Rui Matsunaga – The Myth of Survival
Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation (13/14 Cornwall Terrace, Regent’s Park, London)
September 10–November 26, 2021

Rui Matsunaga, a Japanese artist based in Yamaguchi, is obsessed with the end of the world. Over five years she has examined the ‘apocalypse’ through various perspectives: the works of Dürer, animism, tribal and religious myths, and climate change. The result? A series of oil paintings and etchings, populated predominantly by tribes of frogs and rabbits, which play out scenarios in an ecological armageddon.

The etchings look as I had expected — like relics from mystic manuscripts — but I hadn’t realised how small and bright the oil paintings would be. Electric blue skies, luminous white pebbles and paintwork so fine she catches the disgruntled expression of a haggard moon in the space of a thumbnail.

Rui Matsunaga in her studio, 2021 (all images courtesy the artist)

As I move, the sun catches on stars and comets texturally embedded into the paintwork. Matsunaga paints one world we immediately see, and one which can only be seen from certain angles, in certain ‘enlightened’ moments.

Matsunaga’s voice is soft and small, but not subdued: her words fizz with an infectious vibrancy, and 10 minutes into the interview, I realise that the room about us has fallen away. Matsunaga has drawn me into a dance, and we step together fluently through conversations of metaphysics, art and the occult.

Alice Gee: With access to Google and living in such an analytical age, do you think we’re losing our ability to tell or make myths? We used to make them in the absence of ‘answers’, whereas now we have answers readily at our fingertips? 

Rui Matsunaga: I feel like we still keep going back to the three basic myths: the creation myth, the hero’s journey myth, and also a big one, the end-time myth: ‘apocalypse’. The works I’m showing you here today centre around this end-time myth. The famous one is, of course, in the Bible, but most religions, spiritual groups, or any tribe have their own end-time myths. I think it’s almost primordial that we have this fear of life and death, and also the way we bear this fear is to create a basic myth. We need it in order to understand who we are in relation to the world we live in.

Back when we had tribes, tribal myths helped us understand who we are. A child becoming an adult has a ‘rite of passage’ or a hero’s journey myth. These rituals help you realise, okay, I am an adult now, I’m going to behave differently. Today’s equivalent myth is, for example, if you wear a school uniform there is a mythology around that: it creates a kind of identity, a symbolic one, and immediately you can place yourself in society: ‘I study in this place, this is who I am’.

As long as we live, we need to understand who we are, and we need these stories to make sense of who we are. Even today in a Google world where we can look up anything, still, we need myth.

Rui Matsunaga, On the Moon (detail – full picture below)

AG: Talking of searching for your identity, what are your earliest memories of something creative or artistic that inspired you?

RM: I guess children’s books and films and TV series — Godzilla, for example. Godzilla’s a powerful monster, but he was just a little salamander, which became exposed to radiation and became humongous and destroyed everything. At first, it’s about fear of monsters and defeating them. Then, on a deeper level, it becomes a social commentary of the dangers around nuclear power in Japan, and then even deeper is the fear or memory of the atomic bomb in World War Two. So I realised: this children’s story, which I enjoyed on a superficial level, was actually expressing much more complex historical and social ideas.

AG: Godzilla is a perfect example of the three basic myths: there’s the creation myth of something gigantic from nothing, and an explanation for the seemingly impossible. Then the hero’s journey, which is killing the monster. Then there’s the threat of apocalypse lurking in the background — a destructive force in the world, the bomb, that could destroy everything. 

RM: Yes!

AG: So you start with these visual and narrative sources of inspiration, like Durer’s Apocalypse series, or the Bible. But when you sit in front of your ‘blank canvas’, how do you position these characters and create these wonderful and bizarre compositions and narratives? 

RM: The practical method is that I do a lot of drawings — especially of the animals. I take a lot from Japanese scrolls and manuscripts, and I draw and stick them onto the wall. My studio is full of drawings. Then I just look at them, and wait for them to create their own stories.

Rui Matsunaga, Ride of Discord, 2020
Oil on plywood, 20 x 25.5 cm
(image courtesy the artist)

Some of them are based on Christian mythologies, or other mythologies. So, there are some basic ideas which I then adapt to today’s context. For instance, how do we now relate to the ‘Saviour image’? It’s no longer Jesus Christ who is the Saviour image we have. Instead, the image of divinity might be an algorithm, or the image of AI, which might now symbolise transcendence.

AG: A spotlight upon these false idols that we now have, perhaps. There’s one particular piece where there’s a tiger skin on a crucifix that’s been skinned as a sacrifice to human greed…

RM: …And also, because of a lack of communication, because we don’t communicate with the natural world. We are so mortified by the crucifixion of Christ, why are we not as mortified by the sacrifice of tigers? We can shut down our sensitivity towards not only tigers but also other animals, and we repress our senses and sympathy so that we can eat them. Otherwise, we could not do so. And if we really think about that, it’s a small step away from a wider dullness in society where we have absolutely no emotional sympathy for other beings or for each other, which is so dangerous.

Also, we live in a monotheistic society, so whilst we may no longer have a strong religion, money has become…

AG: Our new one god.

RM: Right! So, even love and care have been given a price tag, even ‘spirituality’ has price tags. Everything now exists in relation to money. And what we are losing as a result is the internal — the ‘out of reach’ — or that which we can only try to pinpoint, through poetry or Oracle tradition or something instinctive. Because we can’t fully grasp this aspect of the world, we can’t put a price tag on it. It’s invisible, and I refer to this internal nature in my work as well.

Rui Matsunaga, Chiming Stones, 2016
Oil on plywood, 30 x 40 cm
(image courtesy the artist)

Rui Matsunaga, Chanting Chrysalis 2016
Oil on plywood, 30 x 40 cm

AG: It strikes me then that there’s two kinds of decay or environmental crises depicted: one an external, ecological one, but also another of the internal spirit.

RM: Yes, I think so, and the internal one is more crucial than the outside one.

AG: Perhaps we can’t truly solve the environmental crisis until we solve the internal one. Leading on from that, with the internet and Zoom calls and modern technology, as an animist, how do you feel about this new kind of ‘interconnectedness’?

RM: I think it’s a complex issue, because on the one hand, you mentioned for example, when we have virtual meetings, what we have in front of us is actually just a monitor, but we adjust our mind to consider that a real person is in front of us, and we behave in that way, so that our mind is adjusting to that type of new reality that we are forming.

Not only that, technology increasingly addresses what we have considered metaphysical before: like immortality and death. Now, science is trying to solve death, as if it’s a technical problem. If you’re elite, you can be treated in various ways, with the aim of anti-ageing and eternal life. So, what is the definition of death? Is it now a technical problem? And if so, then what is the definition of life? These questions used to be divine questions, but now scientists are dealing with them.

AG: Before the interview, you mentioned that we need darkness to have light — and you capture both through violence and humour in your work — and it struck me that what you’re suggesting, about society looking and seeking for immortality, is that the further we embark on this quest to eradicate the dark, against death, against mortality, the more we compromise the light in the world, until everything is numbed into some grey dullness. 

RM: Yes! And they are also trying to define ‘what is light?’ ‘What is consciousness’?

AG: And then ‘let’s sell it’! 

RM: Yes! Yes!

Rui Matsunaga, Beast from the Sea, Edition of 5 (AP3), 2018,
from the Apocalypse series, Drypoint, 30 x 20.5 cm
(image courtesy the artist)

Rui Matsunaga, Fearful Symmetry, Edition of 5 (AP 3), 2017,
from the Apocalypse series, Drypoint, 30 x 20.5 cm
(image courtesy the artist)

AG: Is your next project about this theme?

RM: It’s actually about Dante’s Divine Comedy. Some people say that Dante actually experienced this journey through hell and paradise. I thought this was interesting, because a Siberian Shaman also had a similar experience, lasting three days. He went into the abyss, and gained knowledge that normal perception doesn’t allow.

Again, this story has a hero’s mythology, one which we can apply to our own psychological experiences, or how we deal with the subconscious. We live in reality, but there is another parallel world which is more emotional or metaphorical, which is where a lot of our everyday decisions come from.

AG: Even if we don’t realise so. Nietzsche uses the characteristics of two Greek gods: Apollo, who represents rationality, and Dionysis, who represents emotions and instincts, to illustrate this internal struggle. But back to the work: how practically, in what medium and style, do you envision this series?

RM: At this stage — like the Apocalypse series — I’m doing a lot of drawings and etchings, and then I will paint based on the etchings.

My visualization of the Divine Comedy is about going deep inside the psyche. That’s the funny thing about the Divine Comedy. It’s almost like Dante suggests that the more you go down and deep into yourself, an ascension happens. It’s a paradox of life: the deeper you go, the wall or mental block you have falls away, and you ascend as a much freer being.

That’s actually one thing which I’m having a little difficulty with right now. Depicting hell is the easy bit, but depicting heaven is tricky. Botticelli did an amazing job of capturing what is ‘beyond’ our recognition of beauty. Towards the end of his drawings or etchings, it’s almost like you can’t see the lines anymore, the beautiful flowers and light, they become so faint…

AG: The boundaries fade away! 

RM: Yes! How can you contain light!

AG: We spoke earlier of exploring both external and internal crises that humanity faces. I think many of us can relate to going through a really dark moment, having to come back from that, and perhaps then having a radically new perspective on life — maybe depression, or grief, or living through a plague! Does this depict a personal journey for you too?

RM: Yeah, totally. As an artist, you have to go there, to those dark places. I was almost thankful that I had art to be able to express those emotions in a way that was both therapeutic, but also helped me to investigate this darkness a lot more. Like you said, after those experiences, life is different, and you read it differently.

Like Dante’s story, it puts you into perspective that all of this, all these experiences, are part of a journey. When you reach the bottom, you need to remember this is not a place you are going to dwell, but this is a journey. All my works illustrate the cycle of life, even my ‘apocalypse’ series: they are about the end of the world, but also about rebirth. That’s very important.

Rui Matsunaga, On the Moon, 2019, Oil on plywood, 20.5 x 15 cm
(image courtesy the artist)

Rui Matsunaga at Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, London, 2021

Rui Matsunaga, Beast, Edition of 5 (AP 3), 2017
from the Apocalypse series, Drypoint, 30 x 20.5 cm
(image courtesy the artist)

Rui Matsunaga, Four Riders, Edition of 5 (AP 3), 2017
from the Apocalypse series, Drypoint, 30 x 20.5 cm
(image courtesy the artist)

If we say that art styles and artistic trends are often used to identify the characteristics of a generation, the method and morphological appearances of the exhibited works by the participating artists reflect how an artist evolves to a better person through changes in the method which culture has no boundaries and professions has no exclusiveness. As the curator, Cui Cancan stated: “A new way of working inspires artists to explore new identi-ties and new artistic directions. These novel directions redefine and create a new life for the artists themselves. New identities and possibilities are the core of methods of the new generation.”

The formation of such a new generation comes from their sensibility to the society they are currently in. The latest creation of Chen Tianzhuo (born in 1985, now lives and works between Beijing and Shanghai) responds to the well-received concept of NFT in the digital art market, while retains the medium of fine art in the forms of installation, performance, video, painting, and photography. “I do whatever I am interested in, whether it is my main or side job,” Chen Tianzhuo explained. The works of artist Ni Youyu who currently lives in Shanghai include acrylic on canvas, woodcuts, installations, sculptures, and photographic collages. His method is to break through the limits that he perceived. Works such as “Domino of Space” and “Trio” construct multiple spaces that are deeply inward in antique frames, and “Pagoda” uses wood and stainless steel to implicate the idea of scale.

“To Be A Better Man” and “Six Pack”, created by Li Liao (born in 1982, now lives and works in Shenzhen), embody the changes in the city and the environment with the most intuitive approach by using his body. The artist concluded that his semi-fictional autobiographical works principally record his day-to-day life and the method resembles polishing or waiting in consumption. Tong Wenmin (born in1989, now lives and works in Chongqing), who makes good use of the body as a creative element, believes that she has no fixed methods. Her works often focus on stimulating visual poetry and inspiring action through behaviors that at first seem counter-intuitive. Through often simplified or regulated movements, her work hints at the allegorical character of the body and action within a semantically rich context. In “Breeze”, paint-stained branches leave a mark upon her back and the canvas like a breeze. In “Wave”, her body moves with the waves on the beach.

From the “Cola Project” and the “Palate Project”, to the “Lemon Project”, the art practice of He Xiangyu (based in Beijing and Berlin) often begins with his observation of a particu-lar object, event, or phenomenon, working towards the unique and relatively frenetic core. In this exhibition, he creatively combines his introspection and observation of the others in the form of games. Mei Shuzhi founded 702design in Beijing in 2010 and serves as its art director. He is constantly seeking novelty from life, to discover more possibilities of design in everyday life. He demonstrates that through his work of “like a bug which slowly moves with its perception.” Mei Shuzhi’s work “Typography Exit 2” allows the exploratory “watching” experience to break through the limitations of text as a conventional reading media.

Ge Yulu (born in Wuhan, Hubei Province in 1990, and now works and lives in the area around Beijing) uses art as an excuse to apply for approval of day-off for the museum staff in the work “Holiday Times” presented in this exhibition. The price is that he needs to cover for the staff during their day-off to complete the work originally arranged for them. In his opinion, the new generation consists of the ones who do not agree with any of the existing orders. In his work “Michelangelo’s Gift”, Zhou Yilun, an artist currently living in Hangzhou, extended the possibilities of everyday materials through multiple techniques such as splitting, reorganization, and simulation. In his view, the way of working is a life-style—he is someone who cooks every night, but also someone who often drinks in clubs until dawn.

The work “Shop Window” presented by Zhao Zhao, who lives and works between Beijing and Los Angeles, is similar to an autobiographical film. His exhibited cabinet shows the reference of his creative ideas. He claimed that his working method is mixed with multiple concerns, and there is no division of time. Architect Wang Zigeng (born in 1984) once served as the architectural history consultant for the director team of the film “Hidden Man” by Jiang Wen. In his work, he uses art to release out his superfluous mental energy. “1994” is a theatrical installation expounding a personal narrative, in which the artist turns the display of stylized architectural projects into an exploration of places and memories. Liang Chen (born in 1987) describes the series of “Spatial Hypnosis” as “the method of discovering and intervening in the spatial subconscious with space as the main body”. Applying the universe to be the new spatial-temporal coordinate, Liang’s analysis spans the Big Bang from the formation of the earth, to the geology of his hometown Dandong, the constitution of its landscapes, neighborhoods, and streets, and finally ends in the residential building where he grew up, manifested in its three interior decorations from three different periods. Through a sub-conscious recapitulation of childhood city and architectural space, Liang Chen intends to depict a sub-consciousness of substance and space.

Zhu Sha (born in1988), a graphic designer and curator who works and lives in Beijing, has begun to intervene in the contemporary art field through curatorial practice in recent years. For him, he aims to establish more links through designing, and the video “Talk and Design” displayed in the exhibition shows how Zhu Sha as an artist completes his “work diary” in a casual and personal way. Drawing Architecture Studio (DAS) (founded in Beijing in 2013 by architect Li Han, born in 1978, and designer Hu Yan, born in 1978, dedicated to architectural drawing, architectural design, and urban study) believes that “honesty” brings along with more practical and hands-on experience. “The Complete Map of Capital Beijing” presented in the form of an architectural diorama serves as a con-temporary copy of its original version from the Qing Dynasty. In the scope of 700 x 700 meters, some of most iconic Beijing architecture are collaged, mixed, and blended: from the Yonghe Temple of the Qing Dynasty to the Chinese Anglican Church built in China’s Republican Era; and from the socialist mansion An Hua Lou around the founding period of PRC to the residential areas developed in the 1980s and 1990s. Through a personal reinterpretation, the architectural models are presented in a distant yet familiar form.

In recent years, these most active and representative artists from the new generation have presented a pluralization seen in their diversified identities and works. Cross-cultural, cross-media, and cross-field practice have amplified their uniqueness. In this re-gard, Cui Cancan stated: “This phenomenon is unfolding with changes in the work pro-cess of the new generation. They are redefining the scope of professions—artists no longer simply make art, architects no longer only build houses, and designers no longer work merely graphically. They have a wide range of interests and more diverse occupa-tions that barely show hierarchy and distinction among each other. Their mindset is not just liberal but also ambiguous, and they are always vigorous, imaginative, versatile, and inventive. The style of ‘there is no single style’ has become their style.”

The features of the new generation truly denote the development of a certain era. When we take a closer look at the eclectic methods of these artists, the styles are the manifestation of the domestic development of cities and cultural life in this epoch of globalization. This new generation has also turned out to be a trace of changes that took place in our times. These revolutionary changes are exactly what Wind H Art Center is pursuing to capture in its practice. As a young art institution, since its establishment in 2020, Wind H Art Center has held numerous exhibitions and public education activities that cover multiple disciplines including contemporary art, architecture, and design. Not complying with the inherent value judgments, Wind H Art Center aims to serve as a platform for diversified cultural exchanges and discussions. Through different projects, the art center presents a wider, more connected, and more inspiring art world to the public to enrich the booming contemporary art today in China.

About The Curator

Cui Cancan is an independent curator and writer active in various fields. He has curated nearly 100 exhibitions and events since 2012. His group exhibitions include Walking the Dark Bridge at Night, Country Coiffure, FUCKOFF II, Not Acting in Images, The Sixth ring is One Ring More Than the Fifth, Ten Nights, and High-Rise from the Ground, 2015-2019 New Year’s special project series, Curatorial Classes, Nine-Story Tower, etc. The solo exhibitions he curated include Ai Weiwei, Bao Xiaowei, Chen Danqing, Chen Yufan, Chen Yujun, Feng Lin, Han Dong, He Yunchang, Huang Yishan, Jiang Bo, Li Binyuan, Liu Wei, Liu Gangshun, Liu Jianhua, Li Qing, Li Ji, Li Zhanyang, Mu Er, Ma Ke, Mao Yan, Qin Ga, Qin Qi, Sui Jianguo, Shijiezi Art Museum, Shi Jinsong, Shen Shaomin, Tan Ping, Wang Qingsong, Xie Nanxing, Xia Xiaowan, Xia Xing, Xiao Yu, Xu Zhongmin, Xu Xiaoguo, Zong Ning, Zheng Chunban, Zhang Yue, Zhao Zhao, etc.

About Wind H Art Center

Wind H Art Center is located at the south gate of Beijing’s contemporary art landmark, 798 Art District. It was designed by the renowned architect Dong Yugan. In the interior space, the architect utilized gardening to create contemporary imagery of Mountain-and-Water landscapes.

The Wind H Art Center integrates ideas of incubation, academic research, art exhibitions, collaborative innovation, humanities education, and cultural creativity. The goal is to establish a diversified research-oriented art institution and to create an academic platform for international art exchanges.

The Exhibition Center is committed to discovering and presenting artists and creators’ art practice that explores the academic frontier and the contemporary context. It emphasizes experimentality to demonstrate Chinese contemporary art’s new vectorial development. Simultaneously, the Art Center emphasizes the integration and exchange of different disciplines to build a bridge between art and life, revealing, exploring, and developing the creative potential of human beings.

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.

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

Replicas, postmodernism and ‘bad copies’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buddhism and the Ten Thousand Things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fire, Water, Air, Earth and Metal

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

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

The Moon in Water

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

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

As Dōgen said of himself watching the moon:

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

Notes

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

Will Thurman ‘Life Paintings, Volume 1: 2015-2020’
Galerie Quỳnh (118 Đường Nguyễn Văn Thủ, Đa Kao, District 1, Ho Chi Minh City) Oct. 20­ – Dec.12, 2020

In this fervent age of over-exposure on social media, mystery is a rare commodity. Will Thurman’s solo exhibition presents an intriguing scenario by requesting its visitors to leave their phones sealed and guarded at the reception desk – meaning, no photography is allowed. Prior to arriving at the show, even the name Will Thurman and his work remain an enigma to most. The gallery released zero photos of the artist’s artworks and a casual audience would be hard pressed to find a professional description of his biography anywhere by Googling. Will Thurman is a 31-year-old artist from New York, who has been living in Vietnam’s cities and countryside for 10 years and is fluent in the language. It was his wish that no photography be allowed, ‘to preserve the integrity of the artworks’. This is his first major public exhibition, a culmination of 5 years of intensive painting,

In place of a standard essay, we have this cryptic passage on the gallery’s website:

“Galerie Quynh presents:
An attack on the senses, a spectacular, a word of warning.
A Great Plague
of serene terror
of willed innocence and candied Errors.
Of cows and rats and pigs and pigeons and machines
that fail to gauge us.
and Uncle Huệ.
Things balanced on heads at some given time
but first titles that transmute as poetry or rather erratic
prose
cut-stitched to stifle the glitches of reality
or waking dreams – or live visions?
Whatever crude cacophony
An outside world – the vulgar menace
Plays mental tennis with our inner strength
just for the thrill that weird pleasure
Squandering time (depending on the weather)
Take baby steps since the bridge self-shatters
and the boat self-sinks and the boat self-sinks
And certain drugs don’t require direct administration.
Enter at your peril
And hold fast to stir still.
Through the Door stands a Dream
of the Noon variety.
— (re)arrangement by Thái Hà, words appropriated from Suzanne Brøgger, Adam Gopnik, Nguyễn-Hoàng Quyên, Quynh Pham, David Rieff and the artist.”

Installation view (ground floor) of Will Thurman ‘Life Paintings, Volume 1: 2015-2020’ (image courtesy the artist and Galerie Quynh)

Installation view (ground floor) of Will Thurman ‘Life Paintings, Volume 1: 2015-2020’ (image courtesy the artist and Galerie Quynh)

Basic questions, naturally, plague one’s mind: who is Will Thurman? Is he (or she) someone famous to have prominent writers such as Adam Gopnik and David Rieff writing about him? I was curious. Truth be told, the ‘no-phone’ request did take me aback for a few seconds – it was the first time Galerie Quỳnh has made such a request in their 17-years in Ho Chi Minh City. My initial bewilderment yielded as a glance through the gallery’s ground floor prompted genuine delight. Stepping through the entrance, occluded by silky grey curtains, one is relieved at the sight – an exhibition of painting, after all! One of the paintings here is titled ‘Through the Door stands a Dream’ (2020).

And yet, the Thurman puzzle did not abate. ‘Curiouser and curiouser!’, I think, looking at the Vietnamese words on many of these paintings. Is this Will Thurman actually Vietnamese? For the manner in which the inscriptions are employed betrays the mind of someone who has been raised and/or living in Vietnam for years, to the extent that their messages connote social observations familiarly dear to a native local.

Installation view (second floor) of Will Thurman ‘Life Paintings, Volume 1: 2015-2020’ (image courtesy the artist and Galerie Quynh)

For one, their vivid colors definitely gladden one’s eyes and heart – Cy Twombly, Philip Guston, R. B. Kitaj, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Willem de Kooning are some of the names referenced in the pages penned by the aforementioned writers about Thurman’s paintings. Their flat pictorial, even artless portrayals of animals and men and hybrid creatures, vehicles and buildings and assembly lines, fetuses and soldiers, blenders and boom box and cameras, Pope and Egyptian deities, among myriad others, in a seemingly ad-hoc manner towards which one’s mind is rather stupefied to make any sense of what it all means, prompted me to hastily refer to the exhibition’s map. In it, the works’ titles reveal themselves to be quite forthright, if not wittily earnest. Consider one: ‘There are men who make people kiss their hand. I’d rather take the chair. And somehow deforestation largely goes unnoticed.’ (2017). Or ‘Pain hurts less when the source is obvious’ (2019), and ‘She thinks one thing, he thinks another. But he’s the one who has to walk home alone at night.’ (2015).

The show’s map also reveals that there are, astoundingly, 103 artworks in total. Whereas the gallery’s mezzanine displays nine thematically white, medium-sized paintings, nothing prepared me for the visual onslaught awaiting in the two rooms on the second floor. The one adjacent to a balcony houses large works of 185 x 200-300 cm, mounted very closely together as if we are looking at one continuous Mexican mural and with their resplendent colors depicting rather strange and surreal imageries. The small back room, on the other hand, contains around 50 paintings of various sizes in salon-style hanging which, effectively, leave you rather speechless by the sheer cacophony of it. All the while, more works are placed on the gallery’s vintage lift area, hallways and ledges on the stairway’s landings. The curation of which was completely entrusted to Quyhn Pham, the gallery founder: ‘Regarding this idea of his five-year output, I did not want to install the show chronologically. I wanted it to reflect this sort of non-linear trajectory of Will’s career’, she says.

Installation view (third floor) of Will Thurman ‘Life Paintings, Volume 1: 2015-2020’ (image courtesy the artist and Galerie Quynh)

Reverse installation view (third floor) of Will Thurman ‘Life Paintings, Volume 1: 2015-2020’ (image courtesy the artist and Galerie Quynh)

Not unlike a modern take on Aesop’s fables, was my impression. Case in point, we have works with self-explanatory titles such as ‘Pig in guillotine’ (2019), ‘Pigeon in shackles’ (2019), and ‘Cow in noose’ (2019); though as their names infer, the tales of these creatures in Thurman’s depictions are more akin to Giambattista Basile’s fairytales in nature than Disney’s polished omission of grotesque details. Traces and fragments pulled from the chaotic fabric of reality are ever-present in his seemingly benign, deceptively cheerful images that range from the mundane to the absurd. On ‘Rescue’ (2019) and ‘Fall’ (2018), full quotes from Vietnamese news are recited word for word, reporting deadly accidents involving fishermen and a construction worker respectively. Accompanied by the artist’s loose, almost dreamlike drawings, the gravity of those situations is as downplayed as (if not accentuating) the detached diction employed by newsmen and accordingly, our desensitized reaction to reading them.

While Thurman’s cryptic visuals can pose as a challenge to lightning understanding on the viewer’s part, it is his agile incorporation of the written and the painted in many works that to me, yields an inviting gateway into his acute pathos. On ‘Broken record’ (2017), he muses ‘The wisest choice was leaving – [maybe, now beginning seeing the merits of staying] because what is left behind will remain/lifting heavy things can strain the back.’ At this stage, as you can tell, words and images for this artist are inseparably of equal introspection – the drawings are as wildly imagined, and yet also thoughtfully constructed as their titles and scribbles are concise and biting. I was particularly drawn to ‘Savagery’ (2020), belonging to the previously described ‘white room’, in which the directly translated Vietnamese ‘Man rợ’ takes upper-center stage on a spare yet cutting composition: who knows! a singled-out word surrounded with animal figurines and blotted out contours of dominating, shadowy men can suggest confrontation with [the history of] humankind’s dark nature. ‘Would everything change if these works were altogether left ‘Untitled’?’, I asked myself at some point.

Installation view (third) floor) of Will Thurman ‘Life Paintings, Volume 1: 2015-2020’ (image courtesy the artist and Galerie Quynh)

As somewhat (or initially) confusing, complex and even sensorially convoluted these paintings are, in the end, they truly and effectively bespeak what the exhibition’s title connotes: ‘Life Paintings’, which one can also interpret as ‘painting of/about life’. Now, how can anybody possibly capture the stories and meaning of life in its entirety, lucidly, wholly, truthfully – a perennial quest that every writer, filmmaker, artist, philosopher can relate to and has been striving for? It forever remains revealing yet elusive, perceptible yet layered, quotidian yet holding unsuspected (even uncalled-for or shocking) surprises – whose qualities I believe, are abundantly transparent in Thurman’s works as showcased in this show. One is free and welcomed to leave this show feeling perplexed, beckoning the urge for a revisit. As I stepped out onto the gallery’s balcony on the second floor for some fresh air, the sounds coming off the street suddenly took over – of boys and girls from the secondary school opposite pouring out after class, of motorbike honks and engines reverberating loudly, laughter and chatter echoing up and filling this colorful facet of urban Saigonese landscape – I found myself smiling, ‘Such is life.’

Jointly sponsored by China Arts and Entertainment Group (CAEG) and Evergrande Tourism Group, organized by China International Exhibition Agency (CIEA) and Ocean Flower Island Museum, co-sponsored by the Co-Innovation Art Creation and Research Center on Silk Road of Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), and with academic support from CAFA, the media briefing for “The Tides of the Century – 2020 · Ocean Flower Island International Art Exhibition”, was held at the CAFA Art Museum on December 22.

View of the Media Briefing

Fan Di’an, Chairman of the China Artists Association, President of CAFA and Chairman of the Exhibition Academic Committee, Li Baozong, General Manager of CAEG, Li Denghai, Vice President of Evergrande Tourism Group and General Manager of Ocean Flower Island Company, Euthumios Athanasiadis, Press and Public Diplomacy Counselor at the Embassy of Greece in China, Zhang Zikang, Director of CAFA Art Museum, Liang Anna, Curator of Evergrande Ocean Flower Island Museum, Liu Zhenlin, Director of CIEA, Sui Jianguo, Artist and Academic Committee Representative, and curators including Wang Chunchen and Yue Jieqiong were in presence.

Fan Di’an, Chairman of the China Artists Association, President of CAFA, delivered a speech.

Li Baozong, General Manager of CAEG, delivered a speech.

Li Denghai, Vice President of Evergrande Tourism Group and General Manager of Ocean Flower Island Company, delivered a speech.

As a large modern marine museum built by Evergrande Group with huge investment, the Ocean Flower Island Museum covers an area of about 74,000m₂, including about 23,000m₂ for gross building area. The museum is composed of eight modern buildings. The inauguration ceremony “The Tides of the Century – 2020 · Ocean Flower Island International Art Exhibition” will be started on February 8, 2021, and the opening ceremony and academic activities will be held in May 2021.

More than 140 works of diversified cultural backgrounds, made by over 80 artists from 23 countries including Greece, France, South Korea, Cameroon, USA, Japan, Thailand, Venezuela, Singapore, Iran, Italy, India, UK, Vietnam, and China, will be displayed during the exhibition.

Wang Chunchen, Vice Director of CAFAM and the Main Curator of this Exhibition, introduced the exhibition.

At the critical moment of global fight against COVID-19 pandemic, worldwide artists have actively responded to the invitations from China. The premium works from all over the world gather at Hainan Ocean Flower Island, expressing the unanimous efforts and wishes for helping each other and fighting against the pandemic.

Xu Bing, Background Story: Thousand Li of River and Mountain,  450x932x30cm,  2014  Provided by the artist studio.

Sui Jianguo, Cloud Garden, Handprint #3, Photopolymer 3D Printing and steel frame, dimensions: 700×300×600cm, 2019 Provided by the artist studio.

Zhang Xiaogang, The Drawer of Time, composite materials: cement slabs, electronic industrial screen, color printing photos, etc., dimensions: 300 x 868 cm (variable as per site), 2018 Provided by the artist studio.

The prestigious artists, such as Tony Cragg (UK), Marc Quinn (UK), Xu Bing, Tatsuo Miyajima (Japan), Leandro Erlich (Argentina), and Loris Cecchini (Italy) will display their works, while Gabriel Dawe (Mexico) and Kedgar Volta (Cuba) will make their debuts in China. And Gabriel Dawe (Mexico) will display his brand new “rainbow” work specially made for the exhibition.

Gabriel Dawe, Exhibition View of Rainbow, Courtesy of the Artist.

In addition, the installation created by French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot with Danzhou Diaosheng, one of China’s national intangible cultural heritages, as core elements, will provide groundbreaking local tactile experience for audiences. The artists, including Wang Jianwei, Song Dong, Choi Jeong-Hwa (South Korea), Sinta Tantra (Indonesia), and Liu Jiayu will display their new works for the exhibition.

For the “Youth Resident Artists”, six artists, namely Cai Yaling, Yue Yanna, Li Linlin, Hu Qingyan, Tian Xiaolei, and Li Yuanchen, will perform resident creations by focusing on the Ocean Flower Island Museum to express their thoughts on marine environmental protection, life, consumerism, natural environment, etc.

Greece is the guest-of-honor and a main part for the exhibition. The part is planned and designed by Katerina Koskina, a well-known curator. Her concept is based on the theory of Socratic dialectics, namely the cognition changes of things are generated through three stages: thesis, antithesis and synthesis. This is both the theoretical basis of Greek philosophic thinking and the origin of modern western philosophy, complying with China’s notion of respecting history and the dialectical thought of keeping pace with the times.

Portrait of Katerina Koskina

The Greek guest-of-honor section for the exhibition has obtained substantial support from the Embassy of Greece in China as well as the confirmation from Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the People’s Republic of China. Important works, created by over 30 Greek artists from the 1970s to present, will be displayed during the exhibition. Many of them are collected by the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece and have participated in numerous international exhibitions such as Venice Biennale and Kassel Documenta on behalf of Greece.

As the miniature of Greek contemporary art, the exhibition displays the works of the late artist TAKIS, George ZONGOLOPOULOS, Costas VAROTSOS, Aemilia PAPAPHILIPPOU, and Theo TRIANTAFYLLIDIS, the backbone forces of Greek art as well as the latest highlights of Athens Digital Art Festival. Besides displaying the contemporary art development achievements of Greece in a distinctive and multidimensional manner, the exhibition responds to the dialogues between China and Greece as two civilizations.

Aemilia PAPAPHILIPPOU, Chess Continuum

Costas VAROTSOS, Horizons

Marianna STRAPATSAKI, Invisible Places- The Vast White, 2008

George ZONGOLOPOULOS, Tel-Neant, 1997

Theo TRIANTAFYLLIDIA, Nike, 2018

THEODOULOS, Aftofota—Eterofota, 1996

Planned by Yue Jieqiong, Vice Director of Co-Innovation Art Creation and Research Center on Silk Road of Central Academy of Fine Arts, “An Azure Rendez-vous” section has invited the artists from Venezuela, USA, and Austria. The artists will jointly make an installation on the basis of the blue “seawater” installation made by Lu Yuanzheng, a Chinese artist, to present the concept of a Community of Shared Future for Mankind connected by the oceans.

The Ocean Flower Island Museum is located in Danzhou, the final workplace of Su Dongpo, a famous poet in China, as well as the origin of Hainan’s culture. For this purpose, Xu Jialing, a curator at CIEA, has invited the famous Arabian poet Adonis and seven Chinese poets and artists, Lyu De’an, Che Qianzi, Dai Guangyu, He Canbo, Tian Wei, Jia Qiuyu, and Fu Xiaotong to display their paintings and installations for the event themed by “Oriental Poetics” and respond to the historical context of Su Dongpo by demonstrating the evolution and development of oriental poetics in contemporary works.

The “2020 · Ocean Flower Island International Art Exhibition”, previously scheduled for the end of 2020, has been postponed to 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the Academic Committee and curators, the exhibition title will remain unchanged even it has been postponed.

Georgios Iliopoulos, Ambassador of Greece to China, delivered a speech via the video.

Liu Zhenlin, Director of CIEA, hosted the media briefing.

Leaders of The Art Department of Ministry of Culture of the People’s Republic of China, the Bureau of International Exchange and Cooperation, CAEG and Evergrande Tourism Group, submitted appointment letters to academic committee representatives and curators (Fan Di’an, Zhang Zikang, Wang Chunchen, Sui Jianguo and Yue Jieqiong).

As Chairman of the Academic Committee for “The Tides of the Century – 2020 · Ocean Flower Island International Art Exhibition”, Fan Di’an has invited 10 experts at home and abroad to be the committee members, including Zhang Zikang, Sui Jianguo, Wang Duanting, Zhu Qingsheng, Adrian George, Caitlin Doherty, Paul Gladston, Nanjo Fumio, Chiba Shigeo, and Tatehata Akira. Wang Chunchen, Vice Director of CAFA Art Museum, acts as the main curator; Dr, Katerina Koskina, former Curator of National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece and Culture Counselor of Athens Municipal Government, acts as the curator for the Greek guest-of-honor section; Yue Jieqiong, Vice Director of Co-Innovation Art Creation and Research Center on Silk Road of Central Academy of Fine Arts, and Xu Jialing, a curator at CIEA, are the curators for other sections.

Fan Di’an, Chairman of the China Artists Association, President of CAFA, answered to the reporter’s question.

Li Baozong, General Manager of CAEG, answered to the reporter’s question.

Li Denghai, Vice President of Evergrande Tourism Group and General Manager of Ocean Flower Island Company, answered to the reporter’s question.

Wang Chunchen, Main Curator of this Exhibition, answered to the reporter’s question.

Artist Representative Sui Jianguo answered to the reporter’s question.

About the Exhibition:

Organizational structure:

Academic supporter:

Central Academy of Fine Arts

Sponsors:

China Arts and Entertainment Group, Evergrande Tourism Group

Organizers:

China International Exhibition Agency, Ocean Flower Island Museum

Co-sponsor:

Co-Innovation Art Creation and Research Center on Silk Road of Central Academy of Fine Arts

Chief media supporter:

CAFA ART INFO

Academic Committee:

Chairman: Fan Di’an (President of China Artists Association, President of CAFA)
Members:

Zhang Zikang (Director of CAFA Art Museum)

Sui Jianguo (Professor at CAFA)

Wang Duanting (Director of Foreign Fine Art Research Laboratory, Institute of Fine Arts, Chinese National Academy of Arts)

Zhu Qingsheng (Professor at Peking University)

Adrian George (Associate Director of Exhibitions, ArtScience Museum, Singapore)

Caitlin Doherty (Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville)

Paul Gladston (Professor at University of New South Wales)

Nanjo Fumio (Special Advisor of Mori Art Museum, Japan)

Chiba Shigeo (Researcher, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Professor at Chubu University, Japan)

Tatehata Akira (President of Tama Art University, Curator of Yayoi Kusama Museum)

Organizing Committee Members:

Liu Zhenlin, Liang Anna, Fang Qi, Ma Ruiqing, Hong Ning, Chen Xiangning

Curators:

Chief Producer: Liang Anna

Chief Curator: Wang Chunchen

Greek guest-of-honor curator: Katerina Koskina

Section curators: Yue Jieqiong, Xu Jialing

Exhibition planner: Zhang Jinhao

Guest-of-honor curator assistant: Wang Ying

Exhibition affairs: Liu Wenbin

Operation & maintenance: Zhang Xiujun, Yuan Ye

Public educational activities: Gao Yue, Li Yunyun

Promotion: Zhang Yaowen, Zhu Li, Zhuang Zhuang, Li Tiantian, Yang Yanyuan

Logistics: Liang Yufei, Fan Chuangeng

Assistants: Chen Gengjiang, Chen Siyu, Gong Jian, Huang Lei, Huang Yutao, Jiang He, Li Chaoshi, Liu Yang, Lu Shengqiang, Na Xu, Qiu Yukui, Tang Shunguo, Wang Jianxing, Wang Jingbo, Wang Wanqi, Wang Wenbin, Xue Lijia, Yang Jie, Yang Lai, Zhang Mengyi, Zhang Xinxin, Zhou Bingxue (in alphabetic order)

“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].

By Kyoo Lee

Chinese Translation by Huang Jingyuan and Liang Shuhan
 

If writing is the mother of the comatose archive,
I wonder if exhibiting could be the rehearsal hall for a brief spell of somnambulation.

— Huang Jing Yuan, Right to Write

Tucked away in the left corner of the third floor of the Power Station of Art in Shanghai, between Francis Alÿs’s video Rehearsal I (1999–2001), in which a Volkswagen Beetle continues its Sisyphean exercise of ascending and descending a hill, and Wu Chi-Yu’s video Reading List (2017), in which the underbelly of transnational capitalism incisively rescales itself, is another “third world,” Huang Jing Yuan’s own hybrid gallery, Right to Write (2018). Her writing room, a co-writing space with three of her own paintings interspersed with calligraphic pieces by others, some close to calligraffitis, is situated between those two videographic loops of the modern, post or hyper. Set up like a construction site under construction, Huang’s work is — or inserts itself like — a ruggedly analog, analogically layered contrarian zone in between, where expressively inscribed surfaces are grafted, seemingly randomly, onto the inner dividers of the space such as PET sheets, semitransparent PC sheets, tall green curtains, long canvases, etc., turning the whole room into a half-closed exit, a passage out of the textual site into another sort, sortie, of third-worlding.

Huang Jing Yuan, “The Right to Write”, Installation view at “the 12th Shanghai Biennale: Proregress”, Power Station of Art, 2018. Courtesy of the Power Station of Art.

How so?

So I am walking in, wandering through this dimly lit, shack-like choral site, a sort of khôrā (χώρα), the territory outside the polis also rooted in it as an invisible receptacle, a housing house. The site is sliced and staged in five “steps on the ladder of writing,” as Hélène Cixous might say: (1) an alley-like corridor at the entrance to (2) a center-stage-like living room semi-open to (3) a backstage-like backroom that, with a set of three display cabinets and chairs, whispers “this is an archive” to (4) a cave-like bedroom long and narrow, where five books on a small plastic table party with nineteen balloons crowded around the corners, all invited by two pillows at the end of the room, a silhouette of which is visible from (5) the reception, also an exit from/to Wu’s darkroom, the only access point.

“The Right to Write”, participants and floor plan, “the 12th Shanghai Biennale: Proregress”, Power Station of Art, 2018. Photography by Huang Jingyuan. Courtesy of the artist.

So this port of dreaming is portable and porous, an ex libris, where the dreamwork, part of the book, also departs from itself, with the x of ex, its own outwork. In an exhibition leaflet, Huang writes:

The project tries to synchronize different kinds of isolation, to create a narrative for segregated worlds to mirror each other (no, they don’t explain each other, nor can they save each other). It invites viewers to ask: What is the ordinary Chinese person’s experience and expression as they negotiate the vortex of changes and ubiquitous inequality? What do these instances of picturing the world say about the time we are in? How may we empower ourselves when faced with the past and the reality in front of us, and the world yet to come?

“The Right to Write”, entrance, “the 12th Shanghai Biennale: Proregress”, Power Station of Art, 2018. Photography by Kyoo Lee.

The layout that literalizes this democratic, cramming, clamoring, and choral spacing stays circular, which renders this documentary project multilayered as well as multilingual, and its discursive realism materially imperative: it is what it is. What you are entering and exiting into at once is a transient cocoon for the dispossessed in transit that can be — and was — constructed in just a couple of days. An interstitial crossbreeding of the words and the worlds across the board, a concurrent sighting-citing of the contingent “coming-together” (Huang’s words) on-site of what matters materially: that is what is happening in this counter-show of the sociopolitical hierarchy and intricacy of existence in China.

“The Right to Write”, entryway (right: Ma Yongjin part; Left: TST part), “the 12th Shanghai Biennale: Proregress”, Power Station of Art, 2018. Photography by Jiang Wenyi. Courtesy of the Power Station of Art.

Held here is an unmanicured display of the messy, messily precise assemblage of wor(l)ds. This democalligraphic utopia is littered with not only letters — a kinetographic mix of Chinese, English, German, slogans, clichés, quips, among others — but an eclectic array of homey materials such as florescent lamps, blankets, foam padding, and vinyl sacks.

There are scraps on the bedroom wall, including a sheet from a college-ruled notebook bearing the logo of Beijing’s Tsinghua University over which an un(der)recognized migrant worker-calligrapher, one of the fifteen invited, has written his lines quite elegantly — a sign of education. The letterhead signifies something for the letter-writer otherwise insignificant; see how such a socially significant space, Tsinghua, one of the highest seats of learning in China, was used as an interface, as a practice paper. What makes this otherwise ordinary note noteworthy is the psychopolitical incongruity between the two different use values held by that inscriptive surface, one utterly functional and the other overly symbolic. Those blank lines inviting aspirational inscriptive practices routinize the small, private pleasure of playing on a (reproduced) public property, which would also be inconsequential — or is it? Such a transposition does seem to effect transvaluation, however micro. In this shabby dreamscape, like a roomy coffin, the glass ceiling could also shelter the nanotransgression of a writer enjoying his own calligraphic (with)drawing, a room of his own.

“The Right to Write”, Installation view (Xu Liangyuan part), “the 12th Shanghai Biennale: Proregress”, Power Station of Art, 2018. Photography by Kyoo Lee.

So what?

Looking back, what initially attracted me was this concept behind the current edition of the Shanghai Biennale: “proregress,” a curious head-scratcher from poet-painter-playwright E. E. Cummings, whose works countered the ideology of progress, the discourse against which one is supposed to feel under- or over-developed or still developing. At the Biennale, the curatorial team has brilliantly recontextualized proregress as the correlate to a mystical dance step, 禹步 (yubu), in the ancient Daoist ritual: a twisted bi-directional movement composed of stepping forward once and backward twice. In its contraction, proregress holds together the scrambled eggy steps of choreographic time across this chiastic zone of modern/postmodern/spatiotemporal contemporaneity and simplexity, “actually absorbing,” as the biennial’s chief curator Cuauhtémoc Medina aptly puts it, “the weight of this moment in time,” all the complications and entanglements that time itself seems to endure now and nowadays as if forever.

“The Right to Write”, floor, “the 12th Shanghai Biennale: Proregress”, Power Station of Art, 2018. Photography by Huang Jingyuan. Courtesy of the artist.

Huang’s Right to Write is, again, an illuminating case in point, a vibrant work in proregress. An imaginatively populated and democratically polyvocalized why-not, this choral space for an archival future honors without trying to harmonize the life experiences of the xiaorenmin (xiao small, renmin people as in People’s Republic of China). She choreographs their microsignatory gestures by unleashing and rechanneling their expressive, and at times lyrical, potentials — through and toward the collaborative platforming of their auto-ethnographic or auto-documentary work. This mode of socially participatory art is literally process-oriented since the work in network, at every step, materializes through co-creative dialogues; the artist is there not to validate or authorize but as a sort of midwife. As a series of counter-proscriptive and co-scriptive experimentations in open-ended collaborations, Right to Write (or to read) becomes a site-specific, descriptively proregressive exploration and analog data-visualization of a polycentric democalligraphic utopia — pregressive, even (walking along as if ahead/around/back and forth).

“The Right to Write”, Installation view (Chen Jianhe part), “the 12th Shanghai Biennale: Proregress”, Power Station of Art, 2018. Photography by Huang Jingyuan. Courtesy of the artist.

What is the condition that makes progressive and regressive moment, itself so ambivalently (with)held, possible? Such a Kantian quest could be recast in the spirit of daoist proregressivity too: pushing for “pregressing,” I’m transporting this idea that dao (way/route 道) is “in the making” (道行之而成), not simply made, as in the second chapter of the Zhuangzi (莊子), which showcases the egalitarianism of Daoist philopoetics. Pregress (道行), a Daoist practice of “following” Dao, is an instantaneous auto-spacing and pacing, an improvisational performance per form (of its own), which is not to say that the pregressor is an “avant-garde” walker or mover, for she “advances” not. Rather, yubu-ing more or less, she lingers with her neighbors and moves with or without them, as necessary, while passing through various walls, connecting the dots here and there. In short, pregress points to choral timing and spacing itself — or herself — embodied in its vehicular dao, namely, passages and processes including protocols in motion.

So why bother?

I am interested in further resemiologizing the eco-echo-spacing mode of socially engaged art and articulating such in a more site-specific, sinographic set of idioms. I focus on the dynamic ambience of Huang’s translingual and social dreamwork, inseparable from her teamwork as well as her own artwork, because there I see how the pregressive level of its praxis also mirrors and reinforces its formative bioenergetics (qi 气/気), not just its morphology; this way, the framing and the framed become reciprocally generative.

Perhaps this is how a Daoist sensorship works as a mode of (counter-)demonstration too. See how a critical intervention happens through and concurs with a counterbalancing perceptual move: observe the convoluted yet stabilized shaking, the shake-up in the middle of it, swift and quiet, potential or actual, literal or metaphoric, the phenomenological and material presence of the other move, its necessary messiness, however mini or contained. What prompts all that jazz, this network of collaboration, if not the work of netting and knitting per se? Huang’s structurally contingent, makeshift production of proletariat calligrammatology through socially synergetic artistic practices presents a matrixially autographic “X” without presetting or representing “it” (X) while proregressively renewing each one in the form of auto-archival backtracking and recasting.

“The Right to Write”, Installation view (Song Chengbao part), “the 12th Shanghai Biennale: Proregress”, Power Station of Art, 2018. Photography by Kyoo Lee.

Involved here is a constant passive-active glancing back and forth, the active gaze of the artist, also visually metonymized in the two (pair-able) paintings of a tight-lipped, stubborn-looking little girl at the back leading to the reading room of the house (Next to the water 01, 2016) and a middle-aged woman in front framing the living room, who looks like a world-weary Chinese Athena today (Next to the water 03, 2018). “If writing is the mother of the comatose archive,” as the artist writes, “exhibiting could be the rehearsal hall for a brief spell of somnambulation,” where that girl turning around to look at you, that haunting one, could be you, any one of, in the past or future, just as that lady resting there for a while in the middle of some group tour could be anywhere, anyone.

“The Right to Write”, Installation view (Oil painting “Next to the water 03” by Huang Jingyuan), “the 12th Shanghai Biennale: Proregress”, Power Station of Art, 2018. Photography by Huang Jingyuan. Courtesy of the artist.

Further telling is the position of those two paintings triangulated by one in between, an image of a (pregnant?) girl and a boy holding each other (Next to the water 02, 2017). The pregressive circularity of and bordered connections among three female figures, only visually signified here, functions like an ur-text (of contemporary China in the making?) that seems already fragmented as if pre-indexed. By proactively staging counterfragmentations as a series of shout-outs, however small or seemingly secondary, Huang’s anarchive, along with the pregressive vacating of its own vocal subjectivity, effects the autocuration of an eclectically free “we”, the sort of intersubject not as strongly present in more elitist and individualistic “other Western” figures such as Emily Dickinson or Walter Benjamin, those also focused on the fragment(ed)o(nto)logy of documented lives.

What would those writers from other shores have seen in this “other” writing?

“The Right to Write”, Installation view, “the 12th Shanghai Biennale: Proregress”, Power Station of Art, 2018. Photography by Kyoo Lee.

The rustic, quietly irreducible residency of the graphic bodies dynamically distributed and detailed in small pieces of papers and big pictures held together in their chrono-diverse proregressivity, pregressively intensifies the very blurry overlap between the visual and the “verbal” which, in the case of Chinese characters, is close to visuo-musical. Right to Write as a right to play de-monolingualizes and re-quotidianizes the very norms, practices, and scenes of writing, and the artwork itself, the platform that looks but is not flat, unfolds through a serially inclusive, transformatively collective aesthetic democratization, especially an asynchronic reminification with other “Chinese characteristics,” of a Right to Write.

This could perhaps be one way to split open and empower alternative social (including socialist or is it now post-socialist?) tracks within China today, in and outside her hyper-controlled politico-economic landscapes and turbo dreams. This idea of a democalligraphic u-topia remains highly speculative and yet it is at least an idea. On my way out of the Shanghai Biennale, right past Museums, Money and Politics (2018), Andrea Fraser’s map of the US shown in China today, another visualization of the “verbal,” I thought, yes, “right: to write _____” alone together would be an idea — especially to write along with others in a corner room of ones’ own belonging to a stately house that used to be a power station, yes, power.

“The Right to Write”, Installation view (Xu Shida part), “the 12th Shanghai Biennale: Proregress”, Power Station of Art, 2018. Photography by Huang Jingyuan. Courtesy of the artist.

Kyoo Lee, a member of AICA-USA, a Professor of Philosophy, Gender Studies and Justice Studies at the City University of New York, and the author of Reading Descartes Otherwise and Writing Entanglish, is a transdisciplinary philosopher, art/cultural/literary critic and writer.

A recipient of fellowships and visiting appointments from Cambridge University, CUNY Graduate Center, KIAS, the Mellon Foundation, the NEH, Seoul National University, 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 numerous academic journals and anthologies. Her Mellon-funded anthology, Queenzenglish.mp3: poetry | philosophy | performativity, with contributions from 50+ poets, musicians, theorists and performance artists from across the globe, is forthcoming.

The co-editor of philoSOPHIA: A Journal of transContinental Feminism, she also serves on the editorial boards of Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics, Open Humanities Press, Simon de Beauvoir Studies and Women’s Studies Quarterly.

Throughout her site-specific cogitographical practices, Q Professor Lee explores co-generative links between critical theory and creative prose including “art writing”.

From August 15 to November 29, 2020, UCCA presents “Elizabeth Peyton: Practice,” the artist’s first solo exhibition in China. Since the 1990s, Peyton (b. 1965, Danbury, Connecticut) has been a major force in the resurgence of painting and the revitalization of portraiture. The exhibition features drawings, paintings, and prints from throughout her thirty-year career, with a particular focus on work from the past decade. Peyton’s repertoire of subjects ranges from fellow artists and friends to cultural and historical figures, including Klara Lidén; Tyler, The Creator; Queen Elizabeth II; Angela Merkel; Dan Kjær Nielsen; Jonas Kaufmann; David Bowie; and Yuzuru Hanyu. Her powerful brushwork, colorful palette, and elegantly austere compositions all serve to bring the viewer into the psychic terrain of both the figure portrayed and the artist observing them. The exhibition is a collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery in London, where Peyton’s solo exhibition “Aire and Angels,” curated by Lucy Dahlsen, former Associate Curator, National Portrait Gallery, and the artist, was held from October 3, 2019 to January 5, 2020. “Practice” is organized by Luan Shixuan, UCCA Curator.

The exhibition reprises key works from “Aire and Angels,” which juxtaposed Peyton’s art with the permanent collection at the National Portrait Gallery, drawing connections between her work and approaches to portraiture from throughout art history. “Practice” consists entirely of works by Peyton, yet similarly grounds her contemporary oeuvre in a longer artistic tradition, evoked by her portraits of historical figures and pictures made after the works of artists such as Edward Burne-Jones and Gustave Courbet. As Peyton states in the exhibition catalogue, the show is not intended as a comprehensive overview: it is more the artist’s view of her own work.

The exhibition title references the idea of “practice” as both a regimen of focused training and an artist’s ongoing process and body of work. “Practice” sees Peyton working and growing across a range of media including gauzy pastels and watercolors, oil paintings defined by intense brooding tones, and monotype prints capturing bold, direct forms. Spare first works like the delicate charcoal characters studies Napoleon (1991) and Princess Elizabeth’s First Radio Address (1993) capture the point at which her personal study of literature and history coalesced into an awareness of the power of individuals and an incisive sensitivity to the stories and charisma that can be found written into faces. As her career progressed, these are qualities that Peyton would increasingly find in her contemporaries, intimately portraying the humanity of creative, visionary people. She depicts both personal acquaintances and figures from the remote past with a tangible sense of love and fascination, each portrait crystalizing a moment, which may reach across time and space, shared between artist and subject.

The exhibition also features still lifes, as well as a number of paintings and prints inspired by opera, from the last ten years. Scenes from operas including Tristan and Isolde and Manon Lescaut, and portraits of performers such as Jonas Kaufmann speak to her engagement with the movements, rhythms, and narrative sense of the art form. Peyton has noted that opera and still lifes provide her with “readymade” compositions, from which she can adopt scenes and stories as frameworks to freely paint within.

Peyton treats each of these subjects with the same compassion and careful attention, no matter the background of her sitter, her relationship to them, or the specific medium used for each piece. With a refreshing directness, the works in “Practice” draw viewers into the hermetic space shared between the painter and the painted, halting time to capture glimpses of love, beauty, and poetry.

UCCA Director Philip Tinari notes, “UCCA is pleased to present this exhibition by an American painter who has inspired a generation of Chinese artists and art lovers. Elizabeth Peyton’s distinctive and poetic approach to brushwork, subject matter, tonality, and composition resonates in an artistic context where figurative painting has always been prominent. While we are disappointed that owing to travel restrictions related to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Peyton will not be able to join us in Beijing for her opening, we nonetheless look forward to sharing her vision and contribution with new and larger audiences.”

Now in his 9^th decade, Alex Katz is one of the greatest living artists. Yet Katz remains in a category of his own. His crisp visual analysis and painting style, honed over the last 70 years and informed by Pop and Abstraction Expressionism, reflect a singular approach to the examination of people—New Yorkers, especially—caught in a moment of time and light. We spoke with Katz by telephone about influences, recent shows and the key model for his entire oeuvre, his wife and muse of 60 years, Ada.

Chris Moore: I want to start, first of all, asking you about light in your paintings; the role that light plays whether in the portraits or the landscapes.

Alex Katz: Well, the light is what pulls everything together. It starts off with an idea of the subject matter, and then I work out the light and the light is what holds it all together. The color is used for the light, the light is the consistent thing in all the work. The light is quite specific.

CM: It creates a certain time too, because light is tied to a certain time of the day.

AK: Well yes, light has to do with time. It’s a quick light and it has to do with getting into the immediate present. It’s similar to the way some music affects people: light is in the present. There’s been things on it in writing where people wanted to get into the ‘immediate present’. I think Gertrude Stein wrote about that: get rid of the narrative, because the narrative takes place in time.

Ada and Alex Katz in Maine，1990
亚历克斯·卡茨与妻子艾达在缅因州，1990

CM: Looking at your paintings over the past 50 years, you can always say that these have taken place after the Second World War but other than that, they’re out of time. If you just look at them as images, it’s impossible to say, were they made last year or were they made 40 years ago.

AK: Well, that’s nice. I have no idea about that, you know, how people perceive the work.

CM: Well I guess it also comes from how you use light in painting, because there is this consistence, this sense of a moment in a day, as opposed to a progression over a period of time.

AK: Yeah, that’s right. Impressionist paintings are over a period of time. They’re not specific at all in terms of light. With me, it’s a lot of light, but it’s analysed Iight. This is really particular and in a lot of paintings, I do different types of light. I do incandescent light, fluorescent light, night light, twilight, daylight, morning, afternoon, and each one is very specific to the time.

CM: This also comes out from how you make the painting. You start off with a sketch done in paint on board.

AK: It’s difficult trying to do it all at once. A sketch is mostly for the light. Then I make drawings that try to work out the forms.

CM: This is really interesting because traditionally drawing would come before painting but in your case, drawing is a tool used in painting.

AK: Yes, drawing comes secondary, because if I start thinking about the drawing instead of the painting, I’m never going to get the light right.

CM: Ha! No, of course not, because then you’re worried about the form! So, form follows light, form follows the immediacy, the moment.

AK: Absolutely. You just use it to make some sense out of it.

CM: That’s really interesting, and I think it’s also part of the reason why you don’t fit into any categories. Some people have tried to say, well, he fits in a little bit with Pop artists, but I don’t see that. It’s like you’re painting on your own.

AK: Well, they’re like big fashion trends in everything and they sort of hook together. And for an artist to be viable, he has to be part of a fashion trend, a big trend. Like a trend after World War Two was to break forms apart. And that’s like Bebop [Jazz music], Faulkner, Jackson Pollock, they were breaking down linear forms and went across everything. I think when work has been made in the big sense of changing fashion, that gives the work style, and I think style hasn’t changed too much. If something has a lot of style, it always has a lot of style and you can say, is timeless, in a way.

CM: Exactly. And would this also relate to the stylisation of Japanese art? I read somewhere that you were also influenced by the Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806).

AK: Utamaro was a real influence because he was doing the same bohemian world I lived in and there weren’t any Americans doing that ‘high bohemian’. There was a kind of ‘low bohemian’ that I didn’t find attractive at all. I saw his work, and I said, “Wow! That’s like people I know!“

CM: Well this is the whole milieu of the poets and the Beat Generation, wasn’t it?

AK: The poets were, I think, more connected to the time period than I was in the late 50s, into the 60s. The poets were where I was. There was a reaction against the rhetoric of some of the Abstract Expressionist, very high minded, generalised things, like religion, god, truth. And the poets and myself were involved in everyday things in a sophisticated way.

CM: In a way also that eschews, let’s say, philosophical pretention.

AK: Exactly. In the work of the Abstract Expressionists, there was a big influence of French Existentialism. It made sense in Paris, it didn’t seem to make any sense to my life. Or to the poets!

CM: [laughing] It didn’t need to!

AK: We didn’t need it.

CM: The French had Existentialism, America had Jazz.

AK: That’s right, that’s right! Exactly, exactly! I was much more in love with Jazz than I was with Existentialism.

Alex Katz exhibition at Timothy Taylor
亚历克斯·卡茨在伦敦蒂莫西·泰勒的个展

CM: I saw the show you had at Timothy Taylor in London recently. I was really taken by the whole show but particularly by two aspects. The first was the use of two-dimensional sculptures: the small version of a woman looking [at the exhibition] but of course from both sides it’s from the back [the view], and the mirrored, highly-polished steel profile that just hangs in space. We can return to that but the other one was all the drawings you did of people in the subway. That was completely fascinating to me because I didn’t know about this work. And again, it’s about the immediacy of how people live, people’s existence at a certain moment in this sort of strange space. How did that all start?

AK: Well, it was like learning how to draw. Cooper Union is a hard school to get into and hard school to stay in. The drawing I had done previously was from casts of antique sculpture, where you would take a week to make a drawing. I got to Cooper and just couldn’t do anything in 20 minutes. So, I got a lot of pads and just started drawing around the clock. If I wasn’t eating, I was drawing. And I did it for about two years. The idea was  just to draw what was in front of you. I wasn’t interested in meaning, I was interested in putting down what I was seeing. I guess that was the start of literary subject matter being eliminated.

CM: Because there’s no narrative in the subway: people are going from A to B.

AK: No narrative. I hated writing about that depressing realism, you know: show how the poor people are! Put it this way: you know what it goes with? It goes with like ‘gypsy’ music! It goes into Western narratives of hopes gone, and it goes on and on, and people love it—they cry, they feel good. I find it not quite disgusting but very boring.

CM: There’s not emotion in your paintings, in that sense. Any emotion is interior to the subject.

AK: Yes, it’s not ‘express yourself’.

CM: It’s catching the particular moment.

AK: It’s an idea of high art too. The thing I got from de Kooning and Kline was painting a large impersonal painting. Being able to do things that size. When I look at Giotto, he’s great, he can have personal feelings done in a big impersonal style. It’s quite fantastic.

Large-scale

CM: When did you start doing the large-scale paintings?

AK: Well I got up to 6ft-square in the early 60s. That was very large. Up until then the largest I’d done was 4x6ft. That was a fairly good-sized painting for those times; the spaces were smaller. The exhibition spaces and where the paintings went [collector homes] was smaller, too. The Abstract Expressionists went back to large sized paintings. I saw a room that collector Ben Heller had and around the room was floor-to-ceiling Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, you know?

CM: Good god!

AK: Yeah! And I thought it was the most elegant things I’d ever seen and I said, let’s go for it! And no one had done large-scale figurative painting, you know? For the early paintings I had no precedent; they were really rough, but I knew what I wanted to do: I wanted to make a large-scale figurative painting that would hold up to the Abstract Expressionist paintings. That was all through the 60s.

CM: This is also when you started using the traditional cartoon method of transferring drawings to canvas.

AK: Yeah, because I could paint 6x6ft direct but when I went to 6x12ft or 6x10ft, something like that, I no longer could do it that way. So, then I started to make preliminary sketches, then larger sketches and put it on the canvas. And I wanted the paintings to be clean, so I didn’t do the drawings directly on the canvas, but I thought of doing it on paper and transferring it.

So, from totally direct paintings to this very indirect way I use now, just evolved because of what I wanted. Particularly when I want to do something with a lot of figures like “Twelve Hours” (1984), those big dance paintings (“Private Domain” 1969) and group scenes (“Rose Room” 1981), I just didn’t want to work on a canvas that’s full of charcoal.

CM: No, because it will get into the paint.

AK: It affects the colors, and I paint very thin.

CM: And the light…

AK I use the grounds; the grounds give me light.

CM: What sort of a base do you use? Is it a traditional gesso?

AK: We use three coats of gesso and two coats of oil.

CM: That’s where you get the luminosity from!

AK: Yes, the luminosity is made physically because store-bought canvas is usually just maybe two coats of white with umber in it. It’s a different color. It hasn’t got any of the light that the grounds I choose have.

Portraits and Landscapes

CM: What is the relationship between the portraiture and landscapes. I was looking at the current show you have at Peter Blum with three paintings. That’s a very specific ‘theatrical’ staging.

The exhibition comprises just three large works: a portrait flanked by two landscapes.

Alex Katz exhibition at Timothy Taylor
亚历克斯·卡茨在伦敦蒂莫西·泰勒的个展

AK: Picasso and Matisse painted descriptively and volumetrically. There’s almost a line around every form and it’s all solid. And I wanted to go out more like Pollock or Bonnard. You know? Spread it out! And the landscapes seemed like a vehicle to do that. I didn’t think about it; I always did both.

Doing figurative work In the 50s Katz was working virtually alone. The London school, with painters such as Francis Bacon, had very little impact on the New York scene.

AK: In the 50s it seemed more interesting for a while to do the figures, the figures in the flat grounds. It seemed more scary but you make it work, right? Then, I always did some landscapes but in the 90s I started to think about the environmental landscapes; the landscapes in a picture as being really an environment that wraps around you. The two paintings at Peter Blum—landscapes—are that, and the other one belongs to the big faces, which was later, a more developed painting than the landscapes.

CM: There are no lines in nature. Color just flows in from one area to another.

AK: Well you really want to get into your unconscious. When painting direct, the unconscious paints the picture, pretty much. That was the one thing from the Abstract Expressionist thing I really took too.

CM: This comes back into the whole idea of immediacy again.

AK: Yes, immediacy coming from the unconscious. I think most of our being is unconscious. You just look at something: you like it, you don’t like it. It’s totally unconscious.

CM: So, there’s no lines, we’re removing consciousness, and we’re removing narrative. These actually are all related ideas?

AK: Yes, it’s all about removing narrative. Most of our being is unconscious, the subconscious you like things, you don’t like things. Basically, when you’re painting direct and fresh, it’s not an idea, you just say, does it look good?

CM: What was the role of the sculptures? Obviously, you’re a painter, first and foremost.

AK: The stuff that I’ve done—the cut outs—it was sort of a freak. It happened by accident… The idea of sculpture, to me, was to eliminate mass and volume and make the sculpture into light, and still have presence. That’s what the cut outs did. There’s no mass to the cut outs, and very little volume. It’s all about the light, but it has substance, and it has its presence, and that was it.

CM: It’s also scale, because there some very big and, in the Timothy Taylor show, two very small.

AK: That had to do with destroying the idea of life-size. Life-size belongs with truth. It’s from another time period.

CM: Because the search for truth again is part of this issue of narrative. It gets in the way.

AK: No, there is no narrative. You’re dealing with perception. Like, where is somebody? That determines the size.

On Photography

CM: Does that have any relationship with photography or not? Either your own or in general?

AK: Well, artists picked up on it early, like Munch’s photos and Manet’s photos and it became taboo because it’s very restrictive. If it’s used in a literal way, it’s very restrictive. I used photos in the early 50s. The static image came out of photos. Brady, the Civil War photographer, was an influence on those early flat paintings because of the multiple impressions. When he shot something, it was an image on top of an image on top of an image, because of the slow exposure. They interested me.

The thing the photo does not have is color and light. It’s always recessive. It’s not in the present tense. Photos are just about always in the past tense. Taking the photograph and painting it in the early works, like I would paint a landscape, brought it into the present tense. Then in the 70s or 80s, if I saw a photo I liked, I would get people to pose like it and do it from life.

Now I’ve been using an iPhone for photos and I can bring the image into the present tense. So, photos have always been a factor for me. Very few painters paint direct from life anymore. The photo has dominated the vision of people in the Western world. Most people think a photograph is realistic.

CM: Which it’s not!

AK: It’s only a fraction of what you see. Photos changed the way people see the world. People see the world now through photos. They used to see it through bad painting.

CM: [laughing] Well, yes!

AK: Well, it’s true!

CM: It is true! It’s exactly true!

AK: People think what they see is true, is real. Well, it’s not. It’s dictated by your culture. Culture tells you the way you see things. People don’t see anything clearly outside of their culture. Example; as Gombrich says: Impressionist art is realistic and African art is symbolic. And I say, to whom? To an African, an Impressionist painting is not realistic. His sculpture is realistic. It’s a clear example of a culture determining how you see things. If you try to be aggressive in terms of seeing things, people don’t like it. And that’s the problem I have with my paintings: they’re really aggressive in terms of seeing. It disturbs people because A it is figurative, and B. it’s different.

CM: People don’t want to see what they’re looking at, they want to see what they expect.

AK: They think it’s real because they’re seeing it.

Ada

CM: One final question: I wanted to ask you about Ada, your wife. You’ve been together for a very long time.

AK: I actually just wrote a book about her. She’s kind of amazing looking. The whole family is extraordinary looking. She’s amazing looking, because she could be Dora Maar. Picasso would’ve gone nuts over her! When I saw Dora Maar—the paintings, I said, god this girl’s beautiful! Then when I saw the photograph, I said, oh he cheated on the shoulders.

Ada fitted to the European beauty of Dora Maar but she could also be the American beauty. She had the full lips, the short nose.

She went to a lot of movies, when she was young, and all her gestures come out of the movies. So, it was like painting a dancer. She never makes a bad gesture. You know, I really lucked-out: I got this great model, who you could shift this way and that way and always made a great gesture. She was brought up in the clothes environment. So, Ada was a great dresser all her life. Her mother made her fantastic clothes. You know, most girls in New York don’t learn how to dress until their late 20s. Ada was well dressed when she was 6 years old. Ada has clothes now that her mother made that are 60 years old and she’s puts them on and they’re just like today. All in all, she was just an amazing piece of work!

CM: When you paint her, are you painting your model or are you painting Ada?

AK: She’s cast in different roles. Very few of the paintings look like her. People always recognise her but a lot of the paintings don’t look like her, because it’s usually some idea of something that I’m painting, that’s she’s the vehicle for.