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ArtReview Asia recently became aware of what feels like a burgeoning trend whereby artists today describe their location of residence as where they’re ‘based’ – a word choice that relates more to pragmatism and transience than a sense of domesticity. Which makes ArtReview Asia wonder what is meant by calling a place home. The Autumn issue explores the different ways in which people relate to their environments, highlighting how they shape and share spaces with others.
For Pakistani filmmaker Hira Nabi, to inhabit a place is to experience a ‘shared consciousness’ with one’s surroundings, trees in particular. In her most recent work, Wild Encounters (2023) – part of a bigger project, How to Love a Tree, launched in 2019 – which will be presented at the Pinchuk Art Centre in Kyiv this month, the relationship between the forest in Murree, Pakistan, and its residents is explored, specifically the synchronised temporalities between the two. ‘At one point these temporalities are listed, as periods of climatic change or seasonal growth,’ Mark Rappolt writes. ‘At other times the video presents the forest as home to a litter of discarded ceramics, a human-made trash heap.’ This varying existence likewise has opposing consequences. ‘If part of the work, with scenes of the forest mists, is designed to take us into a leafy dreamworld, there are occasional reminders that this is only a dream.’
For Chinese-Malaysian artist Tan Zi Hao, a shared space closely aligns with a linguistic environment. Tan’s work interrogates the way languages are considered key identity markers in Malaysia’s multicultural society – a view that he believes valorises the dominant language and often excludes minority ones from being recognised as a part of the country’s identity as a whole. Tan’s works engage with Arabic, Tamil, Sanskrit, Javanese, Hokkien, Hakka and Rohinya, to name a few, perhaps suggesting that only a polyglot would be completely ‘at home’ with the texts he references. The polylingual approach ‘alienates us from language and dispels the illusion that it is a transparent transmitter of meaning,’ Adeline Chia writes. ‘His view of linguistic communication is anarchic. It is a shifting, ungovernable force that moves between different languages, scripts, races, nationalities and classes.’
If to settle and live in a place is to gain a sense of belonging, Mire Lee fears “being comfortable”, as she tells Emily McDermott. Known for her largescale installations that are often grisly and grotesque (some literally look like churning guts), the Seoul-born, Berlin- and Amsterdam-based artist speaks of always “wanting to be able to be surprised” as well as her fear of entering a state of stasis and “[becoming] judgemental and exclusionary”. ‘By creating works that are jarringly uncontainable and unpredictable,’ McDermott writes, ‘Lee likewise pulls the viewer out of their own ordinary – their daily – rhythms, offering instead an experience to see, to smell, to hear – to feel – anew.’
Elsewhere in the magazine, ArtReview Asia speaks to Do Ho Suh, whose solo exhibition Speculations, at Seoul’s Art Sonje Center, includes new elaborations of his ongoing Bridge Project, a hypothetical dwelling located equidistantly between New York, London and Seoul, the three places he considers home. In columns, Suraj Yengde reflects on his relationship with food, recalling his experiences of growing up in a Dalit household. Yuwen Jiang reports on contemporary art finding a foothold in an abandoned Catholic chapel in rural China. And Pearamon Tulavardhana makes a visit to the newly opened Bangkok Kunsthalle, which occupies what used to be a historic printing house in the city. The issue also takes a look at upcoming exhibitions, from the Karachi Biennial to the Forest Festival of the Arts in Okayama, as well as ones that have already opened, such as Outside In at Bangalore’s MAP, which compares the practices of modernist artist Meera Mukherjee and folk artist Jaidev Baghel, and Ho Rui An’s solo show at ArtSpace@Helutrans in Singapore, which interrogates the infiltration of neoliberal ideologies into our daily life. As for books, there’s The Waiting Room, Choo Yi Feng’s debut collection of fantastical short stories that imagine worlds in which humans and nonhumans yearn for love, and Elif Shafak’s new novel, There are Rivers in the Sky, in which a drop of water allows us to travel across time and history.
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