Totemic geometric structures. Eldritch sounds. Shifting moods. Stepping into this exhibition at Berlin’s Esther Schipper Gallery initially feels like skipping a dimension or two and arriving in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But whereas Kubrick’s black monolith challenges the viewer’s scrutiny, Bulloch’s twisting, colorful stacks invite the mind to play.

I gravitate towards a far corner, beside five stacked modules, centered before a wall of LED lights flickering on and off. How natural, how easy it is, for the eye to see in the place of algorithmic automations and calculated angles, the towering figure of a feminine deity, lit by a sky of stars.

Animal Mineral Vegetable is Angela Bulloch’s 13th exhibition with Esther Schipper, and features Bulloch’s newest iteration of her signature ‘Stack’ sculptures and ‘Night Sky’ installations, with the addition of a wall painting and digital animation.

Angela Bulloch (photo (c) Andrea Rossetti 2021)

The sculptures, Pentagon Totems — composed of ‘modules’: dodecahedrons in block color, mostly stacked but sometimes singular — mark points on the exhibition floor that wind a path between, choreographed to a 15-minute light and sound display, including a six minute video projected onto the back wall.

‘I started with the model of the space’, Angela says via video-call, ‘I’m interested in measuring the world with myself —comparing space to the body. The room is an industrial type of space, not a domestic one, and it’s also really quite large,so I’ve done certain architectural interventions.’

The room Angela calls me from seems to be a chintzy London hotel, a world away from the spatial aesthetic here in Berlin, where Bulloch has lived since 1999.

‘For example, I have inserted freestanding night-sky pillars, and hidden a doorway and two pillars in this space inside much bigger ones. In the show, there are both acts of erasure and architectural gestures.’

Perhaps the show’s most obvious architectural gesture is the huge geometric wall painting, which spans across one wall and a corner. Tightly overlapping shapes — as if made by a spirograph ruler — stretch on either side like the nucleus of the big bang or as if the shapes splay out at increasing, or decreasing, speeds. Space and time bend in Bulloch’s virtual reality, and on the video projected onto the parallel wall, the universe grinds to a halt, at warp speed.

‘I wanted to make a very dramatic architectural scale wall painting, so that when it would appear in the video, you would get a reference of the size of it and the position of it, so that it locates you in the room’.

The video feels familiar; COVID-19 popularized the use of uncanny virtual exhibition software. This too is a digital mimesis of the ‘real experience’, only, with the addition of a rotating polyhedron with a face on it, a mottled cat and one other unexpectedly charming character.

‘The melancholy cauliflower is made from a cast of a cauliflower and a pipe, and it’s actually a reference within my own oeuvre. I made the original ones in the 80s when I was still a student, then in 2017, I made a revisited edition. So this reference to earlier work is like a step back in time’. 

Watching the video for the first time, I latched onto this floating cauliflower like an irreverent talisman: an assurance that lurking at the heart of this mathematical and calculated exhibition, was a kind of approachable playfulness.

‘I’m working a lot with sound, light, geometric or abstract shapes, the universe, different images of somewhere very far away, and these topics, those different elements of my language, are kind of alienating, cool and detached. I wanted to add a human element or something that was, you know, a bit quirkier, that people can identify with within the film. I kind of like to think of it as a friend of mine.’ 

I have already noted a precision to Angela’s speech; a restrained use of adjectives; a sparse use of metaphor. Angela describes herself as ‘visually organized’, but there is a linguistic neatness too. Talking about this old friend, something softens.

‘The reason why it’s called “melancholy flower” is because its color is melon yellow and it’s a cauliflower — a linguistic slippage.’

The cauliflower is also exceptional in the exhibition for its organic, nebulous shape. I ask Angela to explain her attraction towards geometric shapes.

‘I’ve chosen a five-sided form in all of the pieces in all of the standing sculptures, except for one and that one’s called ‘Twisted Sister’. There’s a series of rhombus modules and I rearranged the order of them, and in that ‘Twisted Sister’ one, I turned one or two of them upside down. But you’d need to know the other works, to be able to realize that. So, it’s kind of like a piece of twisted language that you could only notice if you remember how they look, as there’s only one of them in the show.’

I run my mind’s eye over the edges of each stack, counting, trying to recall ‘Twisted Sister’ and crack the geometric puzzle Angela has set. Walking about a room with totems and stars, I had expected to be told to suspend intellect and analysis, but the more I talk to Angela the more I feel like the show is an exercise in critical thinking, both for the artist, and the viewer.

‘I’ve mainly worked with rhombus shapes, and I wanted to fill the gap differently. There was a part of my brain that wanted to see a different shape. You know, it was really like a fulfillment, a wish.’

She continues, ‘also, you know, the sculptures there, some of them are made with regular pentagon shapes, and some are much more irregular. And the way it looks as you walk around changes because of the way they’re put together — those sculptures look very different from different angles. So the sculptures are really a kind of provocation to walk around and look at them.’

The light display that Angela has designed enhances this phenomena, as shadows scatter over one face to another.

‘It’s a feast for the mind because their appearance changes, so you’re constantly doing adjustments with your eyes. Your eyes are trying to find the similarities, the differences, the irregularities. It’s like scratching an itchy place in the mind.’ 

Angela’s comment about the ‘itchy place in the mind’ jogs my memory of what the exhibition reminds me of. ‘Sensory rooms’, often filled with sound-scapes and calming coloured light displays, are often used to help those with learning difficulties or sensory impairments engage with stimuli and regulate their sensory processing. Animal vegetable mineral is also a kind of therapeutic space; a provocation to slow down and to concentrate — a valuable practice, when technology is eroding our attention-spans.

This concept of sensory play is not only the product of the show, but a fundamental component of the process of making it. In the video, besides the floating polyhedron and cauliflower, is a small, sparkling dark object. Angela speaks animatedly about the process behind creating it:

‘In the summer, I was invited to a glassworks. I put a very hot piece of glass flat on the metal table and then made a kind of dent in it with the end of a metal thing, and I put a small piece of a peanut onto that very hot glass and then put another big blob of hot molten glass on top.’ 

Strange, is this a traditional method?

‘No, it was a very experimental thing to do. I tried it with popcorn, potato, peanuts, different things’

The result?

‘The oil in the peanut burns, blackening the glass with a strange, rainbow, gray anthracite texture, that’s shot through with rainbow-like newton’s rings.’ 

I imagine Angela like a scientist in a laboratory, hyper focused and exacting. Watching the video, with its uncanny animation style, I had no idea the objects were born from real life, or from such a traditional art practice like glass-blowing.

Reading about Angela before the interview, I came across one image that surprised me. During 2010’s Art Basel, Esther Schipper suspended one Night Sky above the altar of a cathedral, the Basel Münster. It’s odd to see a panel of white, electric lights in such a traditional and sacred space, but then, isn’t the Romanesque and Gothic architecture, the stained glass, achieving what the installation does; the human approximation of the divine, the heavenly?

‘I also chose to make one in the rotunda ceiling of the Frank Lloyd Wright building in the Guggenheim. I was invited for an exhibition and I chose to do it in that “church”. It was a many-sided form, and I also I added some frameworks and some kind of architecture to the Ceiling Rotunda so that it was more justified and made parallels to the Parthenon.’

Situated in temples, these installations gesture towards a heightened consciousness. The Night Sky series are an example of technology simulating a reality beyond our reach — a view of the constellations we could literally never see from earth. As corporations like Facebook thrive off toxicity and polarization, it is easy to forget that the creation of the world wide web was in part catalyzed by LSD trips into the ‘expanded consciousness’. These control-panels of constellations seem to me like a reminder of what ‘virtual reality’ can be at its best, what it was hoped to be in the 1960s: not something invasive and homogenizing, but expansive and elevating.

What’s next for Angela Bulloch?

‘Well, there’s this show with Esther Schipper, and one in London with the Simon Lee Gallery and a third show which will be in the museum in Nantes in France. These three shows have a selection of sculptures, wall paintings and a film, so they are all linked by their method of making. But they are also quite different: the museum space is a grand, large atrium which will host the biggest night sky that I’ve made so far. That one will be opening in May, and I will be creating another film about navigating through that exhibition. So really, these are a trilogy of exhibitions’ 

I thank Angela for her time, and before I go, pass round the exhibition space a final time. Christina, from Esther Schipper, joins me. ‘Which one is your favorite’, she asks. Looking at the stacks, with their unique irregularities and color combinations, I find myself searching for personalities to project. As Angela mentioned, when you have a room full of standing sculptures, people very easily anthropomorphize them.

I think about what Angela said, right at the beginning of our interview, ‘there’s a kind of edge where something is related to a human or something is not related to the human, and there’s somewhere in between those two different poles, there’s a kind of line. And I’m very interested in either side of that line.’

The room is full of edges and lines, with divergent answers hinged on either side. Am I dealing with something mystic and celestial, or analytic and mathematical? Should I be responding emotionally, or analytically to the room? And are they even edges at all? Or are they angular curves of a woman’s figure? Light falls on different answers at different times.

Animal Vegetable Mineral plays with this line, this glitch between perception and recognition, where meaning gestates and slippages form. It asks the entrant to look, and to look again and twist the room in your mind’s eye like a Rubik’s cube but without solution.

* Images courtesy Angela Bulloch and Esther Schipper. Portrait of Angela Bulloch by Andrea Rossetti. Melancholyflower by Eberle & Eisfeld.

See+ Gallery, Beijing, China

December 05, 2015–January 30, 2016

Organizer: Hua’er, Director of See+ Gallery

Moderator: Antonie Angerer

Translator (Chinese): Zwei Fan

Date: December 04, 2015

Q (aka Kyoo Lee, hereafter Q): Thanks, everybody, for being here. Special thanks to Hua’er for organizing this event, Antonie and Zwei for moderating and translating, and Gabriela for creating this beautiful work so that we can all come here talk photography and philosophy! We will have a general conversation first and then open the space up for you all to participate later.

When I first saw Vanishing Deconstructions, I asked Hua’er: “How did you get to meet Gabriela, how did this encounter happen?” Hua’er told me this micro-story of their first meeting—she walked into a photo exhibition in Paris, saw this wonderful work, and spoke with the artist, who ended up saying, “we don’t need words because images connect us.” Indeed, images somehow travel in such a way that we become connected by what we see before or without what we say.

In this show, we encounter so many images. In particular, what we encounter photographically is not only intersubjective in itself but perhaps the inter-subjective itself, as in an inter-view. A communication happens in such an interim space, between the viewers, that is, through this work: now then, how? I will ask this first question, against that background.

As the title of our conversation today indicates, we begin by reflecting on the philosophical and poetic aspect of photography, a kind of philophotopoetics, on a photograph that makes itself or herself: what does this photographic scene see and show? Gabriela, as a photographer, you take or create a photographic image, you create something you saw or something you see, and you make the work show that seeing. How is this act of photographic seeing different from the usual seeing? What is a photographic vision?

Gabriela (Morawetz, hereafter G): That is a great question. I think that the first important thing for me is to get pictures which are not perfect because in that case there is a new field, an open space. I don’t consider myself a photographer in the usual way photographers define themselves but it’s important to note that indeed my point of departure is photography. While I am working with my camera, my negatives, and my chemicals in my darkroom in a very usual way, the approach is still paradoxical because I would like to get out of this photographic kitchen, to cross its boundaries. For me, the point is how to see what I want to see.

We can also start from that paradoxical affirmation of the moment we see (something) we don’t see. This is because we mostly see what we know already but we don’t understand it even when we can see it. My approach would be like to get close to some kind of feelings or thoughts, and following the path like it is Ariadne’s thread. So the question, the challenge, is how to get this thread to get to the place you want to get in. I always try to do this by observing elements from nature, the sphere of being, along with material particularities there.

Q: A great way in. Now then, we have this cliché, our usual metaphor, almost dead, that a photograph “captures a moment.” This phrase is very intentional—almost like animal hunting—and it’s a fairly universal concept, or at least universalized. What Gabriela is saying is countering that notion of intentional framing, right? Intentional in the sense of getting at what you want to see or have already seen in the form of knowing. The point Gabriela is highlighting is rather to let the images appear in such a way that we will be able to see what is left to see instead of what we intend to see. Such elements of contexts and accidents, those otherwise invisible or visible, become very important, “elementarily” significant.

I like to link this counterpoint on “envisioning the invisible” to the very concept of the “photographic.” Photographia or photography, in its Latinic sense, is light-inscribed, something via or with light. Photo-graphy uses light to have or keep an image appear … almost like the command “let there be light.” Just a while ago, Zwei and chatted about the Chinese notion of photography, which is more like “shadow-tracing (摄影shè-yǐng, trace-shadow).” These two aspects complement each other—light and shadow. Curiously, we use different faculties to approach the same thing: the “photo-graphia” looks at the light while “shadow-tracing” turns to the shadow.

Now, to turn to the very idea of inscription or re-presentation too: there is a subtle yet significant difference between representation and re-presentation, about which Vanishing Deconstructions says a lot. If you think about all the tracks, like animal tracks and things left behind, the artistic animals like us—many in this room—also tend to track them again.

So here is my second question. One of the things that captured my imagination and attention in the first place was the very title of the show, Vanishing Deconstructions. As a scholar of contemporary French philosophy where the word “deconstruction” is one of the key terms, I have my own sense of what de-construction usually means or has come to mean in more “academic” senses. In this context of a photographic gallery aptly named “See+,” some other lively meanings of “deconstruction” do appear too, and yet, to remind ourselves, it is about and performing Vanishing deconstructions. So now, it’s your turn, Gabriela, to explain what it could mean.

G: I understand your question on the dichotomy between vanishing and deconstruction. When we use the concept of deconstruction we should be conscious of Derrida’s theory. But what I want to explore is just more of the idea of vanishing, disappearing. I use no words, but instead images. To make images, there is a combination of elements, some well-known objects, sometimes human bodies or nature. They compose an environment which eventually can be interpreted by each of us in a different way. That construction of the world, which is individual, is vanishing through the perception from each one of us. When I do “deconstruction” I am trying to construct my own system of understanding.

“Deconstruction” sounds a bit like “destroying,” but also like constructing something else through the elements of what was “destroyed.” In that flurry of words, there are many meanings of “deconstruction.”

From my point of view, that title is based on the construction of something like spaces which would contain a possibility of metaphor—something that complements. I start with a very minimal material, almost nothing. If you put only one point in an empty space, it is something very important. If you contextualize it through other elements, some kind of narration emerges.

Framed images in my work look very rational because of the geometrical forms, but, at the same time, they are absolutely intuitive and the inner structure is reflected outward.

Q: Again, your description vividly points to this paradox you talked about: the ability of the photographic surface to indexicalize this co-existence of moment and movement. The moment becoming movement and vice versa—such a layered imposition and exposition, each time, becomes Gabriela’s signature “move” or “moment.” Each time, we see what we might call a kinetic photograph, always moving. Something is becoming almost nothing and nothing is becoming something. We have a fairly clear and distinct, semi-Cartesian “rational” moment of focus, and then it goes out of focus at the same time. Such a layered vision in and of space and time is also richly explored in the 20^th century contemporary French philosophy, phenomenology in particular, where this dialectic crossing of the visible and the invisible—I am also thinking of the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in particular—produces a constant and productive tension.

And before we invite questions and comments from the audience on what is “photographic seeing” or work, I want to ask you, Gabriela, if you could talk a little about how you would contextualize this exhibition in relation to your works in the past and something you will do in the future. Where do you think you are with your work, the one we see in the gallery today?

So my question is about the philopoetic “spatiotemporality” of your work, your meta-and or intra-photographic focus, so to speak. Martin Heidegger says that everybody has one thought they try to figure out all their life, just like one body, one body of thought. What is that one thought you have, if there is one, any “one”? That one, of course, doesn’t have to be strictly “one,” which has many meanings, itself richly layered and resonant. So what I mean by “one,” especially in your case, would be something like Adriane’s thread of yours we talked earlier: where is that thread, where does it come from, where does it leave, what is its trajectory?

G: I am searching for the way to get into the very inner space which we cannot describe just with words. It is about a desire to enrich the essence of what is impossible to get. The concept of Das Ding is probably something to define and be defined constantly.

Let’s say that I am interested in the mental sphere and in the energy of the unknown.

Q: What or where could be that core that keeps unfolding?

G: I think the creative process is like a destiny. You must continue and search for all kinds of possibilities but it is not a linear process. Once you get into the work, the material character of the things will suggest other dimensions and it is important to be sensitive to those signs. It is like trying to listen to some shimmering voices.

Q: This is a perfect moment to let some other waves to intervene.

P1 (a person, an unidentified interlocutor from the audience): You mentioned the idea of light and shadow, which is obviously the main matter in photography. There is a comparable pair of concepts: emptiness and play. It’s coming to me because just before our meeting we were talking with a group of students of photography. It appeared as a concept because I was talking about the idea of emptiness and its generosity as mirrored in this series of work.

Does the generosity of emptiness mean that emptiness is producing more emptiness, like feeling emptier? Or does emptiness generate plenitude, a plane?—the idea being that, in your culture and art, emptiness is an essential part of the image. I would say that from the occidental point of view emptiness is a kind of fear and we have a fear of emptiness, so we deal with that.

Q: It’s like we want to avoid the void. If I may add, the “cultural” or intercultural point aside, what you’re talking about touches on the absolutely essential, irreducible space in and of art. There is a space for art that cannot be filled in but must be kept empty. A space of freedom. For instance, modern mathematicians and physicists including the “foundational” philosopher Descartes, they debated on the existence of a vacuum. Our ability to imagine the world beyond the visible frame of space is reflected in our avoidance or fear of emptiness. In some sense, then, the photographic reproduction of worldly materials in the form of images, along with its differential constancy, is a fascinating counter-example of this plenitude, the fullness of this life.

G: I think about the image, what it should tell us about the emptiness or fullness. Should it show emptiness as a physical space or rather as a mental state of mind? Should it suggest something like the idea of emptiness? But how? Should that be like a white page? Why white instead of black? It’s obviously not about representation but rather a metaphor of the void. Creating emptiness is creating a possibility of filling it with something which has never been before and is not, either. Then, in order to find that “nothing” we must see through the screen of reality, which is hiding all kind of other spaces.

Q: Through the physical do we access something like the metaphysical. For the sake of comparison, in traditional Chinese paintings the empty space is not simply vacant. The empty space is part of the composition. To give space to that empty space is part of the artistic imaginary. We must bear that point in mind when discussing the importance of the empty in a photographic reproduction of the present. One example from mythology is Pandora’s Box, where the first evil woman was condemned. There is an interesting group of theorists writing about how the camera is like that box. It captures everything, anything (Pan-dora); if you unlock it, everything comes out. It’s a reproduction machine into which emptiness is built, as a condition for the possibility of reproduction. In other words, it itself has to be empty—or to empty itself (or herself) out.

G: It’s a very nice metaphor for the ancient type of Camera Obscura. But does it work for the digital type?

Q: So, has Pandora now gone digital too!

That is about machines, about how they capture the present and how they affect the way we think about photographic materials too. There is a very interesting book by Elissa Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, looking at photographic reproduction from “maternal” viewpoints. It’s a mother-metaphor, a mother’s womb, for instance. It itself, its “self,” is empty, through which figures get reproduced. This is a classical model of the camera. What is the mother in the age of mechanical reproduction? And how does she “figure”? That’s another, endless line of philosophical debate that touches on not only aesthetics but philosophy of and around the “sexes.” We have to pay attention to the material and maternal metaphor because literally this is how the mother’s body is employed and deployed as a camera. It itself should remain empty, pregnant with emptiness—also meaning potentiality.

Another point of interest, even the word, concept, suggests that: to conceive is to get pregnant. So light-writing and shadow.

P2: What I like about this conversation is that it concerns the negative. It is not about making a beautiful image but trying to show the background, an opening that sets your emotion, a certain condition of attentiveness toward something beyond any pre-conceived ideas; these days we are constantly bombarded with pictures. So instead, I wanted to stress the practice of setting yourself into an emotional stage, into a certain mood, through staging the thing. Or even just getting up brings you into a position of being able to be empty without feeling empty.

G: The idea is how to make emptiness radiate in a positive way. Usually its meaning is associated with some kind of negative feeling. While we are talking, I also sense how the process and series of work, so rich with all kinds of elements, maybe even too many, also illustrate my own fear of emptiness. There are two opposite states: emptiness and fullness. But the question could be the “emptiness or fullness” of what? What is the vessel which contains them?

There is poetry by Gherasim Luca who wonderfully developed that concept.

But the process I am interested in is the transition between the state of emptiness and the moment of taking a creative action.

Q: And not just what this emptiness means but how emptiness functions.

G: It’s very important, probably for everybody, but especially for the artist to arrive at that moment of “floating states.” Take on those eternal questions such as: Where are we? Who am I? What am I doing? Where is the sense of the existence? All of those questions are essential and they are coming from the anxiety in front of the emptiness of the universe.

Q: Running with this theme of paradox, this show offers an intriguing example of how remembering and forgetting are paired. In order for us to remember anything, we should almost be able to forget, so to speak. To re-member is to be able to make it a member of something. The human beings are those animals who keep promising because we have a sense of future and of failure. I will meet you tomorrow at 2 o’clock! I promise! I owe you $5, I will pay you back! I will do this and that—a promising animal. But that requires us to be able to forget, to get beforehand. Nietzsche, too, saw that jagged paradox coming: if we do not forget, we cannot remember. The process you relate to resonates with that. An example of this emptiness in a more performative sense would be: you reset yourself through a happy new year, or shall we say, “empty” new year. Likewise, there is a kind of existential dynamic in a photographic vision: something else gets freed when an image freezes (the moment)—in a sort of serial syncopations.

P2: I like the concept of the camera as the mother’s womb. But then, what is the image? In the end, the image is not a reality. The image is also flattening things. The three dimensionality of a certain body is described by the shadow that is moving, so the kinetic aspect is very important. When Gabriela’s images offer a view, they perform the viewing in an objective way.

This is a motherly emptiness, the actual ritual of taking the camera, putting it in position where you could get into those in-between moments. What are the different aspects among the camera, the body, the image, and the woman? What are the parallels in these metaphors?

Q: Precisely! What you’re pointing to is the mystery of photographic transition, transposition, transference, anything that moves. Something is on a plane of consciousness, carried along and over (also as in meta-phor). Like a mother’s womb, we think about the metaphor, we think about generosity in the gene, genre, gender … as Derrida also points out. It is what it is, what we cannot see.

P2: And its potential.

Q: Yes, so that’s why there’s a constant repetition of that which re-appears and re-presents. It’s a series of mediations at the heart of which is the mother’s body. I joke to my students in my gender philosophy class or dis-seminar that the word “reproduction” should be banned! It’s not re-production, it’s production.

G: That’s why I want to defend the idea of uniqueness even while using a technology of reproduction. A unique piece in photography means that it returns to its materiality. It becomes also an object—the image’s own materiality. There is only one “product” related to the mother’s body as a unique child.

Q: The mother’s body is not a Xerox machine! But somehow patriarchal politics treats the woman’s body as if it were or could be just that. The idea here is to honor and value the uniqueness of each being, in the sense of and with respect to its potentials.

P4: I believe the standard of the arts is measured by their philosophical quality. I just came to see the exhibition and I also see how the highest standard of the arts is met by these philosophical questions!

I hear wonderful metaphors, especially the photographic kitchen. In the kitchen it’s always a lady, that’s always the one reproducing also as in “social reproduction.” I see the connection you mention between the mother’s womb, the reproduction and the kitchen—it’s a lady that links.

In Chinese, we have a clear sense of an artistic birth, the birth of a work. Even a male artist, we do not tell if it is female or male. In Chinese even when we talk about a male artist, if the talk is about a creative moment, we would say that the baby is “stuck” at the moment or in the process of birthing, something to be “pulled out of the womb.” All artwork is like giving birth to a baby.

I see this connection across different cultures. In terms of that emptiness, in the Chinese context, the “hundreds” of everything coming together as a unity is also in a state of emptiness. Everything comes together and gets integrated. This state of emptiness is also Wu—there is something and nothing. Emptiness is related to nothing as in Wuwei (non-striving, inactive activity), so in the time-space, it has an original time and also the end of time. Emptiness is a background to consciousness; beginning of time, end of time, through lines.

G: I was also interested in the idea of the term, “in illo tempore.” It’s a Latin term which can be translated as “in that time” and Myrcea Iliade develops that idea of archetypes. That time means time without any time. It could be in the beginning of time, throughout, or in the end. It’s about the vision of the receptacle which contains emptiness but is not really empty. It’s filled with concepts, symbols, metaphors…from the beginning of time.

Q: It’s also about a bodily immersion, as we say in the middle of.  Of doing things, of being, so the ego has to be evacuated. I’m thinking of the Chinese notion, Zhong (middle), which for me also means something like a quietly orchestrated con-temporaneity of the concurrent.

Now, I want to loop back to the beginning of your talk, how you say you are trying not to frame things in advance. To let things be in the middle. That’s the magical, soft “catch” we are looking for. This emptiness and nothingness or middling. Middling without meddling. It has ancient resonances, both Greek and Chinese. “Middle Voice’ is like that in ancient philosophy—it is neither this nor that. In your work, I see it happening as a quiet, photographic pitch in the middle (of nowhere). You pay closer attention to where the baby’s head is stuck. A labor of meta-or intra-photographic midwifery, this kind of visual poetry, philosophy, artistic creation, that’s really helpful. The emptiness there also enables an inner shift of focus from the negative to the positive, trans-generating a sphere of creativity. That requires a certain resignation of agency, literally the agent, the “one” doing this or that or rather dying this way and that…you have to let the work work.

P5: The first word that comes to mind is an egoless perspective. All the past, present, future, design—they all start dissolving. I would see it as quite positive, similar to chemicals that lots of members from British art world take to gain emptiness, to gain exploration and space. Complete emptiness, an extreme state from which to create a new art of painting or music. So that’s another perspective on emptiness. Emptiness could be quite abstract, so I’m wondering: from your experience, how do you visualize that part of the visual layers of emptiness?

G: If I understand, you would like me to tell you the process, how this work of mine happens that way. I could answer like this: At the beginning of all, there is nothing, then some small element appears, which becomes a central point of the construction of the space. At that point, the empty space is not empty any more. It is already constructed, designed with lines, squares or circles. The objects can be really very ordinary, but at the same time I care about and take care of the emptiness of their own. Their shape should also express emptiness.

Such a constructed space at that initial stage is a kind of envelope for the other, an inner-theater. So talking about materials, there is still a symbolism of emptiness because of the in-betweeness of both layers. The idea is to convince the space to become symbolic at that point. Earlier we were just talking about it, comparing it to the fruit or an object from which you are taking out its mass. Then, the container is getting empty and gets filled again with new images, new realities. I don’t like to use the word “image” because it is flat. Rather, reality has all kinds of forms.

P5: Your remark illuminates how you construct layers, which is quite hard, and it is why, I think, your work creates distortions, using different tools to strike a new reality, an image’s own reality.

Q: So the procedural dynamism of emptiness is also quite literal, right? Such kinetic connections between pictorial spacing and photographic timing we have been exploring also help us move onto the next and final phase of our discussion, which is to look at some specific examples of Gabriela’s work. Let us see how those themes we discussed materialize, how they matter there.

Following on that question of emptiness, the life itinerary, your biography, exhibitions and locations where you worked, if we look at your work, so far it involves a lot of travels, moving around. You have various experiences in different locations. There are also artists who literally never leave their nest, but as you lived and passed through various spaces, I am interested to hear your thoughts on the role of memories, experiences and travels in your art. I imagine that these series of forms of life would force you to empty yourself out of your comfort zone. How does that “produce” your mind? Well, to experience is to live OUT OF the limit, to ex-perience.

It means you have to trust that emptiness, that space you are jumping through and sometimes into. It’s a fascinating image. You have to allow space in your lifeboat. For those of you who travel a lot, every time you travel, you must pack the absolute minimum and then you have to empty it out. Or at least that’s how I try to travel. When you leave for a new place, you must also leave some room in your luggage. If your suitcase is full, you won’t be able to add anything else when moving to a new place. Again, the wisdom of leaving some space is about underdetermination. From the way I experience your work, that kinetic, convex mirroring, that space works like a slightly empty suitcase. So the photographic kitchen itself is on the move. It enables a constant mirroring so that you won’t lose that inner eye, that inner core space, as you’re going on a space-trip, too.

So how does this literalized movement of ex-periencing impact the way you produce work? I ask this question because the work you produce is almost ritually layered and materially evocative in ways that seem to reflect and even stress various traces of time and space. There is an allegory.

G: I really agree: you have to trust that emptiness, that space we are jumping through. It is an essential feeling in every displacement and a real experience as in crisscrossing the sky. It means also: don’t be afraid, go ahead.

I don’t feel that I belong to some particular space. Although I have been living in France for a long time, enough to feel home there, it doesn’t mean that it produces something like lightness. Yet, not being attached to some particular space or community in a very tight way doesn’t produce strength, either. Still, my main working studio is in Paris where I live, and I must say that that is the material space where my ideas are taking shapes.

When traveling, being somewhere else, on the move, open to understanding others as well as others’ understanding of you … such is always a huge invasion of your own comfort zone. But this is exactly that idea of emptiness. You become the vacuum space in order to receive all kinds of new experiences—you must make space for that. Coming back to my own space, I see there is an issue of how to classify all those experiences and how to absorb all of that space, of emptiness-fullness.

Q: From what we’ve heard so far, along with many wonderful images and ideas, I feel like I am beginning to have a photographic memory of what you have been describing on that space of emptiness and that emptiness is an envelope of the other.

P3: An envelope is a space, so actually it offers a particular space and fold.

G: Something I think about is the concept of not knowing. There are moments in life and particularly in every artist’s practice of getting to the point of doing something without knowing why and what it is. How can you understand it? You probably become very afraid of that unknown object created by yourself, and you just need to follow that work. The idea of getting deeply inside this unknowledge is very interesting.

P4: Your idea of unknowing is about self-consciousness or lack thereof?

G: No, it’s really about not knowing. Something appears in front of you because you are going forward but you don’t understand why, what its real content is, what the real meaning of that object is. There is a paradoxical situation in that because if you are doing that it means you know but you don’t know why. It seems like the two sides of the brain get disconnected at that point. It is important to consider that space-time of not-knowing as a fully valuable process. It is probably something related also to emptiness as a condition of creation.

P3: I have a friend who immerses herself in a room or a strong force gives her an inspiration, so she is somewhere just writing, and unconsciously producing, whether it’s writing or not, in a state where she create something because she us possessed or emptied, I’m not sure.

G: There is something like a third thing, a third space, which is AVIDIA, something to study more about. It’s about space, this particular space in between where you can see the shape of things but you don’t know what’s inside and what it means.

Q: I think it is linked to the question of the exteriority of the envelope, the difference between bribery and the present, for instance. Consider the notion of gifting: when you give someone a gift and also when you are “gifted.” You don’t know what it is you’re given when gifted, and what you’re gifted in. It’s a kind of pure thanking, and, as with Heidegger, Danken, to think is to thank. The difference between bribery and a gift is this: I give you ten yuan so you do something nice to me, you know what you’ve given and are receiving in return; but, I give you a gift in an envelope, you just take it, just receive it, don’t question it, and you don’t actually or fully know what could be inside, metaphorically and literally or both, even after you’ve opened it or think you have. It could be a bomb, too, including a time bomb you don’t see now; Derrida talks about this in the classical Greek, “pharmakonic” parable of writing as a gift given and to be disseminated as such, as both a medicine and a poison. That’s the limit and risk of it. That’s the aporia of gift-giving. It’s also an artistic notion, an artistic “gift” inseparable from the notion of freedom. An artist as one who responds to a call, you just follow it but you don’t know what it is.

That ties back into beginning of our discussion of not trying to do this or that, but the question then comes down to framing. All the frames in these photographs, as you say, are not very intentional. It’s there to leave the space of not knowing, leaving it active and let it speak. That seems to be the ethos, character and the momentum of your work of “shadow-tracing.”

This notion of passively powerful “gift” is very important especially today. What is the space for the arts in this hypercapitalized world of micro-transactional calculations? We talked about reproduction, some people will produce something with the preexisting model of what is acceptable, what is popular, what “sells,” what is “catchy,” etc. There is something about unknowing as a value of and vehicle for irreducible freedom no one can take away from us, which is really real. This also reflects, it must be said, a discursive tension as well as reciprocal tie between the critic and the artist, where the critic wants to know everything about a piece, taking it apart, wanting to know every move, every sign, while rendering it more visible.

G: The idea of freedom and space tied to unknowing is very intriguing. There is a great freedom for all the interpretations when there are no any instructions for understanding but it becomes also a source of anxiety because you cannot access the essential and hidden meanings.

Q: Oh, don’t worry, I will sign and seal your envelope! I can sell it for you! (Laughter) So, leave that envelope sort of half-open so that it can interact with this otherness you also describe through your own experiences.

Speaking of such deconstructive “framing,” I’m also intrigued by the geometrical figures in your work, the free-floating, naked bodies, and the very mathematical, superimposed work. It’s also your own body. Are we seeing images of your body sort of naked or semi-naked? If you are interested, would you mind talking a bit about what you have given us in that regard?

G: Maybe I am thinking about this particular idea of geometry; or maybe I am thinking against the geometry? Once again, I am in the opposite side of what it looks like! Explored here is a sensitive approach to geometrical shapes which are by definition rule-bound. But how to construct such a space with minimum elements and without mathematical calculations: my approach is a bit random without any particularly sophisticated structures and necessary systems, and it is also an autobiographical process because all those elements used here belong to my familiar environments, as they also become part of other works or part of collected objects. Why do I collect things? I am like a magician always surrounded by some artifacts to play with. Sometimes human beings take sensual approaches to the question of existence, which are important to them. And there are shadows of all those elements, another space inside the image. We have been talking about deconstruction and its meanings, all those elements penetrating one another and all those things even include something that does not exist in fact since it is an illusion or ephemeral effect, basically light and shadow.

About the process: it’s very important for me to be emotionally creative and to be able to arrive at the synthesis of everything at such emotional moments.

Q: Listening to you, I realize your work is also about the unframeable richness of framed ambiguities. We all carry our coffees or cages around, which could also be a window that frames and frees you, all sort of portals into another world within a world, both portable in themselves. In that connection, something about the rectangular, the surface of life that annexes itself, is really interesting, its inherent metaphoricity: I mean, it is and carries its own frames. That self-reflexive or self-referential tension is what remains so arresting, what forces us to look. Look! And shadows are this photographic work … another layer of ambiguity.

G: Maybe the next exhibition could be the installation of emptiness and its shadows!

P6: I want to ask about the glass you have, also the mirror. Did you deliberately choose your own materials?

G: Yes, the materials are important—it’s all about my approach to photography. It’s not only the matter of image. The image is absolutely connected with the surface because each material is producing a perception of what we can see, each time differently. It can be cold, warm, soft, pleasant, or unpleasant to touch, and so on.

P6: I notice you use a mirror a lot. Can you speak about that?

G: You are right and there are other reflecting materials like water or the black surface of shining glass, etc. There is something about something (else) being reflected inside but it’s mostly about creating another possibility of perceiving the real. Also there is certainly something from the myth of Narcissus, which always appears when we talk about the mirror. When you are reflected in something, you still see the surrounding world, so you are included in the whole image and sometimes it is much stronger to show that through a mirror than to show it frontally. It’s kind of turning everything upside-down and inside-out.

P7: I have one final question and then we can go for dinner! It is about the perception and moment of illusion or irritation. I remember the first time I saw your works on the wall and thinking: is it a shadow, is it not a shadow? We talked a lot about how the works are expressions of your inner emptiness and how your creative unknowing of what you see creates a kind of original moment that is this emptiness where you, without thinking, constantly get and get out of such images. So, I wonder how much of this is part of your working process.

G: I’m always searching for the magic moment. An important thing in general is the emotion of being close to some new, unknown point where the habitual perception reaches another level. The motion between the matter and the psyche generates those emotions, the main elements in my creative process. So such a material emotional translation has a big influence on the image that results, along with the clear and confused perception of it. This moment is crucial.

Q: Most importantly then, this is the moment for us to say: thank you! 

Kyoo Lee, a member of AICA-USA,the author of Reading Descartes Otherwise (Fordham University Press) and a forthcoming book on visual culture (The MIT Press), is a transdisciplinary philosopher, writer and critic, who currently teaches at the City University of New York where she is Professor of Philosophy. A recipient of fellowships and visiting appointments from Cambridge University, CUNY Graduate Center, KIAS, the Mellon Foundation, the NEH, Seoul National University and Yanbian University among others, her philopoetic texts have appeared in AICA-USA Magazine, Asian American Literary Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Flash Art, PN Review, Randian, The Volta and the White Review as well as various standard academic venues.

An editor active in various fields, she is the chief co-editor of philoSOPHIA: A Journal of transContinental Feminism, and serves on the editorial boards of Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics, Derrida Today,Open Humanities Press, Simon de Beauvoir Studies and Women’s Studies Quarterly. She is also on the board of directors at Litmus Press. Her Mellon-funded anthology, Queenzenglish.mp3: poetry | philosophy | performativity, with contributions from 50+ poets, musicians, theorists and performance artists from across the globe, has recently been published (2020).

Throughout her site-specific cogitographical practices and collaborative projects, Q Professor Lee explores co-generative links and zones between critical theory and creative prose.

Gabrieal Morawetz, born in Rzeszów, Poland, is a photographer and visual artist based in Paris, France, who also works in painting, graphic design, sculpture, installation, and video. A graduate from the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow and the Instituto Nacional de la Cultura in Caracas, Venezuela, her works that are richly liminal, metaphorical, and dynamically intercultural, have been exhibited internationally at prominent art institutions such as Chicago Cultural Center, San Antonio Museum of Art, Yerba Buena Art Center, Rubin Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas (MACSI), Fotomuseo in Bogota, Te Papa Museum, and Art Museum in Kathmandu, as well as art fairs such as Art Paris, ARCO Madrid, Art Bologna, Paris Photo, Photo Shanghai, Aipad, and Photo London. In 2011, Descartes Et Cie published Gabriela Morawetz: Ne faire qu’un (PUBLICITÉ) as part of its celebrated AREA series, documenting her pieces from 1992-2011, with text by Anne Tronche, Marek Bartelik, Serge Fauchereau, Edward Glissant and Joanna Sitkowska-Bayle.

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

The upcoming exhibition of Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts (TMoFA) will be featuring the works of 17 finalists of the “Taoyuan International Art Award,” the very first international award from the city that eyes on promoting artistic creations from around the globe and to build up an exchange platform for the participating artists.

TMoFA is the foremost and the long anticipated art institution of the growing city of Taoyuan. With the city being part of the 6 special municipalities in Taiwan, the importance of the award is undeniable, and it will only be the first step among the museum’s future programs to connect with the international art scene. The opening ceremony of the exhibit will take place on 13 March 2021 with the announcement of the grand prize winners. The “Taoyuan International Art Award” exhibition is scheduled to open to the public from 13 March to 18 April 2021, at Taoyuan Arts Center.

CHIEN Yu Jen (Taiwan), Workers Holding Placards – a Portrait Project No.6
簡佑任 (臺灣), 舉牌工人肖像計劃#6

“Taoyuan International Art Award is in the foreground of the development of the Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts, and even more so, that of the vision of Taoyuan city toward the international art scene. We look forward to building a new dynamic art hub to nurture contemporary art creations. At the same time, we also aim at providing artists with another professional exhibiting platform, in the hope of opening up the possibility for dialogues and cooperation through the holding of the award.” says the Director of Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts, LIU Chun Lan.

Mizanur Rahman CHOWDHURY (Bangladesh), LAND
Mizanur Rahman CHOWDHURY (孟加拉), 土地

The 1st international award from the city to promote the power of contemporary art creations

Taoyuan International Art Award, organised by TMoFA, is an award that aims at encouraging a diversified development of art practices and cultivating talents in contemporary art. With an expectation to strengthen international exchanges and to provide full freedom of expression, the award accepts application worldwide. The entry to the competition is not limited to material, category, or size as long as the submission would be a new work that has yet been exhibited nor recognized by other awards. As a result, the open call has successfully drawn the attention of more than 600 artists from 46 countries to submit their applications. The number of submissions received has set a new record for the award, and also, an important milestone for the vision of TMoFA and its subsidiary art centres to come.

The organizer will cover the finalists’ expenses for the basic exhibit build-up and transportation. Their selected entries will be exhibited in Taoyuan Arts Center for one month while going through an on-site review to decide one winner for the “Grand Prize,” three winners for the “Honorable Mentions” and one winner for the “Sojourn Award”. With the announcement of the winners on the opening day of the exhibition, the medallist is entitled to a prize of NTD$500,000. Honorable Mention artists will receive a prize of NTD$ 120,000 each, and  Sojourn Award artist will receive a prize of NTD$ 150,000.

TING Chaong Wen (Taiwan), Going Home
丁昶文 (台湾), 魂归故里

A creative dialogue: 17 artists to showcase together in Taoyuan and to reflect on the issues of our time

17 selected artists from across the continents will be showcasing together. Their works come in different practices includes paintings, installations and new media artworks. They invite the audiences to re-discover and reflect on the various issues from cultural identity, community, history, global politics, the notion of time, and to re-experience how the artists express their thoughts and feelings through different materials and methods of creation.

The finalists of the Taoyuan International Art Award are: LEE Tek Khean(Malaysia), WANG Yi Wei (Taiwan), KOO Bon A (Korea), Ray KIANG (U.S.A), CHUANG Li Hao (Taiwan), Ana MENDES (Portugal), LIN Yan Xiang (Taiwan), CHANG Chih Chung (Taiwan), Lewis COLBURN (U.S.A), Takahiko SUZUKI (Japan), Liva DUDAREVA (Lativia), Sara WU (Taiwan), Maria VARELA (Greece), CHIANG Chun Yi (Taiwan), TING Chaong Wen (Taiwan), Mizanur Rahman CHOWDHURY (Bangladesh), CHIEN Yu Jen (Taiwan). Further details of the artists and their submitted works can be found in the Appendix.

The awarding ceremony will take place on 13 March 2021 following the opening of the exhibition. The event will be livestreaming at the Facebook and Youtube page of TMoFA at 14:30 (GMT+8). During the period of exhibition, the museums will also be launching a series of onsite events to invite the audience to have further engagement with the artists and artworks.

The Taoyuan International Art Award is organized biannually, and the upcoming open call is scheduled to be in June 2022. For more information on the exhibition and future open call, please visit here.

Ray KIANG (U.S.A), The Invisible
Ray KIANG (美国), 不可见之物

About Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts

The Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts (TMoFA), an upcoming cultural marker, is an institution with multiple venues consisting of one main museum and three subsidiary art centers. The main art museum is located in the Qingpu area of Zhongli District, and the three subsidiary art centers are the Taoyuan Children’s Art Center, the Hengshan Calligraphy Art Center, and the Chunglu Art Center.

The architectural design and landscaping of the Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts combines aquatic views and green zones, with history and culture integrated. The design echoes with the regional features of Taoyuan, a city that is known as the Land of a Thousand Ponds. Applying its diverse functions, the museum is going to link the heart of the city with its communities and form local and international ties. With Taoyuan as its foundation and together with an international outlook and a vision for the future, TMoFA is going to serve as a driving force for the promotion of art and become a dynamic base for innovative experimentation and cultural development. For more information on the museum, please visit this link.

CHIANG Chun Yi (Taiwan), Holobiont Project: Ji-mi
张致中 (台湾), 作鸳鸯

Maria VARELA (Greece), Rugs of Life
Maria VARELA (希腊), 生命织毯

Sara WU (Taiwan), Lived Absence of Objects
吳依宣(台湾), 事物不在场

Liva DUDAREVA (Lativia), V_br ⃤ nt* m ⃤ tt3r*
Liva DUDAREVA (拉脱维亚), 活跃的物质

Takahiko SUZUKI (Japan), Global-store.info : Taoyuan 2021

Lewis COLBURN (U.S.A.), Disposable Monument II (After the Boys Who Wore Gray)
Lewis COLBURN (美国), 抛弃式纪念碑II（仿照”穿灰衣的男孩们”

CHANG Chih Chung (Taiwan), Fabricating Mandarin Duck
张致中 (台湾), 作鸳鸯

LIN Yan Xiang (Taiwan), If Mountain Has Deities
林彥翔 (台湾 ), 山若有神

Ana MENDES (Portugal), The People’s Collection
Ana MENDES (葡萄牙), 人民的收藏

KOO Bon A (Korea), Teeth of Time.
具本妸 (韩国), 时间的牙齿

WANG Yi Wei (Taiwan), Running Fast and Slow
王译薇 (台湾 ), 快慢奔跑

Credits: all images courtesy the artist and by TMoFA

“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].

Dr Alex Burchmore is Sessional Lecturer at the Centre for Art History and Art Theory at the Australian National University, Canberra. In 2013-14 Alex lived in Beijing after receiving a Prime Minister’s Australia Asia Endeavour Postgraduate Award.

Exhibitions of Chinese art outside China tend to confirm certain assumptions about the country’s history, culture, politics, and people. At first, ‘XU ZHEN®: Eternity Vs Evolution’ at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), Canberra, seems no exception to this rule, promising viewers a proven combination of two enduring preconceptions about China’s past and present. On one hand, the ‘Eternity’ of the title evokes fantasies of a civilization distinguished not only by antiquity but by an apparently unbroken lineage of cultural florescence, inspiring flights of fantastical chinoiserie as well as stereotypes of Oriental despotism and stasis. ‘Evolution’, on the other hand, evokes the ceaseless metamorphoses that have come to define contemporary China for many of those who have made a career of watching the country’s transformation from afar. In the eyes of these ‘China Hawks’, those who rule the People’s Republic have betrayed an ancestral birthright in their relentless pursuit of profit, degrading the environment in the name of industrial advancement, denying human rights to those disenfranchised by their rule, and destroying architectural and material heritage in their efforts to remould the face of the country.

XU ZHEN®
Shouting (stills) 2009
single-channel video, sound, duration 3:42
White Rabbit Collection, Sydney
Image courtesy the artist and White Rabbit Collection, Sydney
© the artist

‘Eternity Vs Evolution’ could be compared in its juxtaposition of these assumptions with the comparable pairing of ossified antiquity in ‘Terracotta Warriors: Guardians of Immortality’ and contemporary metamorphosis in ‘Cai Guo-Qiang: The Transient Landscape’ at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Melbourne, in 2019. In contrast to the artefacts of China’s early imperial rulers showcased in ‘Guardians of Immortality’, however, remnants of classical civilization on display in ‘Eternity Vs. Evolution’ are visibly artificial, culturally ambiguous, and irredeemably compromised by the artist’s creative manipulations or distortions of history. In Melbourne, the First Emperor’s sentinels and the ‘gunpowder-paintings’ of one of China’s most renowned contemporary artists were shown in proximity but remained self-contained. In Canberra, no such separation has been enforced. Present and past are inextricably combined in Xu’s intentionally contradictory and confounding installations, paintings, textiles, and mixed-media assemblages. Additionally, while ‘Guardians of Immortality’ grew from an ongoing partnership with a provincial arm of the Chinese government, and ‘Transient Landscape’ comprised a series of commissions from Cai Guo-Qiang himself, ‘Eternity Vs. Evolution’ has been drawn almost entirely from the collection of the White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney. As such, a closer comparison could be drawn with ‘A Fairy Tale in Red Times: Works from the White Rabbit Collection’, also at the NGV in 2019.

In his analysis of the role that White Rabbit has played in mediating Chinese culture for Australian audiences since opening in 2009, David Bell attributes the gallery’s success to its ‘accommodation of the challenging, discomfiting, and dislocating.’ White Rabbit’s exhibitions have become known for their strategic use of ‘shock, humour, gaudiness, or subtlety [to] transport viewers beyond their … comfort zones,’ compelling a reassessment of assumptions derived from prejudice or preconception and thereby challenging the frequently clichéd representations of contemporary China found elsewhere. The gallery has been greatly enabled in this mission, Bell explains, by its independence from conventional sources of patronage in the Australian arts community as a not-for-profit charity financed entirely by founder Judith Neilson, whose appetite for Chinese art has been guided since her first purchase in 1999 by a taste for the provocative.(1) Neilson’s fortune and the formidable size of her collection, now estimated to contain over 2000 works by almost 700 artists, have also allowed the gallery to avoid cooperation with state-owned arts institutions and therefore to openly critique government agendas.

XU ZHEN®
Dah…Dah…Dah…Dah… 2009 (ed. 1/5)
steel
White Rabbit Collection, Sydney Image courtesy the artist and White Rabbit Collection, Sydney © the artist

XU ZHEN®
In Progress #180×131 2012
plywood, inlaid wood veneers
White Rabbit Collection, Sydney
Image courtesy the artist and White Rabbit Collection, Sydney
© the artist

XU ZHEN®: ETERNITY VS EVOLUTION
installation view

Nevertheless, while challenging prejudice and preconception, the works represented in Neilson’s collection can also serve to confirm other prevailing assumptions about the art of contemporary China. Their frequently controversial or subversive content, for example, supports a view of such art as an inevitably oppositional statement on adverse socio-cultural and political conditions. This is especially true when these works are shown, as at the NGV, alongside artefacts of a past China – many visitors to the gallery in 2019 may have found their assumptions confirmed as they moved from the promise of ‘Eternity’ in the display of Terracotta Warriors on the ground floor, to the visions of contemporary ‘Evolution’ furnished by White Rabbit on the top floor. ‘A Fairy Tale in Red Times’ also illustrates the extent to which the transposition of Neilson’s ambitions to a state institution presents curators with something of a double bind. It is perhaps inevitable that some of the transgressive potential of her collection is lost, while works deemed too controversial or inflammatory are rarely shown beyond White Rabbit’s walls. Yet institutional affiliation also has its advantages, foremost among which are the benefits of increased space, a larger install team, and a broader audience. The challenge for exhibitions like ‘Eternity Vs Evolution’ and ‘A Fairy Tale in Red Times’ therefore lies in the need to strike a balance between these competing objectives: to cultivate blockbuster appeal while overturning convention and stereotype.

XU ZHEN®
Immortals’ Trails in Secret Land 2012
real and synthetic fabric, leather, feathers
White Rabbit Collection, Sydney
Image courtesy the artist and White Rabbit Collection, Sydney
© the artist

XU ZHEN®
Spread b-041 2010
synthetic fabrics, cotton, faux fur
White Rabbit Collection, Sydney
Image courtesy the artist and White Rabbit Collection, Sydney
© the artist

Entering ‘Eternity Vs Evolution’ from the NGA’s Asian Art galleries, visitors are introduced to (or initiated into) the exhibition with ‘Rainbow’ (1998), one of two videos that stand as representative expressions of the first of three phases in Xu Zhen’s career. Philip Tinari, art historian and director of Beijing’s UCCA, has identified Xu’s work of the 1990s as a product of ‘the tail end of the underground era’ in Chinese art, when ‘a sense that art could challenge … mainstream values’ remained possible.(2) The four-minute video shows the exposed back of an anonymous performer against a stark white background that accentuates the gradual reddening of skin when struck repeatedly by an unknown assailant, the impact of an open hand heard but not seen. No context or reason is given for these blows, yet the immobility of the performer suggests complicity and implies that what seems to denote punishment, torture, or abuse may signify the fulfilment of a masochistic pleasure or a playful test of endurance.

The choice of this as the opening work for the exhibition is equally ambiguous. On one hand, it could be a rite of passage, a transformative shedding of the self through ritualised exposure to pain that simultaneously initiates the performer into a heightened awareness. On the other hand, it could merely be a display of bravado, a time-honoured hazing that must be endured to join a secretive and hedonistic fraternity. This blending of slapstick and sincerity reappears in ‘Shouting’ (1998) in the first gallery, the second video representing this phase in Xu’s career. In this work, rather than a voyeuristic observer, we take the cameraman’s perspective, sharing his mirth as the crowds occupying the lens turn around in surprise at the sound of his repeated exclamations, quickening their steps as they return to their aims. The NGA’s caption explains Xu’s screams as ‘a way of asserting his individuality in a society that prioritises community and conformity,’ enlisting the work as a combatant in the struggle of democratic values against authoritarianism that many critics outside China identify as the primary content of the country’s art.(3) Like ‘Rainbow’, however, ‘Shouting’ might also represent little more than an expression of youthful exuberance, a prank or dare between friends.

XU ZHEN®: ETERNITY VS EVOLUTION
installation view featuring Eternity – Longxing Temple Buddha Statue Part Three, Tang Dynasty Buddha Statue, Longxing Temple Buddha Statue Part Five, Northern Qi Amitabha Statue, Vairochana, the Cosmic Buddha, Hebei Northern Qi Dynasty Standing Buddha Torso, Parthenon East Pediment, 2013-14

XU ZHEN®: ETERNITY VS EVOLUTION
installation view featuring Eternity – Longxing Temple Buddha Statue Part Three, Tang Dynasty Buddha Statue, Longxing Temple Buddha Statue Part Five, Northern Qi Amitabha Statue, Vairochana, the Cosmic Buddha, Hebei Northern Qi Dynasty Standing Buddha Torso, Parthenon East Pediment, 2013-14

In the context of the exhibition, these works introduce a theme of noise, alternately contained and released, that also appears in ‘Calm’, ‘You’re Going to Heaven Tomorrow’, and ‘Dah… Dah… Dah… Dah…’ (all 2009), installed opposite ‘Shouting’. Rather than human cries of pain (or pleasure) and excitement (or anxiety), these works embody the aftermath of what we are led to believe would have been deafening blasts of rhetoric and explosive detonation, made eerily silent by entombment within mute metal and rock. The caption for ‘Dah… Dah… Dah… Dah…’ and ‘You’re Going to Heaven Tomorrow’ identifies these jagged sheets of corroded steel as material records of gunfire and ‘the soundwaves of a speech made by a politician or terrorist … a visible echo of the violent reality that those words can create.’ Yet the onomatopoeic title of the former is a deliberate misnomer, likely intended to heighten this sense of violence – both pieces are ‘voice-graphs’ taken from political figures associated with conflict in the Middle East.(4) ‘Calm’, a mass of twisted metal and stone on the gallery floor, also invites association with conflict, recalling the ruins that war inevitably leaves in its wake. In contrast to the lifelessness of the latter, however, the almost imperceptible, undulating motion of a concealed waterbed imparts Xu’s wreckage with a tenuous vitality marked by the rasp of stone against stone.

The solemn dignity of these conflict-laden works may seem antithetical to the sardonic abandon of ‘Shouting’, despite a shared emphasis on the containment of sound. Yet their apparent sincerity and ideological rigour, like that of the earlier video, is not as straightforward as it seems. As some of the earliest products of MadeIn Company, an ‘art corporation’ that Xu founded in 2009, these works also stand as representatives of a second distinct phase in his career. The trading name of this corporate entity is a nod to the ubiquitous label ‘Made in China’ stamped on mass-produced commodities across the world – an ironic statement, perhaps, on the quantity of contemporary art from China saturating the market when Xu decided to incorporate. The Chinese transliteration for this term, on the other hand – meiding (没顶), meaning ‘without a head’ or ‘without limit’ – implies both ‘[a] submersion of the ego and individuality … a sacrifice of the self in favour of the final product,’ and the infinite extension of this production ad nauseam.(5) The transformation of his independent artistic practice into a corporate endeavour therefore allowed Xu to disguise his personal investment in the process of creation while at the same time multiplying the range of identities that the products of this process could represent.

XU ZHEN®: ETERNITY VS EVOLUTION
installation view featuring European Thousand-Armed Classical Sculpture 2014 (ed. 2/3)

This capacity for masquerade and multiple identity found clear expression in MadeIn’s inaugural exhibition, ‘Seeing One’s Own Eyes: Contemporary Art from the Middle East’ (2009), for which ‘Calm’, ‘Dah… Dah… Dah… Dah…’, and ‘You’re Going to Heaven Tomorrow’ were created. The central conceit of this exhibition, as the title indicates, was the misleading assertion that works included had been created by young Middle Eastern artists with the intention of ‘dissolving any monolithic views’ about the art of this region and assembling ‘a representative – if never comprehensive – sample of what Middle Eastern art wants to be about today.’(6) Those who visited the show found a range of stereotypical motifs on display, from chadors and mosques to oil derricks and razor wire, ‘generically evocative forms spiced with enough ethnic detail to make their consumption feel like a border crossing, albeit a very smooth one.’(7) The aim, as the accompanying text makes clear, was to ‘provoke the viewer to think about issues of cultural perception’ and to expose ‘the tendency of the West to create a neat package for art from other cultures.’(8) Hence the apparently missing preposition: we are not expected to see with our own eyes, drawing back the veil to bear witness to the unadorned truth, but to recognise that our vision is always already compromised by prejudice and preconception – we see what we want to see. Impartiality is an impossibility.

For those unfamiliar with Xu’s artistic career, this subtext in ‘Calm’, ‘Dah… Dah… Dah… Dah…’, and ‘You’re Going to Heaven Tomorrow’ is not immediately apparent in ‘Eternity Vs Evolution’. A clue to their contrived exoticism is provided, however, by the inclusion of ‘In Progress #180×131’ (2012), a Persian rug recreated in plywood that both confirms the Middle Eastern theme while exposing its fabrication. The implied substitution of soft woollen fibres for a more inflexible medium also draws attention to another unifying theme in the exhibition: an attention to material contrasts. This is evident as well in the combination of masonry and silicon rubber in ‘Calm’, but especially in the pairing of the steel ‘voice-graphs’ with ‘Under Heaven 20121018’ (2012) and ‘Under Heaven – Black Light 0302VS0137’ (2013). Xu (or rather his staff at MadeIn) created these and other works in the ‘Under Heaven’ series by using a chef’s piping bag to apply oil paint in icing-like swirls and daubs so thick that they can take months to dry and must be rotated when hung to prevent slumping. The visceral effect of this application has been diminished at the NGA by their display behind glass in a poorly lit corner of the gallery, preventing a full appreciation of their three-dimensionality. Nevertheless, the contrast of voluptuous excess and unyielding rigidity created by their juxtaposition with the other works in the room remains in evidence.

The material contrasts continue in the third gallery, in which sculptural and textile works of monumental proportions imbue the recurring tension between hard and soft with an air of faded luxury. The excess of the ‘Under Heaven’ canvases finds an echo here in the visually and materially ostentatious tapestries ‘Spread B-041’ (2010) and ‘Immortals’ Trails in Secret Land’ (2012). The former is a variation on a series first shown in ‘Seeing One’s Own Eyes’ in which European and North American caricatures of Middle Eastern politics are combined in feverish collages of fear, hatred, and prejudice. The eclectic cast of characters populating this tapestry, on the other hand, are drawn from popular cartoons and animated series, their garish and crudely embroidered forms overlaid to the point of illegibility. ‘Immortals’ Trails in Secret Land’ is equally unintelligible, juxtaposing a haphazard assortment of figures, motifs, and symbolic objects drawn from various cultures with marine animals, birds, and a writhing serpent. The spectacle and inscrutability of both works are heightened by their installation above eye-level and their overwhelming scale, enticing the viewer to search for some key to unlock the mystery of their composition, only to discover that this mystery lies entirely in their resistance to any attempt at understanding. There are no complex allegories here waiting to be uncovered by a worthy initiate, only an absurd and vacuous palimpsest calculated to mislead and deceive.

XU ZHEN®: ETERNITY VS EVOLUTION
installation view

XU ZHEN®: ETERNITY VS EVOLUTION
installation view

The same fusion of vacuity and spectacle animates the final three works in ‘Eternity Vs Evolution’, imposing sculptural assemblages that dominate both the exhibition design and branding. These works exemplify a third phase in Xu’s career, created following the inauguration in 2013 of his XUZHEN™ brand among MadeIn’s growing range of art-products. For Monika Szewczyk, this most recent self-commodification signals a final metamorphosis of the individual into the corporation, ‘[devoid of] biography, personhood, or personality [yet acting] as a kind of super-subjectivity.’(9) David Elliott has identified a resemblance between this super-subjectivity and the incarnations of Daoist and Buddhist deities, the diversity of which both embodies and obscures the multiplicity of the divine.(10) Once again, Xu is demonstrating his capacity for infinite transformation – with Walt Whitman, he celebrates the ambiguities of his artistic practice: ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes).’(11) Characteristically, however, the artist himself has dismissed his self-branding as little more than another stage in MadeIn’s development as a business, driven by market demand: ‘Over the years we have found that people want a person to focus on rather than a group.’(12)

The three monumental sculptural works included in ‘Eternity Vs Evolution’, marketed under the XUZHEN™ brand, exemplify this apparently contradictory combination of the divine and prosaic. ‘European Thousand-Armed Classical Sculpture’ (2014), when viewed head-on, conjures an illusion of unity – or perhaps of super-subjectivity – in which a procession of sculptural icons embodying European and North American deities or allegorical figures are incorporated into a composite facsimile of Guanyin, the thousand-armed bodhisattva of compassion. The unity of this figure immediately dissolves, however, as soon as the viewer moves around the sculpture and discovers the fractured artificiality of its construction, a material echo of those equally fragile and contrived dreams of geopolitical harmony or universal syncretism of belief to which so many idealists have dedicated their lives. ‘Eternity – Longxing Temple Buddha Statue Part Three, Tang Dynasty Buddha Statue, Longxing Temple Buddha Statue part Five, Northern Qi Amitabha Statue, Vairochana, the Cosmic Buddha, Hebei Northern Qi Dynasty Standing Buddha Torso, Parthenon East Pediment’ (2013-14) embodies another fusion of ‘East’ and ‘West’ in the decapitation and reassembly of sculptural icons standing in for classical Greece and China, inexplicably fused at the neck.

These works appear, at first, to confirm the conventional separation of these regions as distinct spheres of cultural development, home to diametrically opposed forms of religious and political civic life. Xu’s use of the Parthenon pediment as a sole support for the inverted Buddhist figures in ‘Eternity’ can even be read as a tongue-in-cheek allusion to the enduring association of the West with a grounded materialism and the East with groundless spiritual fantasies. Yet in the context of Xu’s broader artistic practice, and especially in conjunction with the other works in ‘Eternity Vs Evolution’, their fusion of sculptural vocabularies speaks instead to his desire to transform material artefacts of the past into ‘information objects’ or carriers of coded ‘cultural genes’. When shown in unison, Xu explains, ‘their relationship seems very natural, as if they were meant to be together … re-determined and re-combined.’(13) Speaking with Philip Tinari in 2015, he associated this recombination with a breakdown of singular cultural identification in the post-internet era, to the extent that ‘it becomes … difficult to distinguish who made which work, or … if a work was made by a Chinese or a foreign artist.’(14) Ornamented with these ambivalent icons of transcultural (con)fusion, the Brutalist architectural void of the NGA’s galleries takes on the universalizing proportions of a conqueror’s vault, where trophies of the vanquished jostle for attention, stripped of all previous meaning and specificity.

Keeping watch over this motley hoard, the voluptuous coils of ‘“Hello”’ (2019) take pride of place in ‘Eternity Vs Evolution’, towering over the viewer and following their every move with a baleful gaze that threatens consumption by the emptiness of the void (and note the inclusion of quotation marks in the title). The caption for this work draws attention to the historic prestige of the Corinthian column that Xu has chosen for the body of his serpent, ‘first created in ancient Greece [as] a symbol of power, prestige and western civilization.’ Yet the flaccid immobility of this automated guardian, save for the hesitant and creaking sway of its pediment-head when activated by the approach of the viewer, inspires more pity than dread. Carved in soft and yielding Styrofoam, this is a column devoid of all function, a structural support incapable of supporting its own weight, spectacular in scale but hollow within. As such, ‘“Hello”’ offers a clue to the underlying message of the exhibition: that which seems invulnerable and eternal is often little more than an artfully contrived illusion, while the evidence of our own eyes is rarely as straightforward as it seems and inevitably colored by the assumptions that structure our view of the world. The eager insistence with which Xu’s column forces viewers to look upon its hollow face seems to mark an impatient desire for us to join in the joke – to realize that the spectacle of this exhibition and the archetypal narratives of Chinese eternity and evolution on which this spectacle rests are contrived, reductive, and devoid of substance. The responsibility for this realization remains, however, as always in Xu’s work, on our personal commitment to the questioning of our most cherished values and our readiness to admit that we are all complicit in the upholding of certain stereotypes.

Alex Burchmore

Alex Burchmore

Notes

1. David Bell, ‘White Rabbit, Contemporary Chinese Artists and Soft Power in Sydney’s Chippendale,’ in China in Australasia: Cultural Diplomacy and Chinese Arts Since the Cold War, edited by James Beattie, Richard Bullen, and Maria Galikowski (New York: Routledge, 2019), 136-40.

2. Philip Tinari, ‘Moving in a Bigger Direction,’ Parkett, no. 96 (2015): 149.

3. In this respect, it seems telling, that both works were chosen to feature in the Venice Biennale – ‘Rainbow’ in the 49^th Biennale in 2001 and ‘Shouting’ in the 51^st Biennale in 2005 – where they would undoubtedly have served to reinforce such assumptions for many viewers.

4. Chris Moore, ‘Chris Moore on MADEIN at ShanghART, Shanghai,’ in MadeIn, Seeing One’s Own Eyes: Contemporary Art from the Middle East (Shanghai: ShanghART Gallery, 2009), unpaginated.

5. Travis Jeppesen, ‘Art, Inc. Shanghai,’ Art in America (April 2013): 91.

6. MadeIn, Seeing One’s Own Eyes, unpaginated.

7. Monika Szewczyk, ‘MadeIn Heaven,’ Parkett, no. 96 (2015): 164-5.

8. MadeIn, Seeing One’s Own Eyes, unpaginated.

9. Szewczyk, ‘MadeIn Heaven,’ 166.

10. David Elliott, ‘In the Face of History: Chaos and Rectitude in the Work of Xu Zhen,’ in Xu Zhen, edited by Chris Moore (Berlin: Distanz, 2014), 35.

11. This line appears in Whitman’s magnum opus, ‘Song of Myself’, first published in Leaves of Grass (1855).

12. Xu Zhen, cited in Michael Young, ‘Where I Work: Xu Zhen,’ Art Asia Pacific, no. 88 (May/June 2014): 185.

13. Xu Zhen, in Rajesh Punj, ‘Information Age: A Conversation with Xu Zhen,’ Sculpture 37, no. 3 (April 2018): 27-31.

14. Xu Zhen, in Tinari, ‘Moving in a Bigger Direction,’ 154-5.

Group Exhibition ShanghART Beijing, Beijing

Marc Schmitz – A Tribute to Gaia

Marc Schmitz will present ‘A Tribute to Gaia‘ allows the visitor to search trough a block of about 100 single drawings, by following the chronicle order of their creation. The graphics are shown in two sections: the ‘Deluges and the Landings’ (each about 50 x 60 cm acrylics on cardboard). A new Neon work, part of the project T.R.U.S.T. is produced for this exhibition, that visualizes a different understanding of the earth in form of a 3 dimensional image. Referring to the actual pandemic situation, a diary in quarantine, that was created during the lockdown in 2020, contains around 200 paintings, one of which is shown, along with a new book documenting the entire work. (The Nomads Square, 30 x 30 cm, oil on canvas). The painting # 125 (Ocean Eye) from the Series La Commedia Divina (130 x 170, oil on canvas)  completes the exhibition.

Han Feng – Containers of the invisible

In 2019 Han Feng moved with his family from Shanghai to Berlin. After establishing his new studio, he began working on a new series of paintings in which the support – the ‘stretcher’ – comprises an object, usually a household item Han Feng found in a junkshop in the city. Sometimes the objects are religious. Importantly, each object has a history but one which remains hidden, disguised, masked and elided, but not destroyed. Some hang on walls like totems. Others occupy a space – a hallway, a living room – like a tear in reality. Each work presents as a ghost, a cipher, but they are also meditations on fundamental art dualities, such as painting/support, revelation/effacement and subject/object.

Han Feng – “I draw inspiration from the Taoist literary tradition. I create pieces intended to evolve over time and change with nature. My new pieces act like containers whose presence are defined by their absence. They are colorful illusions meant to conflate accustomed spatial notions. In this way, they can be also viewed as playful precautionary reminders.”

About Marc Schmitz

Marc Schmitz is a conceptual multi-disciplinary artist based in Berlin and Ulaanbaatar. He explores the foundations of the different media that he is in use with, by challenging their limits. His works convey sensuality and thought, inviting the viewer to enter into a mutually constructive dialogue, while addressing the limitless space with all of the viewer’s basic senses. His works have been exhibited internationally, are represented in private and public collections and have been remarked with several international awards.

About Han Feng

Han Feng was born in 1974 in Harbin, in the province of Heilongjiang in the north of China, near the border with Russia. He graduated from Harbin Normal University in 1994 and Shanghai university in 2006. In 2008, Han Feng received the Creative M50 Jury Award and two years later Han Feng won the first prize of the firstJohn Moores Painting Prize (China).

In 2011 his works were shown at the 3rd Biennial at the End of the World in Ushuaia, Argentina as well as in MoCA and Around Space, both in Shanghai. In 2012, HAN Feng had a solo exhibition at CCCA Manchester. Britain’s Saatchi Gallery and Japan’s Aichi Triennial both exhibited major works of HAN Feng in 2013. In 2017 Han Feng had two solo shows, SOMEWHERE at ShanghART, Beijing (2017) and This Moment, Liu Haisu Art Museum, Shanghai. In 2018, Han Feng had a solo show at the Art Patrons, Qiao Space & Tank Shanghai Project Space, Shanghai, and also Sense of Paper – Melting Point, L+ Space, Shanghai. His solo show, The Poem Simply Rising, took place in 2019 at the Wuxi Museum, Wuxi.

Contact information

Email Kunstforumberlin@gmail.com

Telephone +49 (0)179 6868386

Marc Schmitz www.marcschmitz.net

Han Feng https://hanfengart.net

Online Benefit Art Auction for NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore

www.ntuccabenefit.org

Bidding Period 1 – 18 October

Place your bids for works of art to support a unique contemporary art institution in Southeast Asia!

The NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore’s (NTU CCA Singapore) Online Benefit Art Auction aims to raise funds for two vital projects currently underway:

1. NTU CCA Singapore’s Digital Archive – A digitisation project of the Centre’s institutional records which date back to its inception in 2013. The online archive experience will document the Centre’s exploration of Spaces of the Cultural in a dynamic way through material in multiple media, as well as staff and collaborators’ perspectives on its groundbreaking exhibitions, public programmes, residencies, and research initiatives. The archive aims to offer the public unparalleled access to experimental curatorial and artistic practices in Singapore, Southeast Asia and beyond.
2. A publication titled Climates. Habitats. Environments. – A culmination of the Centre’s research focus over the past three years, this book engages with the consequences of globalisation and the climate crisis through a combination of the artistic, the academic, and the cultural.

The projects encompass a twofold proposition – to make available NTU CCA Singapore’s legacy by giving access to its archive, and to disseminate the Centre’s work in Singapore and beyond with a print publication aimed at furthering artistic research. Both projects make accessible and focus on contemporary art and its role in knowledge production, public engagement, and participation.

The Online Benefit Art Auction features artworks donated by artists who have participated in the Centre’s residencies, exhibitions and other programmes, including: Alecia Neo (Singapore), Ang Song Nian (Singapore), anGie seah (Singapore), Animali Domestici (Thailand/Italy), Arin Rungjang (Thailand), Entang Wiharso (Indonesia), Fyerool Darma (Singapore), Haegue Yang (South Korea/Germany), Heman Chong (Singapore), Ho Tzu Nyen (Singapore), ila (Singapore), Jae Rhim Lee (South Korea), Jason Wee (Singapore), Jeremy Sharma (Singapore), Lucy + Jorge Orta (United Kingdom), Magne Furuholmen (Norway), Marjetica Potrč (Slovenia), Ming Wong (Singapore/Germany), Regina Maria Möller (Germany), Robert Zhao Renhui (Singapore), Rossella Biscotti (Italy/The Netherland), Shubigi Rao (India/Singapore), Tiffany Chung (Vietnam/USA), Trevor Yeung (Hong Kong), Wei Leng Tay (Singapore), and Weixin Quek Chong (Singapore).

Each artwork has a unique narrative, created and brought to life as a result of the artists’ visions and active engagement with knowledge, research, community and praxis. These works reflect the Centre’s attention to promulgating ideas that engage with social and ecological concerns.

For those who would like to help through other means, NTU CCA Singapore’s own Artists’ Limited Edition Everyday Items comprising specially commissioned objects made in limited quantities – ranging from scarves, umbrellas, notebooks, raincoats, totes bags to beach towels – are also available for purchase from the auction website. Alternatively, you can also make a donation for any amount here.

The Centre is immensely grateful for the support of all the artists who contributed new or recently commissioned works, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and the precarious financial position of artists and cultural producers around the world.

Let the bidding begin!

1. Alecia Neo (Singapore)

Alecia Neo, Homeostasis, 2017, archival photograph, 81.4 x 115 x 4 cm (framed). Courtesy the artist.

2. Ang Song Nian (Singapore)

Ang Song Nian, As They Grow Older and Wiser, 2017, archival dye-sublimation on polyester textile,
206 x 256 cm
(framed). Courtesy the artist.

3. anGie Seah (Singapore)

anGie seah, The Nightcatcher, 2017, ink on paper, 23 x 18 x 2 cm (framed). Courtesy the artist.

4. Animali Domestici (Thailand/Italy)

Animali Domestici, Bangkok Opportunistic Ecologies, 2019, printed synthetic fabric canvas, embroidery, 300 x 300 x 0.5 cm. Courtesy the artists.

5. Arin Rungjang (Thailand)

Arin Rungjang, Johnston (450% high exposure photoshop), 2016, digital print on paper, mounted on acrylic, 47.3 x 84.1 x 1 cm. Courtesy the artist.

6. Entang Wiharso (Indonesia)

Entang Wiharso, Decoded: Alone, 2015, cast paper, etching collage, gampi paper, copper plate, 28.8 x 34.5 x 10 cm (framed). Courtesy the artist.
Entang Wiharso, Decoded: Hunt, 2015, cast paper, etching collage, gampi paper, copper plate, 40 x 24.5 x 10 cm (framed). Courtesy the artist.
Entang Wiharso, Decoded: Jaga, 2015, cast paper, etching collage, gampi paper, copper plate, 28.8 x 34.5 x 10 (framed). Courtesy the artist.
Entang Wiharso, Decoded: Disconnected, 2015, cast paper, etching collage, gampi paper, copper plate, 40 x 24.5 x 10 cm (framed). Courtesy the artist.

7. Fyerool Darma (Singapore)

Fyerool Darma, Portrait of Win$ton_ed-Jaga_d_paradiso, 2019, poster print with adhesive on wood, detritus and clear epoxy with artist frame, 42 x 59.4 x 15 cm (framed). Courtesy the artist.

8. Haegue Yang

Haegue Yang, Vegetable Prints – Shanghai Green #2, 2012, prints on 100% cotton paper, water based ink, Shanghai greens, 40 x 40 x 3 cm each (framed). Courtesy the artist.

9. Heman Chong

Heman Chong, Fahrenheit 451 / Ray Bradbury (3), 2020, acrylic on canvas, 61 x 46 x 3.5 cm. Courtesy the artist.

10. Ho Tzu Nyen (Singapore)

Ho Tzu Nyen, 4 x 4 – Episode of Singapore Art, 2005, video, 20 min. Courtesy the artist.

11. ila (Singapore)

ila, ngaku lepat, 2019, photographic print, 29.7 x 42 cm. Courtesy the artist.

12. Jae Rhim Lee (South Korea)

Jae Rhim Lee, The Infinity Burial Suit, 2016, biodegradable fabric, biomix, 209.5 x 186.5 cm. Courtesy the artist.

Jae Rhim Lee, The Forever Spot Pet Shroud, 2016, biodegradable fabric, biomix, 50 x 60 cm. Courtesy the artist.

13. Jason Wee (Singapore)

Jason Wee, Labyrinths (Sungei Road), 2017, galvanized steel, mirrors, cotton cloth, rubber-coated fencing, powder-coated steel, 209 x 168 cm. Courtesy the artist.

14. Jeremy Sharma (Singapore)

Jeremy Sharma, Eaton, 2014, polyurethane foam (Relief wall Sculpture made with foam), 70 x 50 x 9 cm. Courtesy the artist.

15. Lucy + Jorge Orta (United Kingdom)

Lucy + Jorge Orta, Amazonia Drop Parachute, 2014 – 2016, archival pigment print and pencil, 54x 38 cm. Courtesy the artist.

16. Magne Furuholmen (Norway)

Magne Furuholmen, Climax Aluminium, 2008, photo etching on paper,
72.6 x 56 x 4 cm (framed). Courtesy the artist.

17. Marjetica Potrč (Slovenia)

Marjetica Potrč, Small-Scale Worlds, 2007, marker and ink on paper, 28.7x 37.3 cm (framed). Courtesy the artist.

18. Ming Wong (Singapore/Germany)

Ming Wong, Untitled, 2019, photography, 40 x 30 cm. Courtesy the artist.

19. Regina Maria Möller (Germany)

Regina Maria Möller, Schutz Mantel (Protective Cape), Regina Maria, model #1, 2019, textile, embroidery, drawing, 53 cm (diameter). Courtesy Regina Maria Möller and © Regina Maria Möller, VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2019

20. Robert Zhao Renhui (Singapore)

Robert Zhao Renhui, New Forest (Kingfisher) II, 2019, digital inkjet print on aluminium panel, 74 x 111 cm. Courtesy the artist.

21. Rossella Biscotti (Italy/The Netherland)

Rossella Biscotti, Extraction, 2020, photography, 28 x 50 cm. Courtesy the artist.

22. Shubigi Rao (India/Singapore)

Shubigi Rao, Untitled (Books rescued from the burning National Library in 1992, still homeless. Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina), 2018, giclée prints on acid- and lignin-free Hahnemühle fine art photo rag 300gsm, 42 x 59.4 cm (framed). Courtesy the artist.

23. Tifany Chung (Vietnam / USA)

Tiffany Chung, Guatemala Agrarian Reform vs CIA Operation PBSUCCESS, 2019, digital print, 40 x 24 cm. Courtesy Tiffany Chung and Jorge L Hurtado.

24. Trevor Yeung (Hong Kong)

Trevor Yeung, Cynic’s Routine, 2019, archival inkjet print,
40 x 60 cm. Courtesy the artist.

 25. Wei Leng Tay (Singapore)

Wei Leng Tay, 5 pink peonies, China. 2 Honey Murcott mandarins, Australia. 1 marble and rosewood table circa 1950s, China. 10 sec, f20, 320 ISO, 37mm. Tungsten light source from right. 11/12/2019, 7.09pm, Singapore, 2019, archival pigment print,
53.5 x 73.5 cm (framed). Courtesy the artist.

 26. Weixin Quek Chong (Singapore)

Weixin Quek Chong, mobile lava flow, 2018, photographic print on aluminum,
64 x 45 x 0.2 cm. Courtesy the artist.

In 2019 Han Feng moved with his family from Shanghai to Berlin. After establishing his new studio, he began working on a new series of paintings in which the support – the ‘stretcher’ – comprises an object, usually a household item Han Feng found in a junkshop in the city. Sometimes the objects are religious. Importantly, each object has a history but one which remains hidden, disguised, masked and elided but not destroyed. Some hang on walls like totems. Others occupy a space – a hallway, a living room – like a tear in reality. Each work presents as a ghost, a cipher, but they are also meditations on fundamental art dualities, such as painting/support, revelation/effacement and subject/object.

Ran Dian commissioned Alice Gee to write a story about Han Feng’s new works. You can read The Maschkera here. During her research for the story, Alice conducted an interview with Han Feng by WeChat. An edited version of the interview appears here.

Alice Gee: How would you describe these works to a child?


Han Feng: I would describe in great detail these works in terms of their characteristics. Given their age, I would prefer to ask a child how they would describe the work. Art explains itself.

What was the inspiration for this project?

If thereʻs a disturbance within your home, however slight, you will feel uncomfortable, with a strong feeling of being unadapted. This happens when a new, obscure thing is placed in a familiar place like a small toy hidden under the carpet.

I draw inspiration from the Taoist literary tradition. I create pieces intended to evolve over time and change with nature. I use the objects of the room as materials, keeping true to scale. For example, I said this sentence, but I don’t want to modify it too much. This sentence is not perfect because of the limitation of the material itself. Its characteristics are the characteristics of the material itself. Its defects are caused by the material itself. I donʻt cover up the defects, I highlight their anomaly. Sometimes, half of the painting is finished and the other half is completed by time. I am interested in the blur between spaces.

My new pieces act like containers whose presence are defined by their absence. They are colorful illusions meant to conflate accustomed spatial notions. In this way, they can be also viewed as playful precautionary reminders.

How did you make these works? What was your process?


The linen covers the frame of an object, such as an old painted, family portrait. The canvas is made taunt, the primer is painted, and then the portrait is removed.

How do you use colour, texture, scale and shape in these works?

I use the objects of the room as materials, keeping true to scale. For example, I said this sentence, but I don’t want to modify it too much. This sentence is not perfect because of the limitation of the material itself. Its characteristics are the characteristics of the material itself. Its defect is caused by the material itself. I donʻt cover up this defect, I highlight the anomaly of it. Sometimes, half of the painting is finished and the other half is completed by time.

How does this project follow on from your previous works?

It is a continuation of my work concerning the strange within the familiar and the familiar within the strange.

How does this project differ from your previous works?

Before there was filled space, now there is empty space. Before I filled the space, now the background becomes the filled space. Before – object; now, it is an assumed presence.

What emotions do you hope to elicit from the audience standing in front of these works?


A general emotion is not hoped for. An illusion can often become conflation. Perhaps, it’s a warning. I would like people to see how they perceive.

Are you inspired by literature?

I draw inspiration from the Taoist literary tradition.

What do you think Covid-19 tells us about the modern world?

The virus was originally in an unknown space. It is a part of nature. Man is a virus that is actively encountered, [it is] not a virus that has encountered a person.

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

By Alice Gee

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

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

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

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

UMLEITUNG. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Zenith Designs: Re-orienting Spaces.’

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

‘This is it: “The Maschkera.”‘

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

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

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

‘What?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She was the boy and his voice purled inside her.

Light.

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

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

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

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

‘Actually he fancied you’ Andy said.

‘What?’

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

‘To whom?’

Andy kicked the gravel. ‘To me’.

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

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

‘What the hell are you on about?’

The dim lightbulb idly brightened but the room was cold.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hanna was washing up when she heard the scream.

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

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

‘Sorry, sorry, Entschuldigung.’ Andy offered.

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

Close to the house the owl continued crying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘—so what?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Wir haben ihn verjagt.’

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

国破山河在
城春草木深
感时花溅泪
恨别鸟惊心

杜甫

Alice Gee on Huangshan mountain, Anhui Province, December 2019