THINH  - Đào Châu Hải
Manzi Art Space (14 Phan Huy Ích, Nguyễn Trung Trực, Ba Đình, Hà Nội) January 2021

Translated by Tran Ngan Ha

Publication was made possible with the support of the Nguyen Art Foundation

Les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus. (The only true paradise is paradise lost’) – Marcel Proust

As we enter the third decade of the 21st century, Vietnamese sculpture seems to be gradually losing its place in the living spaces and the flow of creative thinking. Just over 10 years ago (2010s), sculpture, then full of inspiration and often present in art news, was introducing a generation of new faces which promised a novel visual language.However today, it seems to have turned into disappointment when, apart from being heavy physical shapes, sculpture works often do not create any significant concepts or aesthetic perceptions. From a high-level perspective, from being an art form with a normative theory system of three-dimensional shaping, of specific technique and language, sculpture has gradually become a merely form of expression, a material and a ‘medium’ rather than a distinct sensory and aesthetic world. It slips out (or is pushed to the borders) of the flow of thinking – as sculptors no longer come up with their own aesthetic philosophy about how they form the shapes, equip them with a capacity to interact with different spaces, diverse contexts, and respond to living spaces that appear and disappear every day. When the present life is no longer isolated islands or kingdoms with standard models of distinct social and physical forms, sculpture requires changes in the artistic philosophy to interpret different aesthetic approaches, or should even guide human perception, but it seems to stand still or go in the opposite direction. Increasingly exhausted and no longer able to find life-engaging concepts, a visual language that is increasingly poor, unable to connect or lacking the ability to occupy real spaces, gradually losing its audiences, sculpture has become either “salonized” in furniture, or a superficial decoration of an outdoor space with a rigid and pragmatic spirit outside the aesthetic.

Dao Chau Hai (b. 1956) belongs to the last generation of sculptors pursuing a pure sculptural language and conception and who have the desire to change humanity – idealizing living spaces  through art. Starting with his ’Cubist’ sculptures in the 1990s, since the 2000s there have been many changes in his perception and spirit regardingsculpture where he was searching for and incorporating his art objects into a variety of topographic and spatial contexts, from smaller to larger scales. The move from natural materials to metals around 2009-2010 continues to give his sculpture new forms and languages, not only within the context in which they are created, with the spaces to which they are directed, but also in their efforts to capture and shape the spirit of the era into a specific visual form. The ideology of the industrial age mixed with memories of the past, the sensitivity to the mechanical, the metallic with the non-metallic crafts, the pursuit of a three-dimensional oppressive body language through monumental art shapes, searching for ideal forms in the ideal space, radicalizing the language of shapes and engineering within the constraints of technology, et cetera, such complex and contradictory thoughts appear in the sculptures of Dao Chau Hai, and which are both a driving force and a hindrance to the artist himself.

THINH, the latest series of work, starts out as an independent sculpture but then opens up Dao Chau Hai’s complex and diverse onsite interconnections. He starts with a simplified figure of a bird drawn on a flat metal surface. The shape is then hollows out using laser cutting techniques, and duplicated on the metal sheet vertically and horizontally. Splitting that flat surface into vertical rectangles and arranging on a square ground, then inserting small squares into larger square cylinders, Dao Chau Hai  builds up a series of standing cylinders with multiple layers, alternating hollow and solid. Fragments cut from flat metal surfaces are also used, radially laminated and stacked to form a solid pylon – solid cube of hollow cylinders. The metal plates of the hollow sections are also not discarded; they are considered other components of the work, intended to be incorporated into specific spaces or terrain. The idea of using both solid-hollow cubes, the cold sharpness of metal and mechanical precision are fully exploited in this sculpture, creating a multidirectional visual reception and opportunities to enter various spatial structures which can be combined in different ways with architecture.

When a three-dimensional sculpture is flattened, it almost approaches the visual language of graphic art and requires comprehensively different directions of ‘behavior’ in terms of concepts, techniques, and aesthetics. The artist did not really make a sudden change in artistic style, but had experimented previously, such as his installation in the exhibition “Uninvolved & East Sea Ballad” at Viet Art Center, Hanoi, at the end of 2010 (a dualexhibition with painter Ly Truc Son). Dao used thin jagged steel plates to form the shapes of ocean waves, laying them on the floor and standing against the wall to create a fierce space filled with of the sensation of violence. Although they are dissipated in a large space without a coherent connection between single parts, and lean too much towards ‘description/narration’ and have no specialized way of processing the blocks’ interior, this is still an experiment and also a transformation in the perception of his structure of sculpture by decomposing the solid block into layered flat metal plates with space left in between. This technical process becomes an artistic approach when it comes to solving the ‘solidity-heaviness’ of the shape, emptying and reducing its weight, making it look more elegant. At the same time, the visually heavy effect of the metal material is retained, the layers stacking up one on another, creating a weight for the forms and a visual impression of the work.

With THINH, Dai reuses this approach with a greater degree of control in both artistic conception and technical precision. Plates of metal are either flat or laminated or separated into independent sheets. Hollow shapes created by chiseling on flat surfaces become the main driver of vision and determine aesthetic effectiveness. At this point, the void/empty space becomes organic and the main subject of the sculpture. Not only do they ‘take away’ the heavy feel of the material and the coldness of the metal, they also solve the overall visual riddle and detail of the work. They guide the viewer’s gaze to weave in and out of the block, exposing the structure and the physical depth of the block’s interior. At the same time, they are the doorways to connect the sculptural body with the architectural interior-exterior landscape and the environment. The work integrates more into the physical context and evokes a lot of interest in viewers because of that ‘openness’.

One advantage of choosing a reflective metal for this sculptural series (aluminum alloy) lies in the properties of that material. Not only is it responsive to light, the surface also reflects many passive and indirect light beams, without an external light source. This sculpture can be placed in a variety of architectural and lighting contexts, from outside to the typical white-cube gallery, in an artificial light hall, or even in a dim lighting spaces. In a dark space, the light on the contours of sculpture makes up the visual form of the subject and that’s where aesthetics reveal itself. The shape becomes fragile, even ‘invisible ‘, and the empty/void spaces become the solid block/subject of the work. When the light changes through time, from day to night, or by the movement of things in front of the work, by the surrounding natural and man-made environment, the visual aesthetic changes accordingly and is not constrained by traditional art disciplines. Diverse adaptations to the environment and scenery, time and weather help the work have a more ‘sustainable’ aesthetic, quickly catching up with the movements of thoughts and habits that always want to renew and accelerate the movement of contemporary life.

Explaining the concept through the title is seldom a strength of artists in general, but with the title ‘THINH’, it seems that Dao Chau Hai has had a satisfactory choice. THINH is part of the word ‘thinh khong’, which designates an empty, silent, nothingness state. Thinh in Vietnamese is pronounced close to the word ‘thing’ in English which means object, or ‘think’ which means thinking, reflecting. During domestic and international trips, the artist has had many opportunities to witness or listen to stories of people drifting, in exile or disappearing following the changes in history, the disintegration of communities and cultures, the rotation of natural and social status. From thinking about the existences of individuals and groups through the transformation of time, Dao Chau Hai approaches the topic with a complex sculpture series of various parts, layers, fragmentations and concentrations, in order to express different states that exist in endless emptiness. Perhaps this idea is more or less influenced by the Eastern Buddhist spirit ‘all things are empty of intrinsic existence and nature’ when it comes to seeing that all matters come from nothing and will return to nothing.

The change in the visual language of sculpture reveals the development of Dai’s thinking process and his researching/reflecting/experimenting capacity, and his artistic philosophy. In his early-staged Cubist forms, Dao Chau Hai was interested in the distortion of the sculpture in three-dimensional aspects, creating an internal ‘force’ inside the rotating cube, thereby affecting the viewers’ vision and emotions. At the same time, he explored the hollowness of sculpture when studying bamboo weaving techniques, inspired by the craftsmanship and the appearance of traditionalhandicraft with their own lyrical and aesthetic characteristics. Then he raised questions about the meaning of the shape in relation to the material and where the connections with the past in matter and identity lie. The next turn was employing the theatrical impression of the massiveness of the monumental art in three-dimensional space, its connection to specific space and context, a sense of industrial life, which certainly was influenced by the time when the artist undertook commissions of monumental statues forcommon architecture and public sculptures. The post-2000 works and showcases were constantly changing and experiencing a variety of scene modifications, demonstrating his artistic styles in dialogue with the space [site] at the physical, environmental or historical layer, following practices of Land art or Environmental art. Influence by industrial life, his excitement using the metal material, together with its technical system and visual language, a distinct aesthetic philosophy attracted the artist and has been his main object for more than 10 years. Working with metal requires more rational thinking, and sculpture will then either tend to structuralize, or will tend towards working in a conceptual sense more than in a technical one, and gradually become a medium for new artistic forms such as Installation. Dao Chau Hai’s later works show that he tends towards structures in the connotation of sculpture but is still interested in how the works interact and control the space in particular exhibitions. Going from Cubism (distorting or analyzing ‘cubes’ [of space]) to Abstraction –– structuralizing and bringing visual structures into space, rotating and colliding with the news, behavior and cultural sensitivities, Dao Chau Hai’s art follows the gradual development of global sculpture, and partly touches on the common perceptions of contemporary aesthetics.

When modern life needs more various expressions in forms, or more diverse exploration at deep emotional levels, or engaging with social and community issues generally, art needs to respond. In the context of sculpture getting further from reality, this artistic practice of Dao Chau Hai has been consistent, demonstrating the limitations of and distance between the creative ideal and reality, when the artistic idea slips from the existing technical and technological infrastructure, the social context and the existing psychology of enjoyment. As a perfectionist, perhaps he is still seeking to build a pure spiritual space, where art defines the values ​​of the physical and spiritual form of that place. But that paradise has never been and will not be for anyone, because the world we live in today is constantly divided and broken, where ideals and beliefs become illusions and delusions. Đào Châu Hải  is a solitary wanderer in the endless exile of the mind, searching for a paradise that does not exist, something that mankind has lost since the dawn of time even though art cannot help being a salvation of the soul in a chaotic and devastated reality.

Nguyen Anh Tuan

Hanoi, Jan 2021

Translated by Tran Ngan Ha

All images courtesy the artist and Manzi Art Space

“I suppose it’s like porno”, the artist Ashley Bickerton chuckles at that day’s handful of surfers, mostly novices of middling ability; “you’d rather not watch somebody who can’t perform.” We are having a solitary walk at Balangan beach in late July 2020. It is the middle of our summer lockdown in Bali, part of the Indonesian island’s effort to stem the surge of Covid-19. “I’ve surfed here for 30 years,” declares Bickerton, “sometimes on its biggest days ever…but, also, on the smallest days because I love to ride long boards.” My interlocutor is showing me around the coastal strip he considers his home turf.

Born in Barbados in 1959, Ashley Bickerton had a peripatetic childhood across four continents, from Guyana to Ghana, on to the Balearic Islands and England, then finally Hawaii. His upbringing followed the career of his Anglo-American father, the eminent linguist Derek Bickerton, who researched creole languages and theorised on the formation of human language. The younger Bickerton admitted that his father’s work gave him a sense of “the amorphousness of language”. On one hand, he says, “nothing exists without being named”, while on the other “there’s a slipperiness to all meaning…Wording is about things trying to be held down and pinned which are always in a state of flux.” Much of this thinking colours his life and work. While there is a firm conceptual agnosticism in his art, there is also a recognition of the impulse to name: our attempt, artificial though it be, at creating meaning.

The author with Ashley Bickerton, Bali, 2020 (image Kinez Riza)

Bickerton completed his studies in 1982 at the California Institute of the Arts, then moved to New York to take part in the Whitney Independent Study Program. He shot up to prominence as part of the so-called ‘Fab Four’, a group consisting of Jeff Koons, Peter Halley, and Meyer Vaisman. Their show at Sonnabend Gallery, in 1985, was hailed by many as the beginning of the Neo-Geo movement. The art critic Roberta Smith, reviewing the show in the New York Times, suggests it heralds “the return of an art that is certifiably American and firmly rooted in the Pop-Minimal-Conceptual tradition. It clearly replaces Neo-Expressionist excess with cool calculation…[and] a bumptious, youthful aggressiveness.”

When applied to him, however, Bickerton has always thought the appellation ‘Neo-Geo’ misleading. He explains, “We were put together…[art dealer] Jeffrey Deitch invented that term.” For him, the unwelcome tag reflects neither his creative vocabulary then, nor his immediate personal affiliations. Conceptually, only Halley was truly Neo-Geo in his exploration of geometric forms and structures. The moniker, moreover, fails to represent Bickerton’s circle at the time accurately: “I was actually much closer to a lot of younger artists because I, myself, was younger, but I’d gotten stuck with the Sonnabend grouping.” A plethora of other labels materialized to describe the supposed movement, from Simulationism to Neo-Conceptualism; from Post-Abstract Abstraction to Smart Art. Perhaps, the most descriptive of these terms in elucidating Bickerton’s early output is Commodity Art.

Ashley Bickerton
Good Painting (1988)
mixed media construction with neoprene covering
90 x 69 x 18 inches
228.6 x 175.3 x 45.7 cm
(image courtesy the artist)

Ashley Bickerton
Seascape: Floating Costume to Drift for Eternity II (Cowboy Suit) (1992)
Cowboy suit, glass, aluminum, wood, caulk, fiberglass, enamel and canvas webbing
22 x 92 x 81 inches 55.9 x 233.7 x 205.7 cm
(image courtesy the artist)

Ashley Bickerton
Wild Gene Pool: Ark # 2 (1989)
Wood, anodized aluminum, rubber, rope, leather and wild seed
76 x 76 x 121⁄2 inches
193 x 193 x 31.8 cm
(image courtesy the artist)

His commodity-related works are often box-like pieces, strapped with buckles and brackets. Many of them are covered with an array of consumer logos and symbols, created painstakingly by hand, but so as to look mass-produced. In effect, these art objects are presented à la Warhol in a manner that recalls consumer goods. Among them are works branded ‘Susie’, which mimic how the trophies of ostentatious consumption are trademarked with luxury branding. Early Bickerton is an irreverent meditation on the interface between art, commodity culture and consumerism. It touches upon our impulse to name and valorise. Although the artist flirts with meanings, he seems happiest sitting on the fence, listening in on his crowd’s inferences and, maybe, laughing a little. In these different layers of communication, some might like to see cool irony or a witty tease; others may find a detached critique of consumer culture and capitalism. One intriguing layer is characterised by art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau as being “the central role of fetishism or, alternatively, the insistence on the fetish character of the artwork”. The artist calls this his “iconisation” of consumer products, his way of investing a kind of apotheosis to the materialist spirituality of America.

As first proposed by Karl Marx, one might look at commodity fetishization as spirituality in a materialist, capitalist guise, perhaps with America as its heartland. If so, the unveiling of a commodity good could be seen as almost a sacred ritual in an otherwise mundane existence. Are such occasions America’s moments of high mystery? Bickerton implies so: “something arrives in a box, and you open it, and take it out, and before it’s put to use, before it becomes something utilitarian and gets scratched up or used, it’s just this perfect thing.” This unboxing – the unveiling – is something akin to the moment when, in a Hindu temple, the doors of the Holy of Holies are flung open to reveal the idol within. Any kind of fetishization demands the suspension of reason and the projection of meaning onto an object. Any act of naming calls for a momentary pause, however temporary, in the unceasing flux of meanings around us. At the same time, all theories aside, there is a visceral, childlike joy in actually suspending thought and time: in distilling a moment of perfection in even the most humdrum of manufactured commodities – fetish pleasure, perhaps, but not without a quality of spirituality. Bickerton’s commodity art pokes fun at the artificial nature of cultural production, all the while illuminating the very human impulse to name and create meanings.

Ashley Bickerton
Landscape With Green Sky (2002)
Photo collage, acrylic and objects on wood 72 x 96 x 14.5 inches
182.9 x 243.8 x 36.8 cm
(image courtesy the artist)

Ashley Bickerton LARGE
Open Flotsam Painting
171.5cm x 227cm x 14.7cm
67 1/2″ x 89 3/8″ x 5 3/4″
(image courtesy the artist)

Ashley Bickerton
Green Waves (2020)
flotsam, ocean borne detritus, oil paint, acrylic paint & rocks on wood and cardboard
171.5cm x 227cm x 14.7cm
67 1/2″ x 89 3/8″ x 5 3/4″
(image courtesy the artist)

Ashley Bickerton
Dawn Estuary (2020)
flotsam, ocean borne detritus, oil paint, acrylic paint & rocks on wood and cardboard
171.5cm x 227cm x 14.7cm
67 1/2″ x 89 3/8″ x 5 3/4″
(image courtesy the artist)

Unless seen as a cultural critique, the artist’s move to Bali in 1993 seems to be a world away from this discussion. By then, he had become increasingly disenchanted with the fashions and politics of New York’s art world or, in his own words, its “different degrees of fawning”. Moreover, as an artist, he was no longer in vogue. Bickerton could probably have worked his way back into the good graces of the fickle market. After all, he had been offered the enviable platform of a full-time teaching position at Harvard University which, to the chagrin of his academic parents, he ended up turning down. He reasons: “I was always a surfer; and I’d given it up to pursue art. So, I just figured, screw that! I’m not going to hang out here.” As a matter of fact, having grown up and lived by the sea for most of his life, his twelve years in New York were something of a wintry, geographic aberration. Now, a different vision of life beckoned. He envisioned more familiar, tropical surroundings – a place far away from the din of New York’s art scene, where he could dedicate himself to his twin passions of art and surfing.

Thirty years on, we are wading through the island waters of his chosen home grounds. The Indonesian island of Bali, he clarifies, “is a huge part of the surfing world with some of the best waves anywhere.” Knee-deep in the sea, he is leading me along a rocky promontory, just off Balangan beach. Banyan-covered limestone cliffs rise up above us until we end up in a grotto, overlooking the Indian ocean. Here, the artist married his fourth and current wife, Cherry, a bright, young Balinese eco-entrepreneur. “It’s my temple,” he professes, “a point of alignment.” From surfing mecca to the wedded contentment of home life, the deep connection he feels to the sea here is palpable: “I don’t really believe in too much outside of the realms…of empirical reality, but right after we got married…while trying to paddle out to surf on a big day, a wave washed my feet out from underneath me, and then I hit the reef and tried holding on as the wave washed me back. It tore both my wedding and engagement rings clean off!”

The author with Ashley Bickerton, Bali, 2020 (image Kinez Riza)

The conventional reading of Bickerton’s career sees his expatriation as a profound change of direction in his conceptual trajectory. The art critic Calvin Tomkins, writing in the New Yorker in 2007, goes so far as to claim that Bickerton “dropped out of the art world”. A succession of clichés come to mind, of escapism, of his supposed life as a privileged, expatriate artist on a tropical island paradise, in short of a latter-day Gaugin. In a similar vein, but with an attempt at empathy, the writer Paul Theroux speaks of Bickerton as “a connoisseur of not belonging”. For Theroux, expatriates like himself and Bickerton, “travel from culture to culture…from one preposterous belief system to another, always teetering just outside it. The challenge of their quest, and their entanglement, is how to represent this profusion of images and beliefs…and more than that, the mass of tactile sensations and smells…the world as wreckage” – both victors and victims of rootless globalisation.

On the surface, the visual vocabulary of Bickerton’s works in Bali certainly departed from their commodity art antecedents. There was a notable shift towards figuration with extravagant, salacious references to Gauginesque life on an island-paradise. At one level, it is the artist’s playful response to other people’s acts of naming, of him as Gaugin-like, of migration as escapism. He himself looks with disdain at exoticism qua exoticism. For him, most of its practitioners “have airs and aspirations that go beyond…the parameters of their actual accomplishments.” Anything bucolic or decadent in his rendering of tropical life invariably serves a purpose: asking probing questions, but with a firm, resolute agnosticism as to their possible answers. During this period, the recurring, grotesque figure of the Blue Man emerged. He is a macabre personification – sometimes an exaggerated self-parody – of much that one finds confronting in contemporary Bali: from the white, male gaze upon Asian femininity, to so-called Orientalist othering, besides the excruciating cultural and environmental effects of crass, mass tourism.

Ashley Bickerton
The Preparation With Green Sky (2007)
Acrylic and digital print on canvas in carved wood, coconut, mother of pearl and coin inlaid artist name
72 x 86 x 7 inches
182.9 x 218.4 x 17.8 cm
(image courtesy the artist)

As pointed out by Solomon-Godeau, these references to “forms of exoticism…possess neither more nor less authenticity or authority than do the corporate logos with which Bickerton earlier adorned his works.” In other words, the artist in Bali quotes from a more comprehensive dictionary of world cultures, but in “the same postmodern syntax that informed the so-called Neo-Geo production of the 80s”. Solomon-Godeau further suggests that Bickerton’s “shift to figuration in no way diminishes his preoccupation with the protean forms of fetishism, in either its commodity or its psychic manifestation (or both).” He humorously drew a parallel between ‘human being’ and ‘commodity’, then proceeded to play with the naming and fetishization of both. Viewed thus, there are persistent, conceptual commonalities between his oeuvres in New York and Bali. His move to Bali merely enlarged the scope of his references, moving beyond the East Village art scene to an ancient culture in the throes of globalisation and modernity – a rapidly urbanising island of five million, rich in the many permutations of contemporary tropical life. Through it all runs an abiding fascination with the ambiguity of cultural production. This extends, perhaps, to his treatment of the reductive reading of his move to Bali as Orientalist escapism tout court.

Ashley Bickerton
Night Sky Over Fallow Field (2020)
flotsam, ocean borne detritus, oil paint, acrylic paint & rocks on wood and cardboard
95cm x 126cm x 14.7cm
37 3/8″ x 9 1/2″ x 5 3/4″
(image courtesy the artist)

Ashley Bickerton
Balangan Cave (2020)
flotsam, ocean borne detritus, oil paint, acrylic paint & rocks on wood and cardboard
95cm x 126cm x 14.7cm
37 3/8″ x 9 1/2″ x 5 3/4″
(image courtesy the artist)

All too aware of appearing the Orientalist escapist, Bickerton initially removed Bali from his creative identity here. His first studio on the island was a plain, nondescript space that could have existed anywhere in the world. Today, however, he is probably the first to acknowledge that over the decades, through the tiniest cracks and crevices, “the seams in closed windows”, despite his own initial misgivings, ideas from Bali, maybe even Indonesia at large, have seeped in. The most obvious local influences, such as the elaborate carvings on his frames or the conflicted references to expatriate life, are identified aptly by Solomon-Godeau as “citations” with “implied quotation marks”. Other, equally fascinating echoes of Bali and Indonesia suffuse the artist’s output. To start with, his low opinion of most expatriate art – unconsciously or not – mirrors the inaugural position of his adopted country’s postcolonial modern art. This was asserted by one of its leading masters and pre-eminent theorist, S. Sudjojono. As early as 1939, Sudjojono dismissed what he judged to be languorous, overly romanticised representations of colonial Indonesia as the ‘tourist art’ of the ‘Mooie Indië’ [Beautiful Indies]. Unwittingly, Bickerton began his career in Southeast Asia with a mind-set not too dissimilar from the foundational premise of modern art practice in Indonesia.

Ashley Bickerton
Lagoon With Storm Front (2020)
flotsam, ocean borne detritus, oil paint, acrylic paint & rocks on wood and cardboard
133cm x 176cm x 14.7cm
52 3/8″ x 69 1/2″ x 5 3/4″
(image courtesy the artist)

For me, though, the most thought-provoking echoes of Indonesia in the artist’s body of work are in its unfolding dialogue with the art and artists of Bali. Similar to the typical layout in Bali’s Batuan school of painting, Bickerton’s creations are often crowded to the brim with characters, objects and events – the world as a bustling, maddening mandala-marketplace of commerce and spirituality, of quotidian nightmare and dreamlike reality. An admirer of Batuan style, Bickerton appreciates how it “brought the traditional formal spaces into their own form of modernity.” He confesses: “that earth and sky binary I’ve got in my paintings definitely comes from looking at both Surrealism, like Miro, even Dali, with their mass and emptiness represented by brown and blue, but also at Batuan, where grey-greeny browns and green-browny greys give it its tone.” Batuan artists reconfigured ancient spaces as a contemporary universe. Here, modern life, pulsating with energy, confronts sinister demons, both old and new, among whom the Blue Man himself would not be out of place.

There are also traces in Bickerton of the singular master from Ubud, I Gusti Nyoman Lempad. Over the course of a long life and career from the late nineteenth century until his death in 1978, Lempad produced a canon of powerful, psychologically prescient, figurative drawings and sculptures. “His understanding of human sexuality”, notes Bickerton, was “so ahead of his time, so liberating, so complex, and with a gorgeousness of line and warmth.” In Red Scooter Nocturne, the Blue Man plonks himself with unseemly heft, flabs overflowing, on his tiny scooter, while the elongated, twirling, silver-skinned, snake-like females of Temptation in the Banjar, gyrate and hiss. The sensibility and line of their movements recall those of Lempad’s characters. In the output of both artists, there is a similar sense of humour, resigned but smirking at the world’s many contradictions.

Ashley Bickerton
Orange Shark (2008)
Polyurethane resin, nylon, cotton webbing, stainless steel, scope, distilled water, coconuts, rope
60 x 108 x 60 inches
152.4 x 274.3 x 152.4 cm
Edition of 3
(image courtesy the artist)

The contradictions in Bickerton’s art, with its underlying conceptual agnosticism, sit comfortably with Bali’s hybridised metaphysics. The artist reflected in a recent interview: “It’s not that I want to define what is dark and what isn’t. I simply think that we must acknowledge that it all exists and get off it”. Here, there are shades of the Balinese worldview. Part-Hindu, part-Buddhist, part-animist, it makes no unequivocal pontifications on either good or bad, sacred or profane. Unlike Abrahamic systems of belief, Balinese spirituality considers ambiguity as part of the natural order. There are, then, tantalizing echoes of Bali and Indonesia in Bickerton’s works. To me, the insistence on seeing him as a latter-day Gaugin is untenable in light of both the nature of his interaction with his adopted home and the conceptual commonalities in his entire corpus.

Rather than seeing Bickerton solely as a “white, male artist, living in the South Seas” – that is to say, through the perspectives of a politically correct, apparently metropolitan and mostly white American monoculture – it might be less parochial to regard him in an Indonesian context. To an Indonesian, the artist is a ‘totok’, or a first-generation migrant, behind whom ‘Peranakan’, or mixed-race, culture thrives. His Indonesian-born children encapsulate this process of creolisation: his youngest is a half-Balinese girl from his fourth and current marriage; and the older a half-Jakartan son from his third marriage. The latter comes on his mother’s side from a cultured and influential Peranakan family, founded in the last century by another totok, the pre-war, French intellectual Louis-Charles Damais and his aristocratic Javanese wife, R. A. Soejatoen Poespokoesoemo. There is a certain charm to the Peranakan identity of the younger Bickertons given Derek Bickerton’s study of creole languages and Ashley Bickerton’s upbringing among creole societies. The artist has found a home in a country where creolisation forms part of its national identity. Unlike America with its apparent multiculturalism of monocultures, forever weary of cultural misappropriation, Indonesia is defined by cultural hybridization. The very idea of Indonesia is a cultural and linguistic construct: etymologically, the country’s name is Greek from Ἰνδός [Indos] or Indian and νῆσος [nesos] or islands. For an artist so obsessed with the artifice of cultural production, it is fitting that he has ended up in a country that, according to historian Benedict Anderson, epitomizes the nation-state as an “imagined community”. Almost by accident, Bickerton has become a co-creator in this act of cultural production. It tells how an ancient society with a long history of civilizational, religious and ethnic hybridization, adapts to new forms of modernity.

Ashley Bickerton
Balangan Sunset (2020)
flotsam, ocean borne detritus, oil paint, acrylic paint & rocks on wood and cardboard
95cm x 126cm x 14.7cm
37 3/8″ x 9 1/2″ x 5 3/4″
(image courtesy the artist)

Ashley Bickerton, Balangan Sunset (2020) (detail)
(image courtesy the artist)

From this vantage point, a lot of Bickerton’s art elicits conversations about the varied forms that this much-mentioned cultural production might take. “Culturescapes are fun,” he avows, “but ultimately too hectic and too noisy. I long for great silence and great emptiness.” In keeping with this meditative turn, as noted by writer Anthony Haden-Guest, the artist’s current practice is “now undergoing further development, and a striking one”. I notice this, too, at his studio before we drive up to Balangan beach. His most recent creations have a quieter, contemplative quality to them, reminiscent of some of his earlier commodity pieces. The Flotsam Series are boxed-in, three-dimensional snapshots of simplified landscapes of sky-earth binary. These are overlain by whirling, circulating currents of sea-borne, man-made debris. For Bickerton, this all conjures up “borderless oceanic detritus, seascapes, culturescapes, swirling cosmologies of micro plastics, fragments of human narratives, residues of lives lived, of vestiges of human presence now swirling in great molecular vortexes.” These snapshots are fixed in a sky-earth setting that is almost sculptural, textured with thick layerings of cardboard, clothing and other miscellanea. Presented in his signature crates, the new works are in dialogue with the artist’s commodity creations – as if to commodify nature itself and transport it in containers on ships across the oceans. One might detect here, again, the fetishization of nature as commodity, or of commodity detritus as nature, or most likely both. “I’d ran away from certain parts of my past,” Bickerton owns up, “and I felt it was time to…circle back, embrace everything and move forward from there.”

Ashley Bickerton
Seascape: Floating Ocean Chunk No. 1 (2017)
resin, fiberglass, oil paint, enamel, aluminum & plywood
57 x 74 x 21 inches
144.8 x 188 x 53.3 cm
(courtesy the artist)

Standing with our feet in the sea, I comment that his Flotsam Series is topical given our preoccupation with plastic pollution, the pandemic, and man’s impact on nature. “Well, hold on,” the artist shoots back, “I’m not an environmentalist. Environmentalism labours under the presumption that we’re saving the planet for human habitation. We’re just one infinitesimal chapter in the enormity of the history of the biosphere; and the planet will eat us up and spit us out.” He explains: “I consider the great gyres of plastic in the Pacific as much a part of the natural order as the migration of wildebeests in the Serengeti. It’s the majesty of molecules…you’ve got great swirling vortexes of molecules as things wash and slush around the planet, and geological time moves on. And the blip of humanity’s imprint is wiped out. Gone!” Bickerton’s insistent agnosticism continues with his proffering that he is “just recording a moment and creating a dark kind of poetry. I don’t know what I’m doing it for. I don’t have much faith in what artists are…we’re perfumed, dancing poodles for the plutocracy. But the point is, if I can get into this place and inhabit that for a second, then I can forget that I’m a poodle. And I can get at a darker and deeper poetry.”

As we look at the horizon, I try recalling our earlier conversation, realising that the crashing waves will render our recorded interview inaudible, washed out – so to speak – in a puddle of salt water. I look at my bullet points: Neo-Geo, Post-Conceptual Conceptualism, Craig-Martin, Susie, Culture Lux, Koons, Gaugin, Mooie Indië’, primitivism, Spies, Batuan, Covarrubias, Lempad, postmodern, postcolonial, Peranakan. I think of the running thread in the artist’s canon, the ad-hoc artifice of cultural production, fetishism in its psychic and commodity forms; and of the quiet he longs for. Across the horizon now, with the sea-sky binary before us, I imagine whirling vortexes of seas, slowly gyrating round the planet as if in a Sufi dance, and in it, the remains of civilization: our flux of meanings, the artist’s wedding rings here, and bits of plastic there. This vision possesses a dark, trance-like kind of beauty. If you suspend time and thought, and inhabit that space for a second; then, before we turn to molecules and return to the swirling ocean, you might just hear Ashley Bickerton’s great silence.

Adi Hong-Tan is an Indonesian historian, writer and social activist, working in art and heritage conservation. He read Law at Christ’s College, Cambridge University, and now sits on the Committee and Advisory Board of Yayasan Mitra Museum Jakarta [Friends of Jakarta Museums Foundation].

•UBS will present the inaugural Taipei Dangdai art fair in January 2019.
• Joining main organizer, ARTHQ, UBS’s partnership aims to nurture local contemporary art in Taiwan.

Taipei – 20 March 2018 – UBS today announced it will present the international art fair, Taipei Dangdai, which is organized by the founder of ARTHQ and ART HK, Magnus Renfrew. Launching in January 2019 at Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center, the fair will showcase contemporary art from Taiwan and across the region. The collaboration reflects UBS’s ongoing commitment to support art and culture in the communities in which it operates, and expands its sponsorship portfolio in Asia Pacific.

Dennis Chen, Country Head and Head of Wealth Management, UBS Taiwan, said: “We are proud to present the Taipei Dangdai art fair which has immense potential for the development of the local art market and Taipei’s cultural ecology. The growth in the number of art collectors in Taiwan over the past 10 years has been matched by the quality of local connoisseurship. From this new platform, we aim to support Taiwan’s creative scene, and at the same time, provide our clients with access to the most important galleries, dynamic artists, and artworks being produced in Taiwan today.”

Magnus Renfrew, founder of ARTHQ and ART HK, said: “We are thrilled to have the support of UBS as we launch Taipei Dangdai. UBS has a widely-recognized and longstanding commitment to art and culture and we look forward to working with them to build a transformative event for Taipei.”

Dennis Chen, Country Head and Head of Wealth Management, UBS Taiwan (L) and
Magnus Renfrew, main organizer of Taipei Dangdai (R)

UBS’s support of Taipei Dangdai is a part of a comprehensive and global commitment to contemporary art which encompasses: the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative; a Global Lead Partnership with Art Basel; the UBS Art Collection and the UBS Art Competence Center; the Fondation Beyeler; and a range of regional art partnerships.

For Taipei Dangdai, UBS is planning a program of activity for clients, employees and the public. They include a UBS Junior Art Program and other educational activities throughout the event. A VIP lounge will be available for UBS clients and guests throughout the fair.

Taiwan boasts one of the most established collector bases in Asia with specialist art magazine, ArtAsiaPacific, acknowledging Taiwanese collectors as “amongst the most progressive in the region.” The country is home to a range of commercial galleries that represent both established and emerging artists, which regularly participate at international art fairs including Art Basel and Frieze. Taipei Dangdai will be a unique platform that will rely on a selection committee of leading gallerists based on peer review to guarantee international standard exhibition quality, VIP services, and visitor experience.

All of them had special backgrounds and experiences. Jin, the initiator of the group, had been born in Xingjing county, Liangning Province, in 1904. He had graduated from Agriculture department in Tokyo University and joined the Communist Youth League in Japan, after coming back to China in 1935, he was actually an Agent of the Far East Intelligence Agency of the Communist. His cousin was the mayor of Xingjing and could provide possible convenience for the art group.

Jing’s wife Kaori Sakai worked for the Manchukuo News Agency as a photographer, and many of her works were published. Her father Koji Sakai was major general of “Manchukuo”, colonel of No.7 left-behind Division. For Kaori, it might be the arts that made her fall in love with Jin. However, did her or her family know the real identity of Jin? The anwser would be kept as mystery with time passing by.

Mu had been born in Tonghua in Andong, 1906, he did double majors in Dyeing & Weaving Design and Horticulture and served as deputy chief of tobacco administration section, in charge of cultivating opium, as it were, a “loyal Chinese traitor” for Manchukuo.

Shangguan Yanqiu was Jing’s fellow and born in 1907. He went to Japan for university as well and followed Uchida Royhei to join the “Black Dragon” gang organization. When he returned to China in 1934, he became Koji Sakai ’s secretary and Chinese translator. In 1936, he joined the Far East Intelligence Agency of the Communist and became Jin Yu Song’s comrade. Later then, he was transferred to Manchuria Railway Investigation Department for translation in 1938, where he shouldered the translation of information documents.

The complexities of their identities and relationships added a sense of legendary to this sketch group, which could even make up a spy story. But the truth was hardly known and submerged by history. Had anything thrilling happened? There wasn’t any reliable reference for Jin and Sakai’s love story. The art community might be an amusement during the trouble times, or an excuse of intelligence activities for them. Which part of the group was the real? Maybe they themselves didn’t know at all.

The dusty-like group disappeared with only one exhibition record. They claimed to create a new form of art belongs to East Asia. However, for viewers who cared about this, the works they left didn’t achieve the goal. In any case, it is worth and valuable that the exhibition archive was brought to light. In the troublous age, all details were skipped over, while behind that, there were a lot of gorgeous lives and detailed stories.

On December 30, 1940, Xing’an West Art Sketch Group held their third exhibition in the exhibition hall of new Jingbaoshan department store. The exhibited works were selected from traveling creations in Daxinganling area. As recorded, the trip was from June to December in 1940, the four served as the accompanying staffs of the police call-setting Inspectorate of police station, and entered the Xing’an East and Mongolia border areas. The medium of this exhibition included oil on canvas, plant monotype, photography, poetry, etc.

刘传宏，木一少——巴彦茫哈牧场（局部），布面油画，50 × 26cm，创作时间不详
Liu Chuanhong, Mu Yishao——Bayanmangha Farm（Detail）, 50 × 26cm, Oil on Canvas, Unknown

The exhibition will be represented on July 22, 2017 in A Thousand Plateaus Art Space in Chengdu. Why can we have this chance? Because the group, its stories and literature as well as their works are all made up by the contemporary artist Liu Chuanhong. In the fall of 2015, he drove along the border between China and Mongolia with prepared canvas, sleeping bags, kitchwares and collected historical materials on the way. The car was his studio, and his inspiration also came from the road trip.

Although we know the truth, we still expect to see the group. We are looking forward to access to their time, feel the fragments that were forgotten by history. Real time always creates stories more dramatic than imagination, but always buries them afterwards. This exhibition by Liu Chuanghong is called “Xing’an West Art Group” , a story that does not exist anymore, in which the artist attempts to fight against the time and history with imagination.

Photosynthesis and photography are two chemical processes which essentially need light. While the first one uses energy from the sun to transform and grow life among plants and vegetation, the second one literarily writes with light. The interaction of light combined with other elements provokes chemical reactions invisibly transforming or seizing our reality. Either in nature and in human made technics, light seems to be the main protagonist for creation to happen. Sunlight via the chemical reaction of photosynthesis allows plants to grow, trees blooming, and flowers to realize their colorful beauty in shape and form. Light helps capturing our environment, depicting stories, shaping images. If the powerful energy offered by nature has been analyzed by scientists for centuries, its fascination has also inspired creators of all kinds, from music to literature, including visual arts. Particular to the medium of photography and video arts, the harnessing and utilization of light by the artist results in an energy transformation of their subject synthesizing into an artistic communication

Beyond their decorative properties and symbolism, plants and flowers have seen their interpretation and depiction evolving through the history of art. While systematically carrying a symbolic meaning during the Middle Ages, the Renaissance begins to represent flowers detached from religious iconography. Two schools then appear, with a will of painting flowers from life in Italy, and setting still-lives in the Netherlands. Many representations of bouquets appeared, giving to flowers the metaphorical concepts of life and death, along with the ephemerality of beauty and existence. Later, the realistic representation of flowers gives way to expressing emotions with painters like Vincent Van Gogh and his sunflowers, evoking mass consumption for Andy Warhol and even bordering on abstraction and sensuality with Georgia O’Keefe. Not being outdone, many photographic artworks testify the rich creativity flowers inspire, wether it be for their metaphorical interpretation or their plastic representation. Their beauty, shape and meaning raise them as main subjects, from pure aesthetic to sexual connotation with Robert Mapplethorpe, to technical experimentations with the surrealists.

“PHOTOSYNTHESIS” gathers photographs celebrating the refinement and symbols of flowers and foliage in general. If Adou creates mise en scene to emphasize their pathos, Michael Wolf almost conceives a documentation on urban plants, while Han Lei explores technics that experiment three-dimensional imagery. All together, the artists of the show attest to the infinite possibilities and diversity of technical approaches in photography while alluding to floral representation throughout art history.

Perrotin gallery is thrilled to present Iván Argote’s first show in New York, marking his 3rd solo at the gallery. Born in 1985 in Bogota, he has been represented by Perrotin since 2009. Argote creates videos, photographs, sculpture, public interventions and performances, as a way to explore our inextricable links to history, tradition, art, politics and power. Argote investigates the city as a place of transformation and potentiality, traveling the world in search of vestigial signs of fallen power, studying the indirect manifestations of control, and observing the conventions that gain acceptance in order for one vision of history to become the official version. Public monuments and sculpture are also recurring themes in the artist’s work. Through his personal narratives, and their connections to history, ideology, and consumerism, Iván Argote questions a Western perspective of History.

Iván Argote’s work has been shown in many international exhibitions, such as “Future Generation Art Price” Victor Pinchuk Foundation, Kiev, 2017, “Ideologue”, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, 2016; “Sírvete de mi, sírveme de ti” (solo) Proyecto Amil, Lima, 2016; “An idea of progress” (solo), SPACE, London, 2016; “Intersections”, Cisneros Fountanals Foundation, Miami, 2015; “Between the Pessimism of the Intellect and the Optimism of the Will”, 5th Thessaloniki Biennale, Thessaloniki, 2015; “Buildering: Misbehaving the City”, Blaffer Art Museum, Houston and CAC Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati in 2014; “Strengthlessness” (solo), Galerie Perrotin, Paris, 2014; “La Estrategia” (solo), Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2013; “Tectonic, Moving Museum”, Dubai, 2013; “Los irrespetuosos”, Museo Carrilo Gil, México DF, 2013; The 30th Sao Paulo Biennial, Sao Paulo, 2012, among others.

When I was a kid, someone told me that a man dug a hole so deep that he stepped out of it on the other side of the world. Standing on firm ground, I wondered why this man, in fact, did not fall out of the earth and exit it upside down. In his new film “As Far As We Could Get” which contains documentary and fictional elements, Iván Argote digs an imaginary channel from Indonesia to Colombia, or from the municipality of Palembang to a town called Neiva. The two cities are exact antipodes (a rare coincidence that only six more cities share worldwide). In both locations, the artist rented large billboards to announce simultaneously a feature film named, “La Venganza Del Amor” (The Revenge of Love). […]
Gianni Jetzer, March 2017

Paper used to be important carrier of cultural transmission in history. The advent of the electronic information age weakened its function of carrying information. But paper shows abundant character in art creation. Vanguard Gallery will exhibit paper works of Chen Xingye, Xue Mu, Xiao Jiang, Ye Linghan, Yuki Onodera. Paper presents unique character in five artists’ creation.

The paintings of Chen Xingye reveal the fascination of apes, which are highly similar to the human being. Artist uses contemporary expression to describe his imagination for the primeval as a modern person, but also for the future. The exaggerated muscular body is undoubtedly the totem of primitive power, and whether there is same relationship between the primeval under the illusion of power and present? “Ape” is just the object of imagination, these imagined images reflect our self-examination and the balance between ourselves and present environment, reality and nihility, past and future.

Bypassing the conventional perception of value imposed by the modern world, Mu’s often abstract artworks are the result of a process of reflection that associates today’s existence. Through an almost synesthetic approach, Mu visualizes the paradoxical co-existences between insignificance and value, to dispute the physical understanding of reality and its moral conventions while facing the intensified ideological confusion and identity struggle at present time of globalization. Critical social events inspire Mu as a catalyst rather than a subject – they accelerate the revelation of the intertwined relationships between the stories surface (the image) and its concealed cause (the dynamical truth). Through art making she wants to revive a mind space exploring the, in fact, none-hierarchic and ever circulating being of things as a complex unity.

At the first look on Xiao Jiang’s work, you will be encompassed with the sharp atmosphere. Something are left by his work unsaid, expressing the power in a silent way.Xiao Jiang’s works has drawn its materials from the episode of the movie and real life which is so familiar to people that is easily ignored. Under artist’s unique perspective, they are cut out and recombined. Xiao Jiang takes the inspiration from the reality but structures an absolute fantasy world, leading the audience to dislocated visionary feelings.

Most of Ye Lingan’s works are derived from his animation creation, which carry strong symbol features and the fragmentation of the sense of time and space. Perfect Part series of paintings is the continuation of the animation Rotation and Chrysler－2013. Ye drew a lot of seemingly obscure of columns or other objects with the purpose to reveal the intangible influence and intervention of daily objects on us and our dilemma and desperation. However, memory has preserved their shape, which is superimposed or “anamorphic” in a vague state.

This series, Onodera’s first printed work, was produced in China by eight craftsmen and employs thirty-eight separate large-format silk screens. Onodera has said that her interest in prints was triggered by consideration of what might lie in the future of photographic printing, in the post gelatin silver print era. In an annular eclipse, the light of the sun seems to shine from behind the moon, making us aware of the middle ground between the visible and invisible. By using such festive elements as fireworks, neon, and confetti, the human and animal pairs in motion present a very different appearance from the still silhouettes of “Transvest”. The wildly twisted postures of the figures is also a metaphor for the relationship of human beings to their environment.

As humans we often imagine ourselves doing grand things as “masters of the universe”, but what if we were rooted to one spot or eternity. Why not take a vacation from our role as omnipotent beings and become an inert object, try on a different skin, to understand what it is like to be something other than human?

Sitting in this vibrating structure, we might begin to imagine, what does it feel like for other organisms to live in the era of the “Anthropocene”—watching mutely as human-powered capitalism slowly unravels the intricate, sophisticated systems of nature, which are a product of millions of years of evolution.

The collective, Shinseungback Kimyonghun, has long been interested in these boundaries and definitions of “humanness” as seen through their many experiments with AI and facial recognition software. For instance, “Cat or Human” explores the failure of AI to accurately sort human and cat faces—to computers cats and humans are often indistinguishable. Another work “Animal Classifier”, creates a whole new taxonomy for animal classification using categories such as “belonging to the emperor”, “embalmed”, “drawn with a very fine camel hair brush” and “having just broken the water pitcher”. Poking fun at the scientific method of classification (such as the Linnean Taxonomic Hierarchy steeped in a culture of man-made scientific rationalism), they present a series of LCD screens in bell jars displaying a variety of relevant specimen culled from a google image search—replacing the learned scientist with image recognition software.

In a sense, we can look at their practice as a character sketch of a computer. How do computers analyze visual data —”FADTCHA”. What kind of alternate languages do they use—The God’s Script. How can we can we avoid communicating with them—CAPTCHA TWEET. And will they become our enemies—Aposematic Jacket. Whether we like it or not, our lives are as intertwined with machines as they are with nature and the animal kingdom and as these boundaries blur we start to wonder how do we even define our species—do we lean more towards animal or machine?

As Elizabeth Oriel so eloquently writes in her essay “Whom Would Animals Designate as “Persons”:

“Are humans mechanistic and should these qualities of supreme intelligence, reliability, and controllability become the hallmark of our humanity, the features we are most proud of? Or are the connections to our ancestors and roots, our honoring of these relationships and our dependence on all of the earth’s systems be our defining attribute, what we honor most?”

(Oriel, Elizabeth, “Whom Would Animals Designate as “Persons”? On Avoiding Anthropocentrism and Including Others”, Journal of Evolution and Technology, Vol. 24 Issue 3 Sept 2014, p 44.)

There is a debate occurring on different strands of the spectrum of posthumism; the first occurs in the field of animal studies—“anthropo-insistence”—that animals should be classified as human. There have of course been many cases to grant personhood to apes, using the definitions of cognizance, empathy and so on but also to “living systems” such as the Whanganui River in New Zealand which was recently recognized as an integrated living whole and was appointed two official guardians: one from the “iwi” indigenous people and one from the New Zealand government.

At the same time, the European Parliament is currently drafting laws to ensure the personhood of robots, in the legal sense that corporations are also considered “persons”, which represents the other side of the debate.

So what does it really mean to be human? Sentience, consciousness, emotions? Many animals have been shown to experience these things. Perhaps then, it is logic and objectivity, but then we find ourselves in the same camp as machines and robots. We have traditionally defined our humanness through our dominance over other species, (i.e. we are smarter than they are), but what happens when we are outpaced by robots—a superior species far more intelligent, capable and logical that doesn’t experience cell death and heart disease not to mention mental illness and grief? What happens when the masters are dethroned; now with no purpose, nothing to do all day but sit and watch the waves wash up upon the shore.

2017.3.31—2017.4.28

10:30am-6:30pm M-F

Opening and Artist Talk: March 31, 2017, 7-9:00pm

Department for Culture and Education of the German Consulate General in Shanghai

Curated by Rebecca Catching

Have you ever imagined what it would like to be something other than human—a hawk gliding through the air or a monkey swinging from a tree? What about reincarnating yourself as a stone? It’s probably not top of your list of shape-shifting choices, but wouldn’t it be interesting nonetheless? Ever since Paleolithic man grasped his first piece of flint, mankind has been on a constant quest to extend his abilities, sharpen his senses—to stretch and enlarge his realms of perception. In their project “Stone” Korean artists Shin Seung Back and Kim Yong Hun examine this persistent human interest in “self-improvement” through technological prostheses—applying this theory of “perception extension” to something as inert as a volcanic rock.

The two artists made a voyage to the island of Ulleungdo, selected a rock and rigged it up with a series of sensors which measured the shock and vibration of the waves as they crashed repeatedly into the rock.

In their exhibition at the Department for Culture and Education of the German Consulate General in Shanghai, they have re-created this experience building a structure with solenoids which viewers can sit inside to experience the relentless pounding of the sea.

As humans we often imagine ourselves doing grand things as so-called “masters of the universe”, but what if we were rooted to one spot or eternity. Why not take a vacation from our role as “omnipotent beings” and become an inert object, try on a different skin, to understand what it is like to be something other than human?

Sitting in this vibrating structure, we might begin to imagine, what does it feel like for other organisms to live in the era of the “Anthropocene”—watching mutely as human-powered capitalism slowly unravels the intricate, sophisticated systems of nature, which are a product of millions of years of evolution.

Shinseungback Kimyonghun (SSBKYH) has long been interested in these boundaries and definitions of “humanness” as seen through their many experiments with AI and facial recognition software. For instance, “Cat or Human” explores the failure of AI to accurately sort human and cat faces—to computers cats and humans are often indistinguishable. Another work “Animal Classifier”, creates a whole new taxonomy for animal classification using categories such as “belonging to the emperor”, “embalmed”, “drawn with a very fine camel hair brush” and “having just broken the water pitcher”. Poking fun at the scientific method of classification (such as the Linnean Taxonomic Hierarchy steeped in a culture of man-made scientific rationalism), they present a series of LCD screens in bell jars displaying a variety of relevant specimen culled from a google image search—replacing the learned scientist with image recognition software.

“Animal Classifier”, 2016, TensorFlow, Inception-v3, online images, 14 Raspberry PIs, 14 engraved metal plates, 14 glass domes and 14 monitors.

In a sense we can look at their practice as a character sketch of a computer. How do computers analyze visual data? “FADTCHA” http://ssbkyh.com/works/fadtcha/

What kind of alternate languages do they use (The God’s Script) http://ssbkyh.com/works/the_gods_script/How can we can we avoid communicating with them “Captcha Tweet” a http://ssbkyh.com/works/captcha_tweet/And will they become our enemies with “Aposematic Jacket” http://ssbkyh.com/works/aposematic_jacket/“CAPTCHA Tweet”, 2013, Web Application(www.captchatweet.com).

Whether we like it or not, our lives are as intertwined with machines as they are with nature and the animal kingdom and as these boundaries blur we start to wonder how do we even define our species—do we lean more towards animal or machine?

As Elizabeth Oriel so eloquently writes in her essay “Whom Would Animals Designate as “Persons”:

“Are humans mechanistic and should these qualities of supreme intelligence, reliability and controllability become the hallmark of our humanity, the features we are most proud of? Or are the connections to our ancestors and roots, our honoring of these relationships and our dependence on all of the earth’s systems be our defining attribute, what we honor most?”^[1]

There is a debate occurring on different strands of the spectrum of posthumism; the first occurs in the field of animal studies—“anthropo-insistence”—that animals should be classified as human. There have of course been many cases to grant personhood to apes, using the definitions of cognizance, empathy and so on but also to “living systems” such as the Whanganui River in New Zealand which was recently recognized as an integrated living whole https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/16/new-zealand-river-granted-same-legal-rights-as-human-being and was appointed two official guardians one from the iwi indigenous people and one from the New Zealand government.

At the same time there the European Parliament is currently drafting laws to ensure the personhood of robots, in the legal sense that corporations are also considered “persons”.

So what does it really mean to be human?  Sentience, consciousness, emotions? Many animals have been shown to experience these things. Perhaps then, it is logic and objectivity, but then we find ourselves in the same camp as machines and robots. We have traditionally defined our humanness through our dominance over other species, (i.e. we are smarter than they are), but what happens when we are outpaced by robots—a superior species far more intelligent, capable and logical that doesn’t experience cell death and heart disease not to mention mental illness and grief? What happens when the masters are dethroned; now with no purpose, nothing to do all day but sit and watch the waves wash up upon the shore.

About the Artists

Shinseungback Kimyonghun is a Seoul based artistic duo consisting of Shin Seung Back and Kim Yong Hun. Their collaborative practice explores technology’s impact on humanity. Shin Seung Back studied Computer Science in Yonsei University and Kim Yong Hun completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts at the Sydney College of the Arts. They met while studying at the Graduate School of Culture Technology in KAIST and after completing Masters in Science and Engineering, they started to work as Shinseungback Kimyonghun in 2012. Their work has been presented extensively, including the Ars Electronica Festival, Vienna Biennale, the ZKM and MMCA Korea. http://ssbkyh.com/

Rebecca Catching

Rebecca Catching is the Executive Director of the contemporary art platform Assembly Line Project and co-founder of the online Chinese art magazine Ran Dian. During the past 15 years in China, she has worked as a magazine editor, art critic, gallery director and museum curator. Rebecca’s research and curatorial interests include the continuing dialogue between Buddhist/Daoist thought and contemporary Chinese art (“Learning from the Literati” series), the field of social practice as (Assembly Line Project Studio) and the topic of posthumanism in the context of East Asian new media art practice (“Foreign Bodies”).

Stone

SHINSEUNGBACK KIMYONGHUN

Part of the Project: “Foreign Bodies: Human Identity in a Posthuman World”

2017.3.31—2017.4.28

10:30am-6:30pm M-F

Opening and Artist Talk: March 31, 2017, 7-9:00pm

Department of Culture and Education of the German Consulate General in Shanghai

Curated by Rebecca Catching

Room 101 Cross Tower, 318 Fuzhou Lu, near Shandong Zhong Lu, Huangpu, Shanghai

Organised by: Department for Culture and Education of the German Consulate General in Shanghai

Special Thanks:

Assembly Line Project Studio

New Media Production Partner: Shanghai Helu Cultural Communications Co Ltd.

As the by-product of international expositions, the biennial/triennial/multi-ennial model not only shapes the development of modern and contemporary art history, it is also intimately tied to the course of modernity: through visual presentation to the construction of discourse(s), it writes its own history. As that history is being written, we also know that many invisible others are excluded, constituting one of the key reasons driving the transnational launch of decolonization projects since the rise of post-colonialism. Against this backdrop, archives—inseparable from history and identification—play a crucial role. Since the post-war period, the excavation, interpretation, and classification of archives has thus precipitated waves of “transitional justice” movements everywhere. As the extensive self-evaluation—both active and passive—that governments are launching from within systems (of the body-politic), transitional justice, or, simply put, overdue justice, aims to investigate perpetrations resulting from the upholding of past regimes in the excavation of historical truths. Due to its international orientation and complex history, not only is Taiwan in the process of decolonization, it is also one of the best sites for examining the relationship between postcolonial theory and international contexts. In a place where almost all cultural activity is dependent upon official subsidies and where public museums are dominated by strong cultural leadership, critical reflections on official cultural systems have become an urgent topic.

Therefore, this year’s Taipei Biennale, entitled “Gestures and Archives of the Present, Genealogies of the Future”, gestures at a long-anticipated and forceful attack on the archival canon. The curator seems to stand by the framework of modernist aesthetics, however; there seems to be no need to mention the emblem of the “fortress of art” (yishu baolei) inherent in its site of enactment (for military metaphors that refer to the museum as fortress, please see Boris Groys’ The Politics of Equal Aesthetic Rights, or my own essay “The Ghost of History—On the Usage of Archives in Contemporary Curatorial Morphology”). Furthermore, as I have prefaced, if one were to have any understanding of past Taipei Biennials and the Taiwan Pavilion in Venice, both of which have been overseen by Taipei Fine Arts Museum, one will easily find that a complex political background and awareness of identification both directly shape the varying presentations of these exhibitions. The Taipei Biennial also reflects TFAM’s bureaucratic authority, vacillating between national subjectivity and the capital’s cultural leadership. This background needs first and foremost to be taken into account.

劳伦斯·阿布·汉丹，《橡皮涂层钢》，高画质录像，彩色、有声，片长19分，2016
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, “Rubber Coated Steel”, HD video, color, sound，19 min, 2016

劳伦斯·阿布·汉丹，《橡皮涂层钢》，高画质录像，彩色、有声，片长19分，2016
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, “Rubber Coated Steel”, HD video, color, sound，19 min, 2016

II.

Yet, what should a biennial look like? Nobody can answer this, because a biennale should not look like anything to begin with. In my view, the Taipei Biennial has always anxiously sought the so-called “international”, or vice versa; the organizers seem to think it appropriate to draw on the latest trends from international biennials in order to catch up with mainstream discourses in Western countries. As a result, “Animism” in 2012, “Anthropocene and Acceleration” in 2014, and “Archive Performing” in 2016 all attempted to introduce or respond to topics deemed important at the present moment. From this point of view, TFAM has played the role of the museum well as an educational hub that promotes connections with the local. In 2016, the curator Corinne Diserens brought many important artists from Europe, including ideological trends and movements since the emergence of avant-garde art, such as the Situationist International and the Communist International, encompassing the historical span of a century. Perhaps due to actual working conditions and a lack of familiarity with the culture of Taiwan and nearby East Asian countries, she did not touch too much upon “incorrect” events, if at all; most of her samples focus instead on constructing an imagination of Taiwan through a network of connections centered on authority. From an etymological standpoint, granted its numerous definitions, and the extensive research required for its Chinese translation, “archive” more or less means “the documentation of specific events” and is tied to modes of administrative control for which the keywords are “public records” and “beginning”. Thus, so-called incorrect events often satirically alter the original meaning of the archive (the real appearance of its “publicness” and “beginning”): the public would be covered up, the documentation tampered with, and the origin either effaced or fictionalized—which is why we need transitional justice. As such, the archive not only reflects but on some level also determines the specific image of history. More importantly, due to the fact that the archive often affects regional politics, it is limited to the region. Looking broadly at this biennial though documents and archives, history seems to have vanished into thin air amid the imaginary connections forged between the international and the local. Hence the foreign curator, deeply restricted by language barriers, is unfortunate—but it’s not her fault. Though on several occasions Diserens has admitted her lack of knowledge about Taiwan, she firmly believes that the works she chose, which unfold around current international situations, and artists’ relationships with modernism (she thinks  we have never escaped from modernity), as well as the accumulated legacies refracted by modernism, could all constitute the universal foundation for current discourse.

陈界仁，《风入松》，单频道录像，蓝光光盘、黑白、有声，片长23分17秒，2015
Chen Chieh-jen, “Wind Songs”, single channel video installation, blue-ray disc, b/w, sound in selected portions, 23 min 17 sec, 2015

洪子健，《尼采转世为一位中国女性与他们共享的生命》，多媒体表演艺术（影像撷图），2016
James T. Hong, “Nietzsche Reincarnated as a Chinese Woman and Their Shared Lives”, multimedia, still image, 2016

If the Taipei Biennial orients itself far beyond Taiwan itself and focuses on east Asia and southeast Asia, then perhaps the majority of the works in the exhibition that follow the trajectory of Western art (paying homage to grand masters) are sufficient for us to rearrange the genealogy of archives, documents, and relevant ideologies in the course of modern and contemporary art history (though this still constitutes modernism). Yet the more challenging question remains: how to understand Asia’s post-colonial condition? On the one hand, the curator’s nationality does not explain much. But if we were to show the construction of the archive and the organization of genealogies, the barrier between language, culture, and regions should be brought to light. On the other hand, in terms of her curatorial gesture, it is clear that Diserens prefers non-topical exhibitions (in fact, topical modes of exhibiting have been making a come-back in international biennials of recent years—this is another topic worth discussing). Instead of providing a clear framework and definition, she turned to performance, film, and interactive symposiums to mold the field of vision. She has also incorporated locally initiated research proposals—such as Tainan China Town, a research plan led by Yi-Hsin Lai and others, Soundscape Taiwan, a project developed for many years by Hueihua Cheng and Lo Jeph, as well as field research conducted by Gong Jow-Jiun on folklore in photography—as a way to breach archives outside her field of vision. Though she does not resist the bureaucratic gags put in place by collaborating with institutions, believing that almost nothing in contemporary life could escape this category, perhaps it would be better to think about the possibilities found within the system. But in terms of the exhibition itself, it surprisingly fails to touch upon controversial archives about the national and the local, or abandon the perspective of a politics of aesthetics. Instead, she focuses on “artistic” gestures (in her words), anti-modern projects that question, deconstruct, and divert the “paradigm”. But in this fashion, even the fiercely powerful works of Chen Chieh-Jen have somehow lost their force.

朴赞景，《公民森林》，三频道录像，黑白、有声，片长27分钟，2016（Art Sonje Center与2016台北双年展提供）
Park Chan-Kyong, “Citizen’s Forest”, three-channel video, b+w, directional sound, 27 min, 2016 (Courtesy of Art Sonje Center and the Taipei Biennial 2016)

III.

Although due to various limitations, the curator was not able to pay too much attention to works that deal with Taiwan’s cultural-historical circumstance, Diserens did draw a constructive imaginary route for the “archive”—this is worth further discussion. This constructiveness can be seen in the subheading given by Diserens: “Performing the architecture”, which attempts to create more room for imagination within the symbolic structure of culture and power in order to transfer two-dimensional (if not crumbling) file cabinets and documents piled in the deployment of time to the three-dimensional structure of everyday living space. In If There’s Been A Way to Build It, There’ll Be A Way to Destroy It, the renowned literary critic Ian Hunt makes a metaphorical bridge between archive and architecture, using London’s urban renewal as an example (and the accompanying evaporation of cultural landscapes) in order to connect with the artist Paul Buck’s autobiographical publications in the search for spatial allegories that we depend so much upon in the process of “self-archiving”. A Public Intimacy (A Life Through Scrapbook), Paul Buck’s classic work, tries to present his autobiography and life retrospective to readers through the method of montage—an unedited and uncompleted creative plan—so that the reader could see how “process” reveals the author’s personal life. All this is as important as the identity of the author/artist, for whom the plans constitute the “result”—in terms of the particularities of the autobiographical form (the “authentic”). Just like the process of gentrification in urban metropolises, “beautiful results” always conceal and destroy precious processes (namely, the traces of history). And if the construction of archives also requires “correctness”, just as autobiographical forms habitually do (for this reason, archives could not be separated from photographic techniques for a long time), then all the landscapes we find in daily life can only be dazzling appearances—all beautiful houses and public construction.

安洁拉．费瑞拉，《倾向遗忘》，多媒体影像装置，雕塑：密集板，松木条、铁，液晶显示器；460×565×415公分，七幅照片：喷墨输出；70×100公分，录像：16：9，彩色，有声；15分钟循环播放，片长19分15秒，2015
Ângela Ferreira, “A Tendency to Forget”, multi-media installation, sculpture (MDF, pine beams, iron), LCD; 460×565×415cm, 7 photos: inkjet print; 70×100cm, video:16:9, color, sound, 19 min 15 sec loop, 2015

安洁拉．费瑞拉，《倾向遗忘》，多媒体影像装置，雕塑：密集板，松木条、铁，液晶显示器；460×565×415公分，七幅照片：喷墨输出；70×100公分，录像：16：9，彩色，有声；15分钟循环播放，片长19分15秒，2015
Ângela Ferreira, “A Tendency to Forget”, multi-media installation, sculpture (MDF, pine beams, iron), LCD; 460×565×415cm, 7 photos: inkjet print; 70×100cm, video:16:9, color, sound, 19 min 15 sec loop, 2015

In the debate over construction and demolition, what is sacrificed is argued for in the name of people’s memories which, just as in the process in which national archives are established: “to construct (archives), is to make people forget.” Ian proceeds to quote “memory palaces”, as a way to explore the relationship between systems of memory and architecture. Memory Palaces are architectural metaphors denoting the visualization of memory systems, in which all the memory (archive) placed in each room could be easily found and played back during each recollection of memory. However, the above-all premise is that there be a place dedicated to “being located”. In terms of etymology, the word “locate” originates from “locus”, which connotes trajectory, site, and control; having definitions in mathematical trajectory and segmentation, trajectory is also profoundly linked to topology, later used in the discussion of spatial positioning on a cultural and mental level. Interestingly, just like all the architecture and streets we are accustomed to seeing every day, it is often difficult to be aware of this constant process of “being located”: as every space for “being located” is continuously destroyed, we can only recognize rapidly changing “results”. This is the way in which modernity makes us forget, in making us accept the reality of life that it institutes (see Paul Connerton’s How Modernity Forgets). The reason Peter Friedl, one of the artists in the exhibition, restages notorious or ill-fated architectural works in the history of modernity and names it “Rehousing” is to extract them as micro-archives (at the same time as spectacles) from the original threads in which they were entangled so that they can be understood in an unfamiliar context. Furthermore, Angela Ferreira’s work “A Tendency to Forget” could also be read in this discursive rubric. In presenting classic examples from the archival documents of the famed anthropology couple Jorge and Margot Dias, the micro-laboratory created by the artwork attempts to overturn the colonialist angle hidden within, revealing the complex relations between knowledge and power within anthropology in the construction of modernity. These architectural spaces herein are no longer sufficient in enveloping people and thus making them hard to detect; conversely, in ensuring a line of vision that allows one to see comprehensively and at close range (try to imagine the posture of viewers who bend down and crane their neck), it overturns paradigms of modernity.

许家维，《神灵的书写》，双频道录像装置，片长9分45秒，制片人：Le Fresnoy，联合制片人：尊彩艺术中心”，2016
Chia-Wei Hsu, “Spirit-Writing”, two-channel video installation, 9 min 45 sec, Produced by Le Fresnoy, Co-producer: Liang Gallery, 2016

IV.

If the above two works highlighted the fate of archival construction and modernist architecture in mental space, “Collectivism”, the large-scale installation placed in the outdoor atrium on the first floor (by the artist duo Eric Chen and Rain Wu) reshaped the landscape of contemporary life in the embodied organic imagination. In contrasting the unbridled growth of botanical gardens with shields that signify the governing of nations, the work strengthened the satirical metaphor between “bodily defence and nurture”, responding at the same time to the previously mentioned viewpoint—“architecture is made for forgetting”. Therefore, the curator created numerous “temporary rooms” in the museum, placing these disruptive rooms within bureaucratic hierarchies (of architecture), hoping to provide audiences with the opportunity for radical thought, more so expecting to “unravel the structure of power”. Perhaps idealized, to me Corinne has overestimated Taiwanese audiences’ imagination of the world, mostly coming from historical and cultural conditions of different regions as well as the complex development of modern art history, forcing the viewer to become lost in a torrent of information. Paradoxically, this kind of imaginary flow is precisely what is needed at present so as to dismantle the unshakeable archives that result from the construction of modernity. Though tiny flaws do not negate the merit of the whole, the curator has deliberate created an empty exhibition narrative, complemented with almost all-encompassing archival samples, as though this biennial was the “search results” of having typed in “document/archive/history” in the browser. Perhaps it failed to show hidden genealogical cartographies (that is, if genealogy is indeed what the exhibition had in mind), and risks floating superficially on the surface. Lastly, I would like to ask: what about archives of the future? How is it to be performed? Looking around at contemporary informational life, highly developed algorithms and their product, big data, largely determine how we document the present as well as ways of looking at the world. The most conspicuous examples aside, businesses and entrepreneurs are able to figure out most people’s needs through big data analysis, insidiously inserting ads along every commercial route, thus generating “additional” needs, ultimately depositing the populace in a preprogrammed future. However, it is a pity that discussion of this new domain remains curiously missing from this year’s Taipei Biennial, which, aside from immersing visitors in a strong sense of nostalgia, reduced its power in shaking the foundations of aesthetic paradigms.

黄立慧，《快乐天堂》，大图输出：1190 ×250公分，计算机割字，硅胶，隔热纸，音乐：快乐天堂，30位观众现场参与，尺寸视场地而定，2016（图片来源：联合报系。台北市立动物园于1986/9/14举行大搬家游行，在警车的前导下，六十五只动物分乘廿辆专车，从圆山动物园出发，驶往牠们的新家木栅动物园，吸引了廿万以上热情、好奇的民众夹道围观）
Li-Hui Huang, “Happy Paradise”, large format transparency: 1190 ×250 cm,vinyl letters, silicone, mylar window tint film, soundtrack: Happy Paradise, 30 audience participation on site, dimensions variable, 2016

彼得·弗利德尔，《安置》，2012–2014
Peter Friedl, “Rehousing”, 2012–2014

叶伟立 & 叶世强，《铁锤，叶世强水湳洞旧居》，雷射感光相纸、水晶裱，木框，125 X 155 X 5公分，2016
Yeh Wei-Li & Yeh Shih-Chiang, “Hammer, YSC Shuinandong Residence”, lightjet print, acrylic face mount, reclaimed wood frame, 124x154x5 cm, 2016

尚路克·慕连，《「三8」烟斗》，cibachrome相纸、diasec装裱，47 × 36公分，1999–2000
Jean-Luc Moulene, “ ‘The three 8s’ pipe.”, cibachrome print, diasec mounted, 47 × 36 cm, 1999–2000

安利．萨拉，《漫漫哀伤》，超十六厘米影片转单频道录像，立体声，片长12分57秒，2005
Anri Sala, “Long Sorrow”, 2005

林珉旭，《假设的承诺_洞穴—手的重量》，单频道高画质录像，彩色、有声，片长13分50秒，2010（Platform L典藏）
Minouk Lim, “The Promise of If_Cave-The Weight of Hands”, HD single-channel video, color, sound, 13 min 50 sec, 2010 (Collection of Platform L)

纳思琳．塔巴塔拜 & 巴贝克．艾菲斯比，《吸入》，文字纸本、铝框、3D动画，2016
Nasrin Tabatabai & Babak Afrassiabi, “Inhale”, texts on paper, aluminum frames, 3D animations dimensions variable, 2016

曾伯豪 & 鬼讲堂，《鬼讲堂》，现场表演，90分钟，2015（全球首演，2016年11月25、26日，纪州庵文学森林）
Po-Hao Tseng & Lecture of Ghost, “Lecture of Ghost”, Performance, 90 min, 2015 (World primiere at Kishu An Forest of Literature on 25th and 26th November 2016)

高俊宏，《博爱》，单频道录像、重返现场艺术行动，片长50分钟，2016
Kao Jun-Honn, “Bo-Ai”, single-channel video, art activism/ returning to the site, 50 min, 2016

亚历山大．席罗，《一篇＿自传》，16:9动画，黑白、无声，片长9分19秒，循环播放，2016
Alexander Schellow, “A_biography”, animation: 16:9, b/w, silent, 9 min 19 sec, loop, 2016

任兴淳，《北汉山 / 北汉江》，双频道录像，彩色、有声，片长26分33秒，2015/2016（版权为艺术家和台北双年展所有）
Im Heung-soon, “Bukhansan/ Bukhangang”, two-channel video, 26 min 33 sec, 2015/ 2016 (Courtesy of the artist and the Taipei Biennial 2016)