Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dewdrop
Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney, Australia) Oct. 2 2020– Feb. 28, 2021

Replicas, postmodernism and ‘bad copies’

I vividly remember seeing Lindy Lee’s early works when they were first exhibited in Sydney in 1985 in ‘Australian Perspecta’ and 1986 in the ‘6^th Biennale of Sydney’. Grainy, velvety black photocopies of famous faces – portraits by Jan Van Eyck, Rembrandt, Ingres, Artemisia Gentileschi and others from the western art historical canon – were arranged in rows or grids.  They gazed out from behind layers of acrylic paint, or wax that had been partially scraped back. Hints of darkened visages emerged through cobalt blue or deepest crimson pigment, unfamiliar and mysterious, their characters both concealed and revealed by the artist’s manipulations.

These shadowy works powerfully conveyed a sense common to artists and writers of my generation (and Lee’s): we were far from the action, on the other side of the world. The cultural centres, the ‘real’ art hubs, or so we thought then, were London, Paris, Florence, New York. We Australians were exiled to the periphery, inhabiting a postcolonial shadow world, a simulacrum – a pale photocopy, faded by the tyranny of distance. The art history we studied was almost entirely European and American; we feasted on images in reproduction, leafing through books with color plates of Renaissance masters, and queued for the (very occasional) blockbuster exhibition of works loaned from overseas collections at the state galleries. In that 1980s heyday of postmodern theory Lee’s works were discussed by critics and academics invoking Walter Benjamin and Baudrillard, but for me their interest lay in the connection forged between the artist and the mechanical reproduction. They suggested the angst of someone searching for a relationship across differences of time and culture.

Untitled (After Jan van Eyck), 1985, Courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Singapore

Lindy Lee, The Silence of Painters, 1989, Museum of Contemporary Art, gift of Loti Smorgon AO and Victor Smorgon AC, 1995

Lindy Lee, Book of Kuan-yin, 2002, Courtesy the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne

But there was more to Lee’s search than the general Australian awareness of the colonial ‘fatal shore’. Lindy Lee was born in Brisbane in 1954 to parents who had immigrated from China. She grew up in the (then) stultifyingly parochial suburbs of Brisbane during the era of the racist White Australia Policy; just a few years earlier, in 1947, Labor politician Arthur Calwell had notoriously ‘joked’ in parliament that ‘Two Wongs don’t make a white’. This immigrant upbringing, and her experience of being the only Chinese child in her school, left Lee uncertain of her identity. Like other children of Australia’s post-war migrants, she felt she was somehow inauthentic – not quite Australian, nor quite Chinese. Her early, experimental work with photocopies examined her own sense of being a ‘bad copy’, an altered, faded reproduction of the ‘real thing’.(1)

Lee loved the aesthetic and conceptual possibilities of primitive 1980s photocopiers, with their frequent accidental spillages and smears of carbon, and the increasingly pale images they produced when the toner was running out. The seductive blackness and loss of detail intrigued her. Even in those early experiments she was, quite unintentionally, exploring the same materiality as Chinese ink painters. The chemistry of carbon and the aesthetic impact of blackness appealed to the Literati whose carbon-based ink created subtle gradations of tone, from deepest black to the palest hint of wash, just as the sooty black replicas of Old Master paintings held infinite expressive possibilities for Lee.

In the next phase of her work Lee turned from appropriating European paintings to digitising and manipulating family photographs and images borrowed from Chinese rather than Western art history. These became her earliest representations of her Chinese heritage. She began with a photograph of her mother, a strong matriarch who had escaped the post-1949 persecution aimed at those from the hated ‘landlord class’ to join her husband in Australia. It was a long and arduous journey via Hong Kong, with two small children and a suitcase with a false bottom hiding the family’s gold. The courage of a woman who was forced to spend years apart from her husband, who had arrived in Queensland years earlier, is repeated in the daughter’s journey to rediscover her Chinese ancestral roots, developing a transdisciplinary and transcultural practice that celebrates her hybrid identity.

Buddhism and the Ten Thousand Things

It was only after many trips to China exploring her family heritage, and a deep immersion in the practices of Zen (Chan) Buddhism and Daoism, that Lee felt secure enough in her Chinese/Australian identity to produce her mature body of work grounded in East Asian philosophy and aesthetics.(2) A comprehensive survey exhibition of her work at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, ‘Moon in a Dewdrop’ (the title is a reference to the writing of 13th century Japanese Zen master, Dōgen) sourced from private and public collections, and the artist’s own archives, covers the full gamut of her practice. The more than 70 works brought together in the MCA demonstrate Lee’s versatility, from her earliest explorations of the photographic replica to recent experiments in ‘flung bronze’ developed from the Zen painting tradition of ‘flung ink’.

Lindy Lee, Listening to the Moon, 2018, stainless steel, image courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Singapore, © the artist, photograph: Ng Wu Gang

At the entrance to the concrete monolith that is the new wing of the MCA, the first work we encounter is ‘Secret World of a Starlight Ember’ (2020), a curved ovoid form of stainless steel pierced with thousands of tiny holes. Reflecting the harbour with its passing ferries, the blue of the sky, and the faces of passers-by, its minimalist beauty is intended to reference the Buddhist belief that human beings and the universe are one. Lit from within at night it recalls a map of constellations. The void at its centre, while an irresistible lure for the Instagram selfie and the narcissistic gaze into its reflective surface, reminds us that Buddhism and Daoism are replete with paradox; simultaneously symbolising materiality and immateriality, it represents tian xia – everything under heaven – as interconnected.

Lee told Elizabeth Ann MacGregor, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art and the curator of ‘Moon in a Dewdrop’, that a work created in 1995 (and recreated for the exhibition) marks her self-discovery. ‘No Up, No Down, I am the Ten Thousand Things’ was made when Lee had returned from China and was ‘released from the imprisonment of being either Chinese or Anglo or this or that’.(3) The installation of approximately 1200 small works made with ink ‘flung’ over photocopies covers the walls, floor and ceiling with blue, red and black rectangles. The Chinese and Japanese technique of ‘flung ink’ was practised by Zen monk painters following meditation. The apparent paradox of finding purpose and meaning in what at first appears spontaneous and random is a metaphor for seeing patterns in the universe and recognising the connection between the self and the natural world.

Without question there is a trace here of Lee’s early interest in the pure abstraction of Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko, seen also in the modernist grid presentation and strong reds and blues of her earlier photocopy works. More importantly, though, this was the first work Lee made with the explicit intention of exploring her relationship to Buddhist philosophy and practice.

Paradox and duality recur in Lindy Lee’s work, and in her life. The art writer Julie Ewington describes Lee as an artist who has had, essentially, two careers, ‘remaking’ herself during the year of her Asialink residency in Beijing in 1995. Intending to study calligraphy, Lee realised that being unable to read Chinese characters she was drawn instead to the sooty materiality of ink itself. Ewington cites a conversation between the artist and Suhanya Raffel: ‘The notion of ‘darkness’ in her work began to take on another meaning altogether: here the dark might begin to signify, in consonance with Buddhist philosophy, “the void that holds everything and nothing”’.(4) The ‘ten thousand things’ (a phrase found many times in the Dao De Jing, attributed to Daoist philosopher Laozi) refers to everything in the universe, to the fluxing, see-sawing, reciprocal relationship between yin and yang that contains this void holding within it ‘everything and nothing’. Polarities of masculine/feminine; light/dark; past/present; eastern/western; Australian/Chinese – the ‘this or that’ that Lee described in recounting her uncertain hybrid identity – are thus no longer binary opposites but, rather, relational aspects of qi (the breath, or the life force).

These ideas are further developed in Lee’s experiments with flinging molten bronze, a breathtakingly physical, difficult, and dangerous process. The ladle containing the liquid metal (at 1200 degrees centigrade) weighs 10 kg and the artist is suited up in heavy protective clothing as she ‘flings’ (slowly, deliberately, and following meditative breaths) the bronze onto the concrete floor of the UAP foundry in Brisbane. A documentary video of the artist at work reminded me of observing groups practising tai chi in Chinese parks. Inevitably, too, there is a faint echo of the film of Jackson Pollock at work shot by Hans Namuth in 1951 – Lee’s actions are similarly performative, but much less self-conscious. Her measured gestures result in ethereally beautiful works such as ‘Seeds of a New Moon’ (2019), a collection of solidified, burnished bronze shapes carefully arranged on the wall.  They suggest a view through a microscope of biomorphic forms, tiny component parts of an enormous universe, moving in unknowable rhythms, quite oblivious to human attempts to control nature. 

Lindy Lee, No Up, No Down, I Am the Ten Thousand Things , 1995/2020, Courtesy the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne

Fire, Water, Air, Earth and Metal

Lee’s immersion in her ancestral Chinese culture has influenced numerous public sculpture commissions in Australia and in China. In ‘Moon in a Dewdrop’ this aspect of her practice is represented by ‘scholar rock’ forms from the ‘Flame from the Dragon’s Pearl’ series, in mirror-polished bronze. ‘Unnameable’ (2017), recently acquired along with a suite of 12 large works on paper for the collection of the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), references the traditional appreciation in China for gongshi, or scholar’s rocks. Limestone shaped by elemental geological forces (sometimes assisted by perforating rocks with holes and immersing them in the waters of Lake Tai for hundreds of years) developed into elaborate, fantastical shapes. Large rocks were an integral part of garden design, a metaphor for the mountain homes of the Immortals. Small rocks were highly prized ornaments in the studies of scholar bureaucrats, symbolising the transformational forces of nature.(5) Lee’s scholar rocks are shaped by fire and water when molten bronze is poured and cooled to produce fluid, organic-seeming shapes.

One of the most peaceful rooms in the beautifully designed exhibition spaces contains a series of suspended paper scrolls which have also been altered by exposure to fire and water. The 2011 ‘Conflagrations from the End of Time’ series references the teachings of Buddhist masters who likened the universe to an infinite net. Intricate patterns are created by holes burned in the paper with a soldering iron, casting lacy shadows on the wall behind them. They curl up very slightly at the bottom edge, appearing weightless, shifting very slightly in the slightest movement of the air. They suggest the passage of constellations across night skies. Burnt and stained surfaces reveal the processes of their creation – Lee sometimes left these scrolls of paper outside in the rain and the sun allowing time and natural phenomena to make their marks. They are echoed by more recent works in which mild steel is cut into lacy patterns. These too reflect the teachings of Daoism: they are both material and immaterial, form and void, shadow and substance. 

The Moon in Water

Lindy Lee’s deceptively minimalist works are underpinned by great discipline and knowledge, like the master calligrapher dashing off apparently effortless characters that belie the lifetime of practice. Lee has practised a form of meditation called zazen – sitting meditation – for many years. It was the foundation of Dōgen’s Zen practice; he called it ‘without thinking’, a pathway to freeing oneself from anxiety and confusion.(6) Through her deep immersion in the theory and practice of Zen, following the teachings of this 13th century Japanese monk who brought Zen Buddhism from China to Japan, Lee fused the Australian and Chinese aspects of her identity that had so troubled her when she was young. She is looking both inwards, seeking self-knowledge, and outwards to the natural world – another Zen paradox, perhaps.

The poetic image of the moon reflected in the tiny sphere of a dewdrop was a metaphor for the state of meditation, a kind of effortless/effortful approach to enlightenment through which the individual can perceive the entirety of the universe. Lee’s body of work reveals her search for this desired state of wholeness that she describes as finding ‘one’s true north’.(7)

As Dōgen said of himself watching the moon:

‘Sky above, sky beneath, cloud self, water origin’.(8)

Notes

1. See the text relating to The Silence of Painters (1989) on the website of the Museum of Contemporary Art https://www.mca.com.au/artists-works/works/1995.191A-O/ [accessed 10.12.20]
2. Lee began to study Zen Buddhism in 1993, taking Jukai, the formal initiation into Zen Buddhism, in 1994. For more see Jane O’Sullivan, ‘Lindy Lee: The Original and the Copy’, Vault Issue 30, May/July 2020. https://www.sullivanstrumpf.com/assets/Uploads/VAULT-Issue-30-Feature-Lindy-Lee-compressed.pdf [accessed 9.12.20]
3. ‘A Conversation between Elizabeth Ann McGregor and Lindy Lee’, in Lindy Lee Moon in a Dewdrop, exhibition catalogue: Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2020. p. 17
4. Julie Ewington, ‘In Praise: Concerning Anne Ferran, Judith Wright and Lindy Lee’, Eyeline 84, 2016, available at https://www.sullivanstrumpf.com/assets/Uploads/Julie-Ferran-Wright-essay-for-Anthology-22-June-2017.pdf
5. For more information see the textual information produced for the exhibition, ‘The World of Scholar’s Rocks: Gardens, Studios and Paintings’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2000. https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2000/world-of-scholars
6. Yokoi, Yūhō (with Daizen Victoria), Zen Master Dōgen: An Introduction with Selected Writings. New York: Weatherhill Inc., 1976
7. ‘A Conversation between Elizabeth Ann McGregor and Lindy Lee’, in Lindy Lee Moon in a Dewdrop, exhibition catalogue: Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2020. p. 21
8. In 1249 Dōgen wrote a poem for his portrait, a painting now known as the ‘Portrait of Dōgen Viewing the Moon’. For more see Kazuaki Tanahashi (ed), Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dōgen, San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985. This text has been digitised and is available at https://terebess.hu/zen/dogen/Moon-in-a-dewdrop.pdf

On the other hand, the long-held kernel of human nature does not seem to open up in a corrective way, but is instead more sticky and solid, conceitedly playing with facts, hoping to validate its own preconceptions in an open field of vision… The tension between these two states is driven by a variety of interesting subtleties, each of us coping with our own and inseparable.

The material abundance, cultural pluralism and technological advances brought about by globalization have led to an endless increase in the number of options, an increasing fragmentation of the community, and a fission in lifestyles to enlarge differences. But the dramatic shocks of recent years have also led to a greater union between people, no matter active or passive.

The “contemporary” is always temporary, and in the “contemporary”, where uncertainty is steeply increasing, so is people’s desire for certainty. In the narrative that many people agree with, big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, biotechnology and so on synthesize a new environment, Homo sapiens is becoming a “demigod-like” life form, from “maker” to “creator”, focusing on constructing a more pleasant living space creatively. Human being is a creature full of limitations. The more this narrative becomes mainstream, the more one has to be wary of the “rational conceit” that it renders people. But the outlook it describes, in both expected and unexpected ways, is currently becoming partly true, integrating into the everyday lives of ordinary people.

“Art” is also temporary; it is always infused with different connotations in a variety of needs. With the global circulation of capital, flourishing consumerist culture, and kaleidoscope of spectacles, art at this time is lonely within the warm embrace, easily lost and deformed at any time but difficult to retain. Both “contemporary” and “art” are rapidly changing their faces, and before long, there is a new scene of “contemporary art” – and the charm of “contemporary art” also lies in here.

Intuitive experience, reserves of knowledge, presuppositions, and the resulting perceptions, interests, methods, skills, etc., incubate a wealth of difference at all times. Many seemingly absolute differences, after switching perspectives, you will find that they are compatible in the same dimension, validating each other in the known and unknown, the knowable and the unknowable. “Contemporary art” has no boundaries in the first place, and the complex interaction with the situation is its driving force and result. The individual is at once unique and relevant to other individuals. Walking independently and sharing resources have never been in contradiction with each other. In a time of geopolitical hardness, sharing and association are especially important: premises, information, knowledge, skills, creativity, community, etc., grow freely and flexibly in an open consciousness, and consciously and unconsciously construct new composite scenes…

The artists invited to this exhibition have, over the years of their practice, developed a close relationship with the “contemporary”: curious about new possibilities, constantly refreshing their reserves of knowledge in a global vision, experimenting with new materials, forms and aesthetics in the unknown, and incubating refreshing works in an improvised way, with creativity flowing all the time in the process. Although they differ markedly from each other, and even from their individual works, there are quite a few overlaps in their presuppositions perceiving from their works, that continue to advance their work in an active imagining of a brand new future.

Under the current new context, compared to the globally popular “co-working” model, these artists, like creators with vision as an important medium, are constantly opening up unique and different horizons and overlapping each other, consciously and unconsciously co-constructing new spectacles, thus gradually changing the stereotypical parts of daily life. This capacity and state of co-constructing highlights multiple meanings in an atmosphere of less consensus, more barriers and more calls for sharing and union. Moreover, “co-constructing” as a driving force is inherent in contemporary art, driving contemporary artists to construct more dynamic discourses while deconstructing preconceived ideas, and to freely unite into multi-dimensionally growing constructs.

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).

Chen Tianzhou ‘Backstage Boys’
BANK (Building 2, Lane 298 Anfu Road, Xuhui District,) November9, 2019–January 12, 2020

Chen Tianzhou, best known for his performance works, has dubbed himself a ‘backstage boy’ – one who spectates his art separately from the audience and ‘disappears into his own work’. In his painting debut at BANK,  he tells us in the press release that ‘the backstage boy steps onto the stage’. This stage is shared with the paintings of his partner, Lu Yang, who normally works from behind a video camera. This whole exhibition is about re-positioning. Once you pass through the beaded entrance, you enter a liminal space where boundaries between life, death, man and deity dissolve into lurid spectacle.

Chen Tianzhuo (image courtesy the artist and BANK Gallery)

Chen Tianzhuo, Crawling Bug 爬虫 (image courtesy the artist and BANK Gallery)

Jingba Lost in the Forest is an inkjet print of a photograph of Ylva Falk and Beio Mao, performers from Atypical Brain Damage, Chen’s apocalyptic pop-opera. They are photographed in a bathroom and set amidst an oil stick scene of a dog lost in a forest,a scene which spills off the aluminium panel and invades the wall with tree trunks and stars. The photograph was taken after a performance and snaps the pair stripping themselves of their theatrical make-up and costumes. Falk pulls open the shower curtain and invites the gaze of the camera. Mao looks up from the sink, his makeup bleeds into red oil-stick which trickles down his body. Chen tells me that he was struck by the violence and beauty of the scene, an intimate portrait of two friends as they destruct their maleficent staged identities.

Chen Tianzhuo (image courtesy the artist and BANK Gallery)

Chen calls this ‘showering off your personal ego’ and the desire to shower off the ‘ego’ seems to be shared across Chen’s id-driven, carnivalesque works. But as Falk coquettishly appeals to the camera’s gaze, poised so the curve of her waist is empathised and her breasts are uplifted, one mask slips to reveal another. If the voyeur must maintain a distance between himself and the image to induce pleasure, then Chen helps maintain this distance through fantastical illustrations which obscure the genitalia of his subjects and mythicise his subjects into a mermaid and a reptilian beast. In this ‘backstage’ dimension, hinged between the performed and the day-to-day, identity is teasingly withheld. Instead the viewer is suspended between fantasy and reality, where play and pleasure reign.

Chen’s work spills off the canvas and onto the wall, and spills off the performative self into the ‘backstage’ self or the subconscious. He also elides the boundary between the transitory and the infinite. The Lost Boy is a large MDF relief lain upon the floor like a grave marker. A small figure lies curled into a foetal position besides an engraving of William Blake’s ‘Little Boy Found’ into the crater-like, inhospitable earth. The skeletal remains of a dog are splayed in the bottom left corner. Colour is used more sparingly here, and the eye gravitates to the figure’s skull, a globe hinged upon the Americas and yet to be enveloped by the dull ground. The work is inspired by something suicidal, and the notion of reincarnation, Chen explains. All these works are kind of continuations of Chen’s performance pieces and give them – as the press release expresses – ‘a second life’. Here lies a permeable body memorialised by an impermeable marker. ‘A Lost Boy’ who will be found.

Chen Tianzhuo (image courtesy the artist and BANK Gallery)

Blake was a printmaker whose art was the product of physical labour. Chen’s performance works, he explains to me, are also the product of prolonged physical labour, and share Blake’s aim to transcend into a visionary trance. To go beyond the body, you must go through it. Blake believed that the imagination was the ‘body of God’ and our bodies are vessels to God. Like a kind of communion, Blake’s spiritual work was born of the body and experienced by the body through meter and rhythm. In Chen’s modern reimaging of the poem, the exhausted ‘lost boy’ is an MDF relief of Chen’s own body. We typically connotate artistic ‘Kinesthetics’ with motion, but does Chen’s imprinted body also constitute what Belgrad calls, ‘a repository of unconscious knowledge’? Chen has worked through the bodies of performance artists to realise his visions; here he offers up his own body incarnate. One flesh representing all flesh, as the globular skull suggests, lost in some hyperspace and seeking spiritual resurrection.

Chen Tianzhuo, Love is Trance-2爱是入迷-2 (image courtesy the artist and BANK Gallery)

Chen Tianzhuo (image courtesy the artist and BANK Gallery)

Chen Tianzhuo, After Life 生命之后 (image courtesy the artist and BANK Gallery)

One piece, propped against a wall, looks like an uncanny high school art study, or the garish attempts to re-colour ancient Greek statues which have challenged the deification of their whiteness. We can Reveal the Shadow of the Shadow is an MDF relief of a shackled man with dishevelled hair, coloured with oil sticks, contextualised by a lurid green background of inexact purple diamonds and heraldic emblems of fire and herons. At the bottom of the panel, in gold lettering reads

‘you want to write, you want to speak
but you are not allowed to
only through art,
we can reveal the shadow of the shadow’. 

The piece recalls a scene in Atypical Brain Damage, where two artists (the Vietnamese ‘Le Brothers’) bearing guns, crawl across the ground and try to evade the observation of sinister patrollers (Valk and Mao). They lament their position as artists: ‘it’s impossible for a westerner to understand our history’, the subtitles translate. Part of his research for Atypical Brain Damage, Chen explains, included interviews with veteran artists, from which these quotes are pulled.

Installation view (image courtesy the artist and gallery)

The conflict in this scene from Atypical Brain Damage allegorises these discussions. Here are artists who must produce work within the constraints of what their country allows, and who may find their work misunderstood or threatened by a domineering, somewhat sinister, Western presence. In this piece, Chen, who is a graduate of Central St. Martins and Chelsea College, seems to set himself apart from the pessimism of the previous generation of artists, and defiantly writes and translates these quotes in English. This globalised optimism pervades and epitomises the collection. In this pleasurable and indulgent break from the strenuous labour of performance work, Chen reveals and stages the ‘shadow’ self. Here, between the real and the noumena, we are catapulted into a borderless ‘new material realm’. Death, chaos and desire dance like shadow puppets, somewhat clumsily, in diasporic, playful colour and pulsate with the direct energy of Chen’s painterly hand.

Alice Gee is a writer. After graduating from Cambridge University with a degree in English, Alice moved to Taicang, a city just north of Shanghai, where she writes and teaches part-time. 

In 2019, Zheng Bo once again introduced the “workshop” into his exhibition Goldenrod held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts at New York University in Shanghai. “Eco-Socialist Garden” is a project that includes workshops, architectural models, and printed material. Zheng Bo invited a group of volunteers from different professional fields and divided them into two groups. He asked each group to imagine a garden for the new campus of NYU Shanghai. The results of their discussions were then made into models and placed in the exhibition space, along with accompanying design instructions. The participation of this diverse group adds complexity to the exhibition. It is as if Zheng Bo built a limited thinking space, but then encouraged each person therein to move freely. Even as the “leader” of such an activity, Zheng Bo did not know each group’s course of action. The more interesting question is: how exactly did these people understand Zheng Bo’s intentions? Do they need to understand them?

There are many terms appearing over the years that can be used to discuss Zheng Bo’s work. One such term is “New Genre Public Art,” which describes art practices emphasizing the dematerialization of the work of art and place importance on processes of public participation, the latter of which is the focus and significance of the work. The artists of “new genre public art” do not directly provide “exhibition objects,” instead they organize encounters, initiate actions, mobilize various social elements, and usually possess clear social movement goals that they want to achieve. The resulting output of “new genre public art” is most often only a process, with transmission and participation constituting the specific content of the artistic work. However, in today’s exhibition-based art system, artists working in “new genre public art” need to deal with various physical materials first: texts, archives, conversation records, and even the many communication documents generated throughout the process of organizing the project. Only then can new possibilities emerge and be woven together in the public space created by the artist. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of “new genre public art” is the degree of social intervention it entails. The specific form of such work and public responses to it can be used as criteria for judging its degree of involvement, while the overall determining premise is reliant on the clarity of the social issue that the work seeks to address. In 2015, Zheng Bo created the work “Sing for Her,” in which the artist collaborated with the Filipino community in Hong Kong to record a Philippine pop song. The song, which was widely popular in the 1930s and 1940s, is notable for its theme of expressing the Philippine people’s strong desire to achieve national independence. The final presentation of Zheng Bo’s piece took the form of a huge metal megaphone. On the one hand, the social issues that Zheng Bo sought to address in this work were very clear: the labor rights and political demands of Filipinos in Hong Kong. And in terms of aesthetics, the metal megaphone towering prominently on Tsim Sha Tsui Public Square in Hong Kong established an effective aesthetic form.

Installation View: Zheng Bo, Eco-Socialist Garden, NYU Shanghai, 2019. Workshop; maquettes and ephemera. Goldenrod, ICA at NYU Shanghai, 10 October 2019. PHOTO: Hong Xiaole. Courtesy of ICA at NYU Shanghai.

展览现场：郑波，《生态-社会主义园，上海纽约大学》，2019。工作坊；模型和印刷品。上海纽约大学当代艺术中心 “一枝黄花”展览，2019 年 10 月 10 日。摄影：洪晓乐。图片由上海纽约大学当代艺术中心提供。

Installation View: Zheng Bo, Eco-Socialist Garden, NYU Shanghai, 2019. Workshop; maquettes and ephemera. Goldenrod, ICA at NYU Shanghai, 10 October 2019. PHOTO: Hong Xiaole. Courtesy of ICA at NYU Shanghai.

展览现场：郑波，《生态-社会主义园，上海纽约大学》，2019。工作坊；模型和印刷品。上海纽约大学当代艺术中心 “一枝黄花”展览，2019 年 10 月 10 日。摄影：洪晓乐。图片由上海纽约大学当代艺术中心提供。

As for the workshop, Zheng Bo’s aims are also clear: first, to bring together different professionals to discuss and learn about ecological issues; second, this workshop is intended to provide ideas for the garden design of the new campus of NYU Shanghai, in the hopes that the actual garden construction design will not be bound by traditional horticultural ideas, instead taking on a more open and radical outlook. If we try to state that this second aim leans toward social intervention, the basis of intervention is only the imagination that emerges from the first aim. But in this imagination, we seem to be able to see something more telling than mere action. The results of the workshop discussion groups included two manifestos in addition to the design instructions. One of them states: “Our garden must nourish. Our garden must connect. Our garden is not poisonous….” Zheng Bo’s actions may not be serious enough to be termed “social intervention,” but they certainly embody a “social imagination” that is full of hope [1]. This is a practice where idea takes precedence over form, and also holds greater artistic interest than dealing with problems of form.

The feedback given by the workshop participants forces us to re-examine some basic art-related questions, such as: what can art do? What kind of influence does art have on reality? One workshop participant, an ecologist named Zhang Minhua, described her “Tree of Life” contribution to the garden design plan: it consists of a carefully designed route where people can experience the evolutionary history of plants. Here, visitors will first encounter ancient moss plants, ferns, then gymnosperms, and finally angiosperms. Zheng Bo believes that this is a feasible design scheme for the actual garden construction. It is not an idea proposed by a professional landscape architect, but originates from the inseparable link between an ecologist’s experience and intuition. In society today, with its hyper-developed mass media and information systems, people work to control and expand their own knowledge boundaries, but at the same time they squeeze out other existing spaces of knowledge that could be used to exchange with others. The result is that the most efficient intermediaries to connect people become commercial activities, while the other elements of life are isolated from each other. In the social sense, what should art activities aim to achieve, and how can a strong connection with the outside world and various groups be maintained? Such queries have troubled many an artist in their work. According to Nicolas Bourriaud, “Art strives to achieve some limited connections, open up some blocked passages, and reconnect the various levels that are separated in reality.” [2] Perhaps, Zheng Bo ’s workshop is a truly effective realization of this mission. Moreover, discussions of his attempts should not simplify or reduce his work to a mere complement of more mainstream “contemporary” artistic practice.

工作坊过程图 In Progress
ZHENG Bo, Eco-Socialist Garden, NYU Shanghai, 2019. In-progress view. Courtesy of the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery。

郑波，《生态-社会主义园，上海纽约大学》， 2019。创作中。感谢艺术家和马凌画廊提供图片。

Installation View: Zheng Bo, Eco-Socialist Garden, NYU Shanghai, 2019. Workshop; maquettes and ephemera. Goldenrod, ICA at NYU Shanghai, 10 October 2019. PHOTO: Hong Xiaole. Courtesy of ICA at NYU Shanghai.

展览现场：郑波，《生态-社会主义园，上海纽约大学》，2019。工作坊；模型和印刷品。上海纽约大学当代艺术中心 “一枝黄花”展览，2019 年 10 月 10 日。摄影：洪晓乐。图片由上海纽约大学当代艺术中心提供。

[1] From an interview between Zheng Bo and the author.

[2] Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, Translated by Huang Jianhong. Foreword to the 2013 edition of Jincheng Press.

Hu Xiangqian’s work evokes a sense of strong will. His art-making originates from a natural desire to use the body and take action, yet he never bows to the corrupting side of such desire. His work falls between artistic performance and athleticism, and thus lies beyond the boundaries of a certain aesthetic form or a definition of a certain win-lose logic. To a large extent, his artistic mission is to make himself healthier in both a bodily and spiritual sense, and to lead us to do so as well.

Hu’s life experience has been one of migration: born in Leizhou, he moved to Guangzhou, Beijing, New York, and then back to Guangzhou again. He likes to travel, and considers traveling an essential part of an artist’s life. He has a strong curiosity that leads to a proactive pursuit of understanding the world and absorbing all kinds of knowledge. The unique thing about him is that wherever he goes, he’s able to live like he is at home. He never abandons the interests and ways of understanding the world he developed while living in his hometown during his teenage years— always being intimate to the land and nature, and living barehandedly.

Hu’s new work for this exhibition is inspired by one of his personal interests: watching internet videos of people building houses using traditional methods. He once said that he’s never wanted to build his own house. He never even tidies up the places he lives. To him, the living space is always temporary. But after a life of moving between places over the past decade, he started to reconsider how places and spaces may influence him. He found that he could never imagine himself relocating to a foreign place, but, like most Chinese people of his generation, in order to search for a life and a career he had to leave his hometown. The affection for home and the aspiration to explore the world became a dilemma, and, in a funny way, watching people building houses on the internet dissolved that dilemma. As a result, Hu plans to appropriate the skills he learned from all these videos and build a structure in the gallery space, as a way of getting closer to the struggle in his mind.

Before attending art school, Lai Chih-Sheng worked for years as a mason. After graduation, he got involved in the business of video production, again for many years. The technical influences of these work experiences on his current art practice may be obvious, but what’s more important is how it influenced his distinction between making/producing and creating: people may make/produce utilitarian and visually appealing things, but they can only create their perspectives on these things in art.

As an artist, Lai Chih-Sheng is often unwilling to make things. He intervenes in ways that are as subtle and invisible as possible. This is because he hopes to point people to the original faces of things and things that we tend to abandon. But in fact, in art-making, he often uses methods from engineering. Only by engineering,

he does not create physical realities but conditions for meditation. One of his mottos is this: “Creating is the moment to let go.” Seeing Lai’s art helps us to make sense of the perplexing world and identify what in it is redundant. It helps to reveal the essence of life.

With his new work for this exhibition, Lai raised this question: in an art exhibition, what deserve to be expelled, and what need to stay? He proposes to restructure the rainwater pipes that are originally located in one side of the gallery space and extend them to reach the central area of the space. The rain water would then flow into a water storage barrel, before it is expelled to outside of the building. Lai’s intervention will not change how the rainwater come and go, but only create a short period of time when the rainwater stops-by in the exhibition and eventually leave traces with the dirt that it carries.

The work of Kwan Sheung Chi shines with wisdom, but it never agrees to “get success.” Critics have analyzed how his work proposes to reconsider the criteria of success and failure. At the beginning of his career, he proudly claimed to be an “unsuccessful artist.” However, as his career developed smoothly, his aspiration to be an “unsuccessful artist” was proven unsuccessful. After that, he could only try his best to keep a distance from all the “correct ways” of being an artist. Even that is difficult to achieve … he doesn’t want to live the life of a professional artist, and yet he still feels like accepting some opportunities to do art.

The dilemma here is that he only aims to find the best way of living his life, and the way a professional artist should live does not seem good to him. Meanwhile, art is still an essential part of a good life. According to this logic, we may assume that Kwan’s purpose in making art is not about making a glorious career or creating good art in the art historical sense; his purpose is to make use of each opportunity offered by art to identify, interpret, and explore how to act wiser when facing all sorts of challenges in life.

To tackle the “problem” of having to come to Shanghai for an exhibition, Kwan decided to imagine the task as a real business trip. Together with a junior colleague, he will visit Shanghai for an imaginary business project. A local assistant will guide them to visit potential locations as well as other Shanghai-based Hong Kong companies and businessmen. They will also make full use of the trip to enjoy Shanghai cuisine and luxurious cigarettes and alcohol, like real businessmen. The interesting question here is: Although the trip is planned as a measure of expediency, why shouldn’t the pleasure and the relief that it actually brings to the artist be seen as the true value of art?

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Hu Xiangqian was born in 1983 in Leizhou, Guangdong Province and graduated in 2007 from the 5th Studio of the Oil Painting Department at Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. He currently lives and works in Beijing. Hu has had solo exhibitions at Long March Space, Beijing, China, 2015; Arrow Factory, Beijing, China, 2013; Observation Society, Guang-zhou, China, 2009, among others. Selected group exhibitions include Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France, 2016; Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern, Switzerland, 2016; Al Riwaq, Qatar Museums, Do-ha, Qatar, 2016; Beijing Minsheng Art Museum, Beijing, China, 2016; UCCA, Beijing, China, 2015;Asian Art Museum, San Fran-cisco, USA, 2015; The 10th Gwangju Biennale, 2014; Sharjah Biennial, 2013; Centro per l’Arte Contempora-nea Luigi Pecci, Prado, Italy, 2012; Asia Triennial Manchester, 2011; Osage Gallery, Hong Kong, China, 2009; Nanjing Museum, Nanjing, China, 2005. In 2016, he won the “Best Young Artist”of the 10th Award of Art China.

Kwan Sheung-Chi was born in 1980, Hong Kong and has held exhibitions at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2017); Mill6, Hong Kong (2016); ZKM, Karlsruhe (2015); Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul (2015); ParaSite, Hong Kong (2015, 2014); Witte de With, Rotterdam (2014); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2014);

Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2013); Hiroshima MOCA, Hiroshima (2013); amongst others. Kwan holds a B.A. degree in Fine Art from The Chinese University of Hong Kong and in 2000 was named the “King of Hong Kong New Artist”. In 2002 the exhibition “Kwan Sheung-Chi Touring Series Exhibitions, Hong Kong” was held across 10 major exhibition venues in Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Art Centre presented “A Retrospective of Kwan Sheung-Chi”. Kwan is also a founding member of local art groups, Hong Kong Arts Discovery Channel (HKADC), hkPARTg (Political Art Group) and Woofer Ten. In 2009, Kwan was awarded the Starr Foundation Fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council to take part in an international residency programme in New York, USA. In 2012 Kwan received a commission from the West Kowloon Cultural District Association (WKCDA) and in 2013 was the winner of the inaugural Hugo Boss Art Prize.

Lai Chih-Sheng was born in 1971 in Taipei, Taiwan. He graduated in 1996 with bachelor degree from Department of Fine Art of Taipei National University of the Arts and graduated in 2003 with master degree from Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts of Tainan National University of the Arts. He currently lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan. Lai has had solo exhibition at, Observation Society, Guang-zhou, China, 2018; ESLITE GALLERY, Taipei, Taiwan, 2017; Project Fulfill Art Space, Tai-pei, Taiwan, 2015; Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France, 2015, among others. Group exhibitions include Crane Gallery, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, 2019; The 2th Greater Taipei Biennial of Contemporary Arts, 2018; Soulangh International Con-temporary Art Festival, 2017; The 3rd Aichi Triennale, 2016; Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, 2015; The 13th Biennale de Lyon, 2015; Para Site, Hong Kong, China, 2015; The 4th Taiwan Biennial, 2014; The 8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, 2014; Hayward Gallery, London, United Kingdom, 2012. Lai has also presented in many programmes, such as in 2016, he participated the creation of work “Water Event” for Yoko Ono’s solo exhibition “Lumière de L’aube” at MAC Lyon, Lyon, France.

The scale of ambition needed to imagine the absolute art form that opera was, aiming to organise every aspect and implication of the viewer’s experience, is intimately connected to that moment of absolute hubris when Europe imagined that it could dominate and reorganise the entire world. But European opera was not only a form of bourgeois entertainment, even one that was celebrating the glory of imperial conquest. These total spectacles, held in some of the grandest buildings erected in this time period—in the symbolic urban position previously occupied by cathedrals—with society neatly organised by class facing the elaborate scene on the stage, were in many ways quasi-religious experiences, where European glory was not just a subject of the performance but a collectively lived ecstatic apotheosis.

This was happening as Europe was priding itself on its modern rationality, seeing itself in opposition to the “animist” world of the peoples it was occupying at the same time. The modern view, deeply connected to the colonial project, also changed the physical, emotional, and symbolic relationship between humans and animals, elevating the status of humans, in a view radically different from many indigenous systems of knowledge and value. But European opera contained the clues exposing this charade, for it was far from its official claim of a secular spectacle, amusing a modern society. The phantoms, monsters, and sacred animals of European Empires have always haunted these opera houses, where they were sacrificed, channeled, and embodied within the great shrines of modernity.

An Opera for Animals is nevertheless interested in how these complexities are still alive, even after the demise of the colonial era and of Western opera as a fully living art form. As a parallel discussion, it includes less discussed connections between European classical music and other music systems. More extensively, the exhibition looks at different acts of staging that have been crucial to our imagination of modernity. The conflicts of staging, controlling, hiding, and repressing that occur within the operatic space are at the very core of our contemporary reality, defined by constructed and “alternative” truths, digital parallel worlds, self-staging of personal identities, and the increasingly palpable promise of a new technological turn in the field of intelligence. As such, the exhibition understands opera and related issues such as “staging” and “operatic environment” broadly, as terms describing the synthetic landscapes imagined and generated in our world today. Equally, the animal spirit connects the still very present ancient beliefs with a highly futuristic fear of new forms of irrationality and intelligence colonising our future. The world of technology continues to draw influence from the unique characteristics of certain animal species, enforcing this connection.

This exhibition explores the way in which the future is now projected less as the rational thinking commonly remembered from the post-war era – advanced machinery, design, and social forms – but once more as a place of amorphous fear, of animals that might take over in artificial landscapes. The future it seems, will again be an opera for animals.

An Opera for Animals at Para Site, Hong Kong (March 23-June 9, 2019) is a prelude to a partnership with Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai. Between June 22-August 25, 2019 at Rockbund Art Museum, and September-December 2020 at Para Site, the two institutions will develop and present together two related exhibitions.

Para Site Art Space is financially supported by the Art Development Matching Grants Scheme of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region

Edouard Malingue Gallery (Shanghai) is pleased to present “LLIMIIINALL”, the first solo exhibition in Mainland China by the Indonesian collective, Tromarama. Stemming from the word “liminal”, which refers to the crossing of a threshold, the exhibition highlights our subconscious blur that straddles reality and the virtual realm – one that flaunts its unconditional reliance on social media. On display are works that combine art and digital technologies to materialise deposits of algorithms, creating a liminal space that simultaneously surrounds – and is surrounded by – the continuum between data and our consciousness of the world.

Initiating as a collective in 2006 in Bandung, Indonesia, Febie Babyrose, Ruddy Hatumena and Herbert Hans have been developing interactive reflections on the contemporary fluxes of urban culture. The trio met while studying at the Institute Technology of Bandung. Students in respectively graphic design, advertising and printmaking, they came together for the “traumatic” creation of Serigala Militia (2006) – a stop motion animation film made of hundreds of woodcut plywood boards – hence the moniker of the visual art collective, which combines the anecdote with the Greek word (h)órāma for “view”.

This initial foray prompted years of creating playful, enigmatic stop motion animations but Tromarama’s body of work has equally extended to video, installation, computer programming and public participation. At the heart of their varied practice is the notion of hyperreality in the digital age: how our perceptive engagement with the world is continuously shaped by the interrelationship between the virtual and the physical.

Indonesia ranks as one of the most populous countries in the world uniting various ethnicities, languages, religions and cultural influences spanning its 17,000 islands. The cultural fabric of the country informs the work of Tromarama, who are part of a first generation of artists to be confronted with the impact of the digital revolution in Indonesia during the early 2000’s. As such, their practice literally animates the ordinary and weaves its existence into a tale of tribulations fuelled by consequence.

This exhibition spells out, over a series of installations, videos and two-dimensional works, Tromarama’s inventive response to the Internet and social media. Soliloquy (2018), for instance, collates user activity on Twitter to reconfigure 96 lamps sourced from a flea market: each time the hashtag “#kinship” is used the tweet is converted into a binary code, prompting the lamps to flicker.

Similarly involving public participation through social media, Living Apparatus (2019) replaces actual lamps with an LCD screen and uses the hashtags (“#lit” and “#lumen”) to animate the phantasm on display. As a proxy for the consequence of living between two realms, the nature of light is redefined by our arbitrary, digital engagement with the word. Such consequence, from Tromarama’s point of view, is more of a mental experience than a physical one, in the sense that it bends the scenes from our daily lives in relation to how it creates and “animates” artificial desires.

Selfghosted (2019) is a series of lenticular prints conceived from collated data following the hashtag “#selfportrait”. Each character in the tweet is converted into a binary code, which is then translated into an RGB colour code. A reference to the

Internet’s anonymity, Selfghosted hints at the way we “translate” reality into various versions of our self-identity and feeds them into an endless chain of reactions.

At the heart of social media is the creation of an inclusive narrative through the use of hashtags, each keyword weaving its iteration into the larger fabric of our collective conscious. Channeling man’s ambivalence towards technology, “LLIMIIINALL” puts into context the incorporation of technology into our bodies and minds, and explores how this interaction – increasingly tending towards one side – restructures our existential experience vis-à-vis shifting interpersonal relationships, one that is loaded with associations and representations that are, if anything, liminal.

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Tromarama is Bandung based artist collective founded in 2006 by Febie Babyrose, Herbert Hans and Ruddy Hatumena. Engaging with the notion of hyperreality in the digital age, their projects explore the interrelationship between the virtual and the physical world. Their works combine video, installations, computer programming and public participation depicting the influence of digital media on the society’s perception towards their surroundings. They have held solo exhibitions at the Liverpool Biennial Fringe; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and Mori Art Museum, Japan among other locations. Their group exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD) Manila, Gwangju Biennale, Frankfurter Kunstverein; Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide; APT 7 QAGOMA, Brisbane; and the Singapore Art Museum.

Josephine Pryde Time and the Tampon (Artist’s Impression), 2018

Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new photography, together with some models in 3D, by Josephine Pryde, her second to be held in the London gallery.

Photography
Carvings were made into the surfaces of rocks, across what was later Europe.

3D Models
She held a tampon between her finger and thumb, and an image popped into her head, of the chemist in Chancery Lane where she had bought the box of tampons.

Memory
If you take a course in Photoshop, the teacher may talk to you about Photoshop and memory. It could be the very first thing the teacher says. It’s thrilling. Photoshop remembers the pixels and where they are. It’s a map. The first verb the teacher uses to introduce Photoshop is ‘to remember’. Not the verb ‘to depict’, ‘to demonstrate’, ‘to represent’, nor ‘to show’.
I think of my body (again) (after the computer). How it takes memory.
The computer. The rocks. The 3D object. How they all take memory.
Taking up memory.
It takes more memory than Illustrator, Photoshop. Because Illustrator works with vectors, and remembers outlines. What is it that Photoshop remembers, if it is not outlines?

Josephine Pryde is an artist known primarily for her work with photography, though she often presents work with sculptural elements. Pryde learns from different photographic conventions, for example from publicity or advertising images, where seductive and highly staged, high resolution images evoke and respond to desire. She draws on visual
languages, responding to ideas and larger conceptual frameworks such as the history of photography and the moving image, through details, references, or the juxtaposition of different works.

For this new exhibition, Pryde has been considering capacities of memory, over time, and in relation to photography and other graphic media. Her text, ‘Constable’, included in the book ‘Anarchic sexual desires of plain unmarried schoolteachers’, ed. Chris McCormack, Selected Press, 2015, introduces some of the ideas she is working on here. When do humans’ minds and bodies expand into different technologies? Where can they withdraw? When do you have periods? Does the change in mind suggested by the exhibition title mean a change of opinion, or something else?

For this exhibition, Madani presents new paintings and animation works. In two large corner paintings, men point handheld projectors at the wall, screens flashing in the distance. Behind the wall, short films combine live imagery with painted animations. In one of them, a group of men struggle to prevent themselves from being crushed by a giant pink penis that has fallen from the sky. In another, a man is trapped in a loop of stairs and escalators in a faceless atrium, eventually caught and dismembered by a crowd. This is one step removed, cinematic, there is an audience looking on; there’s something natural in it all.

Tala Madani, The Shadow, 2018. © Tala Madani, courtesy 303 Gallery, New York.

塔拉·马达尼，《阴影》，2018，图片由塔拉·马达尼和纽约303画廊提供

In a group of paintings, infants are portrayed innocently discovering their imagination. One child crawls toward a light source with his hand outstretched, projecting a mammoth shadow of himself. Another canvas shows a billboard of a child carving glowing lacunae into a body, multiplying the sun. These base instincts hold a puerile allure, where a lack of inhibition is infantile and callow, but also human and liberating. You find these humans crawling into glowing gas ovens to stick their heads inside, returning to a fetal posture of sincere and relatable ignorance. Exploring from beginning to end.
 
Born in Tehran in 1981, Madani received her MFA from the Yale University School of Art in 2006. Recent solo exhibitions include: La Panacée, Montpellier, 2017; First Light, MIT Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, 2016; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, 2014; Nottingham Contemporary, 
2014; Rip Image, Moderna Museet Malmö & Stockholm, 2013; The Jinn, Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam, 2011. Madani has also been included in: The 2017 Whitney Biennial, New York; Hope and Hazard: A Comedy of Eros (Curated by Eric Fischl), Hall Art Foundation, New York 2017; Los Angeles – A Fiction, Musée d’art Contemporain de Lyon, 2017; Zeitgeist, MAMCO, Geneva, 2017; Invisible Adversaries, The Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, 2016; The Great Acceleration: Art in the Anthropocene, Taipei Biennial (curated by Nicholas Bourriaud), 2014; Made in L.A. 2014, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Where are we Now?, 5th Marrakech Biennale, Marrakech, 2014; Speech Matters, La Biennale di Venezia, 2011; Greater New
 York, P.S. 1, New York, 2010; Younger than Jesus, New Museum, New York, 2009. Madani lives and works in Los Angeles.

Tala Madani, Corner Projection with Prism Refraction and Buckets, 2018. © Tala Madani, courtesy 303 Gallery, New York.

塔拉·马达尼，《棱镜折射与感光元件角落投影》，2018，图片由塔拉·马达尼和纽约303画廊提供

Tala Madani, The Audience, still, 2018. © Tala Madani, courtesy 303 Gallery, New York.

塔拉·马达尼，《观众》，截图，2018，图片由塔拉·马达尼和纽约303画廊提供

Tala Madani, Corner Projection with Squares, 2018. © Tala Madani, courtesy 303 Gallery, New York. 

塔拉·马达尼，《方块角落投影》，2018，图片由塔拉·马达尼和纽约303画廊提供

Installation view, Tala Madani: Corner Projections at 303 Gallery, New York, 2018.

塔拉·马达尼：《角落投影》展览现场，纽约303画廊，2018

Installation view, Tala Madani: Corner Projections at 303 Gallery, New York, 2018.

塔拉·马达尼：《角落投影》展览现场，纽约303画廊，2018

Installation view, Tala Madani: Corner Projections at 303 Gallery, New York, 2018.

塔拉·马达尼：《角落投影》展览现场，纽约303画廊，2018