled Les Hindoûs. The project

was a financial disaster: perhaps, due to Napoleon rampaging through Europe, no one was interested in it. Or perhaps, regardless of the political situation, no one was interested in it. Mumbai’s City Museum chooses to state that the lack of public interest related to questions of taste: European audiences were unprepared for Solvyn’s sombre aesthetic. But that’s all in the past. Today the works are interesting for what we would now call Solvyns’s Orientalist gaze (the City Museum politely calls it ‘problematic’), which in turn prompts the question of whose history is being recorded here: that of the colonisers or the colonised? The etchings record people working in a variety of professions (some of which no longer exist), who belong to a variety of castes (all of which still exist), while depicting a variety of races (visitors from the Far and Middle East are present). The objects that surrounded them are featured,

13 Ming Wong, Rhapsody in Yellow: A Lecture Performance with Two Pianos, 2022. Photo: Sebastian Reiser. Courtesy the artist

15 François Baltazard Solvyns, Chaise Palanquin from Les Hindoûs, vol. iii, 1808–12, coloured etching, watercolour on paper. Courtesy Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai

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as are their religious rites and festivals (like most visiting artists at the time, Solvyns aimed to create some sort of encyclopaedia of ‘local’ life in Bengal). His etchings were produced in a manner that, today, would be classified as disturbingly pretty. But perhaps that’s progress for you. In any case, Solvyns was an ‘underground’ artist, working in Calcutta without the permission of the British East India Company, so there was some sort of subversive edge to what he was doing after all. (nd) Shadow Spirit, a brooding exhibition curated by Kimberley Moulton of work by 30 First People artists that reflected on the cosmologies that inform Ancestral knowledge, was the highlight of last year’s rising:, an annual art, music and performance festival that takes place over two weeks across venues in Melbourne. For this year’s edition (its fourth), Moulton has 16 curated another group show, The Blak Infinite,

which bases its premise on ‘sharing First Michael Cook will present images of fantasy Peoples connections to the cosmos, political worlds in which the historic roles of the constellations and futures’. What might that invader and the invaded are reversed, and a series of sculptures titled beam me up look like? Tarryn Love’s ngaka – look here will be on view: a site-specific nighttime projection The Art of Abduction, by multidisciplinary that takes visitors on a visual journey into artist Tony Albert, who’s known for making Sky Country (the stories and histories of work that addresses historic racial misrepreAustralia’s First Nations peoples connected sentation, will look to ‘themes of alienation, via the cosmos). Richard Bell brings his version belonging, and place’. These artworks, alongside others that will be installed across of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, a permanent Melbourne’s Fed Square, aim to highlight protest occupation site established in front alternate ways of understanding humanity’s of Canberra’s Parliament House in 1972, by Michael Anderson, Billie Craigie, Bert Williams position within the wider universe. Shadow and Tony Coorey, from where activists could Spirit leaves The Blak Infinite with big footsteps rally against the government’s oppressive to follow – but who knows, they might just policies on First Nations peoples. Here, Bell’s lead out of this world. (fc) Brussels-based Filipino artist Joshua embassy (2013–) takes the form of a large tent 17 Serafin and collaborators Lukresia Quismundo and will function as a space for reflection via and Bunny Cadag are performing pearls a programme of screenings and artist talks (2024) at this year’s annual Holland Festival, that will take place each evening. Photographer

16 Josh Muir, Bellow with Pride Don’t Hide, c. 2012, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 91 × 100 cm. Photo: Christian Capurro. Courtesy Koorie Heritage Trust, Justine Berg and Shanaya Sheridan

17 Joshua Serafin, Lukresia Quismundo and Bunny Cadag performing pearls at Viernulvier, Ghent, 2024. Photo: Michiel Devijver. Courtesy the artist

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18 Wataru Tominaga, Untitled, 2022, wool, cotton, polyester, vinyl textile, 500 × 150 cm. Courtesy the artist

18 cfgny, Family Portrait vii (Toyo Miyatake Studio, shot by Alan), 2024, inkjet print on Hahnemühle paper, 53 × 43 cm. Courtesy the artist

in Amsterdam. pearls celebrates nonnormative of timawo (2020; a series of drawings, studies figures from precolonial Philippines through and film collage) and void (2022–; a series of dance, singing and theatre. Citing Indigenous video installations and performances included traditions of divine transformation, Serafin in the ‘Nucleo Contemporaneo’ section of this describes pearls as a ‘ritual of healing’ in which year’s Venice Biennale). (mvr) the performers ‘acknowledge the pain they The Hammer’s summer show (which share as gender-diverse brown bodies’. The was previously on show at the Japan Society, performance opens with the three emerging New York, 2022–23) pairs Concept Foreign from darkness accompanied by lyrics like Garments New York (cfgny) and Tokyobased Wataru Tominaga to explore how “whereis home” that help situate the dancers’ these transdisciplinary artists and fashion exploratory movements. However, as Quisdesigners challenge received and perceived mundo recounts the traumas of colonialism, 18 notions of gender. Yes, Refashioning covers their actions seem pained. Soon, sap bursts forth from the ‘mother pearl’, a bud hanging all today’s hot topics, in a range of media from photography and textile works to sculpfrom the ceiling, and the trio begin to dance ture and installation! As Tominaga (who, in the thick substance, their movements turnfollowing in the footsteps of fashion heavying celebratory as they find joy in one another weights such as Anthony Vaccarello, Viktor and the newness granted by the mother pearl. & Rolf and Julien Dossena, won the Hyères pearls is the last iteration of Serafin’s tripart Première Vision Grand Prize in 2016) has said Cosmological Gangbang (2021–24), which consists

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in relation to his formative years as a student in London: ‘my interest was more in colour, print design, and materials in relation to gender. However, rather than only illustrating the idea, I was trying to be more expressive and ambiguous.’ There are even, whisper it softly, objects that can be identified as clothing (ArtReview Asia has had its eye on Tominaga’s ‘Pleated Long Coat’ from 2015 for some time now). Complementing this work by people crossing or ignoring traditional social and disciplinary boundaries, the Hammer’s survey show of Filipino artist David Medalla – who, of course, pushed the boundaries of what art could be during the course of his career and is increasingly influential (even in death) – is concurrently on display. (nd) J.J. Charlesworth, Fi Churchman, Nirmala Devi, Yuwen Jiang, Marv Recinto

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The Endless Spiral

BETSABEÉ ROMERO

Curated by: Gabriela Urtiaga

Detail from Rolling Totem of Rubber and Gold by Betsabeé Romero

April 20 - September 1, 2024

Istituzione Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa Galleria di Piazza San Marco

Main Partners: William S. and Michelle Ciccarelli Lerach and Santiago García Galván

628 Alamitos Avenue, Long Beach CA, 90808 562.437.1689 [email protected]

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Courtesy the artist

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The Interview by Mark Rappolt

Tenzing Dakpa

“When I’m out and making pictures, I try to be completely blank or unaware”

Tenzing Dakpa is a photographer based in Goa. He came to prominence with his series The Hotel, which he began in 2014/15 and published in book form in 2020. The series (shown at the 2022 Kochi-Muziris Biennale) shows the photographer documenting his parent’s hotel, which was also his childhood

home, in Sikkim, Gangtok. Having helped out with the business as a child, the artist was curious about revisiting the site now that he had no work to do there, and to explore both his identity (a secondgeneration Tibetan) and that of his family. This month, in his first solo exhibition

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at Experimenter in Kolkata, he presents two new series of works: Manifest (2023), which documents the aftermath of manmade fires in North Goa, and Weather Report (2023), photographic installations that document the natural landscape in relation to time, climate and seasonal change.

Get Out artreview asia Did you want to be a photographer from a young age? tenzing dakpra No. It started with moving to Delhi in 2004 and travelling across the country. I was in an undergraduate graphic-design programme. The college was really horrible, so I used to travel around the country backpacking and taking pictures. It started there and this idea of being in Delhi and being a northeastern boy, a Tibetan boy, trying to figure out his own identity within the place. ara Was that desire to figure out your own identity your own desire or one that other people projected on you? td It was definitely something other people projected onto me just in terms of racist laws and a certain area within Delhi where you have to go and live. You cannot be outside that area because you just live as a community there. There’s all of that, essentially. There are places you go to. It’s understood that you’re supposed to go there, you’re supposed to have that. It’s safe. Also, it says something about the place of what they think of you, if that makes sense. ara Do you think that’s getting worse? td I left Delhi very much for those reasons, and I think it’s still there. It’s still aggressive and it’s still a thing, but again, there’s like my brother being lynched or me being stabbed. There were incidences in Delhi that really made me reconsider my life and take it more seriously in terms of, ‘Stop fooling around, focus on your work and try and get out of this place’. ara What brought you to Goa from Gangtok?

td After I finished my master’s in Providence, Rhode Island, I lived in New York for a year. Then in 2017 I moved back to India. I had lived in Delhi for ten years before I moved away to the us, but when I came back, I just could not get myself used to living there – it was too hectic and I also had a lot to unpack from the programme. A bunch of friends were moving to Goa and said, “Why don’t you just join us?” I went for a visit, liked the quality of life and I stayed on. ara Do you feel like an outsider in Goa? td Very much so, yes. ara Your new exhibition features two bodies of work that relate to Goa… td I’ve been working on it for the last three years. I have a studio in Goa, in a big old Portuguese house. We put on small exhibitions there, so the work has been shown in small parts as it was developing. ara Your new work focuses on landscape in a way that’s quite different from series such as The Hotel, in which signs of human presence are obvious and everywhere. td In some ways photography has always been a way to explore my immediate environment. I think that happened organically. Especially after Providence. There I had this habit of photographing every day, just going out on long walks and taking pictures. I tried to maintain that in Goa, which is generally a beautiful place to walk around: it’s got beautiful light; the seasons change; it’s very rich in terms of the forest and the biodiversity. But while the works are portraits of landscapes in some ways, and devoid of people, they are nevertheless about the presence of people.

Fresh paint, Olaulim, 2019 (from the series God’s Gift, 2023), archival pigment print, 43 × 56 cm. Courtesy the artist

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ara Mainly in a negative way? td I don’t think about it. That’s the thing. When I realised that I could not unsee the development and industrialisation that was happening around me, I stopped the project. When I’m out and making pictures, I try to be completely blank or unaware, and I’m just responding to forms and shapes and light and colour. It’s more exciting that way. ara Are there particular scenes or scenarios to which you’re more attracted? td Yes. There’s a series called God’s Gift [2023], which also focuses on these types of humanaffected landscapes. It’s more directly related to development projects, or this idea of extra paint being painted over a tree trunk. It’s got a sense of humour. Coming from the Hotel work, which looked at my parents working, there’s this idea of what we live with. And you’re trying to make sense of that through pictures. That’s what I was getting at with God’s Gift: there is always a push and pull between nature and your habitation, basically. ara I guess in The Hotel, for instance, you’re attracted to the kitten, Dungkhar, and you’ve said before that the project began in a way as you were following this new presence. This interest in the nonhuman continues in the newer works. td Yes. There’s a certain kind of remove – you’re part of what’s around you, but there’s a certain distance that you’re maintaining in some way. ara How important is keeping that distance as a photographer? td I think it’s very important to do it through the images as opposed to the images illustrating

Fly-over construction, Bambolim, 2022 (from the series God’s Gift, 2023), archival pigment print, 43 × 56 cm. Courtesy the artist

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Urgency/Calling, 2016 (from the series The Hotel, various dates), archival pigment print, 43 × 56 cm. Courtesy the artist Stairs 02, 2015 (from the series The Hotel, various dates), archival pigment print, 91 × 114 cm. Courtesy the artist

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your idea. It’s the other way round, where the images are like a story in some way showing you where to go or what to do next.

world and comes back once a year and photographs his dad’s garden. Sometimes.

ara Is it generally after you’ve taken the photos that the project itself takes a form?

Saved by Pillows

td It shapes up, yes. It’s like you’re making images and then you identify a few things that prick your interest. You see a certain kind of potential in it and you develop that further, but never in a way that’s articulated in the sense of: ‘This is what it’s about’. It keeps going and suddenly you stop and you try to figure things out: ‘Maybe I need to stop and show it to someone’. Then you try and articulate, formulate the idea, and think about it. It’s in retrospect. ara You’ve previously said of The Hotel that part of the idea behind that was finding out who you and your family are. td It was a premise that I set myself to get into it, which was just something I told my dad, “Dad, do you know I want to figure out who we are as people just in terms of trying to figure out my relationship with this place now. Because I’ve moved away and I’m not really part of the family.” I can hear, as I say that, this idea of articulating or explaining what I’m doing before I actually do it. But in the case of The Hotel, it had to be articulated – some sort of introduction. A push needed to happen for me to receive and let them do their thing. ara Were there any surprises in terms of the answer to that question about who you were? td No. But I think it made my position as a photographer very clear. It helped me acknowledge or adopt this person I had become: who’s a photographer who lives outside in the real

ara What did your parents think of the series? td They thought the pictures were funny. I think it was a very simple and direct response in terms of how they were making fun of each other, in terms of how they looked at the pictures, how they were looking in the pictures, or what they were doing, and that they are very sure of their own ideas in terms of who they are, what they do. Right now I’m learning embroidery from my mother and I’m making some things. She looks at my embroidery and she sees that there’s a very different way of approaching what we each make, and the way we explain and describe things. My parents are very sure of how they do it. They’re not judgemental or anything, they’re just sort of… ara …they have a sense of right and wrong ways. td Yes. But they’re not judging me. Basically, growing up in the hotel also, or seeing my parents work, you realise that there’s a lot to do with the hand. There’s a lot of labour that goes into making. My brother is basically making leather bags all the time. My mom is doing embroidery all the time, and Dad’s working with bonsai all the time. I work with paper and Mornings at Naikavaddo, 2023 (from the series Weather Report, 2023), grid of 135 prints, 20 × 25 cm (each), mounted with magnets, 287 × 218 cm (overall). Courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata & Mumbai

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prints and I make books. I’m making different maquettes. I’m asking my friends to come over to my studio and we produce books together, trying out different kinds of binding, making different kinds of paper profiles. Even with photography, you’re going out into the world and you’re being out there alone and sometimes you catch yourself realising what and who you are. There is that work that involves just being out there photographing and looking at the real world. ara Some of the new works are printed on paper that’s then crumpled. I guess that makes them feel a bit more handmade. td There’s the expectation that photography should look ‘real’. And that’s the curse and the gift of photography: it’s too close to reality. I come to a point where I’m exhausted making pictures. Then I’m trying to do something else to upend the work in some way, to change it, maybe materially, maybe formally. With The Hotel, in a less-conscious way, it was the images of pillows that did that for me. They added a certain kind of abstraction. They were formally very different from the others. ara In the new work, I think also it maybe forces you to look at the print as an object in itself and not an image of something else. td I think it has in some way transcended or transformed the materiality of what a print should look like, and it begins to be something else. It could have been a fabric. It could be more. It’s a text. ara It’s the same with the bigger prints that are made up of smaller prints. td Some of these things are coming out of my own limitations – having a smaller printer and

stuff. This idea of the grids was something that happened with this habit of wanting to make larger prints with a smaller printer. The more I thought about it, it was in some way like when you’re dividing land: you can cut up different pieces – small pieces of land – and you can piece it into a large chunk of land, divide it back into smaller pieces. But the prints also move, they curl, they do their own thing. ara What happens when someone buys one of those prints? Are you encouraging them to let it curl and move? td Honestly, I’ve not really thought about it. It’s a boxset sort of a thing. There’s an instruction guide where you can actually put it up with the magnets. You can fasten it from all four sides if you want to. ara You’re happy for people to make their own interpretations? td Totally. It’d be nice to see. ara With the series Manifest, it’s in the aftermath of a fire or a series of fires. Has the human impact on the environment in general become a subject?

can’t unsee it, then it stops becoming exciting to me. It has to keep moving.

about my process. That applies to all things, not only Manifest.

Goat or Sheep?

ara In a sense the Buddhist elements are part of your identity. Does that play out in other ways in terms of how people look at your work?

ara The text that accompanies the show mentions elements of Buddhism being present in the work. To what extent is that something you’re thinking about when you take the photos? td For me, I think of it as something that’s a parallel philosophy or an idea of how I work with images. As a photographer, you photograph something and you take it out of its context and put it next to something else. You give it another meaning, try to shape it. You try to guide that meaning and give it a form, whether that is in a book, a print, a poster or maybe as a zine, whatever, but I think it changed. I like to think of the photographic process as taking something and guiding it to make it something new. As relying on what it is given to you and making something else out of it.

td I guess, again, it’s just looking at people’s presence within landscapes of environment and what they do, but also photographing it with a flash and with the light receding into darkness. While you’re recording the subject in itself there’s also something transformative that happens along the way. There is that interest in what happens once you photograph it and what it then becomes.

ara Can you be more precise? Does the subject have to be something that surprises you, for example?

ara Action without all the actors.

td It’s just something that I think about and practise myself. When it comes to the reading of the work, people who are interested in those things can pick it up. It’s a way to think

td Yes. That was the thing. Like I said, like with God’s Gift, once you realise that the scenes trace the effect of human presence and you

td Yes, definitely. It has to become more than itself in some way, like surprises me materially, sometimes just in terms of the rules of photography, in terms of what it’s becoming basically. ara To what extent do people have to know about the Buddhist narrative when they’re looking at the work?

Manifest viii, 2022, archival pigment print, 41 × 51 cm. Courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata & Mumbai

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td In the sense of growing up as a secondgeneration Tibetan? Not really, but there is an element of that. I made a series called Ari / Ramaluk [2021]. Basically, what that means is something that’s ‘neither goat nor sheep’ [ra means sheep, luk means goat]. It’s a particular slang term used to describe Tibetans who are not really Tibetans. Like I said, our culture is rooted, but in some way, growing up in India you’ve drifted away from your own culture and you’ve become something else. It was made apparent to me in a very direct way with a work that I did called Vez and Me [2005–11]. I was photographing my girlfriend then. We were living in Delhi and the images are of our seven-year relationship. I made it into a slideshow series and showed it in a Tibetan youth hostel. They were looking at those images and they were saying, “This does not look like Tibetan work”. They just saw this young couple in Delhi photographing each other. Which was the work. The reference of visual culture within Tibetan identity was very different as opposed to what I was doing. At least, that was the reality for me. I identified that idea with the term ‘ramaluk’, which means you’re existing in the middle basically, neither this nor that, you’re always shifting. Weather Report, consisting of two new bodies of work by Tenzing Dakpa, is on view at Experimenter – Hindustan Road, Kolkata, through 27 July

Manifest xxiv, 2023, archival pigment print, 51 × 41 cm. Courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata & Mumbai

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Monsoon in the Western Ghats in South India is a force, perhaps the single most important event in the economic and political calendar of a still largely agrarian country. The big wet winds usually make landfall in Kodagu district (where I live) by early June. Just before this, thousands of Indigenous peoples, or tribals, gather in villages in the interior of the region to hurl the choicest of abuses at their god and fellow community members. It is an act of subversive irreverence that, every summer, disrupts the mainstream Brahminical diktat of fear- and hierarchy-based worship of deities confined to temple monuments or stuck within shimmering photo frames. Unlike mainstream Hindu festivals, whose dates, decided by astrological charts, are wildly different each year, Kunde Habba (literally, ‘ass festival’) is observed on the fourth Thursday in May. It is also a perfect example of Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnivalesquegrotesque theory. According to Bakhtin, the carnival is a moment between the reality of life and art when displays of grotesqueness, excess, perhaps even violence, are not just permissible, but expected. In the Indian context, carnivalesque grotesque helps in the understanding of caste, power and the institutionalised oppression of some the poorest, most vulnerable communities in this coffeegrowing region. There are about two dozen different Indigenous peoples living in the southern parts of the district (and sharing community, gods and belief systems with tribes in the High Range region of neighbouring north Kerala). Legend is that Ayyappa, a forest deity of the Kurubas (the mountain-dwelling Betta-Kurubas, who harvest produce from the forest for a living, and Jenu Kurubas,

honey gatherers, being two of the prominent subtribes), was on a mission in the forest with many tribespeople in tow when he became

Assimilation

On her visit to the subversive ‘ass festival’ in rural Kodagu, Deepa Bhasthi is disturbed by signs of conformity

Men and boys celebrate Kunde Habbe, Devarapura, Kodagu, May 2024. Photos: Deepa Bhasthi

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distracted by Bhagavathi, a forest goddess. His subsequent abandonment of the ancestors is remembered by the tribals when they curse him each year. The scolding as prayer is a dialogue with the god, for demands unmet, for negotiations and confessions, for letting off steam, no holds barred. It must help, too, to be able to vent frustrations and let loose on family, friends, neighbours and employers – these last nearly always wealthy coffee-plantation owners on whose lands the Indigenous peoples work for a daily wage, sometimes effectively as bonded labour – for one day of the year. On the day of the festival, boys and men dress in drag and dance to bawdy lyrics that feature the refrain “kunde, kunde”, engaging in a mostly friendly exchange of abuses and rude gestures with other groups. Drums are made out of old tin-boxes or cut from broken blue storage-barrels. Silver-painted bodies are dressed in ingeniously repurposed gunny sacks or umbrella cloth, or in miniskirts, bralettes and long dresses borrowed from wives, sisters and daughters. Flowers are affixed to underwear; people wear bright face paint, slapdash makeup, a party wig, a Money Heist mask. In this transgression of the self, men, under a vow to the forest goddess, dress like women for a few hours. At Devarapura, a tiny village where celebrants congregate after collecting money from shopkeepers and passersby in nearby towns, the atmosphere is that of a carnival. The music is loud, the dancing is risqué and stunned chickens are sporadically thrown into the air as sacrifice. In the background, some elders fulfil the more ritualistic aspects of the festival, including a horse dance and mainstream acts of prayer with flowers, bells and chants. Elsewhere in

the district smaller versions of the same festival are celebrated in prayer under trees, or to stones in shrines deep in the forest. Here in Devarapura there is a large, well-kept temple for Bhagavathi. As in any village fair, there are ice cream trucks, snack shops, cheap clothes for sale and plastic and soft toys for the children. Women participate as the audience. The performance of the festival is an allmale revelry. By dismantling the unequal power equations between themselves and their gods, and between themselves and their employers, and by speaking across this divide in words and tones otherwise disallowed, the tribals access, however momentarily, a state of utopian freedom and social equality. The alternative world summoned by this pageantry is a humorous, creative and annually rejuvenating critique of the staid religious practices that mainstream Hindutvaforward systems prescribe, where god must be approached with fear, not friendship. Bakhtin points out that while the carnivalesque is able to temporarily weaken feudalism and caste-based oppression, it does not have the political heft to overthrow such age-old practices. In fact, in contemporary India there are signs that Kunde Habba’s performance of subversive protest is being subsumed into dominant religious cultures. This was my first visit to the festival in nine years, and saffron

Rest and revelry at Kunde Habbe, Devarapura, Kodagu, May 2024. Photos: Deepa Bhasthi

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buntings now fill the village (colour is intensely politicised in India: saffron for a radical version of Hindu, blue for the Dalits, green for Muslims). Local families of Kodavas, an Indigenous community that prefers to side with mainstream Hinduism while shying away from acknowledging the tribal nature of its cultural practices, seem to have a more visible role in the management of the festival and temple in Devarapura than in past years. Murmurs of complaint can be heard regarding the ‘unnecessary vulgarity’ of throwing abuses; the festival’s name has been sanitised as ‘Bedu Habba’, meaning ‘prayer, or asking festival’, in the media. Now, alongside the irreverence, hundreds of tribals pay to line up and offer special prayers at the temple; a priest as middleman presides. In the story of Kunde Habba as it has come to be told today, Shiva and Parvati, prominent members of the Hindu mythological pantheon, have been made protagonists. This isn’t necessarily wrong: myths are not set locations in history, and must change constantly if they are to survive. However, considering that Indigenous peoples are routinely oppressed by policy, social conditioning and systemic violence in India and elsewhere, any such overt departure from a tribe-led festival for something more palatable, more commercial even, calls for scrutiny and critique. Whether a new restraint in the grotesqueness of folk humour during the festival is the result of a country hurtling towards forced homogeneity in sociocultural practices or simply a natural progression of time that, thanks to political intervention, dilutes the purported problem of alterity and encourages assimilation, I cannot quite tell. Nonetheless, it is always a good idea to leave carnivals like Kunde Habba alone. They are among the last cultural sites that offer a strong counter to the upper caste and class that gatekeep religious and social relationships. A necessary reminder, in these years of majoritarianism, that alter-natives are not just possible, but also available for proliferation. Deepa Bhasthi is a writer based in Kodagu

Bhimrao Panchale in Butterfly on thorns, a 2024 work by Sanjeev Sonpimpare

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In India, Youth Festivals provide a forum in which young adults can compete in a cultural event that allows them to demonstrate their artistic talents in categories ranging from singing and theatre to debates and dancing. All these activities require a great deal of preparation and cooperation among team members. At one such festival, near Nanded, I heard a cultural demonstration of a different sort. More specifically, I overheard someone singing at the top of his voice while in the bathroom. The song wasn’t classical; neither was it pop. It had a style of romantic poetry. The owner of the voice emerged from the toilet, and I asked him for the source of this new melody. He paused and mentioned that he was singing Bhimrao Panchale, assuming I would know what that meant. I didn’t. “It’s a Marathi ghazal,” he said, sensing my bafflement as he walked off and broke into another song. Apparently Panchale (he’s a singer) is a star within the community devoted to that genre. That was 2007. In addition to BuddhaBhim-Geete, a Dalit Buddhist musical form invented during the second half of the twentieth century, I have been a lover of ghazal music from India and Pakistan for a while. But Panchale’s attempts to bring ghazal music, traditionally seen as belonging to the more Persianate (for which read Islamic) Urdu language, into the Marathi sphere were initially scorned. But thanks to the artist’s defiance and persistence, his concerts are now packed. Originating from Arabic forms, ghazals are a short, emotional exposition of punchy matters of the heart – often conditioned by betrayal or longing. The (generally) male protagonist invites the audience to follow their journey of pain, allowing audiences to escape the quotidian mindset and enter the scandalous world of trampled taboos. In a caste-based society, forbidden love is an idea that is close to one’s heart, but nevertheless suppressed. Ghazals, however, encourage communal confession. Here’s an example of a translated Marathi ghazal written by Ilahi Jamadar and sung by Vikas Kadam: Either burn me like corpse or decorate like flowers in necklace You may ignore me with words but curl me with your eyes You may forget me or misplace me but don’t put me in someone else’s custody I am a sensitive book of poem, read me or even skim over I will visit you in my imagination, keep the house of dreams open We will meet at leisure, talk, touch me with your fragrance.

Popular Music

In a caste-bound society, writes Suraj Yurende, the defiant performance of songs about forbidden love challenges the dominant status of a Brahmin artform Or this one, the reminiscence of a dead poet, composed by Suresh Bhat, one of the most famous Marathi ghazal writers: Why did you cry so much for me today? Did you even shed a tear at my corpse then? You have started reading me now Did you ever bother to turn my page then? You kissed my word in solitary Why did you avoid lips then? Ghazals rely on repetition but deploy alternating styles. You may hear the same verse, but its pattern will have changed by the time you hear it for the third time. Panchale has enriched the form by singing regional ghazals that have been articulated by canonical figures such as Siraj Aurangabadi, an eighteenth-century Persianate ghazal writer. The classical, Brahminical morality has always prevented the non-Brahmin artform from really ‘belonging’ to a general audience. When in fact Brahmins established the walls of ‘classical’ music by copying from the original form of non-Brahmins. Yet non-Brahmins persisted in their efforts to popularise the form, despite the active discouragement of those who felt they were not the natural inheritors of these traditions. Suresh Bhat introduced ghazal in the linguistic metre of the Marathi language. He, in turn, inspired Panchale (Bhat died in 2003). Writing a ghazal requires skilled oratory and jargon-infused, highbrow diction. But writing is only part of it: the performance alongside danceable tunes and walking words is what gives the form its true value. In Panchale’s case, if he

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found a good ghazal he bonded it to a tune and sang it, without worrying about who wrote it or what their background might be. Panchale was born in Amaravati, central India, in 1951. He trained in formal classical music for nine years before he took up singing ghazals in 1972. His first teacher was his mother, who sang devotional songs in Varhadi (a dialect of Marathi), a practice among Mahars that continues to this day and which Panchale tries to emulate in his singing. Evidently, Panchale’s background is musically rich. The Mahar, Mang and other untouchable communities played instruments and sang songs that were not considered equal to the classical music of dominant castes. But they remain central to the musical art of India, something that Keshav Waghmare and Yogesh Maitreya have demonstrated in their research into Marathi Dalit performers. Chandraiah Gopani has elaborated the Dalit musical form through the use of Dappu (drum) in the Telugu region. In Tamil, The Casteless Collective brought the pariah music to the popular genre. The Punjabi music has seen a rise of ‘dangerous chamar’ (dangerous untouchable) in response to the low-caste-infused Punjabi music industry. Dalits have sung the poetry of their ancestors and popularised it as devotional music that calls for honesty, accountability and righteousness. Each morning, messages passed through Dalit musical artforms that take the shape of bhakti – songs of liberation – continue to circulate. The poetry of Kabir, Ravidas, Chokhamela, Tukdoji, Panduranga and Buddha is united with an ektara (a singlestring lute), halgi (drum) and dholak (drum), completing the circle of outcastes: using their own poetry and instruments. Panchale has insufficiently attempted to sing about his ancestors. There are no popular renditions drawing from his heritage. Ghazals are not meant to be a long path. They are suggestive, and with a tease of brevity they are meant to leave the listener with occlusions. Panchale’s soft tone is unlike singers of ghazal who have high decibels and a pitch to match the Hindustani gharanas. Panchale walks into the terrain of raised inferences but delivers in treble, making it a one-tempo delivery. During an interview he said he composes music to ghazals by reading them hundreds of times and letting the process of matching the weight of words evolve. It is for this devotion to the music and words that Panchale has been anointed as Ghazal Nawaz (Gift of Ghazal). Suraj Yengde is a W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow at Harvard University and a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Caste Matters (2019)

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Art Featured

Open the windows 51

Kawita Vatanajyankur by Mark Rappolt

The Toilet (still), 2020, 4k video, 5 min 30 sec

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The candy-coated domestic horror of the performance artist

Dye (still), 2018, hd video, 7 min 24 sec

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In her performance and video works, Thai artist Kawita Vatanajyankur round and round to create the yarn.) In Shuttle, the yarn and its has been a vacuum cleaner, a toilet brush, a flying shuttle in a weaving manipulation become her purpose or function, and a bondagelike loom, a crop sickle and a spade. Her latest projects see her exploring entrapment, as she fights her way through, turning her own body the role of humans and their labour in a world that will be (if it isn’t into a cog in a machine. As in many of her works, she’s performing already) dominated by ai. The Machine Ghost in the Human Shell (2024) precisely that which she critiques, just as she invites her audience sees the artist hooked up to electronic muscle stimulators controlled to objectify her body in order to make a point about the objectificaby Openai’s gpt-4 large language model (she’s collaborating with Pat tion of women. Women make up nearly 60 percent of workers in the Pataranutaporn at mit’s Media Lab on that bit). “I really wanted to garment industry globally and up to 85 percent of the labour force in have the ai fully puppet me,” she says, the work’s title inverting that of Southeast Asia and India. In Shuttle the background is bright yellow, Masamune Shirow’s popular Manga series Ghost in the Shell (1989–97), the loom itself is painted baby blue, the yarn looped onto it is bright which features a robot controlled by a human intelligence. Although purple and that which the artist is weaving through it (wrapped she qualifies that desire by adding that she “could not be electrified all around her body) is bright red: bright Day-Glo colours that represent the time, otherwise I would die”. a cliché of Barbieland doll’s house Vatanajyankur was born in femininity and projected happiVatanajyankur invites her audience to ness, and are typical of the artifiThailand but moved to Australia objectify her body in order to make a point at the beginning of her teenage cial colour palette that is a feature about the objectification of women years, staying on through univerof the artist’s work. Researching the series, Vatanajyankur visited sity. She struggled to adjust to the move at first. She couldn’t speak the language and, she says, found factories in both territories, interviewing both owners and labourers, it difficult to shake the Thai ideal of a silent, quiet woman being a and witnessing a protest against labour conditions in Bangalore – perfect woman. By the time she returned home to Thailand in 2011, conditions that have worsened with the advent of fast fashion, and after graduating from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, she which we, the consumers of it all, are confronted with as we consume was no longer quiet and no longer performed to the same social ideals. her art. As much as it’s about ideals of colourful beauty on the surface, In a sense she had gone from being an outsider abroad to being an it’s about danger too: the risk of getting trapped in Shuttle, the risk outsider at home. “I feel like an alien in both worlds,” she confirms. of slippage and the needles in Spinning Wheel, and the total physical And that sense of the alien, alongside the expectations of what it is exhaustion too. “Embracing horror is part of life,” the artist says, to be a Thai woman, has driven much of her art, which spans perfor- before adding, “it’s the art of life. It’s something that if we grow through it, grow from it, grow out of it, we look back and we think mance, video and installation. In Shuttle (2018, part of a series called Performing Textiles, 2018–19), that was beautiful.” Her point perhaps is that we, the audience for both a performance and a videowork, the artist takes the role of her work, as well as the ostensible performer and the actual workers a shuttle in a loom, passing through looped yarn on a loom. (In her performance is based on, need to grow beyond our culture of exploitation. Although in her verbal articulaSpinning Wheel, 2018, she features as the mechanism of the title, her body curled up around and tion of the beauty of that pain it’s as if, again, Shuttle (still), 2018, melding with the wheel’s large needles, spinning she’s performing what she critiques. hd video, 3 min 27 sec

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Spinning Wheel (still), 2018, two-channel video, 5 min 36 sec

Summer 2024

My Mother and I (Vacuum iii) (still), 2021, 4k video, 8 min 55 sec

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In a way, it’s the artist’s deployment of idealised colours of beauty that magnifies the horror in her work. At first glance you would think it couldn’t possibly be about anything dark or unpleasant. But just as the garment labourers are conditioned to accept the dark reality of their jobs, we’re conditioned by advertising and merchandising (and to some degree by the history of art) to accept the message that life is good when we see bright colours. “The funny thing about every time I think of developing the work or think about the visual language of the work, I would think of something that people would think is commercially pretty, actually,” she explains. “I would think of the colours, compositions, all those theories that would probably make some people mistake it for a commercial image, for example. A candycoated trick for people to be attracted to the work, and then, after a minute of watching the film, see the horror or the message,” she says, chuckling. Sometimes, however, and despite the cheery colours, the horror is more obvious. In the two-channel videowork Plough (Plaw) (2020) the artist is both a tool and its operator. In one channel she’s kneeling, bent over, head immersed in a trail of topsoil. In the other she’s facing the other way, appearing to stretch and strain as she pulls (by a pink rope) her crooked double through the earth. On the one hand it’s a picture of the exploiter and the exploited. On the other it’s difficult to work out who’s working harder. Which leaves you wondering who they are working for. And whether or not there’s a message here about a tendency towards self-harm. In My Mother and I (Vacuum iii) (2021) the artist’s mother, reading a newspaper, distractedly pushes Vatanajyankur’s stretched and stiffened body, her feet acting like a grip, her head on the floor and her mouth attached to a tube immersed deep into what looks like a cloud of dust, disturbed as her head sweeps the floor, as if she were a human vacuum cleaner. Your initial reaction is to fear for the artist’s health and safety; then you might think that this image simply reflects the air that we generally breathe in a world that we’ve so successfully toxified; then that this is an image about

what we define as women’s work: the perfect housewife. Or how toxic it can be to be conditioned to aspire to such ideals. “I think there’s something magical about the visual language,” the artist explains. “It’s something that’s very universal. When you see it at first, you might not think about the message yet, but it sort of sticks in your mind. You keep analysing what you saw. I think that’s what’s powerful about art. It doesn’t have to have a direct message, but it does. It’s the conversation between that art and your experience and your memory. Then I think through that process, something is changing within you. You’re thinking, you’re like really deep-thinking about it. Then you realise, ‘Oh yes, actually, this could mean that’. I think this is a very slow process of the mind, but through individual change, even a little bit, I think it matters. I think that’s what art is to me.” Though her relatively short career to date, Vatanajyankur’s work has tackled the agricultural, fishing, textile and domestic-labour industries, all with a focused critique of their mechanisation and industrialisation, and how that has obscured the bodies of the (mostly) women who perform the work within them. Now it has turned towards ai and the ways in which its advent, and related technologies, might complete the job of corporeal obliteration: bodies ground down and disappeared by corporate, industrial or social machines. Currently she’s working on the development of a voice for the ai controlling her body, so that might go further to erase her personhood, replacing memory as well as intention, for a performance of The Machine Ghost in the Human Shell set to premiere at the upcoming Asia Pacific Triennial in Queensland. The ai will control movement in both her arms via electrodes, which sneak peeks on Instagram suggest is currently a little jerky. Nevertheless, the finished work will be a step into the future and a return to one of the countries she might call home – however disturbing she may have made the idea of homes appear. ara The 11th Asia Pacific Triennial, organised by the Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, opens on 30 November

In collaboration with Pat Pataranutaporn, The Machine Ghost in a Human Shell (still), 2024, video projection with Pepper’s ghost illusion, 20 min 33 sec all images Courtesy the artists and Nova Contemporary, Bangkok

Summer 2024

Gone Walking (While Kicking a Stone for 900km) by Max Crosbie-Jones

How Chinese artist Cheng Xinhao explores his home province’s history, culture and psychogeography through longdistance foot journeys and related ‘performative madness’

Stratums and Erratics Part 1 (stills), 2023, single-channel video, colour, sound, 33 min 36 sec

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In geographic terms, Cheng Xinhao’s subject matter is nothing less In conversation, Cheng explains that his preoccupation with perthan the full length and breadth of Yunnan: the landlocked province formative forms of slow travel pivots upon a particular date: 31 January in Southwestern China, bordering Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam, from 1910, the day the first train came to Kunming. Prior to that, the only which he hails. Watching the artist’s videoworks, however, it quickly way into the province was by foot, as horses conveyed cargo, not people becomes evident that he’s less interested in charting Yunnan’s phys- – a trip that could take “more than 24 days from the north, or 20 days ical terrain – its mountains, rivers, plateaus or frontiers – than he is from the Red River Valley in the south”. Trains, having cut journey in mapping its inhabitants’ mental and physical relationship with his times to a few days, suddenly gave the region a different connection homeland by various means. Most notably, he has conducted a long- with the world and, in changing how people entered and left Yunnan, term field study of the Ma� ng people (an ethnic group unrecognised by shifted their view of, and relationship with, it. the Chinese state), probed Yunnan’s oral traditions and, in recent years, One of the old tea-horse roads, or caravan paths, that shaped the geographical imagination of Yunnan’s inhabitants before the advent gone walking. On 1 December 2019 Cheng embarked on the first in a series of of rail travel forms a key component in another walking odyssey. In the conceptualised treks centred around Yunnan’s old transport net- video Stratums and Erratics Part 1 (2023), we see the artist as he attempts works by setting off alone along a section of the Yunnan–Vietnam to kick a serrated stone a distance of 900km, from Kunming to the railway, which was built by the French in the early twentieth century. China–Myanmar border. This gruelling journey (even minus the To the Ocean (2019), the single-channel video documenting this 465km, addition of the harebrained foot–eye coordination challenge) entails 19-day journey towards the South China Sea, records the artist, who him traversing roads formed at different points in history (including is wearing two backpacks and a wide-brimmed hat, picking up one the Burma Road, built to connect China with India during the Second piece of track ballast for each kilometre travelled. These are not stones World War) that today interact, overlay and unite at certain points, selected for their beauty, their arresting stone-ness, but stones that and so form what he terms “a stratum of time and materiality”. systematically add bulk and weight to the journey, and so “become Here our attention is not only drawn to the palimpsestic road my burden”, as he tells me via video call, on the evening before setting network, quotidian life and open skies that fill the frame, but also Cheng’s purposeful kicking. Appropriately dressed for a long hike, off on his latest durational-walking challenge. Watching the 50-minute film, we get a sense of this: he starts off he walks briskly, his head trained on the smooth tarmac, or rocky quick on his feet, and even jogs across the screen, or balances balleti- path, immediately in front of him. Not even a bemused cattle farmer cally along the tracks, at points. But by the end, when the 449 stones or chained dog, or the toots of a passing truck, can distract him. gathered total around 20kg, he is But while Cheng displays a comical flagging. And wearing knee supdetachment, the stone as it meets his “My medium is also my body, because ports. Was the schlep worthwhile? foot and then ricochets along the it reveals certain kinds of perceptions, Not entirely, the final shot suggests ground becomes a skittish, tenacious, certain kinds of links between events and – Cheng concludes his journey by animated presence. This is especially dropping his bags in the border the case when he passes through a the landscape, the image and history” town of Hekou, then staring longquiet village or veers off the busy ingly along the railway bridge that extends into Vietnam’s Lào Cai prov- main highway, and the stone becomes audible above the ambient ince. The ocean is still a ways off (389km, to be exact). Yet his motoric sounds of birds or cowbells or low growls. For Cheng, the stone is an performance – which finds him passing people and landscapes, goats emblem, and enabler, of fortuitous encounters that also exhibits indiand bridges, with robotic indifference – also inches him, and us, vidualistic tendencies. “I think maybe it’s a metaphor for the inditowards less tangible goals. “I like to walk into the shot, like a probe,” vidual and the collective in China,” he says. he explains. “The medium for me is not only the camera. My medium Asked about his formative influences, Cheng namechecks Werner is also my body, because it reveals certain kinds of perceptions, certain Herzog, whose films have “some kind of madness in them” as “he kinds of links between events and the landscape, the image and history.” throws himself into uncontrollable situations”, and which, while For him, to walk the length of a rail track is to negate its over- clearly performed, offer “a sense of the realities and tensions behind arching logic – its utility as a mode of rapidly conveying people the performance”. This citation chimes with his own bizarre pursuits, between locales – and to instead draw our attention to the internal and not simply because Of Walking in Ice (1978) – the German filmlogic of its aggregate elements and immediate surroundings. In maker’s diary of his three-week walking pilgrimage from Munich this sense, his body is a relational tool that helps lay bare and make to Paris in 1974 – inspired To the Ocean. Across large swathes of his physical the layers of time – geological, contemporary, anthropolog- multipronged practice, a performative madness meets a geoanthroical, phenomenological – unfolding in parallel in everyday life, but pologist’s or psychogeographer’s sensibility and sensitivity to the which the speed of rail travel has obscured. One gets a lyrical sense world. The videos filed under the ‘Body in Situations’ heading of his of this modus operandi from 24 Mails from the Railway (2020), an epis- website show him building a cairn mid-gale (As the Wind Whirls, 2018) tolary photobook-cum-companion piece in which Cheng’s childhood and carrying a pine log 30km in an attempt to rebuild a demolished memories of the railway growing up in Kunming and daily sense house (There They Return Again 2, 2021), to name just two examples of impressions spur a playful diachronicity – an interest in the route over him seeking out an intensely sensuous understanding of places. time as well as in the moment. The foot sensations (and pains) caused Yet not all his projects involve his body. Cheng’s circuitous first by the various cement, steel and wood railway sleepers he encoun- steps towards becoming an artist were taken when he enrolled on ters lead him to liken the Yunnan–Vietnam railway to ‘the ship of an anthropology module while studying chemistry in Beijing – a Theseus, the components of which have been replaced continuously’. decision that led to him to study the Ma� ng. Stretching back to 2013,

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Summer 2024

above There They Return Again 2 (stills), 2021, two-channel video, colour, sound, 37 min 9 sec preceding pages To the Ocean (still), 2019, single-channel video, colour, sound, 49 min 56 sec

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this participant-observer relationship has yielded ethnographic works such as Silver… and Other Elements (2020), a meditative fourchannel montage in which a young Ma� ng man discusses the role of coins in his community, namely the silver piastres that once circulated throughout French Indochina. “This kind of coin has no practical use. We can’t use them to buy things,” he explains, standing beside a stream. “However, such coins are essential when we want to get married. We must send at least one or two coins to our mothersin-law.” For Cheng, the Ma� ng’s retooling of the coins into a purely symbolic form of dowry is a shining example of new traditions being built using the materials of the modern world – and, in turn, as he sees it, an act that weakens the sway of the nation-state. Today, the coins circulate between members of the tribe who live either side of Yunnan’s porous, high-elevation China–Vietnam border. This isn’t the only group he has foregrounded or drawn inspiration from in an effort to deepen his understanding of Yunnan. If some of the Ma� ng’s unruly, Zomian qualities seem to have informed Cheng’s walking art, as well as his wider interests – for me, his occupation of hard shoulders, straying off paths and treatment of his body as a sort of ‘probe’ can be read as mild resistance to encroaching governmentality – then this might also be true of Yunnan’s last free-roaming wild elephants: the focus of Cheng’s contribution to the most recent Thailand Biennale (held in Chiang Rai in 2023). In the 41-minute videowork March of the Elephants (2022), Cheng explores the sociohistorical significance of the elephant in his home province. Images attesting to the centrality of the Asian elephant in the Yunnanese imaginary – from nineteenth-century French-colonial illustrations that depict it cavorting in the Lancang (the upper Mekong River) to Cheng’s footage of the elephant statues dotting the city of Jinghong – give way to invocations of the myths and legends of the Dai, one of China’s 56 officially recognised ethnic groups. Dai monastery murals depicting white elephants in scenes from the Vessantara Jātaka (the Theravada Buddhist tale of the Buddha’s past lives) provide the backdrop for Cheng’s narration of how the last Dai

king of Sipsongpanna (as Yunnan’s Xishuangbanna district is also known) presented an elephant named Nanjiao to Chairman Mao in 1950. This leads to a larger discussion about the recent symbolic discourses and layers of instrumentality with which Yunnan’s wild elephants have been unduly saddled. “The sacredness of the elephants takes on a socialist veneer,” he imparts, as the framing shifts to the mid-twentieth-century story of an elephant-capture expedition in Yunnan, led by People’s Liberation Army soldiers and local hunters on behalf of Shanghai Zoo. Drawing on surveillance and drone footage, the video culminates with a dissection of events in 2020, when a dozen or so wild elephants began an unprecedented 17-month, 1,300km march northwards – a journey that, by taking them out of their nature reserve and into daily contact with humans, saw them entering yet more speculative discourses. While scientists offered “logical guesses” for the freak event – “an increase in population numbers, the shortage of food in their habitat, or the inexperience of a young leader” – the media “began to make it into some kind of allegorical action”, Cheng’s narration explains, “linking it to words such as harmony and ecological civilisation, and thus implicitly pointing to the strength of the country and the regeneration of the nation”. However, this half-baked theory of peaceful coexistence collapsed when the elephants turned back in August 2021: a fuzzy drone-shot towards the end shows the herd filing silently over an old bridge across the Yuanjiang River, returning to their habitat in the south. Whether this slow retreat to the fenced-in wild was born of defeat or defiance (or hunger) isn’t clear – but through Cheng’s invocation of the elephants’ ungovernable act of walking, something of the semiotic landscape of Yunnan itself, and the methodology underpinning his earthbound practice, emerges. Here the motif of the elephant journey functions as an interface between Yunnan history and discourse across time. Much, I would argue, like Cheng’s zany perambulations do. ara Work by Cheng Xinhao will be included in the 15th Gwangju Biennale, 7 September – 1 December

Silver… and Other Elements (still), 2020, four-channel video, colour, sound, 18 min 21 sec all images Courtesy the artist and Tabula Rasa Gallery, London & Beijing

Summer 2024

Through the Haze by Adeline Chia

The happenings, events and exhibitions of collective Art Labor remap colonial legacies 64

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In the language of the Jarai people, who are native to the Central commercial viability. Nonetheless, the plantations caused widespread Highlands of Vietnam, the word ‘jua’ refers to an elemental state that ecological damage and the displacement of Indigenous populations – exists between water and air. This dynamic term can be used in refer- factors that contributed to ongoing land disputes. ence to a stream, cloud or breeze, and could also describe breath or the Another little-known historical trajectory uncovered by Art Labor wind. It forms the title of a series of exhibitions and events organised is the colonial exploitation that encompassed the cultivation of rice in by the collective Art Labor, who have an ephemeral and hybrid nature France, which was pioneered by Vietnamese people forcibly recruited to them. A one-day happening (more akin to a carnival than a typical during the Second World War to work in arms factories in France and art exhibition) that took place at Saigon Botanical Garden & Zoo in left stranded in the country after the war. These workers, called Công July 2019 was emblematic of their practice. Available for sampling Binh (worker-soldiers), were ostracised by the Vietnamese for being were goods from the highlands, such as freshly ground Robusta coffee, traitors, and lived and worked in France under harsh conditions. They brewed via the drip method rather than the more standard instant mix were the ones who started growing rice using traditional Vietnamese for which the bean is generally used, as well as bong ̉ gȧo ống, a snack techniques in a wetland in southern France, the Camargue. Camargue made from popped rice. Hammocks, a common feature of the roadside rice now forms 75 per cent of France’s rice production, and the red rest-spots used by those travelling along the highways of the Central variety is marketed as a superfood and a gourmet item. Highlands, were set up in relaxation corners. Invited Jarai artists made Art Labor was formed in 2015 by artists Thao Nguyen Phan and sculptures from the roots of abandoned coffee trees, drawings with Truong Cong Tung, and writer-curator-artist Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran, coffee grounds and kites from old gunny sacks used to transport beans. who describe the collective as ‘working in between visual arts, social Also included was a smallscale exhibition called Lai (Crossbred) and life sciences’. All three members are Kinh, the majority ethnicity that featured research carried out by Art Labor into the histories of in the country, and are based in Ho Chi Minh City. They also have solo coffee agriculture in Vietnam and rice cultivation in France. This took careers that, in contrast to their social-practice work as a collective, are the form of a series of lenticular prints that create a holographic effect, more conventional studio practices that produce art objects to be exhimerging together archival documents, such as old maps and images. bited and sold in galleries and museums. Phan works in video, painting Nearly a month later, in a talk at The Factory Contemporary Arts and installation, with an interest in sociopolitical histories and enviCentre, the artists expanded on their research relating to the migration ronmental issues in Vietnam, particularly the Mekong River area; her of crops and people caused by colonial rule. In the eighteenth century, multilayered videos First Rain, Brise Soleil (2021–) and Becoming Alluvium four types of coffee beans were introduced to Vietnam by the French, (2019) explore the myths, histories and ecologies of the river and delta. without much financial success. Yet after the Tran is primarily known as a curator and writer above Art Labor in collaboration with ̦ (who has also contributed to this magazine), Ðô i Mó i economic reforms were instituted Jarai artists, Jrai Dew 2, 2016, Blut Grieng village, by the Vietnamese government during the but is having her first solo art exhibition about Gia Lai province 1980s, the Central Highlands were desig- facing page Art Labor in collaboration with Jarai artists, modernism and its political legacies at Gallery nated as a coffee-growing zone and achieved Medium in Ho Chi Minh City in September. Jrai Dew 3, 2017, Amo village, Gia Lai province

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Tung is most connected to the highlands. His sculptures and Rather, the group seeks to provide new ways of relating to history, video works engage with the materials and histories of the area, and as well as to each other. In the words of Phan: ‘Is there a way for the disruptions caused by the forces of modernity, colonialism and a softer, gentler kind of contemporary life, one that shows respect conflict. Many of his sculptural installations utilise soil from the to Indigenous knowledge and our ecosystem?’ On the group’s highlands, as well as wood from tree species introduced there for website, it describes its works as ‘seeds’. It is an analogy that highindustrial farming, such as coffee, avocado, rubber and cashew. His lights their overall vision: one that supports incremental, organic family also lives there. His grandparents were originally from coastal change across disciplines, through the creation of works that gather Vietnam and moved to the Ðă´k Lă´k province in the highlands during audiences and coproducers over a longer period. They write: ‘The the 1960s. During the 1990s, his parents moved to another highland seed grows – the inspiration expands and bears into a rhizome of province called Gia Lai to start coffee and pepper plantations, and collaborations, projects and artworks. In each activity new collaboas a result have firsthand experience of the complex changes under- rators and/or mentors are added as additional partners to the collecgone by the landscape and economy. When the Vietnamese govern- tive varying from filmmakers, writers, visual artists, architects to farmers, folk artists, patients, scienment decided to make coffee a key agricultural industry, Tung’s family tists, and doctors.’ Art Labor’s interventions bought a section of pristine rainforest Art Labor defines their open-ended provide new models for collaboration, from the Jarai and cleared it for cultiwork as ‘multi-year journeys’, which empathy and healing vation. During the early 2000s, when are organised using themes inspired coffee prices plunged, many farms by Jarai cosmology. For instance, could not service loans they had taken out at high interest rates and the Jrai Dew (2017–) event series refers to reincarnation: after death, either went bust or continued operating under crushing debt. Larger the Jarai believe that we go through a process of living (and dying) corporations moved in, buying up land from these smallholdings again through seven different creatures before finally turning and consolidating them into larger businesses. Over the years, the into dew, evaporating and then transforming into the basic partihighlands have seen the destruction of rainforests and the displace- cles that can incarnate as various other beings. Since 2017 Art Labor ment of Indigenous populations, while migrant farmers have strug- has been staging activities that echo this sense of constant metagled with debt. Art Labor’s multifaceted efforts are an attempt to morphosis. They have organised festivals in highland villages understand the intersecting forces that produced this contemporary almost every year that celebrate local art and culture. Each edition reality, and their interventions provide new models for collabora- may be slightly different in its offerings but nevertheless builds on community relationships established previously. Such events tion, empathy and healing. Of course, the problems faced by the region are historical and sys- usually involve the sharing of food and drink, art workshops for temic, and Art Labor is not in existence to resolve these complex issues. children and lively performances.

Art Labor and collaborators, jua, 2019, one-day ‘happening’ exhibition at Saigon Botanical Garden & Zoo, Ho Chi Minh City

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Jarai artist Kpuih Gloh with his work at Jrai Dew 2, 2016, Blut Grieng village, Gia Lai province

Summer 2024

Art Labor in collaboration with Jarai artists, Jrai Dew 2, 2016, Blut Grieng village, Gia Lai province

ArtReview Asia

Jarai wood-sculptors, who have traditionally made carvings of more conventional exhibition-making. Art Labor’s showcase at Hong human figures placed around tombs, are long-standing collabora- Kong’s Para Site later this year, its first survey outside of Vietnam, tors. During one festival, Art Labor collected unwanted trees from will highlight the collective’s manifold roles as facilitators, curacoffee and rubber plantations (which had been uprooted to make way tors, researchers and creators. Taking place in August, the exhibition for new crops) and invited these artists to work with them. The result will explore the entanglement of existing binaries in the highlands, was a vibrant sculpture collection ranging from semiabstract works such as Indigenous cosmology and modernity, nature and technomade from rugged roots to figurative pieces depicting people and logy, and art and anthropology. Phan will curate a selection of drawanimals. This ever-growing group of objects has travelled the world, ings by Jacques Dournes, a French missionary who lived in Vietnam thanks to Art Labor’s inclusion of them in exhibitions and festivals from 1946 to 1970 and studied the culture of the Jarai and other highland ethnic groups – his ethnographic studies of the highland they curate or within which they participate. This kind of social action work is not unique in Southeast Asia, tribes are key – if not unproblematic – documents of their underdocumented histories, lifestyles and where infrastructures can be less deThe group describes its works as ‘seeds’, beliefs. Tran will show a suspended veloped and projects by independent structure of curved mirrors, onto art collectives have the potential to a vision that supports incremental, which images of thermal images of fulfil wider functions than the expresorganic change across disciplines, hydroelectric dams in the highlands sion of an individual artist. Groups through works that gather audiences will be projected, creating a flickersuch as Taring Padi and ruangrupa ing, shimmering structure inspired in Indonesia, Jiandyin from Thailand and coproducers over a longer period by her feelings of awe and terror at and the now-defunct ax(is) Art Project from Baguio in the Philippines produce works that offer alterna- huge machines. Meanwhile, Tung will present sculptures made from tive frameworks for social, economic and political engagement. found objects and red soil collected from the highlands that look like Yogyakarta’s Taring Padi run children’s art workshops, host music relics from the past, as well as a future that has yet to be seen. There performances and support the political causes of oppressed communi- will also, of course, be wooden sculptures and sound installations by ties by making woodblock prints that gives visibility to ongoing strug- Jarai musicians and instrument makers. Hammocks will be set up gles. Members of the ax(is) Art Project have organised art festivals and for rest and conversation. Finally, as a social lubricant and material barter markets, and collaborated with Indigenous artists of the moun- product of the complex historical forces that have shaped the hightainous Cordillera region to make exhibitions of their carvings. lands, the ever-present Robusta coffee will be served. ara Art Labor’s social practice art operates in a similar vein. There are participatory events like food tastings, which entwine with a lineage An exhibition of work by Art Labor and collaborators will be on view of relational aesthetics (Rirkrit Tiravanija is a mentor), as well as at Para Site, Hong Kong, from 16 August through 24 November

Art Labor and collaborators, jua, 2019, one-day ‘happening’ exhibition at Saigon Botanical Garden & Zoo, Ho Chi Minh City

Summer 2024

Enjoy the Silence A new videowork by Liu Chuang, full of allegory and representation, posits an alien invasion against the beauty and lost opportunities of Earth and its dumb inhabitants by Mark Rappolt

Lithium Lake and Island of Polyphony (stills), 2023, three-channel 6k-video installation, 55 min 4 sec. Courtesy the artist and Antenna Space, Shanghai

ArtReview Asia

Taking past, present and future China as its playground, Bitcoin treated as if they were (threatening) aliens. Like most great art, the Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities (2018), a 40-minute, three- work performs a perfectly judged tightrope act, guiding viewers channel (think super-widescreen) videowork by Shanghai-based artist safely across the fine line that, to a purely academic mind, would sepaLiu Chuang, is a meditation on victims and oppressors and the inter- rate the profound from the ridiculous. While nevertheless keeping us related subjects of power, profit and control. In both human and entertained with the sensation that it is continuously tottering on the nonhuman arenas. If there’s such a thing as going ‘viral’ in the world brink of the latter. of art (tricky, given that the unspoken economy behind art is built Liu’s latest videowork, the near-hourlong, three-channel Lithium on scarcity), then Bitcoin Mining seems to have achieved it, seemingly Lake and Island of Polyphony (2023), deploys the same techniques as its on a continuous trundle through worldwide biennials, among them predecessor and debuted last November at Antenna Space, Shanghai. Like Bitcoin Mining, its title links two the Asian Art Biennial, Taipei and Humanity is doing a pretty good job, apparently disparate subject matters: the 5th Ural Industrial Biennial of the production and extraction of an Contemporary Art, Ekaterinburg, in through the destruction of other atomically unstable alkaline metal 2019; the Dhaka Art Summit, 2020; species and Earth’s atmosphere the Seoul Mediacity Biennale, 2021; (best known for its use in smartphone and the natural environment more batteries) and a musical texture made and most recently finding a corner in this year’s Diriyah Contemporary Art up of two or more equal but indegenerally, of retarding itself Biennale in Riyadh. pendent melodies. During the midThe work uses a blend of found and filmed footage, extracts from sixteenth century, in Italy, the Bishop of Verona forbade the form from popular and unpopular cinema, and citations from academic litera- being performed in convents on the basis that, unlike monophony ture and pop culture to draw out its core themes. By entangling fact (which became the dominant form in Western music), it was morally and fiction, time and space, Liu poses bitcoin miners as practitioners dangerous and encouraged individual vanity among the nuns. of traditional transhumance and, conversely, ethnic minority cultures Some of these latter, however, continued to write, in secret, polyas dead museum relics. As a viewer, one minute you’re pondering an phonic hymns, and when polyphonic singing is part of Liu’s video analysis of Zhou dynasty (c.1046–256 bce) economics, the next you’re it is notably performed by Lithuanian folksingers and Mbuti tribesconsidering the relationship of Mongolian wedding dresses to the women. While Europe is not the primary target of Liu’s work (other aesthetics of the Star Wars movie franchise, all the while wondering than as a colonial force, ultimately responsible for many of the probwhat any of that has to do with cheap karaoke machines, colonial lems related to capitalism and globalisation that plague the global majority today), Lithium Lake proposes the telegraph wires, a tendency to put big statues Liu Chuang: Lithium Lake and Island of Polyphony, persistence of related fears and proscripnext to big dams and why some human 2023 (installation view, Antenna Space, Shanghai). Photo: 21 studio tions. Not least in an intriguing segment on beings (ethnic minorities) are continuously

Summer 2024

Lithium Lake and Island of Polyphony (stills), 2023, three-channel 6k-video installation, 55 min 4 sec. Courtesy the artist and Antenna Space, Shanghai

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Project Cybersyn, a decision-support system developed by British the transformation of apes into humans and the idea of progress and cyberneticist Stafford Beer and deployed during the early 1970s by its accompanying violence. This time, though, the bone has holes Salvador Allende’s shortlived socialist government in Chile to create a drilled into it, suggesting more a flute than a club. In keeping with managed economy with ‘almost instant’ feedback (via Telex machine) that, the shot of the bone cuts not to a rotating space station, as it does from factories and service industries. This polyvocal form of socialism in 2001, but to a cgi of the Voyager 1 spaceship (launched in 1977 and was crushed following an America-backed coup and Allende’s subse- now the most travelled humanmade object in the universe, hurtling towards nowhere in particular through interstellar space) and the quent death in late 1973. Lithium Lake also picks up themes that rumbled through Bitcoin Golden Record attached to it. The Golden Record is what it says it is. Mining: the link between the control of water and the exercise of Once an alien civilisation has worked out how to play it (instructions power, the relation, with respect to control, between silence and the on the golden packaging, which also contains a guide to the location of Earth), they will hear greetings lack of it, the more general links bein a number of languages, a speech tween ecology and economics, and The result is a paean to diversity in from Kurt Waldheim (back then an obsession with scenes from Steven the face of humanity’s blinkered drive Secretary General of the un) and a Spielberg’s movie Close Encounters of down a highway to ecological hell general introduction to the diverthe Third Kind (1979), in which humans sity of life on Earth (in both sound attempt to communicate, through light and sound, with an alien mothership. The result is a paean to and images). A diversity, Liu’s video goes on to suggest, that is rapidly diversity in the face of humanity’s blinkered drive down a highway becoming extinct. to ecological hell. With song as its metaphor and representation as its From there, Liu channels the contemporary Chinese sciencedriving force, its narrative blends science-fiction movies and novels, fiction writer Cixin Liu, and in particular the plot of his novel The a long-extinct hominid ‘discovered’ in 2002, an incarnation of the Three-Body Problem (2008; translated into English in 2014 and this year Buddha whose compassion led him to become a meal for a tigress, adapted as a controversial Netflix series) and the related ‘dark forest the theories of historic and contemporary economists and physicists, theory’, which asserts that the first thing an alien race will do, on seventeenth-century philosophers, twentieth-century ethnomusicol- discovering the existence of another, is to destroy the threat. A theory, ogists and historians, the chief adviser to French president François effectively ‘silence is golden’ – an ironic riposte to the Golden Record – Mitterrand and a focus on Earth’s flora and fauna. that was also espoused by physicists such as Stephen Hawking, It starts, however, with a homage to Stanley Kubrick’s movie and which reflects the policy of most earthbound ‘superpowers’ throughout history. One of the limits of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968): a bone rotating Liu Chuang: Lithium Lake and Island of Polyphony, through the air, presumably symbolising, science fiction, perhaps, is that we can only, 2023 (installation view, Antenna Space, as in Kubrick’s film, the discovery of tools, really, imagine what we know: ourselves. If we Shanghai). Photo: 21 studio

Summer 2024

Lithium Lake and Island of Polyphony (stills), 2023, three-channel 6k-video installation, 55 min 4 sec. Courtesy the artist and Antenna Space, Shanghai

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look to nature, Liu suggests, while projecting images of tiger moths evading predation by bats, aided by a soft, sound-absorbent fur and an ability to project the false sounds of other elements in the natural world, we might learn a thing or too. Even if the rule of this jungle is that every living thing is afraid of unfamiliar forms. Today, the tactics of the tiger moth are deployed in the creation of light shows designed to make ugly largescale infrastructure – here dams – less unpleasant and more entertaining. Back in the world of Cixin’s novel, that alien race is the Trisolarans, who upon discovering the existence of Earth set about to destroy it. However, on realising that it will take them 400 years to reach their target, by which time they surmise that humans will have evolved their technology beyond that of the Trisolaran’s own at the time of launch, they send a computer, the ‘Sophon’, as an avant-garde tasked with slowing down and confounding any technological development (particularly when it comes to particle physics and energy production), and generally spying on Earth. In Liu’s film, the Sophon, which has transformed into a female human, acts as our largely mute guide (words are provided via a narrator) through the rest of the artwork. And what she discovers is that humanity is doing a pretty good job, through the destruction of other species and Earth’s atmosphere and the natural environment more generally, of retarding itself. In relation to which, Liu evokes economist W. Brian Arthur’s ‘lock-in’ theory, by which increasing-returns technologies that ‘by chance gain an early lead in adoption’ corner the market to the extent that no one continues to think about alternatives (in Liu’s video this relates to the dominance of carbon and then lithium technologies). Similarly, in Lithium Lake the discovery of whale song is the accidental byproduct of the paranoic silence on Cold War submarines: woven together with

ethnomusicologist Joseph Jordania’s theory that humans sang in the trees and became silent on the plains, progress is gradually related to silence, alterity to song. By the halfway point of the video, the Sophon has discovered and started dealing with its own redundancy, smoking and staring at a reproduction of Caspar David Friedrich’s classic depiction of the Romantic sublime, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818), touching and feeling the natural world in what, perhaps, are the alien equivalent of its moody teenage years. Perhaps what’s most intriguing about the film is that, like the Golden Record, much of the view of Earth presented by Liu is through representation. A Ming-dynasty scroll painting is used to depict urban demand for managed nature in the form of gardens. Hu Huai’s tenthcentury painting Bestiary of Real and Imaginary Animals is animated to depict the extinction of species. Vintage movie footage of a tiger on the prowl is presented in the context of a traditional theatre setting. In the midst of her musings, the Sophon is applying face paint as if to perform a Chinese Opera version of the mythical Sun Wukong; Edgar Degas’s 1875–76 painting Dans un Café becomes the trigger for an exploration of the spread of silence and distinctions of class; coins, with the heads of Ferdinand VII, King of Spain (1784–1833), and his predecessor Charles III (1759–88), become a cypher for colonial exploitation. The entirety presenting art as a space of truths and imagination. Towards the end of the film, Liu cites French economist and scholar (and adviser to François Mitterrand) Jacques Attali, who asserted that representation was a power that once only belonged to God. Today, seven billion mobile phones have changed that, Liu suggests. We’re subject to an uninterrupted stream of messages, but don’t really speak. Although we could. ara

Liu Chuang: Lithium Lake and Island of Polyphony, 2023 (installation view, Antenna Space, Shanghai). Photo: 21 studio. Courtesy the artist and Antenna Space, Shanghai

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Lee Ka-sing, photograph from A Floral Transformation, 1996, 12 x 14 in, as published in A Floral Transformation, 2024. Courtesy of Lee Ka-sing.

ANOTHER DAY IN HONG KONG 18 MAR–31 AUG 2024 ASIA ART ARCHIVE An exhibition that reconstructs one day from Hong Kong’s art history, with new works by six groups of artists and art collectives.

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Le Contre-Ciel Empty Gallery, Hong Kong 24 March – 25 May In his poetry collection Le Contre-Ciel (The Counter-Heaven, 1936), French avant-gardiste René Daumal describes the emancipatory potential of negation, reimagining decay and death as regenerative states that might overcome ego-driven delusion. Invoking such ideas, curator Olivia Shao’s impressive exhibition fills the tenebrous interiors of Empty Gallery with works by 25 artists from around the world, alongside a selection of Chinese antiques. Like the eponymous book, Le Contre-Ciel is animated by elemental forces and the interplay of light and dark. Encapsulating these central motifs, Liz Deschenes’s 1928 – 1898 (2019) is a silver-gelatin photogram produced by exposing photosensitive paper to the night sky. Grey smudges that may be mistaken for fingerprints on the inky substrate are in fact indexical traces of the moon and stars, mapping their relative positions and the contingent conditions from which the work arose. Another form of cartography can be found in Mel Chin’s oil-on-steel Polycentric Multi-Polar Paradigm (2005), in which three multicoloured jellyfishlike blobs float within concentric translucent domes. The work presents an abstracted view of power: the three blobs stand for Saudi Arabia, China and the United States, with population denoted in pink, military budget in green and ideological influence in white. Many of the works engage with notions of contested authority. Screened in a separate room, Francis Alÿs’s Cuentos patrióticos (1997)

references an act of protest in 1968, when civil servants forced to gather in Mexico City’s main square to show support for President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz’s unpopular administration chose to bleat like sheep instead. In the looped black-and-white video – soundtracked by a tolling bell that resonates throughout the gallery – the artist circumambulates a flagpole in the square followed by a growing flock of sheep. Moving in single file, they eventually form a closed circle to the point where the sheep appear to lead the man – a switch that nods to the fluidity of power. In a corner of the main gallery, Antek Walczak’s lambent Culture lv11 (2017) is a copper sheet silkscreened with barely visible images of $100 bills. The surface of the piece was treated with heat and corrosive liquids to give it the appearance of a relic, hinting at the artificial yet dominant systems of value that undergird fiat money and art objects alike. Elsewhere, authority figures are fragmented or spectral, as in Yu Ji’s Flesh in Stone – Ghost #2 (2018), a wall-mounted sculpture of a hand reaching towards emptiness, and Trisha Donnelly’s I Am Taking Your Morning (2003), a chilling recording of a female voice claiming possession of ‘everything you see’ when the sun rises. Invisible order gives way to visible chaos in Mr. O’s Book of the Dead (1973), a video produced by experimental filmmaker Chiaki Nagano and choreographer Kazuo Ohno. In the video, Ohno and a troupe of dancers enact a series of ritualistic, bizarre and ecstatic gestures across

Le Contre-Ciel, 2024 (installation view, featuring Tang Kwok-hin, Riddles of Light pt.ii, 2015, video, 2 min 57 sec, loop). Photo: Michael Yu. Courtesy Empty Gallery, Hong Kong

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abandoned temples and desolate hillsides. This grotesque performance from the founder of butoh – the ‘dance of darkness’ in Japanese – is an inspired inclusion that chimes with Daumal’s morbid poetry. Although the original text is driven by the desire for revelation, Shao’s Le Contre-Ciel frequently turns to the obscure. Displayed on a plinth are three carved cong dating to the Neolithic period. No one knows the exact purpose of these ancient Chinese tomb objects, granting them a sense of totemic mystery. The penchant for the esoteric continues in the smaller downstairs space, where Bruce Conner’s Untitled (1970) presents a degraded image encased inside a dirty glass bottle. Installed on the floor is Tom Thayer’s Rock Symphony (2024), a trio of stones attached to mechanised rods that tap out a code of clinks and thunks on metal discs. On the wall behind this piece, Wucius Wong’s beautiful ink-painting River Journey #2 (1986) renders a surging channel as negative space, with finely traced mountains receding into the misty background. Making use of the classical ‘leave-white’ technique, Wong balances form and void to express an elemental mystique. A moment of clarity comes in the form of Tang Kwok-hin’s video Riddles of Light pt.ii (2015), depicting a disembodied hand manoeuvring a teacup so that it catches the light. In Tang’s image of a moon in a teacup, one sees the minuteness of human endeavour within an infinitely expanding and unknowable universe. Ophelia Lai

Le Contre-Ciel, 2024 (installation view). Photo: Michael Yu. Courtesy Empty Gallery, Hong Kong

Summer 2024

Yokohama Triennale Wild Grass: Our Lives Various venues, Yokohama 15 March – 9 June A squiggly sentence spelled out in masking tape runs along the walls and edges of the stairs, in between the ramshackle tents and temporary wooden shacks set up in the foyer of the Yokohama Museum of Art: ‘The surface of the land where I stand now was created from inorganic grains of sand and dead microorganisms mixed and accumulated tens of thousands of years before they became nutritious organic matter, which gradually became soil’. The pronouncement establishes the mindset for the eighth Yokohama Triennale, titled Wild Grass: Our Lives (held this spring as a postponed 2023 edition, due to the delayed renovation of the museum, the triennial’s main venue), asking us to take a temporal long view. The statement is an intervention by curators Carol Yinghua Lu and Liu Ding (rather than an artist’s work), and functions as a teaser for Lieko Shiga’s dialog in the fog: fire – What Nozomi Onodera, a hunter, told me in the mountains of the Oshika Peninsula in Miyagi Prefecture. (2023–24), a set of photographs and texts that line the museum’s

upstairs hallway. Snapshots of people making fires, and haunting, abandoned nocturnal forest scenes are interspersed with a deer hunter’s transcribed musings on humanity’s transactional approach to nature, the realities of eating meat and criticisms of Japan’s relentless drive for industrial growth. ‘What I am saying is romantic. But to put it simply, it comes down to whether we think from the perspective of humans or animals,’ he expounds. Wild Grass: Our Lives is full of such earnestness, yearning for humanity to be more in tune with other life on Earth; there’s no irony to be found among the work of the triennial’s 90-plus artists and collectives, which is housed in the museum as well as in two ancillary venues and a nearby subway station and mall. There is beauty, wonder and rage, and ample evidence of protesting. But for every doe-eyed moment idealising nature and community, the curators ensure that there is a more self-conscious offering. Just around the corner from Shiga’s work is another forest philosopher, this one a bit more

Your Bros. Filmmaking Group, Ký Túc Xá (Dorm), 2023–24 (installation view, 8th Yokohama Triennale). Photo: Tomita Ryohei. Courtesy the artists

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suspect: the camouflage-clad protagonist of Ingo Niermann and Erik Niedling’s video Walder (2023) practises self-defence in a forest enclosure, ranting about city-dwellers and mocking Hitler (“A single testicle – he was only half a Teuton!”) while chewing on a wad of raw meat. Isolation, it seems, is delusional. The Chinese curators have positioned their show as a time-travelling pan-Asian gesture, drawing its title from a book of prose-poems by the popular early-twentieth-century Chinese writer Lu Xun, who studied in and began his career in Japan; words by Lu, and Japanese writers he translated into Chinese, stretch across the walls of several of the galleries. There aren’t any shouty showstoppers here, nor large works by a single artist dominating any one room. Instead, the approach taken is suggestive of integration, creating links between regions and time periods. What this usually means is Japanese and Chinese works from across the twentieth century, displayed as evidence of long ignored forms of Sino-Japanese artistic

exchange, cocooned by contemporary international artworks. In one room, Takashi Hamaguchi’s blackand-white photographs – documenting confrontational moments from the 1969 student protests in Tokyo against Japan’s security treaty with the us – sit next to Tomas Rafa’s video v65: Far right Identitarians protest against refugees (2016), documenting reactionary protests in Vienna. In a neat curatorial match, Rafa’s videos appear twice in the show alongside pairs of Josh Kline’s unsettling Productivity Gains (2016) series, in which lifelike models of what look like white-collar workers are curled up on the floor in foetal position, bagged in transparent plastic as if in stasis, waiting to be wakened and summoned to the hate-filled marches that Rafa has captured. The exhibition also documents moments from the 2014 Sunflower Student Movement in Taiwan, the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong and countless protests from the pluri-crises precipitated by the covid-19 pandemic, which are placed alongside examples of, say, ancient Jōmon clayware that inspired Japanese artists to search for a new national art during the 1950s, or prints depicting life during the Chinese Civil War (1927–49). ‘History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes’, a saying often attributed

to Mark Twain, comes to mind around here. The curators might at points have overrelied on artists’ biographies to make their point, but they seem adept at pairing the ways artists have represented and responded to moments of crisis over the past century. The prominence of figurative woodblock prints throughout the show – whether earlier-twentieth-century works on paper by artists such as Yefu Zheng and Tadashige Ono, activist zines made by the Guangzhou duo Prickly Paper or the Inter-Asia Woodcut Mapping Group – is suggestive of the artist as social documentarian, who creates an imprint of the times and makes sense of chaos: art as the world’s litmus paper. In a small untitled woodblock print, a man struggles under the weight of a basket of coal on his back; next to it, Small Mine (1950) is a drab, cubist-style landscape painting, dotted with murky smokestacks. Included in a room dedicated to the work of Takeo Tomiyama, these works are her attempts to document the miners of Japan’s Kyushu island; accompanying wall texts describe her frustration with the effectiveness of the results. They make a nice rhyme with Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave (2001) screening in the adjacent room, which is a reenactment of a conflict between miners and police during

the 1984 uk miners’ strikes, the bemused spectators visible at the edges of the frame. The scene is echoed on the other side of the building, in Your Bros. Filmmaking Group’s installation Ký Túc Xá (Dorm, 2023–24), based on a 2018 incident of Vietnamese workers in Taipei going on strike. A room crowded with a maze of bunkbeds is strewn with hand-drawn cardboard signs in Vietnamese; one of the television sets dotting the room shows a group of women lining up, facing the camera. ‘We don’t want to act for you’, a subtitle reads; they then proceed to reenact a strike meeting. Here, history is a poignant, necessary spectacle to be replayed again and again. But where does all of this time-hopping actually leave us? We can only go out the way we came in: through the sparse encampments in the museum’s foyer, as lean-to tents by Joar Nango and Søren Aagaard, haunted by the floating, slouched partial figures made from purple cloth in Sandra Mujinga’s Unearthed Leaves (2024), and the mutant headless glitched figures of Janus and Mars (both 2022) by Miles Greenberg. Humanity as we know it has gone; perhaps it has ‘become soil’. Wild Grass is ultimately a statement of dystopian realism: art reflects its time, and humanity’s time is running out. Chris Fite-Wassilak

Joar Nango, Ávnnastit (Harvesting Material Soul), 2024 (installation view, Yokohama Triennale). Photo: Tomita Ryohei. Courtesy the artist

Summer 2024

Wong Ping anus whisper Kiang Malingue, Hong Kong 25 March – 4 May anus whisper announces itself before visitors have entered Kiang Malingue’s Wan Chai gallery, with a giant silicone anus that has been installed onto the building’s street-facing balcony. This installation of splayed skin cut into the shape of the sun invokes Georges Bataille’s The Solar Anus (1931). The surrealist text rejects the projection of ideas onto phenomena for the purposes of achieving ‘total identification’, given the instability of matter on a ‘terrestrial globe’ that ‘often violently ejects the contents of its entrails’. Hence the equalisation of the sun with the anus, which destabilises a hierarchy of generative entities and articulates the view that ‘life is parodic’. In keeping, anus whisper resists narrative cohesion. blah-blah-blah (2022), a giant copper ear positioned on the ground floor, brings to mind Bataille’s interpretation of Van Gogh’s self-mutilation as a ‘fuck you’ to polite society’s wholesome ideals, with balls of ‘earwax’ shot out from a ping pong machine accumulating around it. Displayed nearby is hairy wisdom: radical (2024), the first of four bowling balls covered in pubiclike hairs included in the show, each inscribed with a word indicated in its title (these include The Closer, black hole and Zen). ‘People sadistically abuse the balls by sticking three fingers into the holes,’ Wong writes in his exhibition text, reframing an unremarkable act as a moment of extreme bodily presence: ‘is it too much, bowling on a first date?’ The riddles continue upstairs, where Crumbling Earwax (2022) is projected onto three

walls in an orange-carpeted room. The looped animation opens with a locomotive riding over the earthlike peaks of a man’s bald head that has been flattened into a fleshy map projection, echoing Bataille’s ‘image of a continuous metamorphosis’. The man offers up a string of reflections: about earwax as a barrier against, and waste product of, things heard; Pantone’s celebration of 2020’s colour of the year, Classic Blue, as emblematic of a new day; and Hans Christian Andersen’s penchant for masturbating in private after chatting to prostitutes, using those same hands to write some of the world’s best known fairytales. He rants about art critics being “alcoholic keyboard warriors”; wokeness as the reason Jesus won’t return; and capitalism as the creator of paralytic choice. As his image is cut in half like a cake, and sonic rumbles of collapse increase amid toxic rain, he admits to becoming accustomed to working from home: “The gaming headset blocks the sound of the air-raid sirens outside.” In anus whisper (2024), a live-action video screened on the next floor, the protagonist describes replacing the flowers whose petals he once picked to make decisions – think ‘love me, love me not’ – by consulting the anus and its wrinkles for help in seeking answers to his questions. (“I hate making choices. Lucky me, I live in a one-party state,” he deadpans.) Lifting lines from Solar Anus – including Bataille’s assertion that humans are incapable of looking directly at the sun, sexual intercourse or corpses –

a conversation with a woman becomes a debate about whether holes are channels, amplifying connections that Wong teases out between Crumbling Earwax and anus whisper. The mention of Pantone’s colour of 2020 in the former creates a portal to the latter’s introduction of 2024’s chosen hue, Peach Fuzz, by a student delivering lines drawn from Pantone’s media statement about the colour (“recalibrating our priorities” is one) in the manner of a propaganda speech. ‘Bullshit is for me the genesis of wisdom’, Wong writes, hinting at what is driving his shit talk. Creation is messy – it can erupt from above and below, without shape or reason, and even unite opposing poles. Departing from his characteristic solo-made animations, Wong embeds that understanding into anus whisper and its ‘accumulation of blood, sweat and flesh of the crew’. The collective energy in filming the work, Wong continues, was revelatory: ‘even the lunch we had as a team on a shooting day made me feel alive’. Perhaps that’s why the protagonist’s final lines describe a woman’s disinterest in throwing stones at policemen because she wants to throw stones at the world. “I don’t want to become the stone thrown at her,” the narrator admits, hinting at Hong Kong’s recent protest history amid a general global clusterfuck, the divisions that have emerged therein and a resistance towards reinforcing them; “when diarrhoea particles disperse in the air, the urge will descend slowly”. Besides, just because shit settles doesn’t mean shit’s over. Stephanie Bailey

) * (, 2024, silicone, hair, 280 × 280 cm. Photo: Lai Ka Kit and Tsui Lai Wah Courtesy the artist and Kiang Malingue, Hong Kong

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hairy wisdom: radical, 2024, bowling ball, hair, 20 × 20 cm. Courtesy the artist and Kiang Malingue, Hong Kong

Summer 2024

Farah Al Qasimi Toy World The Third Line, Dubai 27 February – 19 April Unassuming moments of everyday life in America and the Gulf, portrayed in a maximalist style with a vivid colour palette – these are usually hallmarks of uae-born, New York- and Abu Dhabi-based artist Farah Al Qasimi’s photography. With Toy World, Al Qasimi for the first time intersperses the anticipated hyper-colourful works with black-and-white images. Although the latter may have strikingly different aesthetics than her usual bubblegum and pastel tones, both speak the language of artificiality. Hung in groups of four or five around a single room, Al Qasimi’s black-and-white images (all undated) include Jarash, depicting the ruins of the eponymous Greco-Roman city in contemporary Jordan; a palm frond in flames (Burning Palm); and a man embracing a horse (Man and Horse). These photographs both create an aesthetic distance from her colour photography and play on our impulse to historicise monochromatic images, subconsciously separating them from the ‘now’. Al Qasimi’s colour images, though, speak to another kind of separation. Alluding to themes of surveillance and the ever-thinning boundary between objective and filtered reality, the photographer brings our attention to the ways in which our gaze is mediated – via the lens of the photographer, or that of ever-expanding networks of cctv cameras. In the triptych Security Camera, Yara, Pigeons on Pink Building

(2024), for example, Al Qasimi, juxtaposes a posed photo of a heavily made up woman with two images of a cctv camera and pigeons sitting on the windowsills of a building; the camera, displayed on the left of the triptych, appears to be pointed squarely at the woman. Objects, such as bright silks and floral ornaments, that often appear in Al Qasimi’s maximalist works depicting life in the Gulf, are physically present in the gallery space: stuck to the walls or adorning a television set showing the video Tumbling Woman (2023), which captures a woman rolling and sliding down a sand dune. These things might feel familiar, evoking images seen in shows past; but they are here in the flesh, not delivered via Al Qasimi’s lens. Here, she exposes her own role as a photographer in the mediation of reality. A complex geography fostered by the aesthetic of the images – photographs in colour and black-and-white depict scenes both in the Gulf and the usa – is mirrored in their physical placement. Walking around the space, your eye is constantly drawn higher and lower; small photos and photocopied book pages bring you closer to the wall, knees slightly bent and squinting to get a good look. In requiring effort from the viewer and perhaps even a level of physical discomfort, Al Qasimi underscores a considered – even calculated – placement of images, laying bear yet another layer of mediation.

Horse Bucking Teeth, n.d., archival inkjet print, 51 × 69 cm. Courtesy the artist and The Third Line, Dubai

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As you move from one to the other, you struggle to draw connections between the myriad, disparate images: from a postcardperfect sand dune (Dune, undated) and the Baton Girls (2019) having their picture taken, to a presumably American serviceman entitled Young Marine (undated), to the chicken and camel bones (in Machboos, 2024, and Camel Bones, undated) that carry the aura of death. The proliferation of imagery comes to a head in Wingspan (2024), a mixed-media work akin to a noticeboard, home to dozens of photos –many of them found elsewhere in the show, and interspersed with pictures of military tanks, flowers and historical artefacts symbolic of war. Inundated with images, the viewer is disoriented – thinking ‘Have I already seen this picture?’ – and desensitised from the pain depicted there. Such is life in a Toy World: a title which implies an illusory, manufactured perceived reality, at odds with its assumed opposite, the ‘real world’. It is in Al Qasimi’s monochromatic collection that we find something of a solution. The haunting Horse Bucking Teeth depicts a horse throwing its head back and exposing its teeth, usually seen when a horse is investigating a smell. As the horse engages in what is known as the flehmen response – a position often held for several seconds – so the viewer, too, must pause and scrutinise. Elise Morton

Qian Qian Portal to the Past Lychee One, London 2 May – 1 June An unidentifiable animal skull nestles in peatmoss on the top of a pedestal. From its cavernous eye sockets, incense smoke slowly spirals up. Oblivious of the gallery visitors who watch them with unease, fungus gnats hatched from the moss are busy crawling around the forbidding sculpture installation. Like a boundary marker, Qian Qian’s Form and Emptiness (all works 2024) guards the border of her solo exhibition Portal to the Past. To walk past it is to be teleported into a realm where the unsettling signs of death and decay join a constant flux of metaphysical life energy. Qian envisions a realm marked by the mutual infiltration of science and mythology, exploring what she calls in her artist statement ‘ecomythticism’. In an almost ominous way, delicate laboratory equipment floats alongside peculiar creatures in the artist’s paintings. Propped up by a frail skeleton of roots, a malicious-looking flower appears to be operating a system of round-bottomed flasks and test tubes held by a brass clamp stand (In a Greenhouse Somewhere). Although contained, agitated waves and thunderbolts inside the glass vessels signal a catastrophe-to-come. In The Oracle we peep

through the cracks of a trompe l’oeil layer of plaster and discover a similarly complicated apparatus. In the foreground, a headless phoenix unfolds its majestic wings and swings its tails. Surrounded by an esoteric collection of things – including spiky vertebrae, a dripping rainbow and an atomic model – the mythical creature seems to carry a lost prophecy about the destiny of the universe. The meticulously rendered surface effects and anatomies of Qian’s curious creatures bring to mind artistic traditions characterised by an obsession with naturalism and scientific accuracy. The avian skeletons, glassy butterflies and giant insect legs with stingers she depicts are reminiscent of the fauna and floral in Dutch Golden Age still-life paintings and eighteenthcentury botanical illustrations. However, Qian’s paintings are ambivalent about where such painstaking attempts of capturing ‘ecomythticism’ will take us. Incarnated in nebulous washes of colours, unknown cosmic energy swashes against the delicate curios. What awaits human beings in this eternal undulation of lights and forms is chillingly unclear: we only see faceless humanoid creatures with

translucent bodies develop unsettling features and become engulfed by raging torrents of colour. The use of watercolours in several works, with wavering shadows where colours flow, puddle and bloom freely, gives way to the congealed paints and hardened outlines of Qian’s oil paintings. In Tidal Recall and the three Portraits, although the biomorphic forms and abstract patterns remain mysterious, they are weighed down by the viscous impermeability created by impasto. The artist’s oil paintings and sculpture transform the faint traces left by otherworldly beings and abstract substances into concrete objects. As mystic beasts’ remains turn into carefully studied specimens (as in the bone and horn of Altar ii), or the physical collectibles of Form and Emptiness, Qian’s elusive evocation of death and immateriality seems to have become too literal. Nonetheless, rising from the sculpture and rippling into the gallery space, incense smoke reminds us of the unceasing transmutations between the material world and those realms beyond it. Silently, away from the fixity of these canvases, perpetual change shrouds us all. Cindy Ziyun Huang

Portal to the Past, 2024 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Lychee One, London

Summer 2024

Living Another Future maiiam, Chiang Mai 24 May – 3 June The protagonist of Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s two-channel My Ailing Beliefs Can Cure Your Wretched Desires (2017) is dead but not wholly dead, speaking to us from the afterlife. “I was the last Javan rhino in Vietnam. The last Javan rhino on the Asian mainland. Our species is extinct,” it harrumphs, as Nguyễn’s prowling cameras pan around the rhino’s skeleton, before heading off to inspect Vietnam’s zoos, abattoirs and pet shops. Voiced by a Vietnamese male narrator, this disembodied rhino proves remarkably self-aware, especially when it comes to its murder by poachers so that its horn could be powdered down for use in traditional Chinese medicine. But what makes Nguyễn’s propulsive survey of human-animal relations in Vietnam doubly interesting is its dialogic format and tone of interspecies

camaraderie. The feminine voice of a Yangtze giant softshell turtle (which ‘has a shot at escaping extinction’, according to The New York Times) interjects throughout; her comments about scientists in Vietnam discovering “two new species every week”, and help being on the way, intellectually leaven the rhino’s fighting talk: his desire for revolution and reincarnation as a “virus that infects every gram of animal horn being cut”. Tapping a vein of Vietnamese ecocriticism and animal fables, Nguyễn’s work doesn’t merely aestheticise violence or decry the ‘empty forest syndrome’ afflicting verdant swathes of Vietnam – it suggests that the solutions to such existential risks (if still attainable) lie in a dialectical clash of imaginations and unlikely new interspecies networks.

Living Another Future, a group show comprising eight works from across the Global South, ostensibly explores how certain real-world narratives – from histories of quackery and superstition to political doctrines and colonial conceits –are shaping and controlling others, and ‘ultimately betraying land and people’, as curator Zoe Butt writes in the exhibition text. In the adjoining room, for example, the deleterious effects of the mining interests and agronomic principles of Belgian colonialists on the Congolese population and landscape are broached by Sammy Baloji’s composite photographs (Memory, 2006) and film (Aequare: the Future that Never Was, 2023). Appearing next to that are Khvay Samnang’s mounted bronze animal masks and accompanying film: a response to a proposed

Khvay Samnang, Preah Kunlong (The way of the spirit) (detail), 2017–19, two-channel video installation, colour, sound, recycled bronze and steel, 18 min 43 sec. Courtesy the artist and maiiam, Chiang Mai

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hydropower dam that, had it been approved, would have destroyed the biodiversity and ancestral histories of one of Cambodia’s remaining forest ecosystems (Preah Kunlong [The way of the spirit], 2017–19). Yet, as with Nguyễn’s work, their subjects are neither passive, nor resigned to their possible fates – both works are counter-spaces wherein hegemonic realities are unsettled. Baloji’s brooding film juxtaposes the propaganda of the Belgian Congo’s National Institute for Agronomics Studies – images of its comfortable houses, charming gardens and spacious laboratories – with modern-day footage of nature repossessing the infrastructure it left behind. Meanwhile, the strategy advocated for by Samnang’s majestic two-channel film relates to standing your ground. Or more precisely, dancing on it: Preah Kunlong’s twochannel video depicts a Khmer dancer embodying, through vine masks and patterned ticlike behaviours, the 11 animal spirits respected by Cambodia’s Chong minority. Filmed in

the pristine Areng Valley, the dancer’s trancelike channelling of a peacock and Siamese crocodile, among other creatures, fits within the subversive field of counter-mapping; in the sense that it pinpoints the Chong’s symbiotic relationship with the land – a belonging and agency rooted in storytelling and memory, not arbitrary borders or orthodox ideas of ownership or scale – by theatricalising it. The first work in the exhibition, and only painting, Ubatsat’s Burmica (2022), is a demonstrative act of solidarity-building: using metallic paint, the Chiang Mai-based Thai artist has transformed over 70 images sourced from Burmese history, including the Spring Revolution of early 2021, into a topsy-turvy, full-size reenactment of Picasso’s Guernica (1937). The spirit of transnational comradeship it establishes – your problem is my problem – runs like a thread throughout the wall texts accompanying each artwork, which are written responses by activists, artists and academics. Nearby, two photo

series centre bodies in emancipatory acts designed to shake off unseen shackles: fundamentalist readings of faith and poverty, respectively. One depicts a hijab-clad woman struggling to put on various corsets, a clothing item also bound up with feminine ideals and gender oppression (Naiza Khan’s New Clothes for the Emperor i–vi, 2009); the other shows Bangkok’s homeless wearing hollowed-out wings while collecting rubbish or teetering atop buildings (Dansoung Sungvornveshapan’s Winged series, 2020). This discursive survey of social and environmental issues across the Global South ultimately floats between being a knowledgebuilding exercise and a starter toolkit for overcoming subalternity, marginality or multispecies injustice. Do what feels right, many of these oppositional practices implicitly propose; develop new forms of armour, become a moving map via animalistic movements or, like the rhino and turtle, build once unimaginable alliances. Max Crosbie-Jones

Ubatsat, Burmica, 2022, industrial lacquer, metallic paint and acrylic on plywood, digital interactive, archival material, seven components, 240 × 840 cm. Courtesy the artist

Summer 2024

Timeless Curiosities Istanbul Modern 15 February – 11 August Jutting out from the centre of a large facade of green rock is a wizened face. Animated and able to speak (in Italian no less), the rock recounts its 70 years of bearing witness to the hypocrisy of politicians. It offers sage advice through its wry observations on global and local histories; one such example is a recounting of the violent expropriation of land native to the Lenape people (what is now New York City). Sometimes the rock even sings. It, we learn, is part of the serpentinite stone that forms the backdrop to the speaker’s podium at the United Nations General Assembly Hall in New York, and it is tired of what it witnesses. Painstakingly reproduced in cgi and animated by artist Cihad Caner in his videowork I, The Green Marble; The (Hi)story Of My Witness and Memory (2020), the piercing gaze of the stone face is the first thing that visitors encounter at Timeless Curiosities. Focusing on 16 early and mid-career Turkish artists and collectives working in digital media, the show presents keen observations about the ways in which the production of historical and social narratives are enabled by technologies that reconfigure how memory is documented and disseminated. Also reflected upon is how the digital world functions as an effective index of changes that would otherwise be too rapid and ephemeral to be observed. In Caner’s work, for example, the eponymous green marble’s ruminations highlight the limitations of the kinds of history-writing and narratives that are subsumed under populist politics. Accompanied

by a poster of a quote that Caner encountered in Crete (‘The only good nation is imagination’), the work challenges both the efficacy of the United Nations as an institution and the nation-state as a social unit experiencing unprecedented crises. ˙ Meanwhile, works such as Beste Ileri’s ˙ sentimap Istanbul (2024) and Coincidence (2024) by Yasin Arıbuğa-Toprak Fırat examine Istanbul’s urban landscape and the different cartographic possibilities for capturing information that is ˙ otherwise difficult to record. Ileri uses artificial intelligence to scan and analyse newspaper articles from the 1970s to the present day in order to distil a map of specific emotions associated with the city by sifting through key words denoting public sentiments through the decades. Arıbuğa-Fırat developed software that creates a dynamic collage in real time from footage taken from traffic and tourist camera feeds across 50 different locations in Istanbul. Their work puts into perspective the complexity and diversity of the city’s cultural and visual landscape. Specific locations also become focal points of artistic investigation: the municipality of Kadıköy, a commercial district located on the Asian side of the Bosporus, is the subject ˙ of Alican Inal’s 3d sonic sculpture and video Museum for Disappearing Sounds (2024) and artist-collective oddviz’s Diasec collage print Kadıköy i (2018). Both of these installations examine the role played by sound and urban furniture, respectively, as substrates of the city.

Alican Inal, Museum for Disappearing Sounds (detail), 2024. Courtesy Istanbul Modern

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Moving beyond the boundaries of Turkey, Ebru Kurbak’s Reinventing the Spindle (2023) traces the history of flax as one of the first plants to be grown in outer space. Presenting video and photographic documentations of her experiments in spinning yarn from flax during a parabolic flight administered by the mit Space Exploration Initiative, Kurbak positions textile production as a technology whose sophistication is under-acknowledged due to its associations with craft, domestic labour and the feminine domain, and in doing so, critiques the gendered biases associated with how histories of technological development have been written. Taking its namesake from the cabinets of curiosities that were precursors to contemporary museums, Timeless Curiosities reflects on how the advent of technology has altered the fundamental relationship between bodies and places, memories and histories. In engaging with the technologies of communication, the function of the museum as a site where notions of history, politics and society are negotiated becomes all the more crucial. Between the immutability of the timeless and the accelerating urgencies of the time-less, this exhibition serves as a local relay for a continual, global conversation on the multiple ways that technology has allowed us to redefine our surroundings, and also drawn attention to the necessity of negotiating our collective and ongoing relationship with technology in turn. Alfonse Chiu

Yelta Köm, are you also here?, 2023, found object, resin, metal, 120 × 20 × 80 cm. Courtesy Istanbul Modern

Summer 2024

Tamiko Nishimura Journeys Alison Bradley Projects, New York 25 April – 29 June Few legible faces appear in the grainy blackand-white photographs of Tamiko Nishimura. The subjects in Journeys, her first us solo exhibition – mostly women, captured in quotidian moments – tend to escape the camera’s gaze. Most of them turn away from us. Some are simply silhouettes. The faces we do see are often partitioned, obscured: in Eternal Chase – Hakodate, Hokkaido (1970–72), a cloche hat covers the eyes of a young citywalker; in a garden in Shikishima – Okunakayama, Iwate Pref. (#016) (1972), a mother burrows her nose into her baby’s hair. And then, in other photographs, there are the visages rendered so faintly as to appear spectral: an infant peeking over her mother’s shoulder at the beach; a woman trudging up a snowy hill. Even Nishimura’s most sensual portraits, like those in her 1970 series Kittenish…, contain only closeups of bent knees, splayed thighs, languid hands. Nishimura, who was born in Tokyo in 1948, is often overshadowed by male counterparts such as Daidō Moriyama and Takuma Nakahira, both of whom she assisted in the darkroom as she began developing her own images at higher temperatures and with longer exposures. The photographs on display in Journeys – largely taken between 1969 and 1978, spanning six

series and displayed as gelatin silver prints – typify the subversive style she found through these darkroom experiments: granular and high-contrast; understated, spontaneous and subtly haunting. Her images evoke hazy memories – just barely out of focus, and out of reach. Taken together, her unidentifiable women become half-recalled figures, the particulars of their faces the casualties of time. Yet in simulating the tenuousness of memory, Nishimura firmly immortalises her subjects. Nishimura’s practice was facilitated by her peripatetic lifestyle. During the 1970s, at the start of the Japanese women’s liberation movement, she travelled throughout Japan, photographing scenes of impermanence across its distinct geographies, from the dark, foamy waters of the Tsugaru Strait to the still, snowcoated tableaux of Kodomari and Ōmagari (both towns would later be redistricted out of existence). A quintessential flâneuse, she also found quiet enchantment in unpeopled urban landscapes, which she captures with her signature fuzzy, memory-warped tone: the shadow of a utility pole in Osaka; a leggy mural in Kanagawa; gently sloping trolley tracks in Hokkaido. Each photograph here is a tacitly feminist ode to her own freedom of movement.

My Journey – Tokyo (#13), 1979, vintage gelatin silver print, 16 × 24 cm. Courtesy the artist and Alison Bradley Projects, New York

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One can picture the twenty-something photographer, clutching her camera, alone and alert to the world. One can also picture a seventy-something Nishimura doing the same: the most recent work in the exhibition – an exultant portrait of a firework display titled My Journey iii – Tokorozawa, Saitama Pref. – is from 2022. Despite the poignancy of her landscape photography, Nishimura’s faceless, citydwelling women are her most indelible subjects. This is especially true of the women she photographs in Tokyo: the stylish grocery shopper at an outdoor produce stand, midstep and turned away, her skirt swirling around her as a bag dangles from her forearm; a pair of sandaled women walking swiftly down a sun-dappled sidewalk, their backs to us. In these images – tender, candid and shot through with empathy – women refuse to pose for the camera. Or they simply don’t see it: their obscured faces, more than just an aesthetic conceit, suggest they are too preoccupied to be bothered. Tracking them with her subtly feminist gaze, Nishimura captured the fullness of their lives in a way that feels just as fresh today as it did half a century ago. Sophia Stewart

Marisa Srijunpleang Blooms With The Wind Blows hop – Hub of Photography, Bangkok 4 May – 21 July, 2024 Last year, emerging Thai-Khmer artist Marisa Srijunpleang jointly won the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre’s sixth ‘Early Years Project’ for an excavation of family history that journeyed deep into the painful recesses of her relatives’ past – to the extent that it was named after the immigrant number given to her aunt when she sought asylum in the us following the Cambodian genocide. An installation centred on family testimony, photographs, letters and get-togethers, t360174 (2023), was an attempt to publicly demarcate and internalise the rarely-spoken-of events that befell Srijunpleang’s aunt and grandparents in 1975, when they got stuck in Cambodia while on a brief trip across the border from Thailand’s Surin province. Its affecting video component paired her aunt’s recollections of their daily struggle to survive during the four-year reign of the murderous Khmer Rouge with footage of the family, as it exists today, gathering wildflowers and preparing offerings for an ancestorworship ceremony known as Sandonta, unique to this region. Srijunpleang’s first solo exhibition expands on this autoethnographic groundwork by paring it down to its earthy floral component: arranged along the walls is an intimate photographic study of the grass flowers that grow along the Thai– Cambodian border near her family home. Most of the 15 images frame disorderly clumps of white-tipped grass flowers sprouting amid the

knotted, desiccated terrain of sun-scorched scrublands – bushes and thickets that faintly resemble, to my eyes, the chalk outlines of a recent murder scene, the silhouettes of corpses that decomposed where and as they fell, or the overgrowth rising insidiously over forgotten graves. Today, along a different Thai border, another civil war rages: more than three million people have been displaced and tens of thousands killed in Myanmar since 2021. With villagers and revolutionaries hiding out and dying in Myanmar’s jungles at this very moment, it is hard not to view these melancholic images through that lens. Yet there is something lifeaffirming about them, not merely funereal. Moving through the inhospitable border zones of Surin, across land that was a vulnerable frontier – a realm of limbo, penury and death – dominated by armies and refugee camps during and after Khmer Rouge rule, and where “bombs were everywhere, just like in the movies” (as another aunt puts it in the video documentation), Srijunpleang found herself drawn to these hardy plants. Her weighty, if somewhat overwrought titles, such as Be Strong Under The Sun, Rough and Resolute with the Wind (both 2024), broadly hint at what her subjects denote within the elegiac realm of evanescence and loss she draws us into through a sparse interplay of image and text: these flowers are at

once placeholders for those blown off course by the war, memories feeding off the stained soil and representations of her family’s indomitable spirit. The core interests at the root of Srijunpleang’s practice – an animistic attunement to the spirits of inanimate things and charged landscapes, and a desire to reforge familial bonds and traditions – are embodied most powerfully by the exhibition’s titular, ritualistic centrepiece: a cone of feathered dok rak (crown flower) seeds arranged on a round acrylic base and spotlit from above for dramatic effect. With many details of the war still unspoken, Srijunpleang has latched onto the Sandonta ceremony as a means of connecting to other forms of local knowledge situated in the past, but also partially lost. Here the fleecy white seed of the dok rak – a ‘flower of love’ often used in phuang malai (Thai floral garlands) – fills the absence left by phaka bai ben – a seasonal flower once used in homage-paying rites but no longer found growing in the region – to moving effect. Having encountered them drifting in the air throughout her journey, and sensing an ineffable significance in them, Srijunpleang has turned what is normally an offering presented to the spirits of ancestors – a simple, decorative flower arrangement structured around a banana-leaf cone – into what appears to be a rare family gathering or reunion of sorts. Max Crosbie-Jones

Re Intertwine, 2024, photograph. Courtesy the artist

Summer 2024

Figuring a Scene National Gallery Singapore 5 April – 1 December Walls draped in crimson; a wax-laden installation with a wooden sculpture of Jesus at its centre; and an earth-brown, nut-shaped sculpture – these are the first things that catch my eye in Figuring a Scene. The exhibition, presented in National Gallery Singapore’s project space, is split into six sections, indicated by the different colourings of the gallery’s walls. Furthermore, each section is themed around an element: fire, air and other more idiosyncratic ‘elements’ like shadow, fruit, wax and the city. Comprising works from the gallery’s collection, but attempting, as the gallery claims, to ‘break free from traditional art history norms’, the works on display not only explore each element’s form, but also its relationship with and impact on mankind. The crimson walls I first encounter belong to a gallery that refers to the Bukit Ho Swee fire, a 1961 blaze that destroyed around 16,000 homes in Singapore, as well as earlier conflagrations. In Lim Hak Tai’s acrylic painting Fire (1956), a bright red-and-orange inferno rages across the remnants of broken low-rise houses, with a compelling contrast between the undulating flames and the sharp geometrical lines of the houses. Lim Yew Kuan’s elaborate woodblock print After Fire (1966) and Choo Kuan’s pencil drawing Rebuilding Bukit Ho Swee (1962) astutely capture the aftermath of destruction. Lim’s crisp monochrome lines depict the ruined neighbourhood, with individuals grappling with nearby rubble. In contrast, Choo’s drawing resembles architectural plans with near-geometrical precision. Depicting the construction site of a high-rise building complex near roughly built wooden shelters, he foregrounds a moment of historical flux: the contrasting building styles allude to Singapore’s past and then-future urban development. Similarly, Shui Tit Sing’s two teak sculptures in the city-themed section reflect both the hopes and anxieties relating to urban development in the wake of the 1961 fire.

Cooperation (Passing Metal Beams) (1976) optimistically depicts individuals working together to construct a high-rise structure, though this dream is shattered in Why (1979), where a person falls out of an apartment, with onlookers watching from their windows. The standout section is a delightful ode to the durian – a fruit endemic to Singapore and Southeast Asia. A mix of paintings, photographs and sculptures show how this hardshelled thorny fruit has captured artists’ imaginations. Rendered vibrantly in oil paint, Liu Kang’s Durian Vendor (1957) depicts five men seated by a body of water who are cutting, peeling and eating the iconic fruit. Two central figures tend to a pile of durians and mangosteens on a weighing scale. Nearby, a third man painstakingly removes the fruit’s flesh from its shell, while another savours it, dark brown seeds scattered around them. Nearby hangs Robert Zhao Renhui’s Durian Tree, Bukit Panjang (2024), which captures the tree in a lush forest in Bukit Panjang, Singapore. Blink and you’ll miss the striped-shirted man in the immersive composition’s lower foreground – a local forager. Rounding out the relationship between human and nature is Indonesian Anusapati’s undated Single Object. Made from the wood of a fallen durian tree, the sculpture foregrounds the material’s rich textures, grain and origin, its organic shape and ridges recalling those of a durian seed. Lim Tzay Chuen’s photograph The Opposite is True #2 (2006) and Sun Yee’s oil painting Storm (1959) appear in the section exploring air. Sun offers a literal portrayal of bad weather: a dynamic composition of dark foliage bearing the brunt of whipping winds, as depicted by expressive streaks of white melding with a storm-blue sky. In contrast, Lim’s work documents his 2006 Singapore Biennale performance, in which he released a fog of pheromones in what was then City Hall (now the National Gallery). Eerily depicting clouds of pheromone

facing page, top Lim Tzay Chuen, The Opposite is True #2, 2006, digital print, 84 × 119 cm. Photo: Lim Tzay Chuen. Courtesy Singapore Art Museum

fog in the Gallery’s unoccupied stairwells, The Opposite is True #2 foregrounds how a building’s interior can make the unseen visible. The final sections, themed around shadow and wax, serve as compact, visceral showcases of the practices of Malaysian artist Sharon Chin and Filipino artist Renato Habulan respectively. Large dark plywood structures and printed posters depict, we are told, the night view of an oil refinery from Chin’s home in Port Dickson. Portraying Chin’s dim backyard with a refinery brightly illuminated in the distance, these posters poignantly foreground how omnipresent humankind’s mark on nature has become, even in the dark. Habulan’s haunting Tira (Remains) (2014–23) is the exhibition’s concluding work. The artist is known for his social realist paintings, but his interests in political and colonial systems transcend the material in this sprawling installation. At its centre is an unconsecrated wooden sculpture of Jesus Christ, symbol of the Philippines’ colonial Catholicism. Paired with the violent imagery of carved, disembodied hands and driftwood in the shape of ammunition, as well as the fact that ‘tira’ means ‘to strike’ in Filipino, the installation hints at the interwoven relationship of religious colonial legacies, destruction and warfare. It’s initially surprising to see works by celebrated names like Robert Zhao Renhui and Liu Kang in an exhibition ostensibly dedicated to lesser-known narratives. However, they offer potential entry points into the practices of artists such as Sun Yee and Anusapati – who arguably have far less of a presence in the region’s art history – by highlighting their shared interests in the area’s natural and urban phenomena. Figuring a Scene serves as insight into how artists might synthesise and represent mankind’s symbiotic relationship with what we consider natural and what we consider elemental. Stephanie Yeap

facing page, bottom Renato Habulan, Tira (Remains), 2014–23, paraffin wax, sculpted wood, aluminium and found objects, 141 × 145 × 225 cm. © the artist. Courtesy National Gallery Singapore

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Summer 2024

Books The Unruly Archive by Stephanie Syjuco Radius Books, $65/ £51 (hardcover) Consider the lie embedded in a century-old photograph. Four Filipino men, dressed in ‘tribal’ costumes with spears in hand, pose for a portrait in front of a straw hut. They were among 1,200 people brought to the United States for the racist spectacle of the Philippine Village at the 1904 St Louis World’s Fair – meant to entertain and educate its American audience. The dehumanising display, and its photographic record, helped incorporate the newly acquired territory of the Philippines into an expanding imperial vision. Manila-born, Oakland-based artist Stephanie Syjuco encountered the photographs of Philippine Village in 2019, while trawling the collections of the Missouri Historical Society and St Louis Public Library. The Unruly Archive brings together Syjuco’s work with archival collections in the United States from the last half decade, which scrutinises the ways in which they have systematically excluded and misinterpreted the history of the Philippines, and asks a simple question: ‘What does it mean to not see yourself clearly?’ Through digital and physical interventions, Syjuco disrupts the colonial archive’s asymmetrical history. In her series Block Out the Sun (2019), which draws from the World’s Fair archive, the four men reappear, this time obfuscated by the artist’s hands, which cover most of the staged scene, particularly their faces. Syjuco’s intervention both shows and doesn’t show, turning our attention away from the archival image and

towards what the viewer might bring to it. ‘I do not make work about Filipino identity,’ she writes. ‘I make work about the white gaze.’ Across more than 300 pages that alternate between archival images and text contributions, The Unruly Archive braids content and form. Pages are cut unevenly, images are often deliberately cropped, outsized and low-resolution to mimic the unruliness and overabundance of archival research, with the original unabbreviated captions reproduced alongside. In this sense, the book simulates a search; ‘a type of forensics’, as Syjuco writes. It deploys the visual aesthetic of its source archives to critique what was or was not permitted into their historical record, and by whom. An exemplar of this investigative approach is seen early on in the book. A series of three collages, titled Pileups (2021), engage with the collection at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, in Washington, dc. Each work appears first in full and then deconstructed over subsequent pages with various elements – portraits of unnamed Filipinos, photographs of guns and cultural artefacts, botanical imagery – singled out, resized and captioned. Underscoring the layered and often visually overwhelming nature of these materials, Syjuco’s ‘unruly’ approach attempts to undermine the colonial archive’s relationship to precise and governable data. Her strategic cluttering

reinstates a sense of complexity against the Smithsonian archive’s flatness. For a book that deals with so much from the past, The Unruly Archive casts an equally sharp eye to the future. Among its most resonant tactics is the space given to other artists working with archives. Syjuco invites them to meditate on a simple question: ‘How do you talk back to the archive?’ Among the responders, Wendy Red Star reckons with her Apsáalooke inheritance and the museumification of Native material histories; Minne Atairu imagines an alternate history for the looted Benin Bronzes using artificial intelligence; L.J. Roberts exhumes forgotten Stonewall revolutionaries from the microfiche archives of the New York Public Library; and Gelare Khoshgozaran positions talking back as ‘a response to the archive as a location of power’. The Unruly Archive remains animated by a larger faith in the value of looking back, carefully and historically. Syjuco considers archives as places of both violence and power, while reminding us of the contingency of their construction. In searching for her own cultural identity within these collections, she finds a system that wasn’t built to see her fully at all. As a response, the artist reclaims these materials from their institutional coffers – both with attention to the past and in service of future readers. ‘Forwards through the archive,’ Syjuco reminds us, ‘not backwards’. Varun Nayar

The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville Del Rey, £22 (hardcover) Keanu Reeves has, over the last 20 years, managed to create a sort of ur-character that has become his only product: the stoic everyman (but with mysterious depths), dragged reluctantly into ultraviolent conflicts that never really seem to end. Maybe now, heading into his sixties, Reeves is finding that it’s getting a bit much. So he created an avatar, in the form of the brzrkr comic series: about a seventythousand-year-old warrior who can’t die without being reborn and who happens to look exactly like Reeves.

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There’s going to be a Netflix anime adaptation. And a live-action movie. In the interim, acclaimed British ‘weird fiction’ author China Miéville has stepped in to spin off his take on Reeves’s unstoppable (but inevitably sensitive, world-weary and introspective) killing machine. Miéville has clearly enjoyed the challenge, exploiting the comic’s dilated historical space between our hero’s current gig with a us ultrasecret special-ops unit and his earlier lives. Ladling in his own erudite predilections for occult lore and gnostic historical knowledge,

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Miéville ruminates on science, magic, the possibility of gods and the meaning of life and death. All the while conjuring characteristically vivid scenes of gore-drenched battle and grotesque biotech horror.It’s a breathless ride, even if Miéville seems content to pastiche styles of sci-fi prose. It’s the compromise of working to another’s brief. And there’s more than a hint of the sense that this is more about Reeves than anything else: the actor comfortably typecast forever. He kills, he dies, he comes back. J.J. Charlesworth

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The Art Institution of Tomorrow: Reinventing the Model by Fatoş Üstek Lund Humphries, £19.99 (hardcover) Irrelevant, impotent and imperialist; closeted, colonial, canonical and unchanging. Elitist too. There’s no doubt that today’s art institutions are fucked. Although in this short polemic against how such organisations organise and position themselves, independent curator Fatoş Üstek puts their plight in more elegant terms. She points out that, given the fact that societies today are being endlessly buffeted by the climate emergency, identity crises, mass migration, war, financial meltdowns, the effects of digital and other new(ish) technologies, and that these all now impact on the stuff that falls within the category of contemporary art, it’s little wonder that our cultural institutions are struggling to keep up. They’re trying to do too much: to be spaces for aesthetic display, social outreach, education and technological innovation, as well as being commercial enterprises scrabbling to cover increased costs and decreased funding. In the face of these multiple ailments Üstek attempts to offer a cure: ‘new ideas to develop institutional models and directorial and curatorial positions’, as she markets it. Although these ideas are not necessarily all Üstek’s own (the book is loaded with interviews with the artworld’s curatorati class), they reflect a synthesis of best-practice models from around the world. Well, mainly from the Global North. There’s no mention, for example, of the institutional questions raised by Indonesian

collective ruangrupa when they were directing the recent Documenta 15, or of the ways in which similarly alternative models are forged in the rest of Asia or in Africa. Some biases, it seems, are harder to overcome than others. Üstek is forensic through the first part of the book as she maps out the reasons behind institutional failure. With their imposing architectures, negligible artist fees, reliance on old centralised power structures, consequent unhealthy working environments for staff, dependence on the whims of government arts policies and funders’ interests, and inability to grasp the fact that ‘culture today is not limited to public institutions but is a product of global society, with everyone contributing to culture in their own way’, she leaves you wondering: why should anyone bother preserving these lumbering institutional dinosaurs? Indeed, the question of why we shouldn’t start with a clean slate – whether or not any institutional model is worth saving – is a question that haunts this study throughout. In this respect, Üstek’s defence of institutions as a model is a little weak: we should care because art and artists allow institutions to ‘be more attuned to the changes in society’. The thesis here is somewhat circular – we need institutions to make artists important to society, because they are important to society. Similarly, the fact that most of the people she talks to are invested in institutions, because

they direct them or work with or within them, means that the question of whether we need them at all never gets fully addressed. Ironically then, it’s when Üstek ventures outside of art to explore alternative business models – such as decentralised autonomous organisations (a member-owned business model in which governance and finance are handled via blockchain technology), or the more general potential of digital technologies to allow institutions to operate beyond the constraints of their site – that her thesis becomes more interesting. In the push for an answer, Üstek is impressively if bureaucratically thorough, exploring all aspects of the art institution: mission, management, finance, audience engagement and collective empowerment. She persuasively argues that horizontal and networked styles of management represent the only reasonable way in which institutions can respond to our current complexity. Institutions must (her concluding chapter is a mantra of imperatives) have a clear purpose and an empowered workforce, be financially self-reliant to be programmatically self-reliant, be committed to risk and continual learning, be resistant to received wisdom when it comes to exhibition-making and always produce critical reactions rather than parroting society’s questions. If you’re committed to art’s infrastructures and want to save your job, then the learning starts here. Mark Rappolt

Like Love by Maggie Nelson Fern Press, £20 (hardcover) Is writing in the writing itself, or in the sharing, and discussion, of that writing? Different versions of this question arise while reading this collection of 30 texts, written (whatever that means) between 2006 and 2023. It includes introductions to other people’s books, reviews, commissioned essays for art catalogues and interviews with other writers. It doesn’t represent Maggie Nelson’s ‘main’ writing. ‘You never really know what’s the main thing and what’s a digression,’ Nelson admits in a discussion with poet and writer Eileen Myles. ‘We just have the pretend idea that the real work is somewhere, and it never is. There’s no there there.’ This book, then, is the decidedly elsewhere, with Nelson’s responses to the writings of Ben Lerner, Natalia Ginzburg, Fred Moten and Judith Butler, a bit of music

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(crediting good teenage sex to Prince) and a hefty chunk of contemporary artists such as Nayland Blake, Kara Walker, Carolee Schneemann and Sarah Lucas, among others. That most of these texts, in their original form, acted as prefaces and introductions gives the book a dislocated feel, in which Nelson’s obligation to avoid spoilers means that the action feels absent, also somewhere else. On page, the tone is friendly, academic, probing but semiformal; the writing often doesn’t feel as lively or as searching as Nelson’s essay collections – in part because most of the texts gathered here are responses to a given prompt, whether a book or film or sculpture: the answers, in a sense, are already there. At its best, this book is a conscious performance of community: gathering moments of

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thinking out loud, generously sharing influences and readings. In other places, it is a conscious performance of writing that community: circular, name-droppy. Perhaps appropriately, then, some of the most pointed insights included here are those of Nelson’s collaborators and interlocutors. In the exchange between Nelson and Björk, the musician closes by musing about what the future philosopher, in the Nelson model, should be: not someone who produces an extended pontificating ‘guitar solo’ but ‘someone like you who collects the writings of our species, merges it and distils it into a human form adding diaries and emotional responsibility’. Perhaps Like Love is best viewed as a test drive for where the writing will be. Chris Fite-Wassilak

The Swinging ’70s: Stars, Style and Substance in Hindi Cinema Edited by Nirupama Kotru and Shantanu Ray Chauduri Om Books International, Rs 695 (softcover) As the editors of this anthology of essays point out, the 1970s was a rich period in Hindi cinema. The decade was marked by the release of Sholay (1975), arguably one of the most successful films ever made; the rise of megastars like Amitabh Bachchan; and the fact that arthouse favourites like directors Mani Kaul and Shyam Benegal, and actors like Smita Patil and Shabana Azmi were at the height of their powers. But it was also a watershed decade in India’s postindependence history. The 1970s was, as screenwriter and lyricist Varun Grover helpfully describes it, ‘the age of post-puberty adolescence for our young nation’. The sense of promise, hope and aspiration felt after independence in 1947 had given way to an age of disillusionment, anger and confusion, culminating with the violence of the Emergency years (1975–77), when civil liberties were suspended. India had left behind the nation-building exercise of the 1950s and 60s that had encouraged austerity and restraint, and was heading into the last of the socialist years during the tumultuous 1980s that advanced regional militancy and violence in political life. What better medium through which to chart the sociopolitical history of the country during this decade than one of India’s most popular and accessible mediums: Hindi cinema. Indeed, it has been a long-standing resource for observing national aspirations – albeit because the language (officially India has 22 others, but in practice

considerably more than that) and customs at its heart are heavily north-India-centric. Still, it is impossible to overstate just how much influence the Hindi cinemaverse has on culture in India (the industry might commonly be known as Bollywood, but several insiders reject the moniker for being patronising and an unnecessary reference to Hollywood). It also directly impacts the billion-dollar profits of other businesses, dictating fashion trends and wedding themes, as well as decor choices and holiday destinations for millions of desis around the world. Far more significantly, perhaps even dangerously so, it strongly influences behavioural patterns and shapes public morality, more often than not strengthening deeply embedded patriarchal value-systems. The essays in this anthology are a mixed bag, both in terms of the quality of the writing and the value they bring to an understanding of the films from the era, but they do span the gamut of themes listed above, giving as much space to nostalgic, emotional tributes to a film, auteur or song lyrics as they do to insider accounts of the nitty-gritty of moviemaking. Some personal favourites include critic Bobby Sing’s essay on the audio-cassette revolution and how it changed the way we listen to music; writer and critic Jai Arjun Singh’s account of how cassettes of movie dialogues helped millions of Indians who lived in places that did not have access to cinema

theatres to listen to a film long before they could watch it; actor Rajat Kapoor on Kaul’s fascinating movie Duvidha (1973); film critic Nandini Ramnath on the moll, the missus and other female archetypes in cinema; journalist Sathya Saran on how film magazines peddled gossip and made and unmade careers before social-media and personal pr teams would come to be employed for the brand-building of stars; and writer Balaji Vittal on the antiheroes and villains of cinema. With trivia quiz questions and answers sprinkled throughout the book, and analytical profiles of stars, directors and other industry stalwarts, the book offers something for both casual film enthusiasts and more passionate students of the artform. The anthology reminds one of how so many tropes invented during the 1970s, like Bachchan’s ‘angry young man’ and the layering of comedy-drama-romance-violence-tragedy within a single film – these would come to be informally called masala entertainers – continue to be points of reference in everyday culture in the country. Arguably, no other population in the world is as influenced in its behavioural patterns and fashion choices as Indians are by cinema. One hopes this book will encourage similar documentation of subsequent decades, which might, in turn, yield an interesting parallel history of contemporary India. Deepa Bhasthi

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie Jonathan Cape, £20 (hardcover) ‘However much I wanted to focus on fiction, something immense and nonfictional had happened to me,’ writes Salman Rushdie in this autobiographical book. ‘To write would be my way of owning what had happened.’ What happened was that, on 12 August 2022, in Chautauqua, New York, just before he was due to give a talk about the importance of protecting writers from harm, the author was stabbed multiple times in the neck, chest and eye. Knife is his account of his miraculous physical survival and how he treated his mental scars. The first part of that, the healing of the body, is primarily a tale of the triumph of love over hate. Aided by his family and friends, and the skill of the medical team who treated him, the author recovers. His eye, however,

was not salvageable. If the first part is shocking and a little sickly sweet, the second, focusing on the healing of the mind, is more narratively complex and fascinating. In it, his would-be assassin (referred to only as the ‘A’) is subjected to an imagined interrogation by Rushdie about what motivated him to commit his crime, as if this book were a means of entombing the ‘A’ in some sort of literary Guantanamo. Rushdie visits his attacker’s real jail towards the end of the book, but by then he’s more interested in the building than the assailant – proof, he suggests, of a successful rehabilitation. Along the way, Rushdie gets to elaborate some of the themes in the speech he never made, delivering a paean to the power of art and the vital importance of freedom for those who make it.

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He cites the examples of writers who suffered violent attacks such as Naguib Mahfouz and Samuel Beckett, and those more generally threatened by ‘cultural terrorism’. At other times, though, it reads like a list of Rushdie’s famous literary friends (among them Martin Amis and Paul Auster, both of whom died as Rushdie recovered), and there’s a sense throughout that it’s Rushdie’s ego that’s recovering alongside his physical frame. Nevertheless, this remains an extraordinary tale of physical endurance and an inspiring defence of art as belonging to ‘the essence of our humanity’. ‘The powerful may own the present,’ Rushdie reflects, ‘but writers own the future’, because art defines the narrative within which the powerful do or do not endure. Nirmala Devi

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on the cover Kawita Vatanajyankur, photographed by Iceintravisit in Bangkok, May 2024

Words on the spine and on pages 17, 51 and 83 are from tata Motors, Sumo Gold cr-4 (bs-iv) & 4sptc (bs-iii) Owner’s Manual & Service Book, April 2013

on pages 8, 9, 30, 33, 43, 50, 80, 81 Pixy Liao & Takahiro Morooka, ‘pimo’ Dynamic Duo Furniture, 2024. Courtesy the artists

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Before Romeo and Juliet, there was the Weaver Girl and the Cowherd. The story, which is over 2,000 years old, comes from Chinese folklore, and tells a tale of forbidden love between an immortal woman and a mortal man. Like most ancient legends, the story shifts: some say the immortal is a court seamstress who, bored of her time in the heavenly palace, decides to visit the mortal realm as a dove and becomes enamoured with a cowherd upon hearing him play his lute; others say she’s the daughter of the Jade Emperor, that she was gifted at weaving and that during a visit to Earth a cowherd steals her clothes while she bathes in a river (after which he proposes to her). That second story is sus, but either way: they fall in love. In the end they’re found out by the Jade Emperor, and the Weaver Girl is dragged back to heaven because someone made a rule about immortals and mortals not being allowed to be together. The Cowherd is pretty tenacious and attempts to follow her, but when he reaches the immortal realm, the Jade Emperor’s wife – Queen Mother of the West – takes out her magic hairpin and draws a silvery river in the sky between the lovers. Separated by the watery expanse (mortals would call it the Milky Way), the Weaver Girl and the Cowherd can only gaze at one another in despair. A year passes and they’re still sad, so the Jade Emperor takes pity on them and allows a flock of passing magpies to form a bridge over the river so that the pair can reunite once more. Rather than changing the rule about immortals and mortals (because that would be too disruptive of the grand order), the Jade Emperor decides the couple are allowed to meet once a year on the seventh day of the seventh month in the lunar calendar (this year it falls on 10 August). That day is celebrated as Qixi festival in China; variations of the story are told in Japan, where it is celebrated during Tanabata; in Korea it’s Chilseok; and in Vietnam, Thất Ti̇ch. The Weaver Girl and the Cowherd are represented by two stars known in the Western world as Vega and

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Aftertaste

Qiao Guo by Fi Churchman Altair. In a practical sense, this story, and the associated stars, were a means of marking the harvesting season (the festival is also known for the practice of wishing for new skills). But people like a hopeful love story, so it’s come to symbolise something of a ‘Valentine’s Day’; this conflation of romantic symbolism and agricultural pragmatism has somehow resulted in a festival that puts the onus on women to pray for skills, like weaving and sewing, that will make them more appeal-ing as wife material. (A line of thought that makes downing a vial of poison seem like a good alternative.) Traditionally on this day, married women would gift their husband and in-laws a batch of qiao guo – thin deep-fried cookies made from flour, oil, sugar and sesame – to symbolise a happy marriage.

The only thing I’ll learn to weave is pastry dough, and I’ll take any excuse to try a new recipe. Even if it’s suggesting that I’m happily married to ArtReview Asia. makes about 20 100g plain flour 15ml groundnut oil 30g caster sugar ½ tsp salt 2 tsp black sesame seeds 1 egg yolk 30ml water Groundnut oil for deep frying (optional caramel glaze) 6 tbsp caster sugar toasted white sesame seeds, to sprinkle 1 Rub oil into the flour to form coarse crumbs. Add sugar, salt and sesame seeds. Add egg yolk and water, then form into a dough. 2 Cover and rest for two hours. 3 Divide the dough into two pieces. Keep one covered while working with the other piece. Dust a surface with a bit of flour and roll dough into a rectangle as thinly as possible. 4 Cut dough into strips. Taking three strips at a time, plait these together and press down ends to prevent unravelling. 5 Heat about two inches of oil in saucepan. Put a skewer in the oil to check temperature: if bubbles form around it, the oil is ready. Lower heat to medium and fry the plaits until golden brown. Remove and drain on paper towel or rack and leave to cool. 6 If making the caramel coating, heat caster sugar in a pan until it dissolves and turns to a dark brown colour – be careful not to burn the sugar, it can happen quickly. 7 Dip fried plaits into caramel, then quickly sprinkle with toasted white sesame seeds.