Old traditions and a brave new world: Jes Fan, Gordon Cheung, Melati Suryodarmo, WangShui, Anna Witt and much more
As its staff began preparing the new issue of ArtReview Asia, the current COVID-19 pandemic was far from a worldwide phenomenon. Although, as we have learned since, there are many ways of defining what constitutes the wider ‘world’ to each one of us as individuals: the planet, the continent, the country, the city, the town, the neighbourhood, the home, the room, the web, the bed… Gradually more and more of the shows we had intended to preview in this issue were postponed or cancelled, and exhibitions we had planned to review were no longer accessible to the public. And, as our print deadline loomed into view, ever greater numbers of that public were quarantined, isolated, ill or worse. Then ArtReview Asia’s staff were confined to their homes too. And not all of them in Asia.
At this point ArtReview Asia began to wonder what exactly its magazine was supposed to do. Not so much on a day-to-day basis – there is always plenty of work for idle hands – but on an existential level. What is its purpose? Are its aspirations to reflect on a world that has been, to shape that world as it might become or to report on the world as it exists? And, on a narrower scope, it wondered: if there is such a thing as an artworld, how does it fit into that?
In a sense, the Spring issue of ArtReview Asia is the product of such reflections, even if the magazine and those contributing to it did not consciously know it at the time. (This is the inevitable benefit of hindsight and a third eye.) Inside its pages, a series of articles explore how the past informs the present and how traditions transform to fit changing times. Sometimes the world turns and we turn with it; sometimes we attempt to give that world a not-so-gentle push.
In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, Canada-born and Hong Kong-raised Jes Fan’s specially commissioned artist project for ArtReview Asia, taking the form of a commercial advertisement for a product that is both real and imagined, and which graces the cover of this season’s issue, examines the ways in which facemasks might provide an opportunity to reconsider what defines the self.
Indonesian performance artist Melati Suryodarmo talks about the adaptation of traditional dance forms in her work, and how her solo and choreographed group performances are as much about the shared experience between audience and performer as they are an expression of cultural, social and political identity.
In Tears of Paradise, a new series of paintings by Gordon Cheung, the British artist draws on disparate landscape traditions, as well as the relationship between infrastructural, financial and digital infrastructures, in an attempt to represent emerging new world orders.
In two close readings of videoworks, Mark Rappolt looks at the evolution of new senses of self in the work of New York-based artist WangShui, who explores traditions of fluid identities through the myth of Hong Kong’s dragon gates. Meanwhile Anna Witt’s most recent videowork, Unboxing the Future, is a documentation of changing working practices at Japan’s Toyota city, where employees share their current working experiences and speculate on the ways in which increased automation and the introduction of artificial intelligence will affect their work–life balance. Or, more basically, the values and aspirations that determine their way of life.
Elsewhere around the world, director of Yangon’s Myanm/art Nathalie Johnston considers the ways in which Myanmar artists are rebuilding the art scene of a nation emerging from nearly five decades of dictatorship; Clarissa Oon comments on the evolution of Singapore and Malaysia’s relationship through the medium of film and theatre; Deepa Bhasthi serves up an analysis of the many ways dinner can also be a coded language – ‘You are how you eat’; and as social-distancing measures have swept the world and exhibitions have temporarily closed or been postponed, Nirmala Devi rounds up all the exhibitions she would have liked to be seeing right now. Reviews from around the world include the Sharjah Architecture Triennial; Biennale Jogja XV; Park Chan-kyong at MMCA, Seoul; Martha Atienza at Silverlens, Manila; The Posthuman City at NTU CCA, Singapore; Dumb Type at MOT, Tokyo; Phantom Plane, Cyberpunk in the Year of the Future at Tai Kwun, Hong Kong; Wansolwara: One Salt Water at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney; Lu Lei at Shanghart, Shanghai; Spectrosynthesis II at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre; and more. And for those of you still stuck indoors, there are book reviews of Hong Kong artist Pak Sheung Chuen’s diary Nightmare Wallpaper 140928 – 19070; Winter in Sokcho, by Elisa Shua Dusapin; An Ecotopian Lexicon, edited by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Brent Ryan Bellamy; and Jun Yang’s illustrated book The Emperor of China’s Ice. And closing things out, on ArtReview Asia’s back page, French emperor Napoleon reveals how his conquest of Egypt was an expression of his wokeness rather than his greed.
