by Wang Zhibo

It has been just over a year since we moved to Berlin. Yuan Yuan has finally made his first solo show “Irregular Pearl” (at Edouard Malingue Gallery in Hong Kong) after moving his studio here, and I have been busy preparing our dual exhibition project, which was intended for this year’s Frieze London, now delayed of course.

Like everyone, we’re going through a tough time. Even the toughness is unpredictable. Just like I have a fear of the sea, the ups and downs of the CoVid19 Virus pandemic gives me a feeling of sinking in the middle of the unfathomable ocean.

I relocated from Hangzhou to Berlin in August 2019 but before that, Yuan Yuan has been living here with our daughter, renovating our studio and arranging our new home. I don’t know how they managed to make it, but our six-year old daughter can take care of herself very well. She learned long before to wash her clothes. We originally planned to make a return trip to Hangzhou to visit our parents and where our new studio there is now completed.

All these years we’ve always had a very tight time-budget in our work. We’re skilled at compressing our life into a ball. In 2018 we moved both our home and studio twice. Another reason we needed to get back to Hangzhou is that our studio had been flooded in an accident two months after we left. It turned out that the master valve was a shoddy one. We didn’t know how long it’d been leaking, but until my relative found out, the studio had already become a 1.5m deep swimming pool.

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柏林工作室里进行中的作品，2020 Work in progress in the Berlin studio 2020

杭州工作室，2019, Hangzhou studio, 2019

Fortunately, the paintings survived, because I moved them carefully upstairs before I left. But nearly all of our painting materials and gears were completely damaged, including our air pump, Festool machines, expensive photographic equipment, and those painting knives Yuan Yuan had been collecting for years.

New neighbors

擦洗干净刚刚铺好的瓷砖地面，工作室明亮了许多，2019. New floor tiles make the studio much brighter, 2019.

Our Berlin neighbor, Florian, one of the owners of Chert Lüdde gallery, is interesting. He said he moved to Wilmersdorf  because he wanted to live away from art, but unfortunately, here there happen to be two medium-sized artist studios, a collector, and an important senior figure in the contemporary Chinese art scene. The building we are in was designed by a sculptor about a century ago.

袁远在柏林工作室准备6月初在香港马凌画廊的 “Irregular Pearl” 展览，2020. Yuan Yuan preparing for his show at Edouard Malingue Gallery, early June, 2020

工作室一角1，2020, studio view, 2020

工作室一角2，2020, studio view 2020.

Outside the studio

柏林地铁一角 ，袁远拍摄，2017. A corner of the Berlin metro system, 2017 (Photo Yuan Yuan)

A few years ago, every time we traveled to Europe, we always spent time lingering in second hand book stores and museum book stores, indulging ourselves in voluminous books and documents. But we could not take home too many because of the weight limit, so gradually the idea of having a studio. We wanted to have a library and data bank of our own.

佩加蒙博物馆的伊斯兰手稿插图，2020. Islamic manuscript, Pergamon Museum, 2020.

The mysterious Encyclopedia of Al-Qazwini, on display in the Pergamon Museum, documents the rich and varied insights of the world collected by the scholar Al-Qazwini between 1260 and 1280.

柏林新博物馆的柱子，2020, pillars of the Neues Museum, Berlin, 2020.

This is a pillar of Neues Museum Berlin, which embodies all the historical details. The whole structure is imbued with details of stories. [The damage is from gunfire during the final days of the second world war in Europe as Russian troops took over the city, descending on Hitler’s bunker.]

Carsten Nicolai 的《Moire Index》， p124，2019

Before the pandemic, when I was in the library of UDK [Universität der Kunst], I came across the book “Moire Index” edited by Carsten Nicolai, who is a musician and visual artist. The book is a visual lexicon of patterns and grid systems. Although such interference patterns are mostly considered to be unwanted side effects, they are actually extremely interesting from an aesthetic perspective. This idea shares the same starting point of my work in recent years.

But we are different. While Carsten Nicolai intends to  program music in order to study visual aesthetics, my approach is quite the opposite: to study visually psychological suggestion through a mathematical model, such as network and code. For example, the feeling music brings about to me is a kind of warm  and sensual experience, while its abstraction can be the object of logic reasoning. My question is, whether this sensual experience can, through mathematical modeling,  be applied to backward simulation and inquisition. And how much of this pure reasoning disciplined by algorithm can dialogue with the crude, obscure, even sordid portions in my paintings.

《DAS ENDE DES 20. JAHRHUNDERTS》，1982-1983，约瑟夫·博伊斯，Marx 收藏与国家美术馆藏品展，2020. “The End of the 20th Century”, 1982-1983, Joseph Beuys, Marx Collection, Nationalgalerie exhibition, 2020.

In February, the serious state of the epidemic made me extremely gloomy. In this mood, I visited the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, and ran into a very therapeutic exhibition, ‘Time for Fragments Works from the Marx Collection and the Collection of the Nationalgalerie”’, in which the religious redemption of art was enlarged by the disaster. I believe Beuys’s work would not have left me in tears before the pandemic. This exhibition lasted until September, 2020. [Joseph Beuys, 1921-1986; Erich Marx , 1921-2020]

Time Flow

I was stunned by the so many ways timber is processed and classified in Berlin’s market, and the way a product is subdivided. Nearly every piece of wood is finely treated. Here in Berlin the degree of precision in craftsmanship is far different from the rough and thriftless way of working in China.

柏林的木材连锁市场Holz possling里面的切割服务区 2019. Cutting service area in Holz Possling, Berlin’s timber market chain.

Yuan Yuan is, without hesitation, throwing himself into his new career. The real reason he moved away from China was he could not put up with the time view most people have there. But I’ve got lost in the two very different time streams…

柏林的春天, 2020. Spring in Berlin, 2020.

Before the school closed in March, our daughter had already been going to the kindergarten for 6 months. The first book I brought back home from the kindergarten was a book of botanical illustrations. We studied these new vocabularies with a dictionary. During the lockdown, we were delighted to find these “new friends” sprouting in our neighbor’s garden. In my memory in Hangzhou, my botanical knowledge was just limited to Cantonese Michelia alba on the school campus in Spring and lotus in the West Lake in Summer. It was beyond my expectation that the first lesson we had here was about more than a hundred plants and their attributes. In Hangzhou’s Summer, the streets are well decorated with all kinds of flowers, they either pop up  or disappear overnight. They are usually piled up on the landscape zones by sanitation men, but we have no time to figure out their kinds.

In China, people are obsessed with arriving at the future right away. It is just for the sake of this “right away” that all details can be put away, all rules can be altered, principles can be ignored, as long as one can stand side by side with the future in the next second. So as we entered this new time sphere, the changed has left us unprepared, especially with a day of suspension every seven days [Sunday]: we have come back to the present from the future.

2017年4月袁远摄于柏林Mauer 公园. April 2017, Mauerpark in Berlin (photo Yuan Yuan)

In fact, we are enjoying ourselves shuttling back and forth between these two cultural camps, whether or not there has been such a disaster as the ‘oxidizer’. Working together with the ‘oxidizer’, there are endless layers and perspectives of virtual life and political stance, and a sense of dizziness seems to be inevitable. At the moment one stands on the cusp of the surge. The adaptability of humankind may be worth our attention, just like the endless joy one gets from observing the reactions of some individuals in this ever-changing world.

A note on moons

An important festival for Chinese people is thee “mid-autumn festival” or “moon festival” and it is happening this week. “Moon” in China is a meaningful symbol. When people miss their families and their loved ones, or when they wish each other good things, they use the term “Moon”. When people are homesick and are nostalgic, they use this term too. But for us, there are “two moons”—two realities. We are Missing one and watching another one at the same time, even if they are reflecting the same heat from the sun.

Han Feng studied at the Art Institute of Harbin Normal University and the Art Institute of Shanghai University. In 2010 he won the John Moores Contemporary Painting Prize (China). Han Feng lives and works in Berlin.

By Alice Gee

Rachel wrapped the final frame, laying it down in the double-walled box marked FRAGILE. Mugs, candleholders, figurines, everything reduced into shapes of thin white foam and tape. She folded the cardboard lips, seated herself, and waited for the box to collapse beneath her. When it didn’t, she pulled the card from her back pocket. The cut on her fingertip caught on the crisp envelope.

Glue glinted beneath the painted rice paper. Snowbells from the kitchen window. Watercolor and ink. Next time, her father wrote inside, she should expect bluebells. On the top fold of the card, printed in neat strokes, were lines from a poem her mother wrote.

Rachel read the poem, loaded the car, and left. Andy arrived back at the apartment two hours later and emptied her grief into each newly blank space.

Rachel had planned the trip to Bavaria to celebrate the completion of a high-profile commission for the re-design of a penthouse. After two months working on top of each other, ‘an intimate and traditional lakeside cabin’ was not Andy’s idea of a holiday. During the long drive down from Berlin, something forgotten fidgeted in Andy’s mind. An object? An obligation?

UMLEITUNG. 

The diversion would delay them by at least an hour. ‘Let’s investigate. We need a break.’ They left their car in a lay-by and pushed their way up the road’s sharp incline. The road was lined with pastel-colored homes with dark shutters and empty flower boxes.

Rachel pushed through the crowd to the pavement’s edge. Jumping and whooping, men swept by in costumes covered in fabric petals, their bodies thawed into fluttering colors. It took Andy a moment to realize that their swollen, red features and black, hollowed eyes belonged to wooden masks.

Plump, hunched creatures spun across the cobbles in tall black hats. Figures with long, woolen faces tossed slack hessian bodies into the air. Cheering. Howling. Screeching. A band of turbaned minstrels pranced through the town in a din of flutes. Rachel searched anxiously for Andy’s hand. Andy’s reached for her phone. ‘We should leave now’ she said.

The directions did not specify which ‘leafy right-turn’ to take. As Rachel made the corner on the most-‘leafy’ turning, she did not notice the small boy crouched in the roots of an oak. Dusting his cropped hair of earth and snatching a handful of gravel, he leapt from the hollow and began pelting the car with stones. Rachel shouted at him as her window rolled down as she sped away. Andy watched the boy vanish in the wing-mirror as Rachel sped down the track. ‘Feral. It’s like they’ve put something in the water here’.

The track opened into a clearing. A lake gleamed through a thicket of bare pines. They pulled up beside a grey, tiled home with green shutters and a wall of neat, chopped wood. Rachel got out and checked the car’s paintwork. Unmarked. Andy trudged towards the house. A note on the door read, Looking for my son. Cabin behind hause. Key under plant pots. Make yourself a home, with a sketch of the grounds and a flowerpot. Lugging their bags, Rachel unlatched a gate with her elbow, and they arrived at a porched cabin shrouded by trees.

The scent of pine and cinnamon welcomed them. Andy felt for a light switch. A basket of star-shaped-biscuits waited on a table. ’Tastes like sawdust’ Rachel said, biting into one as she set her bag down on the neat double bed.

The cabin contained one large room and a bathroom. The ornate bed, side tables, wardrobe and chest of drawers looked barely 10 years old. Andy’s fingers curved along their wooden carvings. Rachel began to unpack. Woolen, moth-eaten blankets crowded the wardrobe. Andy noticed rings on surfaces where coffees had gone cold, and spaces marked by hooks where pictures once hung.

Andy was showering when the host dropped by. Clothes, hair ties and toiletries cluttered the cabin. Would she notice the void of masculine objects? Or would the host see what she came to find? Some vapid, foreign girl with too many shoes, too many things. Would these spools of thought wind the host’s focus away from Rachel’s eye? Or would these judgements ravel imperceptibly?

Andy listened to Rachel falter over German phrases. It would be easier if she just spoke English, Andy thought. Three months in Berlin and one of the few words Andy immediately recognized – after two months of overestimating her popularity – was ‘Handy’. She tried to picture the provincial woman’s expression as Rachel handed her their business card.

‘Zenith Designs: Re-orienting Spaces.’

In bed that night, the glare of Rachel’s phone broke the darkness.

‘This is it: “The Maschkera.”‘

Lying next to her, Andy ran her fingertip across Rachel’s arm. Her skin was golden, warm, clear of blemishes save from a small cluster of moles on her right shoulder. Long ago they had mapped Guǐ, the Ghost of the Vermillion Bird, in this constellation of five freckles. In the dim light she struggled to re-connect the dots.

After ‘Epiphany’, when nature hibernates and demons menace the valleys of Upper Bavaria, locals band together to scare away the ghouls and awaken spring. At noon on ‘Crazy Thursday’ the ‘Maschkera’ parade through towns in their outlandish costumes. Traditionally, these costumes – including the hand-carved masks – pass down from generation to generation.

As Rachel dozed off, Andy whispered, ‘We are the demons.’

‘What?’

‘The boy. Didn’t he try to chase us away?’

‘Maybe the boy is a spirit. Maybe we are Spring. Fresh life.’ Rachel said, and kissed the back of Andy’s neck.

Rachel lay flat on her back, in a dreamless sleep. She seemed to pass through life like each new place had a Rachel-sized hole waiting to be filled. Andy arranged the crumbs of Rachel’s half-finished biscuit into a star on the side-table. How different would she have been if she had grown up somewhere like this? If she had filled into spaces left by her ancestors?

By the time Andy was 15 and her family had settled in Shanghai, she had lived on four continents and attended five different schools. She pulled her knees to her chest and bound herself in. She sucked the split ends of her bleached hair together. Demons haunt a wanderer; Rachel had said. What demons haunted her?

One of the few consistencies in her childhood was a large Chinese watercolor. Retreat in the Bamboo Grove. By the third or fourth move, rehanging the picture in their new home had become a ceremony, a ritual of relocation. Her parents gifted Andrea the privilege of choosing its position. Something to occupy her. The arrangement had suited her. The lonely girl could lose herself in the enchanted, unchanged landscape. As the family settled, and playdates were arranged, the picture would fade into the crowd of decorative objects and await the next beginning. By now it had waited 8 years.

Andy’s eyes, adjusting to the dark, imagined the watercolor in the void above her.

Foggy strokes washed over the ceiling. Next, in delicate, black lines, she traced the outline of a town. She gave the homes shutters and tiny parading stick-figures – neat and insignificant, she thought, in the rocky expanse. With quick, sharp brushes, pines surrounded the town. In the furthest, eastern corner – just visible through whispering mist – she traced the outline of a building. From this distance, Andy could not distinguish if the timber cabin was more Chinese or Alpine.

Color draped the rocky hills. Grey clouds lulled into pale blues and jagged branches of teal. She raised her fingertips against the sky. Her fingers pushed deep, deeper into a mouth of cobalt blue. Slowly at first, an emptiness crept from the West.

The void relinquished a moan and hailstones bit into the earth. The cobalt mouth engorged in a howl as a sea poured out and swallowed the people and their little homes. You took it! You stole it! The sea roared as it flooded into crevices and tore through empty spaces in its desperate search. She ran, her feet pounding against the hail-like rocks, to the distant cabin.

She was the boy and his voice purled inside her.

Light.

‘You’ve been talking in your sleep again’ Rachel said, forcing her feet into knotted trainers. Andy sprawled on the bed and reached for her phone. ‘Shit’. It had long gone 11. ‘I’m going to have a cigarette and nose about’, continued Rachel. ‘Leave in 10?’ Bitter air gnawed at Andy’s toes. She murmured agreement beneath the duvet. A zip fastened and the door closed. Andy kicked the covers onto the floor, hauled herself onto all fours, and stretched her back. Her legs swung off the bed and propelled her towards the sink. Two minutes to brush her teeth. Two minutes to clarify the dream by daylight, then drive it away.

Rachel’s parents moved to Oxford in the ‘80s before Rachel was born. They had returned to Changsha only once, for her grandmother’s funeral. It had been easier to leave 9-year-old Rachel behind. 12 years later, in a moody London bar, Andy told Rachel her stories of Shanghai. The shade of plain trees, the sun’s heat on her changing body, a first kiss on steps behind Nanyang Road: ‘my lips burning from the spice of Sichuan-skewers’. ‘I’m more Chinese than you are!’, Andy teased, and rocked the Star Anise in her G&T round and round.

Andy spat the toothpaste into the sink. She reached for a flannel and smeared toothpaste on the soft, cobalt towel.

‘So, after 3 hours hiking up a mountain, you buy kitsch you could get in Berlin?’ Andy said slamming the car door. Rachel tied the novelty apron over her jacket. On its front a man’s belly bulged in tight lederhosen. She wobbled comically over the stony path. ‘You only bought yours because he was cute’, countered Rachel. Frustrated she had forgotten to charge her camera or bring blister plasters, Andy had impulsively blown €40 on a decorative beer mug. ‘Well it will make a nice vase’. The sun fell through the bare trees and encased the clearing in soft, pink light.

‘Actually he fancied you’ Andy said.

‘What?’

‘The store owner, he fancied you. You bought it to prove a point’

‘To whom?’

Andy kicked the gravel. ‘To me’.

Rachel moved in long strides towards the cabin door and swept her black bob into a knot, flung the apron on the bed, and faced her. She would not blunt herself against Andy’s edge.

‘Something’s missing. Not lost, missing. Under the sofa–missing. You’re meant to help me look.’ Rachel said and dug her nails into the bedpost. If she gripped it tight enough, she might become sturdy, robust too. ’I don’t think you want to find it. In fact, I think it’s you who kicked it away’ she continued. Red blotches collected on the skin below her neck.

‘What the hell are you on about?’

The dim lightbulb idly brightened but the room was cold.

Rachel left for dinner. Andy told her she had a headache, to go without her. For a few hours this lie slackened the knots that tightened their stomachs. Andy lit candles and sat on the porch, shuffling through music on her phone. At first the crunching of biscuits and a thrumming guitar drowned out the faint call. Then it held her attention.

Mewing came from the clearing’s farther side. She unlatched the gate and passed by the house. Glass-panes framed warmly lit domestic scenes, though she resisted the urge to peer in. Max, in his spider-man pajamas, saw her and watched the stranger closely.

She envisioned herself fading into the dim forest, called away by an endless woodland night. The night breeze snuffed her candle out, and she switched on her phone’s torchlight. A warning displayed – 30% battery.

Among the trees the sound crystallized. The call was sharp and short, too confident to belong to someone lost. There! Peeking through the nook of an oak, was a fluffy owl, no larger than a paperback novel. Startled by the phone’s glare, it dived into the darkness, its wings tipped in moonlight. Following its flight, Andy’s eyes landed upon a shadowy outline in the distance, a grander, older cabin between tall pines.

A mossy heap of off-cut wood obstructed the arched, double door. Her hands hurried to remove the planks which blocked her passage. They hurried as if Andy had no choice but to anchor her body to an action whilst blood swelled through her like helium. A woodlouse scuttled between her fingers and moths accumulated in the torchlight. She flinched from the mossy static of their wings as if disease textured them.

She hoped a locked door would reprove her to go to bed. But the iron handle seemed wrought to the curve of her palm and the door opened silently. Darkness ate her light.

As her eyes adjusted, on the walls knives and axes nicked through choking dust. Spiders whispered their legs over the glinting glass of lamps hanging from ceiling beams. Moonlight through dirty windows reflected off white sheets cast over expansive tabletops, shielding dormant landscapes beneath. She walked to the largest table. Her hands ran across the fabric, over unfinished work, invisible objects hinged between being and non-being. She fingered the corners of a sheet hesitating. Then she began to tug.

Hanna was washing up when she heard the scream.

He had suspected the women from the moment they arrived. They had taken the annex but his grandfather’s workshop had to remain uninvaded, unspoilt. Max thought he was brave and strong but when he rammed into the tall woman’s side, he had not foreseen that his form, small and strange, would elicit this much terror. He had never heard an adult scream like that, at least, not since that night. The night Max was trying to forget.

Max ran out of the barn, tripping over gnarled roots, back to the house, falling into the arms of his mother. He burrowed his face into her chest. ‘Opa’, he exhaled as his chest rose and fell and relented to her heartbeat. Hanna exchanged looks with Andy.

‘Sorry, sorry, Entschuldigung.’ Andy offered.

Max’s glared at Andy and fled inside. The woman was petite, younger than Andy had imagined, and wrapped in a fuchsia dressing gown. ‘It’s OK’. He is very sad because his Grandfather died. Max loved being with his Grandfather in his workshop. Carnival was their special time.’

Close to the house the owl continued crying.

Andy slunk into the empty bed, relieved her host had been understanding. She tensed and relaxed her sinewy limbs, tracing a line of focus about herself like a silkworm winding a cocoon.

Rachel would be back any minute. It would be easier to be asleep. Hours later Andy awoke but Rachel was still gone. Her silk thread kept snapping.

Last month, Rachel had invited Andy to spend Chinese New Year with her family.  One evening, Andy found herself alone in the kitchen with Rachel’s mother, Lili. As Lili stirred her wok, she recounted to Andy the legend of Nian, the beast of Spring Festival. Hungry Nian, the child-eating monster, would emerge from the mountains and tear through villages. To intimidate him, locals banged drums, plates and saucepans and doused their homes in red paint. ‘Gou Nian’. Lili pressed the shape of the words into the girl’s mouth like a ginger candy. The cadence soured under her lips. How had this girl ‘gotten away with’ learning so little? Rachel’s friend knew even less Mandarin than Rachel. ‘Pass-over of Nian, the year-beast’, Lili translated.

Translucent snowflakes caught on the window. Outside, the boy played in the garden. He threw something, retrieved it, threw it again. Snow blanketed the panes until she could only hear him. It’s gone! It’s gone! Where is it? As he shouted, the object bulleted through the glass and into a sideboard. Blue and white China splintered into triangular shards. Andy tried piecing them together as snow rushed through the window. But as she grasped them, the painted details smeared together winding blue trails across the snow. The boy plunged through the window, searching the snowdrift until he lifted the object to his face and a spirit summoned in the window.

Andy wailed. Rachel held her in her arms. ‘I’m here now, I’m here now’.

It was their final day in Bavaria. Rachel had overslept. If they wanted to visit the Castle and Weiskirchen then they should be passing the Tegernsee right now. Andy slammed the wardrobe door. Rachel groaned. What had the revelers taught her? Saufen wie ein Loch: Drink like a hole! Saufen bis zum Verlust der Muttersprache! Drink until you forget your mother tongue!

‘Have fun?’ Andy said, refolding a red turtleneck. She lay it in the empty suitcase, stared at it, then retrieved it and pulled it on.

Rachel swallowed an aspirin. ‘I wasn’t grumpy with you yesterday, why do you have to be so…’

‘—so what?’

‘I don’t know…’ Andy parted the curtains and Rachel grimaced ‘– fragile.’ Her voice was measured but the still word roared. Rachel went into the bathroom. Makeup had collected in the corner of her eyes. ‘You feel things deeply, and that’s fine…’ she said, pulling out threads of mascara from her eyes, ‘…but are you sensitive to your surroundings, or expecting the world to accommodate, you?’ Andy watched the spitting rain collect on the windowpane. ‘I’m not saying this is deliberate, just…’ Rachel tried to collect Andy into her arms, but Andy stiffened.

‘Is this why you brought me here? A trap?’

Tears pricked at the raw skin beneath Rachel’s lashes. ‘No. A retreat.’

Andy threw the beer mug against the wall. She began crying. Not knowing what to do Rachel collected the shards. A trail of blood bloomed on her finger.

Max belted his papier-mâché monster into the front seat of the car. As Hanna reached for the gear stick, she knocked against one of the creature’s flailing arms. Craftsmanship must have skipped a generation, she thought. She did not expect to meet Rachel’s car pummeling down the narrow track. Rachel pulled up on the verge and rolled her window down. She had to leave, but Andy would check out tomorrow. Rachel fumbled for her German. The cabin was wonderful, and the biscuits were delicious. And could Hanna provide Andy with a taxi number? Dark smudges around Rachel’s eyes appealed to Hanna for silent understanding.

As Hanna scooped Max’s limp body from the pool of television light, she thought she heard something move across the gravel path. Carrying Max up to bed, she pulled on a blind’s cords with a fore and middle finger, but the blind just gave way to unmoving darkness.

She lay her son down on his cabin bed and prayed for undisturbed sleep. He was right, it was too soon to rent the annex out. His room felt too warm. Hanna loosened her dressing gown and went outside. She thought of Rachel. What if her father – voicing his objections – had jinxed the strange couple lying in his bed, splintered them, burrowed into them, whilst they slept? Maybe this young couple offended her father. All that infinite, celestial perspective, now, yet his ghost remained in the past. She chuckled. So much rot beneath that veneer of tradition and pride. Hanna turned inside and missed the light thrown towards her across the thicket from the workshop.

His eyes and mouth gaped open. Hanna rushed up the stairs to dam Max’s pouring screams,

Another nightmare. The psychologist said Max would relive the trauma in his unconsciousness for some time, though she assured Hanna he was doing fine: ‘Well, when you consider how Max found the body’.

On Sunday Mornings, Hanna would prepare small parcels of rolls and salami, and two flasks of hot chocolate. Max would scurry with this breakfast to the workshop where his Grandfather would already have begun work. He would set his tools neatly down, and share with his Grandson in their silent communion, whilst heaters whirred and burnt dust. For two hours each week, Max was permitted entry into this precious, masculine world.

Milk congealed on Max’s mug of chocolate. He lay in the hollow space of morning with no routine to fill it. Pulling a hoodie, then a jacket, over his pajamas, he scampered out into the cold. He reached the lake’s edge where grassy blades met still water. Reaching into his coat pocket, he found the sharp gravel stones. He crushed them into his palm. They did not skip across the lake’s surface like the pebbles his mother threw. They sunk, he could hardly make out where – the ripples left behind were so fleeting. If Max threw himself into the water, would the sound fill the valley? Would it knock birds from tree-tops, wash plastic debris to the banks? Or would he sink, as simply and quietly as these stones? Max searched about for something heavier. A second reflection collected in the pool of water.

Andy thought she was always going to put them back, and really, she had not known what she would do with them anyway, other than examine their terrifying, appealing depravity, passing their weight between her hands. Now they clunked in her cloth bag as she moved through the thicket to the lake to return them to the workshop.

Max rummaged through the tall grasses. When he emerged she was standing there. They stood, each mirroring the other, waiting for their reflection to flinch. His tight gaze loosened into ambivalence, and Max slumped onto the dirt, his back turned to Andy. Andy watched as the boy fed rocks to the lake, its water leaping to engulf each morsel. She approached the water’s edge and sat down with her bag beside him.

Entranced, they watched the stones fly and fall, and listened as they hit the surface and each splash subsided. The mouth of the cloth bag slumped open. Inside were two masks. One had prized itself free with its long-curled horns that squirmed out of the darkness like centipedes. Last night Andy’s fears had writhed in its hollow eyes. Now it lay, childish, almost benign under the pale, grey sky. Now she looked through those holes to the face beneath. Another face, pink and flushed and red, propped the monster up.

Max reached for the mask by its horns, a lump of wood chiseled and painted into the image he had given his Grandfather. The wooden ridges curved about his face exactly. Bitten, grubby fingernails twitched over the dog-grin. Max pursed his lips and yelped. The sound, unsteady at first, evolved with each cold breath until an eldritch howl punctuated the valley.

The face in the bag watched her. The familiar face Andy had taken in kinship now grimaced menacingly in the periphery of her vision. She had cradled his face. Now it grinned gleefully in her hands. When she put him on, she could not see him.

The small wooden mouth moaned. Andy tried again, her ungainly cries merging with Max’s. At first furtive, the sounds grew stranger, wilder, louder. The tawny, slicked moustache twisted over gaunt cheeks which hollowed into a stiff, gaping jaw. Pale pink lips engorged with every mangled cry, every screech, and from bulging mounds chartreuse eyes sneered at the crying child.

Max tore off her face, his grandfather’s mask, and threw it into the water. A hollow briefly opened in the surface, then the turbid water stilled. Max and Andy stared at each other blankly, then watched as the mask stole across the water towards the wood.

‘Wir haben ihn verjagt.’

*
Though a country be sundered, hills and rivers endure;
And spring comes green again to trees and grasses
Where petals have been shed like tears
And lonely birds have sung their grief.
Du Fu

国破山河在
城春草木深
感时花溅泪
恨别鸟惊心

杜甫

Alice Gee on Huangshan mountain, Anhui Province, December 2019

Extended opening hours Gallery Weekend Berlin
Wednesday, September 9 to Sunday, September 13, 10 am – 7 pm

The Michel Majerus Estate is delighted to present Takashi Murakami: Michel Majerus Superflat, curated by Tobias Berger. Takashi Murakami (b. 1962) and Michel Majerus (1967–2002) both started exhibiting widely in the mid-1990s and can be considered the first generation of artists who fully embraced the post-analog. As early as 1995, Michel Majerus remarked in his notes: “unplugged (…) -> analog digitalized -> fragmented the analog,” perhaps one of the pithiest descriptions of the paradigm shift towards the full digitalization of the world at the end of the 20th century—a time that we are only starting to grasp as being one of the past decades’ most innovative periods for creative minds of all disciplines.

Strongly inspired by Michel Majerus’ treatment of street and computer culture, Murakami became interested in Majerus after observing that he was “much more mysterious” than his American counterparts, pushing forward from the “New Painting Movement” of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and “twisting things”—a general observation of German art that Murakami is intrigued by and is an approach close to his own practice. This twist is especially interesting in the work of Michel Majerus, “who mixed late ‘80s culture, gaming culture, Japanese pop—everything, but on the surface.” As Murakami states, “It is completely dry—opposite to Anselm Kiefer or Gerhard Richter. This is a new freedom in a painting.” Having only discovered the works of Michel Majerus a few years ago, Takashi Murakami devoted three years to this series; using mostly silkscreens stoked a certain kind of jealousy of how Majerus could achieve the same result with freehand painting.

Both highly influential figures and inspirations for many visual artists and other creatives, Michel Majerus and Takashi Murakami also happily absorbed everything around them, which they incorporated into their art. From contemporary graphic design to historical drawings, from machine instructions to computer game graphics and from club flyers to manga heroes—all have been consumed to serve as some sort of springboard to be appropriated wherever suitably inspired. Where Takashi Murakami has appropriated Japanese anime, post-World War II images and the Japanese art historical canon, Michel Majerus was perhaps more influenced by Capitalist Realism, making use of the newest signifiers of the ‘90s like sneakers, computer fonts, company logos and album art created for electronic music.

Takashi Murakami, Superflat Bubblewrap Michel Majerus, 2019
©2019 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of the artist studio and PERROTIN

Looking back to Michel Majerus’ works from the turn of the century and witnessing the impact that they still have and how inspirational they have been for Takashi Murakami—one of the most knowledgeable connoisseurs of art and artists that I have ever met—Michel Majerus’ wall work what looks good today may not look good tomorrow from 1999 comes to mind. In the case of both artists, one might even dare to proclaim: “What looks good today may even look better tomorrow.”

Tobias Berger

Simon Mordant is one of Australia’s most prolific art collectors and philanthropists. As chair of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney and as Australia’s past Venice Biennale Pavilion Commissioner, Mordant has been one of the major forces driving modernization of Australia’s visual arts scene. Simon and his wife, Catriona, live in Sydney. Chris Moore spoke with Simon via video conference during the Covid19 lockdown.

Simon Mordant is sitting in his office at his beach house. He is thoughtful in his responses but also fairly relaxed, defensive only when criticisms of Australia are raised regarding his adopted country (his voice has also adopted some monotone Australian drawl). Born in 1959 in England, aged 23 Mordant emigrated in 1983 to Australia. Since then Mordant has become the picture of the browned, successful Aussie. In 2010 he and Catriona donated AUD 15 million (at the time, around USD 12 million) towards the AUD 53 million redevelopment of the Museum of Contemporary Art, and in doing so also brought State and Federal governments to each contribute AUD13 million too. In 2012, Mordant was awarded Member of the Order of Australia for services to the arts and cultural community. In 2020 he was knighted in Italy. This week Simon was awarded Officer of the Order of Australia, the country’s second highest honor, for services to the visual arts. We begin our conversation with the question of why he became an art collector.

“We’ve never thought of it as collecting. We love being around creative people, whether that’s visual artists or performing artists. We enjoy being around people making excellent things, and along the journey we’ve been able to acquire works that hit us emotionally in the heart and are works that we’ve loved at the time that we bought them. We’ve never sold anything that we bought. There are a number of works that we’ve acquired over 35 years, and some no longer have that same emotional response. So, we don’t show those works in our homes or offices, and increasingly works that we know we’re not going to show, we’re gifting to public institutions, rather than have them gathering dust in a warehouse. But every single thing we’ve bought has had an emotional impact on us at the time of purchase. And in pretty much every case we’ve got to know the artist or maker subsequently, and in some cases, we’ve supported the artist for 30 years and in some cases have 30 or 40 works by that artist over their particular career.”

The Hangman’s House

I ask whether there are particular art works that have maintained their interest over a long period of time? “I still have on my desk in the city the first work of art that I bought. When I was 22, I wandered into the Royal Academy Summer Show and saw this work in my lunch hour. It had a really significant personal impact. It was a picture of a house in a field of flowers. It was unusually beautiful, but it had a very odd title. The work was called “The Hangman’s House”. I couldn’t reconcile the beauty of the picture to the title. I wrote to the artist and asked her to explain to me the context of the picture. The artist wrote back and her letter is stuck on the back of the picture and that picture sits on my desk and I look at it every day.

J. Feaney, The Hangman’s House Salzburg, Aquatint, 6/75 collection Mordant Family, Australia

“We often open our homes to international museums and collectors who are visiting. Often people will ask us, in the event of a fire, what would you take? We always answer the same way: there are some sculptures that our son made at kindergarten, when he was 4 or 5 years old, and they would be the things that we would grab in the event of a fire.”

‘The Hangman’s House’ was the first artwork you bought. How did it develop from there? “I continued to buy works that I loved, that were beautiful, that had an impact on me through my early 20s. And then I chose to emigrate to Australia by myself, left my family, and came to Australia with maybe 8 or 10 pictures that I’d bought and some clothes. What I quickly realized was that for whatever reasons, those artworks didn’t work in Australia. The light was different. My state of mind was different. They no longer resonated with me. I started to learn a little about Australian contemporary art. There were no museums dedicated to contemporary art when I arrived, and the state-owned institutions were full of dead art and were very unchallenging for me. I mean, I love van Gogh and Renoir, but I can’t sit down and talk to them about what was on their mind when they were creating a particular work. I can read books or letters or correspondence but with a living artist, you can sit down and have a discussion with them about what was on their mind. So, I quickly gyrated towards contemporary art and started to learn about Australian contemporary art, and visited galleries and institutions, and then started to collect Australian contemporary art.”

Leaving England

What prompted you to move to Australia?

“In 1977, when I finished school in England, Margaret Thatcher had just been elected Prime Minister after a long period of Labour governments. The country was under general strike. The IRA were very prevalent. I can remember my father looking under his car every day before he went to work in case there was a bomb. [a common practice for business people at the time] My best friend at school’s father was killed by the IRA. I was in Harrods when the bomb went off. I was pretty disillusioned with England. I didn’t like the class structure. There was no meritocracy. I felt I needed to go somewhere that spoke English, because I didn’t have other languages. And I needed to go somewhere that my family had never been before, to be able to prove to myself that I could make a go of something myself.

Simon with his parents

“At the time I emigrated, my parents thought they’d wasted their money on my education. They’d made significant sacrifices to put me and my brother through boarding school. I was the eldest of two and I shot through as soon as I finished school and never really lived at home, because I was at boarding school from the age of 7. My brother went to boarding school at the age of 6. He had a similar reaction, albeit a little after me; he moved to South America and subsequently, about 25 years ago, settled in Bali, where he [has] lived ever since.” – I remark these are examples of successful education. “Subsequently my father apologized for criticizing the decision to emigrate and my parents loved coming to Australia. They came for a couple of months each year, and my father came here to die 16 years ago, and he’s now scattered off our jetty. They fell in love with the place subsequently, before I emigrated they had a very 1950s perception of what Australia was…until they got here and saw it for themselves, they didn’t understand why I had chosen to move here.”

Catriona

You moved to Australia and started working as an Chartered Accountant. “Yeah, I didn’t really last long as a chartered accountant. I used that to get my emigration and sponsorship by an employer. Within 6 months I’d left the profession and moved into investment banking, then in its relative infancy in Australia. This was early 1984. Every summer in Australia there’s something called the Sydney Festival for the month of January. There’s a lot of art and public performances. Every year I used to go to Opera in the Park, which was a free opera for about a hundred thousand people in the Domain [a park in central Sydney]. I used to get there early and take a big picnic rug and friends would come and join me through the day until the opera performance in the evening. In the summer of 1988 one of the people that was joining me was a very dear friend, who was a single mum. I was an early adopter of technology, so I had one of those military-style mobile phones, with the handset sort of glued to a car-battery, with a 6-foot aerial. I was sitting down in the park and the phone rang. It was this friend to say that her young daughter was sick, and she couldn’t come but she had planned to bring a friend and she was going to come anyway, and where was I located so she could find me. I said, ‘Of course! There’s going to be about 20 of us here… I was wondering back to my car to get another Esky [cooler box] of beer and wine, and I recognized this person who’d been described to me. We went back to the picnic. We talked all the way through the opera and subsequently arranged to meet for dinner together. We were married six weeks after that dinner.

Simon and Catriona Mordant

“Catriona grew up in the theater. So, she had been surrounded by creative people. Her mother was a dancer. Together we had a shared creative interest. She had some art works artists had given her in return for staying in her apartment or just gifts from friendships. We started this journey together. It started as a hobby, it became a passion, and then it moved into an obsession.”

At this point it is hard to tell whether Mordant is talking about art collecting or Catriona. Possibly both.

“For the last 30-plus years we’ve been on this journey together, which we’ve absolutely loved. Because we travel a huge amount, we’ve seen art in many different places. We generally find that places going through significant change are producing the most interesting art. Whether it’s the Middle East, or Korea – given the tensions between North and South or Africa, we find that art coming from places going through change is more impactful upon us. In more recent years, the relatively safe economies of Australia and North America aren’t producing work that has the same level of emotional impact on us. Maybe post Covid this will change. Yes, we have continued to buy Australian and North American art, but our main focus is on markets going through significant change.”

Venice Biennale, 2015

***

The conversation moves on to how Simon began to be involved in the Australian art scene. “In 1983 there was no institution focused on contemporary art. The state museums had eclectic collections, mostly of dead artists, a lot of colonial Australian art – interesting but certainly not emotionally appealing. So, I started to ask around: where were the commercial galleries? But there weren’t many commercial galleries in Sydney then. I started to meet the gallerists and go to openings. If I saw something I liked and I could afford it, I’d buy it. I then heard – this must have been the mid-80s – that there was an initiative to start a museum of contemporary art. A guy called John Power (1881-1943, an Australian artist) had died at the end of the Second World War and he’d left a bequest […in which] he had stipulated,

“…to make available to the people of Australia the latest ideas and theories…of the most recent contemporary art of the world and by creation of schools, lecture halls, museums and other places for the purpose…of suitably housing the works purchased so as to bring the people of Australia in more direct touch with the latest art developments in other countries.”

That bequest had been left to Sydney University, who had not completely fulfilled the terms of the bequest as there was no museum. A few people unearthed this bequest and put the university under some pressure to meet the obligations that had been stipulated. I became quite close to Leon Paroissien, who was driving that initiative and who subsequently became the first director of the Museum of Contemporary Art when it opened in 1991.(1) I can remember in the late 80s going through this shell of a building with my wife, looking at this ambitious desire to turn a building on Circular Quay into a museum. I joined the inaugural board of the foundation of the museum, and subsequently in the mid-90s joined the Board of the museum and chaired the finance committee. At that point the museum was in significant financial strife. Annual attendance was under 100,000 people and the institution was close to bankrupt. Bernice Murphy, the second director of the museum had resigned. A search was begun for her successor. I was in London on business and I met with a short list of candidates to potentially succeed Bernice. I met Liz Ann Macgregor and realized that she was going to be the most outstanding director, and I wasn’t going to leave the room until she had agreed to take the job. She came out in 1999 as the third director of the museum and very quickly transformed it.

Catriona and Simon Mordant, with Pipilotti Rist (center) and Elizabeth Ann Macgregor

“She lifted the admission charge, which, given it was our key source of income, was a pretty brave move… for an institution that was effectively bankrupt. She found a sponsor, Telstra, who was prepared to give the funds for free admission, and over the next 15 years the audience grew exponentially to 500,000 people.  In that period, Board chair, David Coe and his wife and Cartriona and I supported the museum buying Australian contemporary art. In 2008, I recognized that the place was bursting at the seams and, in the absence of change, we were going to lose Liz Ann, because she was not being challenged and had taken the place as far as she could. I proposed re-establishing a foundation to raise money to redevelop the institution. The museum had a vacant carpark on the northern end of the building at Circular Quay and with architect Sam Marshall we came up with a design concept that would solve many of the issues that we faced.”

The first firm to win an architectural competition regarding the MCA was Tokyo’s SANAA in 1997. The project to add a cinematheque was ultimately abandoned (SANAA’s Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa subsequently won another competition to design the Sydney Modern annex to the Art Gallery of New South Wales). Another competition held in 2001 by the City of Sydney was won by Berlin firm Sauerbruch & Hutton, first for an annex to the existing building and then for an expanded concept replacing the old building, and again including a cinema complex. But Sydney has seen many notable old buildings obliterated, particularly on Circular Quay, so there was great public outcry at the risk to a relatively bland 1930s Art Deco sandstone building being destroyed. Plans to expand the museum were abandoned. (2)

Like many cultural architecture projects in Sydney whose designs are drawn from competitions (most infamously, Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House), Sydney Modern is also controversial, with an construction budget of AUD 450 reduced in 2017 to AUD 344, necessitating a substantial redesign, which ultimately also caused the construction contractor to withdraw. Former Australian Prime Minister and art collector, Paul Keating, who frequently comments on urban planning, described the Sydney Modern plan as a “swollen lump of [a] megaplex on the bridge across the expressway.” (3) Frankly, getting any cultural building off the ground in Sydney is extraordinary, however ill suited.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia

The discussion with Mordant continues. By late 2008 the MCA building’s problems were becoming acute. “We decided to design something that would solve our problems. Firstly, circulation. Secondly, creating a world-class education center. Thirdly, improving the gallery spaces. Fourthly, making the building more welcoming. The existing building was…quite an austere building, so the extension needed to ‘smell’ of ‘contemporary’. And finally, to create spaces to enable the institution to be financially sustainable. We built two massive rooftop function spaces, which have been the most popular venue spaces in Australia, for weddings and corporate events and there are also office tenancies. We included a couple of cafes and bookshop, which also created significant income. We then went out and started to fund raise for that in 2010. With Liz Ann I led that campaign.” This was the same year Simon was appointed Chair of the MCA Foundation. “The GFC hit [the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-08] when we were halfway through, which caused obviously a significant headache, but ultimately the building opened in 2012, on time and within budget, and since […then] visitors have exceeded a million a year. Last year we were announced as the most visited contemporary art museum in the world.” The Art Newspaper reported that the MCA beat other renowned institutions such as the UCCA in Beijing (905,000), the Serpentine in London (770,000), and the New Museum in New York, the MCA Chicago, and the Hammer and MoCA in Los Angeles, all three of which had fewer than 350,000 visitors each in 2018. (4) As Simon says, “which was completely extraordinary for a city the size of Sydney.” (Mordant’s comment is true but it no doubt helps that Circular Quay is the most visited tourist destination in Australia, although 60 percent of the MCA’s visitors are locals, not tourists).

Simon Mordant with Malcolm Turnbull, Prime Minister of Australia, Lucy Turnbull, and Elizabeth Ann Macgregor (photo Anna Kučera)

“Now we’re closed because of the Covid situation [MCA reopens on June 16]. We’re fortunate that we’ve built a prudent level of reserves to help weather the storm. And the storm’s been fierce, because all our function revenue [events] evaporated.” Projected revenue for the museum dropped from 22 million to 13 million. “We’ve had to dramatically reshape the place during this period of closure and that coincides with my 10 years as Chair of the Board, finishing in July. Last week we announced my successor from amongst the board members.” Lorraine Tarabay, the new Chair, is also a collector and former investment banker, whom Simon has known for almost half her life.

Museum of Contemporary Art entrance hall, Mordant Wing

The Tate

I ask Simon about how the Australian art scene has changed in the last 20-30 years and mention my personal feeling that the visual arts still lag behind other areas of Australian cultural endeavor, such as film and music. In my view there are reasons for this situation. Australia is isolated compared to Europe or America but it is very wealthy, well-educated, well-travelled, extremely multi-cultural, so we have connections everywhere, not least of all to our neighbors in South East and East Asia, including China, Indonesia, Japan and South Korea, each amongst the most influential countries in the international art world. Does Australia do enough to take advantage of that more than superficially? “I’m not sure you’re entirely correct. I think part of the problem is the perception that Australia’s a very long way away. Therefore, curators in Europe and North America, who are reluctant to spend 24 hours on an aeroplane, would rather go to things that are more familiar to them. But when they come here, and then go on artist studio visits, and meet artists, and see collections, they come away completely inspired and recognize that they made a mistake by not having invested the time before.

One of the things I am most proud of is an initiative that the MCA entered into with the Tate in London 5 years ago. Qantas (the Australian national airline) was winding up its foundation and was looking for a way to increase the profile of Australian artists internationally with the remainder of the funds, which came from selling its collection. I was concerned that institutions like the Tate had very little Australian art in their collections. With Liz Ann Macgregor we commenced a discussion with the Tate about a joint acquisition program. There’s never been a joint acquisition program like this in the world. There have been examples of institutions jointly buying individual works but there’s never before been an initiative where two institutions together buy works over many years. We persuaded Qantas to gift AUD 2.5 million to a joint acquisition program, over five years, of Australian contemporary art, that would be jointly owned by the Tate and the MCA, and which would acquire living Australian artists to show in a global context in the Tate and MCA collections. We’ve now had every year since 2015 the Tate curators come down to Australia. They visit 30 or 40 artists and with that money, they bought, together with the MCA, a large body of works that are now being shown in an integrated way in the Tate collection. That’s been fantastic for the Australian artists, who’ve never really been able to have a profile in international museums. In fact, the Tate has historically thought of indigenous art not as art, notwithstanding indigenous art is the longest continuous culture – 60,000 years. They thought, like most institutions, that that type of work belonged in encyclopaedic museums like the Met rather than museums of modern art, but as a consequence of the curators visiting Australia over the past 5 years on a continuous basis, they now absolutely turned upside down the way they think about First Nations art. They have recently appointed the inaugural First Nations curator and they are now putting First Nations art from Australia and Canada and South America central to the way they think about art making today. Although the works they’ve been buying together with us have been both indigenous and non-indigenous, the impact of the curators getting to understand indigenous art has been transformational for the Tate. That’s something I’m particularly proud of having achieved for Australia.

Venice Biennale

In 2013 Simon was appointed Commissionaire of the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Since 1988 the site had been occupied by what had been intended to be a temporary building, designed by prominent Australian architect Philip Cox and situated in the western edge of the Giardini.

“Australia was the last country to be granted a permanent site in the Giardini in Venice. In 1988, which was our bicentennial year, following extensive lobbying by Franco Belgiono-Nettis,(5) we were given a block of land, the only waterfront block, in the gardens. A temporary pavilion was built very quickly to enable Australia to have permanent representation.” The first artist to be shown in the pavilion was painter Arthur Boyd (1920-1999).

Cate Blanchett at the opening of the opening of the Australian Pavilion, Venice, May 2015

“I’ve been involved in Australia’s activities in Venice for 30 years and it was clear to me, that the temporary pavilion was no longer optimal for showing great Australian art. Venice is a very important window for any country, because it is the only biennale that has national pavilions. In the vernissage week you have 30,000 curators and art critics from around the world descending on Venice to look at what is considered each country’s best contemporary art of the time. If you have a suboptimal piece of infrastructure, you’re not able to present your artists in the best way. I made a proposal to the Australian government that we should look to redevelop the pavilion into something that was more reflective of contemporary Australia and was better placed to position Australian contemporary art in a global context.

“Together we commissioned a feasibility study and were surprised to find out that the temporary pavilion that was constructed in 1988 was the only non-heritage listed building in the gardens….As a consequence of that, we were able to get Venetian authority approval to redevelop that site. Fortunately the original architect, Philip Cox, was still alive and he was willing to consent to his temporary building being removed. Denton Corker Marshall won the architectural commission and I drove the campaign to raise the money to build the pavilion, which opened six years ago to enormous acclaim. The other countries that are represented in Venice were extremely jealous that Australia had built this extraordinary building. I think the combination of the Tate partnership, a world class building in Venice, and the extraordinary success of the MCA significantly enhances Australia’s position internationally in the arts.”

“There are a small number of very strong commercial galleries that exhibit at international art fairs and represent the key Australian living artists. Because we’re all able to travel – pre Covid – a lot more than people used to do 50 years ago, and because we’re able to go to international art fairs and biennales, we see non-Australian art in a different way and many collectors find seeing something new more exciting than seeing the same art that all your friends have at home. There are some great Australian living artists. There are a number in our collection that we’ve supported for 30 plus years like Shaun Gladwell, Janet Laurence and Lindy Lee.. There are a number from whom we own multiple works over their career but generally we’re finding non-Australian art to be more challenging at the moment.” I agree on this but disagree on the Australian commercial gallery scene, which I think is weak compared to other places around the world. In my view, this partly is a function of environment but there is a big difference between exhibitions being held in commercial galleries in Australia and other places. Berlin is smaller than Sydney and nowhere near as wealthy. This is an extreme example because Berlin is an art center for other reasons, not least, rental, milieu, opportunity and history, but we could also look at Beijing, which can be a very difficult environment to hold exhibitions now. I suggest to Simon that the Australian commercial gallery scene could be much stronger, certainly in terms of the international art market. They have almost zero input into Art Basel for instance or the galleries that select exhibitors for Art Basel or Fiac in Paris, which incidentally is run by Jennifer Flay, a New Zealander. This is something that has to get much stronger because you can’t have museums doing all the heavy lifting for an entire art market, it is impossible and not desirable either. A broad, transparent market with lots of talented professionals makes a big difference and that’s something that is still missing in Australia. “I’m not sure that you’re correct. We spend a huge amount of time travelling. Whilst we get challenged by things we see in other places, whenever we come home, we realize what a great group of independent galleries we’ve got. It’s not like New York where you’ve got Zwirner, Gagosian and Pace, which really are museum-like equivalent institutions. But we have a very strong group of independent galleries who are doing a great job, domestically supporting their artists and investing in things like the Hong Kong art fair and the New Zealand art fair, which are very expensive things for independent galleries to do, but they are constantly seeking to broaden their collector base…I think the Australian galleries are doing a pretty good job.”

Simon Mordant in the Kimberley, Northern Territory, 2014

What would you like to see develop in the Australian scene? What still requires support or a new direction? How would you like to see things develop in the next ten years? “I’d like to see a broader commercial network, but I also recognize the economics of running a gallery are extremely challenging. You need to sell a lot of art to be able to cover your overheads, particularly if you’re playing the international art fairs as well. And the price points of most Australian art make that extremely challenging. A living Australian artist that is selling work for six figures would be very unusual. A living Australian artist that is selling work for seven figures – I can’t think of one; and recognizing our currency is about half to the US Dollar, you can quickly see how the economics of a gallery are very hard, but I’d like to see a deeper arts ecology, including universities taking art schools more seriously. We’ve got a strong museum base but finding more commercial galleries, encouraging artists and supporting artists, that’s something I’d love to see over the next ten years.

“What surprises me is the number of homes we go into, usually designed by great architects, have cost a huge amount of money and the owners have nothing on the walls. The commercial gallery space can be quite intimidating when you first embark on that journey and having people who can hold your hand and give you comfort is a help. If you go into a car showroom you don’t get challenged if the BMW or Mercedes Benz is costing you 50,000 dollars, you pay the price. You might haggle a bit, but you pay the price. If you go into a commercial gallery, and the artwork costs 50,000 dollars, the first thing you want to know is whether you’re getting value or not. And I find that quite surprising. If you are buying a car for 50,000 dollars and not being concerned whether that’s value or not, why should it be any different if you see something beautiful like an artwork? Why should you be intimidated by that?”

“I’m surprised by the number of my contemporaries who have no art, who when I ask them why they don’t have any art; say they don’t understand the value. And when I point out that they have no concerns buying a car or a boat, where there is no value other than what’s on the pricetag, they really don’t have a response. They’re just anxious that they don’t know enough, and they are going to be buying something that’s going to be worth less in the future.”

***

“If we love an artwork and can afford it, and it has an emotional impact on us, we’ve never questioned the value. We obviously seek a collector’s discount, but given we’ve never sold a work of art, people [artists and galleries] aren’t worried about us flipping…We’ve often signed contracts to agree to gift works to institutions, which we’re very happy to sign, because we don’t have any intention to trade.”

5 May, 2020

Sydney and Saigon

Cav. Simon Mordant AO was chair of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney from 2010 to July 2020. Besides his close work with the MCA, Mordant is also Board Member of MoMA PS1, New York, a member of the  International Council of MoMA, New York, a member of the Executive Committee of the Tate International Council, a director of MOCA in Los Angeles and a board member of the American Academy in Rome, as well as a former director of the Sydney Theatre Company, Opera Australia,and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. He was Australia’s Commissioner at the Venice Biennale in 2013 and 2015.Simon is an investment banker during the day. 

Simon Mordant at the American Academy Gala, New York, 2017

Notes

1. Leon Paroissien (b.1937, Ghisborne, Victoria) was director of the MCA from its inception in 1989, through its opening in 1991, until 1997. He had been Curator of the Power Gallery of Contemporary Art at the University of Sydney from 1984-1989. Co-curator at the university and then Chief Curator at the MCA was Bernice Murphy, who succeeded Paoissien but resigned in November 1998, ostensibly to run an art magazine but it was thought, “the move was at least partly a response to the chronic state of financial crisis in which the museum had been operating for several years and which had created a level of stress on the staff that was simply too much to deal with. The MCA has never been properly resourced; as the prophetic article by Joanna Mendelssohn in Art Monthly (July 1998) explains, unlike the AGNSW and the Powerhouse Museum which receive a large portion of their funds from the NSW governenment, it receives almost no government money. The Power Bequest, upon which the Museum was founded, only provides 6% of the annual turnover of around $7.5m.” MCA Sinking Fast, Edblog, Artlink, December 1998 https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/2540/artrave/

2. Louise Schwartzkopf, ‘In Utzon’s shadow: the other architects shunned by the city’, July 3, 2009, Sydney Morning Herald https://www.smh.com.au/national/in-utzons-shadow-the-other-architects-shunned-by-the-city-20090702-d6k8.html

3. Paul Keating, ‘Michael Brand’s plan for the Art Gallery of NSW is about money, not art’, November 24, 2015, Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh.com.au/opinion/paul-keating-michael-brands-plan-for-the-art-gallery-of-nsw-is-about-money-not-art-20151124-gl6j7x.html

4. Jori Finkel, ‘Topping a million visitors: how MCA Australia broadened the appeal of contemporary art’, The Art Newspaper, April 4, 2019.
https://www.theartnewspaper.com/analysis/broadening-the-appeal-of-contemporary-art

5. Franco Belgiorno-Nettis (20 June 1915 – 8 July 2006) was an Italian-Australian industrialist and philanthropist. After migrating to Australia in the 1950s he established Transfield. Belgiono-Nettis was an avid art collector and cultural philanthropist, in 1961 establishing the Transfield Art Prize, which became one of the most important art prizes in Australia. In 1973 he helped establish the Australian Biennale, later renamed the Biennale of Sydney).

With hundreds of millions of people in self-isolation and quarantine, hundreds of thousands hospitalized and tens hundreds of thousands dead, and the world economy stopped, talk of art seems trivial if not deluded. But art is expression and we need to speak and to speak up, all the more when threatened and isolated. Art is about asking questions, and that won’t stop, but the places in which we ask them will change.

So what will the the contemporary art market look like?

The art world as we know it has changed forever

Art has not vanished and making art has not ceased but Art Basel Hong Kong was cancelled. In March, TEFAF Maastrict’s “VVIP” sales were down 29% and US visitors too. Art Basel itself has been moved from June to mid-September, along with numerous other art fairs and events like Gallery Weekend in Berlin (now September 13-15). The huge question, of course, is whether any large exhibition or art fair can or will take place in September. Even if they do, will anyone go? Will US collectors fly to Basel? Will they risk a sudden 2-week quarantine? Even if they do, will they still feel like spending? Will they still have anything to spend even?

No one knows.

Rat Year

Looking to China, will there still be international visitors in November for West Bund and ART021 in Shanghai? Will international galleries still want to come, even if they still have the resources to do so? Last year most international galleries sold poorly at both exhibitions, and when they did, it was mostly to collectors from the U.S., Japan, Korea and Taiwan; not local collectors. When they did sell to locals, there was the problem of payment (many sales were frustrated in the following months). For major collectors with foreign bank accounts it was less of a problem but for the great art buying majority China’s strict capital controls mean it is increasingly difficult to be able to pay for international artworks over USD50,000 (though some managed to pay in cash). All this at time when local confidence in local artists is waning. Some say it’s because, on average, local art isn’t as good as its foreign counterparts. This is twaddle. Western artists are trained how to speak; Chinese artists learn to stay quiet. Moreover, Western galleries, curators, museum directors, art writers and even art PR are all still very much better trained, more competitive, more professional. And there’s just more of them. Berlin has more serious art galleries than the whole of China and Hong Kong put together. Its population is just 3.7 million people (Basel just 171,000).

And then there’s the China-US trade war, which briefly receded on the back of a sticky-tape trade deal, now rapidly morphing into a ‘cold trade war’ due to the disingenuous Co-vid 19 blame game, a conflict which could soon easily lose the word ‘trade’.

Survivor

The line between private museum and private gallery is often relative but always opaque, particularly in China. Who will survive? Thankfully, one way or another the key founding galleries of the Mainland China art scene will all get through – Beijing Commune, ShanghART, Long March Space, Tang Contemporary, Vitamin Creative Space. So will the galleries backed by serious collectors, such as AYE Gallery. The international galleries that have strong local networks will be fine too, including Continua, Perrotin, Lisson, Almine Rech and Galerie Urs Meile. For everyone else survival is going to be a lottery. In Hong Kong, the rental costs of H Queens and the Pedder building now look like a sick joke. Here too though, the majors will be ok, including Gagosian, David Zwirner, Pace and Axel Vervoordt. That former French prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, has just opened a gallery with his son Arthur on Hollywood Road is a confidence vote for the fragrant island but one with unique characteristics. The galleries in the more affordable Wong Chuk Hang district perhaps have a better chance than those in Central but it’s still going to be very tough. However, summer will no doubt also bring the return of the protests, closely followed by an ideological heavy hand. Back on the Mainland expect to see interesting smaller galleries emerge in Shenzhen and more regional centers like Nanjing and Chengdu (in Wuhan maybe not so much, more’s the pity).

(Former police officer Scottie (Jimmy Stewart) spies on Judy / Madeleine (Kim Novak) visiting the art museum (Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, 1958)

Museums or mausoleums?

Many museums will close, public and private. Some shouldn’t have been opened in the first place. Some will be sorely missed, whatever the reasons may have been. But that was already the case, from SiShang in Beijing to Zendai in Shanghai. Some of the best we hope will continue, from How Art Museum and RAM in Shanghai, Sifang in Nanjing and to Red Brick and Faurschou in Beijing. The UCCA under the leadership of Phil Tinari has become one of the great survival stories of the art world. It will survive this too. In fact, it is because of institutions like UCCA that we have hope museums in China will come back faster and better than we can currently predict (opening May 21 is UCCA’s new show “Mediations in an Emergency“). We look forward to the new Jupiter Museum of Art opening in Shenzhen this year and M+ in Hong Kong next year. We hope too that the government will eventually give all these museums the freedom to not only survive but prosper. Well, hope springs eternal.

Unfortunately, some prominent artists, curators, and collectors will also survive who really shouldn’t. Evolution is not always about the fittest and the strongest, let alone the most beautiful or most interesting, but often just about the most ethically flexible, the most ingratiatingly flattering, and just dumb luck too.

(Cao Fei, Haze and Fog, 2013, trailer. Courtesy MoMA and Vitamin Creative Space)

Online ad infinitum

Will the art world move online completely, occupying VR rooms and AI processors? No. Just look at the disastrous Art Basel online viewing rooms. As Dominique Lévy said to CNN Money recently “An interesting experiment that doesn’t work.” To be blunt, you didn’t buy the art so why buy the hype?

The freedom to explore the Louvre from half a world away is amazing but it is a poor second best to being there. And for less famous museums? ….. well, meh. The same with private galleries – online viewing rooms are now a reality but an underwhelming one. We stare at our computer screens enough already. Unless galleries are going to put porn or Joe Exotic in their viewing rooms, don’t hold your breath for a digital Renaissance.

(Ran Dian hopes Epic Games will include Art Basel in the next season of Fortnite. C’mon, you know it makes total sense.)

Similarly, online art auctions can work at USD5,000 but much less so at USD50,000. But who cares about auctions anyway? It’s not like they contribute anything to making art or the artists who make it. This must change.

Paper magazines are dead. Long live art critics!

Art publishing was already in deep trouble. Now it needs a ventilator but can’t find one.

With the exception of a few legacy publishers like The Art Newspaper and Artforum, there will be little in the way of a business model for paper art magazines to survive without a sugar daddy. The inherent compromises between sponsorship and independent writing are increasingly impossible to balance with production costs. We are also extremely skeptical that online databases like Artsy will continue to survive in the absence of Trustafarian cash injections. Paddle8 has already succumbed. So we will be back to just Artprice and Artnet.

Will there be art writing? Of course. Will it be good? Much less certain. Then again, a lot of writers and the universities that produced them, have a lot to answer for their suicidal dive into Daedalian irrelevance. It would be nice if great art criticism was also fun or even just not painful to read. Hiding behind obfuscation must end. This doesn’t mean there is no space for complex writing but it has to have a point. Rosalind Kraus is complex because she is good but others are complex because they are not.

So?

We need opinions not only to count but have weight too. Facebook likes and Instagram hearts are no more reliable than pumped and primed auction results. Mere popularity comes and goes, consumed and processed faster than fast food. In the age of social media, with the whole world ‘roasting’ and ‘flaming’, it is astonishing how bland art became. Art stopped being risky and became just entertainment. Where’s the anger? The subversion? The plain weird? Be prepared to be unpopular, ugly and wrong. And be prepared for people to be unpopular, ugly and wrong about you too.

And now?

Is it all doom and gloom? Actually no. Out of catastrophe will come great change. The seeds of the future were already germinating. Expect the crossover between art and science to continue and spread and the lines between formerly discreet and disparate disciplines to become increasingly porous. There will be far greater cooperation, not just between artists but also curators. There will be far fewer art fairs and those that remain will maybe get back to their roots as genuine markets for the best art, old and new and not simply the financial and travel roundabout of recent times (despite their critics, the best art fairs play a very important cultural role and meeting point). A lot of loud but superficial collectors will vanish. Same goes for curators.

Most importantly, art will become less polite. It needs to.

 Independent Art Spaces (IAS) is pleased to announce its fourth edition from 6 – 8 September 2019. The largest edition to date, participants include 24 domestic spaces and 10 international spaces hailing from Germany, Australia, Switzerland and Japan. This year, IAS festivities begin at Aotuspace on 6 September with the launch of the IAS MAP 2019, and continue over the weekend (7 – 8 September) with a series of professional development workshops hosted at I: project space.

Foregrounded by China’s decades-long imperative to urbanise, the topography of contemporary art remains in constant flux throughout Beijing. Offering an up-to-date snapshot of the landscape, the IAS Map 2019 is an indispensable bilingual research tool, profiling the locations and backgrounds of participating institutions. Far from claiming to the represent a “complete” picture of such a dynamic scene, the IAS Map 2019 stands as an interactive reference guide, inviting users to add spaces that are omitted, have since disappeared or in the future have the potential to be. Post-launch, the IAS Map 2019 will be available in museums as well as design and art book shops across Beijing and internationally.

Alongside the launch, a series of workshops is hosted at I: project space, focusing on the exchange of knowledge around operational strategies across geographic lines. Workshops are separated into morning and afternoon sessions from 7 – 8   September. Attendance is free, but spaces are limited. Further reservation information below.

IAS Founders Antonie Angerer & Anna-Viktoria Eschbach state, “Through the IAS Map and accompanying workshops, we hope to encourage the exchange of knowledge and strategies capable of building resilience within our regional scene. The IAS is operating on an international solidarity fund, which in turn provides sponsorship for the local Beijing scene. Through the solidarity fund, IAS strives for ‘mutual benefit’ that break down stagnant modes of cultural funding.

IAS 2019 is accomplished with funding from partners that include The Japan Foundation, Beijing; Pro Helvetia Shanghai, Swiss Arts Council; Australia Council for the Arts and German Embassy Beijing. LAVA Beijing provides visual design for IAS 2019. Sinclair Arts is the communication partner. Other sponsors include Greatleap Brewing (大躍啤酒) and BigSmallCoffee (大小咖啡).

[END]

Independent Art Spaces 2019

Program

September 6^th       Official opening IAS 2019 at Aotuspace at 19:00

September 7^th   Workshop series at I: project space from 9:30 – 19:15

September 8^th   Workshop series at I: project space from 9:30 – 19:00

September 9^th to 30^th features of spaces and events on social media

Please use the I: project space official WeChat (search ‘iprojectspace’) to reserve seating for workshops.

About Independent Art Spaces

Independent Art Spaces (IAS) is a network that seeks to unite Beijing’s patchwork of alternative, non-profit and non-commercial galleries in the spirit of sharing knowledge and purpose. Each year, Independent Art Spaces selects a different theme for public events towards the end of summer.

Beijing is the petri dish for a growing network of new and alternative art platforms in all sorts of environments: From the small alleyways in the city’s hutongs, to programs in artists’ studios, to exhibitions in private apartments and spaces in residential buildings in various parts of the city. Characterized by strong conceptual approaches, open dialog and by incorporating parts of the city in which art could flourish away from the predetermined art zones, these spaces have merged into a network of dynamic art exchanges making new contributions to the progress of the discourses of contemporary art in China. This broad spectrum of programs is mirrored, archived and made publicly accessible by Independent Art Spaces.

www.iasbeijing.org

About I: project space

I: project space is a platform for international art discourse and exchange and was founded 2014 by the two curators Antonie Angerer and Anna-Viktoria Eschbach.

Dedicated to build support structures for artists and open possibilities for long-term dialogues between artistic, curatorial, research and other modes of knowledge production, I: project space is operating completely non-profit. The space is located in the old Hutong area of Beijing and is combining an exhibition space with a residency studio for visiting artists from China and abroad. Taking its location in the centre of Beijing but outside the art districts as a premise, I: project space engages in bringing an interaction with art back into the daily life.

I: project space aims to encourage innovative and investigative approaches, crossing borders between different creative disciplines, cultural identities, geographical locations, political economies, crafts and new technologies. By placing emphasis on the open dialogues, I: project space looks to foster experimentation, collaborations and inter-disciplinary exchange.

www.yi-projectspace.org

For more detailed program and related events to IAS 2019, please follow our official websites and our official social media channels:

Instagram: @ias_festival_beijing; @iprojectspace

WeChat: iprojectspace

In this exhibition the Nanjing-based artist, who is profoundly rooted in China ́s cultural wisdom, connects to contemporary discourses in painting and pushes the boundaries of his artistic practice forward yet again. Uncertain spaces have been a signature element in the work Xu Hong for a long time. This exhibition discusses three different spatial methodologies the artist has developed.

The first one shows land and seascapes within the (painted) interiors of his artwork. This inversion transforms outside nature into a psychological reality for the artist and therefore, by proxy also for the viewer. When we see the distant landscapes painted by Xu Hong, we immediately search for them within ourselves.

深谷桃源之三 | Peach Orchard in the Valley No.3
木板综合材料 | Mixed Media on Wood
244×488cm （四联拼 | Tetraptych）
2018

此山中 | Inside This Mountain
木板综合材料 | Mixed Media on Wood
180×210cm
2017

早春二月之菊 | Chrysanthemum – Early Spring in February
木板综合材料 | Mixed Media on Wood
166×138cm
2018

The second approach is a new focus, or “zooming in” onto details of landscapes. Differently to his previous work where landscape became an interior reality of  psyche and yet retained quite some distance, the new works seem to surround the viewer with an intensity at very close proximity. These paintings engulf the viewer and give him/her the feeling of getting lost in the dense undershrub of the woods on a foggy day.

The third and most recent development incorporates the material reality of his artworks, broken plywood and scraped paint into the formation of space. When the previous two approaches still made representational suggestions to landscapes – with a few brush strokes the artist can invoke an image of a bamboo twig for example – the new approach forfeits this painterly rhetoric. Instead the artist has begun to fully trust his materials to invoke different notions of landscape as pictorial space. In other words: By shaping the plywood, splintering it, scraping the paint, Xu Hong creates art works that do not represent space (of a landscape), the painting “are” landscape and claim their own painterly reality of space.

For Xu Hong the use of space in his artistic work and pictorial practice is a direct expression of his connection to the world. The ambiguities inherent in his work are part of the complex process of relating that we as humans all have to go through. It is the artist ́s achievement to open our eyes to something that causes unease in most of us. He also gives us ideas on how to face this.

About the artist

Xu Hong was born in Chongqing, China. He graduated from the School of Fine Arts Nanjing University of Arts in 1993, and lives and works in Nanjing. The art creation of Xu Hong can be divided into several stages: from the early experimental sarcastic realism and surrealism to the turning point of depicting interior scenes in 2009, and finally in recent years, his “Peach Orchard in the Valley”, ”Early Spring”, and “Broken Mountain“ series, in which the space in his painting has changed from domestic to the natural landscape. Xu Hong embraces Chinese tradition as the core of his art, expressing the longing for seclusion and the spiritual convert in Chinese literaticulture.

Xu Hong’s latest solo exhibitions include: “Xu Hong: The Space Inside Within” (Triumph Gallery, Beijing, China, 2019), “Peach Orchard in the Valley” (Amy Li Gallery, Beijing, China, 2017), “KSANA : XU HONG & QIN AI” (Today Art Museum, Beijing, China, 2015), “The Morning after a Party” (Zhuzi Arts Center, Nanjing, China, 2013), etc.

About the curator

Thomas Eller is a German artist, curator and writer who lives and works in Beijing. Currently he is artistic director of the Taoxichuan CHINA ARTS & SCIENCES project in Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province. He is also president of the art magazine RanDian. He currently also serves as Vice-president of the board of SAVVY friends, Berlin, since 2015 and is a Board member of MOMENTUM worldwide, since 2012.In the past, he founded the Gallery Weekend Beijing in 2017. From 2008 to 2009 he was director of Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin, a temporary art museum on the site of the future Humboldtform in Berlin. From 2004 to 2008 he has been founding editor-in-chief of the German artnet magazine and executive manager for artnet ́s German operations.

Thomas Eller has been curating many exhibitions. The most important ones were: “ Painting after Painting after Painting after“ At the Guangdong Museum of Art in 2018 with Franz Ackermann, Thomas Scheibitz and Katja Strunz. In 2014 “Die 8 der Wege” presented an important group of younger artists from Beijing in Berlin. This seminal exhibition introduced the works of artists like He Xiangyu, Zhao Zhao, Lu Song, Guan Xiao, Sun Xun and others to German audience.

He is the recipient of several prestigious awards in Germany. Käthe-Kollwitz-Prize, Akademie der Künste Berlin, 2006, Villa Romana Prize, Florence, 2000, and the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Prize, 1996.

At this year’s Art Brussels press conference, it was announced as a positive development that 28 % of the participating artists at this year’s fair were women. To be fair, it is in fact an improvement in comparison to last year where it was only 21 %.

Despite the  broader movement in past years to re-evaluate the role of women artists in the contemporary art world, there is still more than enough reason to question these kind of statements. – Or said in another way, for some the glass might be half full but for others it is still, well, 22 % too empty.

The Berlin Gallery Weekend, another significant art-world event, took place simultaneously to Art Brussels and it was interesting to learn that before and during Gallery Weekend an anonymous campaign had been hanging up posters and stickers throughout Berlin, criticizing that 75 % of the participants were male, and that out of the 45 galleries participating in the Gallery Weekend, 38 galleries showed works by men.

I personally don’t find the term “Women Artists” very appealing and to some extent even rather “ghettoizing”, but despite the complexities of defining a minority-issue without stigmatizing at the same time, I have chosen to focus this report on the so-called “28 %” as a comment on the dubious statistics at this year’s Art Brussels.

JULIE FAVREAU
House of Egorn (Berlin)
Julie Favreau’s video work ’Will Deliquesce’ (video, 4K, 8 minutes 28 seconds, 2018) invited the viewer into an intriguing voyeuristic world, exploring the sense of touch and sensory stimulation. A curious camera moves around calmly in a small Berlin-loft apartment. It’s raining outside, which makes you, as a spectator, want to “stay inside”. After a little while you see a group of performers, that are all either naked or lightly dressed, performing intimate choreographic gestures and interactions with one another. At first glance, not a lot happens in Favreau’s erotic and aesthetic video-work, but in all its simplicity it’s a brilliant depiction of existence in its sheer and undiluted materiality.

Veeeeerrrrrmmmmmeeeeerrrrr, inkjet print, 46,66 x 70 cm, 2018 (edition of 4)
Still from ‘Will Deliquesce’, video, 4K, 8 minutes 28 seconds, 2018
Photo credit: Joseph Devitt Tramblay

Installation-view: Gallery booth of House of Egorn with work by Julie Favreau
Photo credit: Renato Ghiazza

Comfort, inkjet print, 45,7 x 68,55 cm, 2017 (edition of 4 +1AP)
Still from ‘Will Deliquesce’, video, 4K, 8 minutes 28 seconds, 2018
Photo credit: Joseph Devitt Tramblay

MERVE ISERI
Ballon Rouge Collective (Brussels)
One of the artists showing work at the gallery was the Turkish-born artist Merve Iseri (based in London). A series of Iseri’s paintings were on display which depicted figurative motives of lush and sensuous gardens and surreal abstract dreamscapes.
The newly opened nomadic gallery ‘Ballon Rouge Collective’, which has organized exhibitions in London, Istanbul, Los Angeles, Sao Paolo, Paris and New York has recently settled down in Brussels with a permanent gallery space. The B.R Collective’s booth was in the ‘Invited’ section at Art Brussels, which is a new section at the fair that includes younger galleries that haven’t previously been invited to Art Brussels and encourages alternate formats to the traditional gallery model.

Work by Merve Iseri.
Photo credit: Courtesy of Ballon Rouge Collective and Photographer David Plas

RACHEL MONOSOV
Catinca Tabacaru (New York)
Monosov’s interdisciplinary practice involves video, photography, sculpture and performance and evolves around various socio political concepts. During the fair a performer was activating Monosovs piece ‘The Space in Between’ (2019), which, in a stylized manner, limited the movement of the performers hand. I was told that the imposition of limitations and restraints on the human-body is a recurring aspect of Monosov’s work.

Art Brussels 2019, Rachel Monosov performance ‘The Space In-Between’, 2018 (cacti, earth, metals, plastics) at Catinca Tabacaru. Photo credit: David Plas

ANNE ROCHAT
Counter Space (Zurich)
At Counter Space the intriguing live performance “Obsidian” by Swiss artist Anne Rochat, attracted a large group of visitors at the opening of Art Brussels. During the performance Rochat’s nude body embraced a large block of ice generating a bodily imprint that became deeper in the course of the performance. Her gesture, both fascinating and disturbing, seemed to be a dramatic maneuver hinting at how our physical actions are generating climate-changes and hence causing ice glaciers to melt…

Anne Rochat performaning ‘Obsidian’ at Counter Space, Art-Brussels 2019
Photo credit: David Plas

ANICKA YI
Gladstone Gallery (Brussels & New York)
Simultaneously with Art Brussels, South Korean Artist Anicka Yi (based in New York) had her first exhibition at Gladstone Gallery, called ‘We Have Never Been Individual’. One of the series of work in the show were ‘aquascapes’ hanging from the wall which resembled paintings (in the broadest definition of the word) and intimate extraterrestrial landscapes. Containing fluid matter, microalgae and cyanobacteria they seemed to hint at a utopian future where humans will learn how to better use the planet’s aquatic resources and the relation between humans and microorganisms will become one that is more symbiotic. Anicka Yi is also represented at this year’s Venice Bienniale.

Anicka Yi, ’15 Hissing Cockroaches’, 2019
Acrylic, UV Prints, LEDS, glass, resin and tubing
50 x 40 x 5 inches (127 x 101.6 x 12.7 cm)
Photo credit: David Regen and Gladstone Gallery

Anicka Yi, ‘Living and Dying In The Bacteriacene’, 2019
Powder coated steel with inset acrylic vitrine, water, 3-D printed epoxy plastic and filamentous algae
33 x 25 x 5 1/2 inches (83.8 x 63.5 x 14 cm)
Photo credit: David Regen and Gladstone Gallery

You dropped onto the floor with the rest of the entrails

Circling the drain, lapping up the seepage

and I had a little bone stuck in my teeth

Salted and stiffening, where are you from?

anywhere, or not at all

Full moon baths during Pisces season

Maker your skin and my scales glint, crack dry in the light

We are always shedding, gleaming, grimacing

licking briny tears from your eyes

visiting each other in our dreams

as you’re eddying on the bank

from the shore I watch you turn

pink

then grey

then white

a poem by Christina Gigliotti for the exhibition Brine

We are pleased to present our first solo exhibition of New York artist Elizabeth Jaeger (born in San Francisco in 1988, lives in New York) as part of Gallery Weekend Berlin, welcoming her into the gallery’s program.

With her sculptures, ceramic objects, and installations, Elizabeth Jaeger succeeds in exploring the relationship between corporeality, perception, and consciousness, between sensation and emotion. Often beginning with the feel of personal experience, something consciously lived through or an observation of a situation, her works conjure a “bigger picture” with a phenomenological quality. Her materials are simple, but haptic and auratically charged: clay, ceramics, plaster, steel, silk and glass show and “preserve” the “imprint” that the artist considers elementary and manual.

If earlier series by the artist focused on a direct engagement with the representation and (socio) cultural gaze on the female body and figuration, Elizabeth Jaeger has recently been working with an ambivalent formal language all her own. Borrowed from amorphous shapes and fantasy, abstract forms based on flora and fauna are combined with strictly geometric steel constructions and thus given a psychological dimension: they are physical objects and at the same time vessels for the “soul” and the world of thoughts. In this way, Jaeger opens a gaze on complex structures between organic objects made with the human hand and questions material and ideational binaries. Her sculptures become organic, viscerally treated “material,” existential intellectual games on thingly truths and the possibility of embodying an emphatic and critical spirit.

“Brine” evokes associations of emptiness, rotting, death, hollowness. In her new series of sculptures Elizabeth Jaeger explores in an almost archaeological fashion the dead and live essence of things, spanning an arch from the phenomenon of the ancient lacyrmonies or tear vessel through natural observation to the human condition against the backdrop of current global problems.

The artist presents fragile, vase-like glass vessels, hand blown, glittering, beautiful and yet otherworldly, in an expansive and yet concentrated fashion. Dark steel constructions allow the smooth, semi-transparent glass creatures to hover, revealing sharp copper sets of teeth—sometimes right at eye level.

The title of the exhibition has a virtually climatic effect on the atmosphere of the space: brine as a substance used to preserve, to shock freeze, but also as a byproduct of industrial manufacturing processes — the gallery space as an abandoned place of refuge. The fragile, mutated animal objects seem to epitomize exhaustion and escapism, the hollow body as a social statement. At the same time, their emphatic beauty and absolute dignity is manifest. As if they had a capacity to persevere and an inherent knowledge that goes beyond their (momentary) stillness.

The objects and sculptures in “Brine” rely on the one hand on the dynamism of their materialities and the play between familiar form and abstract refraction on the other. In the process, they openly express their political content and their emotional urgency. Their special quality lies in this very immediacy.

Elizabeth Jaeger (born in 1988) attended Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and École Nationale Supérieur des Arts in Nancy.

Her most recent exhibitions include the solo show Hours (2019), Pommel (2017) and Six Thirty (2014) at Jack Hanley Gallery in New York, 8:30 (2015) at And Now, Dallas, and Music Stand at Eli Ping in New York.

Her works have also been on view in numerous group shows, such as Mirror Cells at the Whitney Musuem of American Art, Greater New York at MoMA’s PS1, Practice: Fantasy Can Invent Nothing Newat Sculpture Center, NY, Zombies: Pay Attention! at Aspen Art Museum, and most recently Dreamers Awakeat White Cube, London , Sticky Fingers, Arsenal Contemporary, and the Sun and the Rainfall II, Galleria Zero, Milan, and per-so-nae, Klemm’s, Berlin. Her works have been featured in the following publications: Vitamin C: Clay and Ceramics in Contemporary Art (Phaidon, 2017), Dreamers Awake (White Cube, 2017), Eros C’Est La Vie (Totem, 2013) and How Other People See Me (Publication Studio, 2011).

Elizabeth Jaeger is the cofounder of Peradam, a publisher of artists’s books, together with Sam Cate-Gumpert.

Some Other Life will feature new works—sculptures, installations, and a video—all articulated around the notion of illumination and enlightenment, both physical and metaphorical, notably through the use of neutral or middle grey, a tone that is perceptually about halfway between black and white on a lightness scale. Many of the exhibited works incorporate the use of rechargeable batteries for the storage of electricity that allow the works to function. In the artist’s own words: “Not only are many of the works conceptual timepieces unto themselves, but like our individual life cycles, they are quite simply running out. This relates to the mortality of the human condition and our anxiety around the influence we play in the world during our time here.”

Monkey See, Monkey Do, 2019 (detail)
Polyurethane, paint, glass, fiber glass, steel,
plastic, lamp oil, flame, timer
95 x 79 x 52 cm

Evidence of Absence, 2019
Two Peli cases containing 12 glowing acrylic cubes each, Installation dimensions variable, 20,4 x 55,6 x 42,8 cm each, 2 Peli cases

Positioned nearby, Evidence of absence, 2019, is comprised of two grey Peli cases containing glowing acrylic cubes numbered 1–24. Nine of them are dispatched across the exhibition marking the position of each artwork, while the remaining cubes are displayed within the open cases.

Monkey See, Monkey Do, 2019 (detail) , Coated acrylic, gas can, timer, 95 x 79 x 52 cm

Featuring a full-size sculptural rendition of Vincent van Gogh’s painting Gauguin’s Chair, 1888 (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam), Monkey See, Monkey Do, 2019, continues Gander’s investigation of the notion of artist. The dark-toned canvas by Van Gogh depicts, through the means of a burning candle and a couple of books left on the armchair’s seat, a portrait in absentia of the French painter, and Van Gogh’s close friend, Paul Gauguin. Not only did Gander reproduce the chair and objects with faithful details—an artificial candle is burning and then mysteriously blown out before re-igniting again in an endless loop—but he also rendered the painting’s distorted perspective of the chair’s structure, mimicking Van Gogh’s style in a three-dimensional space.

The candle is also the central motif of Gander’s Embrace Your Mistakes… Your Mistakes Are the Markers of Your Time, 2019. In this series of 365 ink drawings, one for each day of the year, the artist tries in vain to draw a candle that goes out. Each sketch is then crumpled and discarded into a waste paper bin, only to be recovered and smoothed out—while preserving each fold and crease—and framed in a neutral grey frame that echoes the color of Gauguin’s chair.

Furthermore, Gander presents a new iteration of his recent animatronic mice. In I… I… I…, a white mouse looks through a hole broken in the gallery wall, close to the floor. The robotic animal attempts to deliver a speech using the voice of the artist’s 9-year-old daughter who struggles and stutters with her words, not quite knowing how to begin or what exactly to say.

In So I see (So I see, the light is changing constantly, as is your perspective), 2019, a short flight of three steps set alongside a low wall, made from internally illuminated acrylic emitting a bright glow of white light, echoes the number markers dispatched in the exhibition.

A new film entitled Foreseeable future, or When the shadows go the wrong way, 2019, virtually renders a high-speed time lapse of the artist’s studio complex being covered by overgrowth, as time continually simulates its passing at an alarming rate. The inexorable degradation of the building is only visible through the image of its shadow being outlined as foliage covers it.

The material, formal and stylistic variety of Ryan Gander’s practice is unified both by his conceptual vision and by recurring themes concerning creativity, the nature of art and the life of the artist. In And for my next show, 2019, grey miniature maquettes of sculptural artworks—all from existing series by the artist—are displayed in a vitrine recessed into the wall, only 80 centimeters from the floor as if exhibited for a children audience.

Gander’s oeuvre evokes fictional spaces, referring to absent objects, artworks or persons, both real and imaginary. The artist often focuses his attention on the playfulness and imagination of children, who are less burdened by facts and appearances than adults.

About the Artist

Ryan Gander was born in 1976 in Chester, England. The artist lives and works between Suffolk and London.

Gander has been awarded numerous prizes including: the 2010 Zurich Art Prize, the 2006 ABN Amro Art Prize, and the 2003 Dutch Prix de Rome for Sculpture. He is the current holder of the 2019–20 Hodder Fellowship at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, Princeton. In 2015, he received the honorary degree Doctor of Arts of the Manchester Metropolitan University.

In 2017, Gander was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to contemporary art.

Gander has exhibited extensively. His institutional solo exhibitions include: Good Heart, Base / Progetti per l’arte, Florence (2018); The day to day accumulation of hope, failure, and ecstasy, Laguna Gloria, The Contemporary Austin, Austin (2017); Faces of Picasso: The collection selected by Ryan Gander, Remai Modern, Saskatoon (2017); These wings aren’t for flying, The National Museum of Art, Osaka (2017); Human/Non Human/Broken/Non Broken, Cc Foundation, Shanghai (2017); Works by Ryan Gander, Dazaifu Tenmangu Shrine, Fukuoka (2017); To stand amongst the elements and to interpret what one knows, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenes, Deurle (2016); Creative play entails some risk taking, Scrap Metal Gallery, Toronto (2016); Make every show like it’s your last, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal (2016), Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2015), Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2015), and Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester (2014) (touring exhibition).

In 2016, Ryan Gander curated Night in the Museum, a selection of works from the Arts Council Collection. This exhibition launched at Longside Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, as part of the celebrations for the Arts Council Collection’s 70th anniversary and traveled around the United Kingdom to Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery’s Gas Hall, and the Attenborough Centre in 2017.

Recent group exhibitions and biennales include: Hate Speech. Aggression and Intimacy, Künstlerhaus Graz, Graz (2019); Apologia della storia – The historian’s craft, ICA Milano, Milan (2019); In My Shoes, Art and the Self since the 1990, Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Aberystwyth (2019); KNOCK KNOCK, Humour in Contemporary Art, (co-curated), South London Gallery, London (2018); General Rehearsal. A Show in three Acts from the Collections of V-A-C, MMOMA and Kadist, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (2018); SUPERPOSITION. Art of Equilibrium and Engagement, 21st Biennale of Sydney, Sydney (2018); Beautiful World, Where Are You?, 10th Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool (2018); Stories of Almost Everyone, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Travellers: Stepping into the Unknown, The National Museum of Art, Osaka (2018); The Heart of the Tin Woodmann, M WOODS, Beijing (2017); The Transported Man, Broad Art Museum, Lansing (2017); Jaguars and electric eels, Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin (2017), and Heterotopias. Avant-gardes in Contemporary Art, Aubette 1928, Strasbourg (2016).