“LE SILENCE Une fiction”

NOUVEAU MUSÉE NATIONAL DE MONACO
56 boulevard du Jardin Exotique
February 2–April 3

Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, Ballroom, Lee Plaza Hotel, Detroit, 2006, color photograph, 38 x 47".

In Werner Herzog’s science fiction fantasy The Wild Blue Yonder, 2005, a space expedition returns to earth to find that human civilization has been wiped out. The exhibition “LE SILENCE Une fiction” builds on this scenario, offering a snapshot of a postapocalyptic world filled with archaeological remains in the form of works representing extinct flora and fauna, extant architectural monuments, or devastated urban sites. Consisting of photographs, paintings, videos, and sculpture, they constitute the building blocks of a compelling, albeit open-ended narrative, triggering—like science fiction literature—the sense of awe, remoteness, unease, or anxiety associated with the aesthetics of the sublime.

These unsettling emotions are compounded by the relations among the works themselves—for example, the dynamic between the shadows of different botanical species preserved in Lourdes Castro’s oneiric heliographic prints and the brown plantlike form on an off-white background constituting Michel Blazy’s Branche, 2009, which turns out to be layers of chocolate and vanilla cream that have been nibbled at by mice. Blazy’s piece comes across as the repugnant flip side to the tenuous beauty of Castro’s work, undermining her poetic perspective on the notion of the vestige or trace. Meanwhile, the swooping colored birds in Bartolomeo Bimbi’s stylized oil painting Uccelli, ca. 1710–20, take on, in this context, a disturbingly menacing quality, reinforcing Jochen Lempert’s more realistic, but no less sinister, static black-and-white close-ups of birds’ heads in Oiseaux-Vögel, 1997–2004.

Still other works foreground traces of human activity. Aestheticized, silenced, and made remote, these vestiges run the gamut of the contemporary urban sublime, ranging from Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s desolate views of Detroit to Hiroshi Sugimoto’s timeless black-and-white image Seagram Building, 1997, which eschews dystopian tropes. Whether trafficking in urban destitution or corporate modernism, these works invite us to reflect on what we want to leave behind.

— Rahma Khazam

Varvara Shavrova

GALLERY OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Meeting House Square, Temple Bar
January 21–February 26

Varvara Shavrova, The Opera, 2011, still from a color video, 21 minutes 22 seconds.

In her previous bodies of work, the Moscow-born and currently Beijing-, Dublin-, and London-based artist Varvara Shavrova explored the sometimes arbitrary nature of territorial divisions. In her installation Borders, 2007, she explored the cultural traditions in the hinterlands between Russia and China; in Untouched, 2008, she juxtaposed images from various social and architectural transformations in Northwest Ireland with scenes of similar activity in Beijing.

In her current solo show, she looks at a different aspect of continuum, division, and difference. At the heart of the exhibition is The Opera, 2011, a nearly twenty-one-minute video that portrays actors assuming their characters for the Peking Opera. When this form of opera emerged in the late eighteenth century, all the actors were male, and elaborate makeup and costumes effected transformations for female roles. By the 1870s, women subverted this tradition by assuming the male parts (the first female Peking Opera company was founded in Shanghai in 1894). The extreme nature of the artifice at play in the art of Peking Opera makes the themes revealed in this exhibition––transformation, ambiguity, social masks, the seductive nature of beauty, and the making and remaking of public and private personas––all the more potent.

As Shavrova follows two such makeovers, a sound track by Benoit Granier, which fuses traditional Chinese music with contemporary electronica, emphasizes the utter outlandishness of the process. The male actor’s nervousness is slowly transformed into confidence, as he is subsumed into his character through the ritual application of wigs and all. A series of photographs, “The Opera I-VII,” 2012, also tracks this process, which is revealed in reverse in a pair of time-lapse sequences, also titled The Opera, 2010.

— Gemma Tipton

“The Parenthesis Show”

CONTEMPORARY IMAGE COLLECTIVE
22 Abdel Khalek Tharwat, 4th Floor
February 26–March 31

Mai Hamdy, untitled, 2012, plastic, dimensions variable. Installation view.

This exhibition introduces audiences to the output of five young, largely unknown artists whose work is physically engaged, playful, and elegantly conceptual in scope. The pieces on view were produced over the course of a three-month workshop, a collaborative initiative of CIC and the Space for Contemporary Art and Cultural Development, which paired participants with established artists Doa Aly, Osama Dawod, and Ahmed Nagy.

Sarah Hamdy’s multimedia work Transmission, 2012, comprises whimsical watercolors of colorful birds, two portraitlike monoprints of the moon, and an old television set hooked up to a laptop computer––an unlikely combination that can be traced to an interest in incidental sound. The TV buzzes gently with white noise augmented by the artist to suggest the aural traces of outer space and echoes of the Big Bang that (unbeknownst to most viewers) leave traces in the sounds of static produced by analog television sets. Meanwhile, Gehad Anwar’s large-format photographs and videos offer quixotic scenes of a plastic toy tiger, worked over by the artist in modeling clay. Aya El Fallah’s painting is a take on a photograph of a man and a woman in formal dress. The nostalgic frisson, the sketchlike lines, and the ornamental details fleshing out the portrait with a design sensibility will seem familiar to art audiences in Cairo. Weaam Said’s three witty sculptural works rightly occupy a room of their own.

After dark, the otherwise unremarkable gallery window floating four stories above downtown Cairo’s urban snarl emanates a subterranean viridescent light. An illuminated swathe of green cloth resembling the material used to drape the building facades of Cairo’s ubiquitous construction projects sheathes the gallery ceiling. It snakes out the window, climbing up the Beaux-Arts building’s exterior and finally wrapping itself over the building’s cornice. This untitled work by Mai Hamdy offers a subtle but startling interruption of those conventions dictating the division of space within one of the city’s densest quarters. In doing so it draws local exhibition and arts practices into focus within this multilayered context.

— Clare Davies

Liu Wei and Ai Weiwei

FAURSCHOU 林冠画廊 | BEIJING
798 Art Zone, No. 2 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang Di
October 13–February 26

Liu Wei, Don't Touch, 2011, ox hide, wood, metal, dimensions variable.

Featuring two of China’s most prominent contemporary talents, this exhibition offers a strikingly uncluttered display of powerful statements. Ai Weiwei’s Map of China, 2004, presides over the first room one encounters. A rigid wooden columnar volume fashioned from demolished Qing dynasty temples, this work has smooth contours that rush up to a cross-section in the shape of China. Beyond, the mood in this space becomes meditative, lulled by a low, flat square of sunflower seeds on the floor. It presents a mere fraction of the amount Ai spread across the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall last year, but even in its abbreviated form, it still voices the tenets on which the original work is based––the individual versus the mass, the geopolitics of exchange and signification, and, on the formal level, Minimalism. In an untitled work from 2008–11, Ai presents a large white panel that records the names of victims of the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, as determined by a citizen investigation.

Hanging from the ceiling in the second room is Liu Wei’s Don’t Touch, 2011. Made with ox hide, which is commonly used for dog chews, this sensitive replica of the Potala Palace in Tibet is part of Liu’s investigation into power’s edifices and residues. Beyond the suggestion of irony––the Palace is simultaneously an enigmatic and fading symbol––the work is heavily sardonic, as both the model and the original palace are rendered absurd. In sum, this skillful quartet of works delivers a strong shot to inaugurate Faurschou’s new incarnation as a foundation.

— Iona Whittaker

Jennifer Wen Ma

ULLENS CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART | 尤伦斯当代艺术中心
798 Art Zone, No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang Di | 朝阳区酒仙桥路4号798艺术区内
April 15–May 27

Jennifer Wen Ma, Hanging Garden in Ink, 2012, ink, plants, dimensions variable.

Jennifer Wen Ma’s Hanging Garden in Ink, 2012, a site-specific commission, offers her latest experiment with the organic properties of mo, or ink. Inspired by the mythical hanging gardens of Babylon—King Nebuchadnezzar II’s offering to his wife who was homesick for trees and mountains—the work is a towering structure of ink-dipped foliage. The plants will continue to grow over the course of their installation in the long, narrow hall, with fresh green shoots sprouting beneath thick layers of black.

Ma began working with mo several years ago and has now inked all manner of flora: At a solo exhibition in Taipei’s Eslite Gallery last year, Ma covered orchid and chrysanthemum plants, bamboo, and plum and cypress trees with gallons of the stuff. Who Would Have Expected to Encounter Ni Zan’s Gentlemen in S-Chanf?, 2011, at the 2011 ShContemporary art fair re-created a traditional Chinese ink landscape as an installation, blackened snow pines and soil placed in front of a white sheet of canvas. Germinating Thoughts, 2011, presents the words AMOR FATI on a lawn with ink and grass seedlings.

Employed in classic Chinese painting as a tool for crafting two-dimensional likenesses of natural subjects, ink is here conceptually repurposed. Ma asks how the densities of mo can manipulate its physical subjects: Does ink obscure or does it illuminate? Is black the color of vitality or of death? Ma’s obfuscations demonstrate that compositions have the capacity for growth, and that darkness can give form to life.

— Angie Baecker

“Two Thousand Eleven”

PARA/SITE ART SPACE
G/F, 4, Po Yan Street, Sheung Wan
December 17–March 4

Heman Chong, Monument to the people we've conveniently forgotten (I hate you) (detail), 2008, one million business cards, each 3 1/2 x 2”.

For his debut exhibition as the executive director of Para/Site, Cosmin Costinas has curated a group show with work by Olga Chernysheva, Heman Chong, Federico Herrero, and John Smith. On first glance the title of the show is something of a conundrum, since all of the works––except for Herrero’s Intervention in and around Para/Site, 2011––were created before 2011. Cleverly, Costinas chose to bisect the gallery with a wall that cuts through the space diagonally, forming a triangle that highlights the impact of Chong’s Monument to the people we’ve conveniently forgotten (I hate you), 2008, which consists of one million blank black business cards scattered on the floor, putting viewers on literal shaky ground as they walk around (an act that feels vaguely rude given the importance of business cards in Hong Kong social exchanges). When viewed with events of 2011 in mind, Monument evokes the recent deaths of several prominent figures, such as Osama bin Laden, Elizabeth Taylor, Steve Jobs, Kim Jong Il and Václav Havel, as well as the rise of a new generation of protesters and activists, within a claustrophobia-inducing physical environment.

Smith’s twenty-four-minute video The Black Tower, 1985–87, is the earliest work on view, and it unifies all the pieces with its tragicomic depiction of a man’s descent into madness due to the appearance of a mysterious black tower. Chernysheva’s Alley of Cosmonauts, 2008, consists of twenty-five photographs that present a vision of crumbling empires and fleeting fame. Countering the bleakness, Herrero’s paintings inject the exhibition with wit, whimsy, and color. His blue abstract marks made directly on the walls, windows, floor, and ceiling here offer a contrast to the range of bleak visions in the other works, and serve to retrieve “Two Thousand Eleven” from seeming as an elegy for what is lost, allowing it to appear instead as a glimpse of what is hopefully to come.

— Doretta Lau

“No One to Hear You Scream”

SAAMLUNG
26/F Two Chinachem Plaza, 68 Connaught Rd. C. Central
February 17–March 31

View of “No One to Hear You Scream,” 2012.

Explorations of space—physical, liminal, temporal—provide the unifying theme for this ambitious group exhibition. Curated by Robin Peckham, it is the first official show at Saamlung, a commercial space that opened last November. Here works by Chen Chien-jung, Gao Weigang, Frank Havermans, João Ó, John Powers, Piers Secunda, and Yaohua Wang transform seemingly familiar buildings, architecture, or objects into something altogether otherworldly. This feeling is underscored by the show’s title, a reference to the 1979 Ridley Scott film Alien, which was promoted by the tagline: “In space, no one can hear you scream.”

The Macau-based Ó offers photographs from the “Threshold” series, 2011. Sakura Cemetery 2, for instance, is a stark image of an interior burial space with graves stretching from floor to ceiling. The lines draw the eye in, making the room seem inviting despite its function. The three paintings by Taipei’s Chen are perhaps the strongest in the exhibition, with Landscape 50, 2010, and Landscape 65, 2011, presenting unidentifiable dreamlike structures through vivid color and lines.

In contrast, Beijing-based Gao’s painting The Third Interior View, 2008, is a realist depiction of a room filled with equipment that is at once familiar and foreign, and ironically the sharp quality of the image does not make it easier to identify the setting. The black cardboard models in Havermans’s “TOFUD # Amsterdam Zuidas” series, 2010, appear to be truncated infrastructure lifted from a futuristic landscape; the inclusion of these sculptural pieces broaden the scope of the show. Overall, the juxtaposition of the various works on view has a discombobulating effect, making the future seem like a vision of the past and a reimagination of the present.

— Doretta Lau

“Boy: A Contemporary Portrait”

LEO XU PROJECTS
Lane 49, Building 3, Fuxing Xi Road | 复兴西路49弄3号, Xuhui District | 徐汇区
February 19–April 8

Guo Hongwei, Give Me a Hand, 2012, collage on paper, 15 x 17 1/2”.

Challenging conventions typically associated with young men, the first group exhibition at this new gallery in Shanghai features installations, collages, paintings, videos, and photographs that create a compelling, unorthodox portrait of boys: melancholic, puzzling, sensuous, and whimsical. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s video installation Faith, 2006, is a dreamlike scenario of two male astronauts floating in a minimalist spaceship interior. In contrast to the perpetual changes of reality––where loss and pain are inevitable––the universe created in Faith reflects the artist’s longing for an eternal dimension in which any sense of time or space is absent. Sharing a similar emotive impulse, an arrangement of Wolfgang Tillmans photographs offers a realistic approach and diaristic narrative. Made between 2000 and 2010, these eight snapshots capture everyday moments wherein young men’s bodies, identities, and intellectual complexities are interwoven. In Buying Everything on You (Su Zuoqiang), 2007, Liu Chuang explores male portraiture by deliberately omitting the figure altogether: A group of personal items acquired from a stranger––such as socks, IDs, and a bus pass––are presented neatly organized by type, in a taxonomical manner.

Situating the exhibition in a historical framework, a black-and-white photograph by Zhou Haiying from 1950 documents a provocative scene: a truck of young men wearing only underwear during a parade celebrating Shanghai’s liberation. Yet closer observation reveals patriotic slogans such as “Unite and Guard the Country.” Still, the symbolic sublime of the male body is drastically undermined in Guo Hongwei’s collage Give Me a Hand, 2012. Here, cutouts of “hard bodies” are jammed together to create a congested and distorted pattern.

— Xiaoyu Weng

“Formant: Forms of Listening to Forms”

V ART CENTER
No.50 Mo Gan Shan Rd, 2F,Building 3 (Space 1) & 1F,Building 6 (Space 2)
March 30–May 24

Yan Jun, Still, 2011–12, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view.

Featuring divergent works of sound art and performance, this exhibition takes its name from the peak in the spectral envelope of sound. A formant’s role in the overall perception of sound quality and its dependence on the resonant environment render it an apt metaphor for the emerging genre of sound art in China. Organized by two artists, Yin Yi and Luca Forcucci, both of whom also present works here, the project includes installations, performances, and public lectures, all aiming to bring greater awareness to sound as art.

Sprawled out along the walls is Yan Jun’s Still, 2011–12, with its tiny “speaker flowers” that play site-specific recorded sounds and music. The endeavor of orienting the audience to listen intently rather than just hearing is perhaps lost in the lofty space, though. Elsewhere, Yin’s You Can Listen to the Same River Indefinitely, 2012, presents a field recording of a flowing river that plays on and reverses Heraclitus’s cryptic aphorism on flow and change. Also displacing the sonic sense of place is Lawrence English’s Slender Blue, 2010, which presents a sound landscape from an Antarctic field base. The dilated time of the accompanying video forces the viewer’s attention on the otherworldly and sublime soundscape conjured.

For the performances, Forcucci’s Under and Upper Grounds, 2012, which occurred on April 14, evoked a contrastive sonic portrait of church bells, trains, busking musicians, and muffled bass from nightclubs on a Berlin Sunday morning. Also of note was Yan’s performance on the same day, which visualized his wall of noise through the throbbing vibrations of speakers laid out on the table. For those circling around, smothered by the unforgiving noise, this was sound made concrete.

— Daniel Ho

Natasha de Betak

EXPERIMENTER
2/1 Hindusthan Road
February 17–March 31

Natasha de Betak, 
Impulse, 
2011, color photograph,
 12 x 18”. From the series “Impulse,” 2011.

“Impulse,” 2011, Natasha de Betak’s latest series of photographs, elicits a surreal string of adjectives: foggy, luminous, somnambulant, amoebic, and sublime, to pinpoint a few. Thirty-six digital prints, smudged and out of focus, are hung in seemingly arbitrary clusters, just as the subjects range from a vacant bed in a psychiatric ward to a droplet of water suspended midair to a naked man and a distant, unnamed landscape. De Betak utilizes a macro lens, zooming in, defying scale; here a molecule looks like a moon. The most intriguing works on view are the two that confront time directly: a worn-out clock marking, precisely, 1:23; a speedometer measuring time relatively—SLOW, STOP, FAST. These paranoid needles seem to cast a shadow over the entire room.

A timeless locationlessness permeates de Betak’s own gypsy life: Born in Madrid to an Argentinean father and a French-Polish Jewish mother, and having lived in Budapest, New York, and Moscow, she currently lives in Paris. Much like the art of travel, her subjects seem simultaneously in motion and frozen. Logic is, in the spirit of nomadism, bartered—for chaos. The photographs are shot in diverse formats, with multiple shutter speeds. Some are video stills, others static; some are taken outside, others inside; some are black-and-white, others in color; some tranquil, others hysterical. Even in its dualities, the series is uncannily consistent in telling a story of the disorderliness of the human psyche through a physical world that attempts to impose a system on it.

De Betak continues her exploration of interior states of mind in a second series of thirty-five prints, titled “Nightshade,” 2011. The archival prints on matte paper emerge more as paintings, framing anonymous people asleep in Kolkata, Varanasi, and Mumbai. The words MY MISSION IS TO KILL TIME, AND TIME’S TO KILL ME, IN ITS TURN are pasted in black vinyl on a black wall, revealing themselves only barely, like the photographs do to the viewer, as if they too were in between death and dream-life. The line reflects the morguelike atmosphere of the gallery, its reflexivity reaffirming the symbiotic—or parasitical—relationship between the physical world and the inner self.

— Himali Singh Soin

Rajorshi Ghosh

SEVEN ART LIMITED
M-44/2, Souterrain,M Block Market, Greater Kailash II
March 30–May 12

Rajorshi Ghosh, Rooms by the Sea #1, 2007–12, projector, DVD player, speakers, acrylic, light-resistive tape, dimensions variable.

Upon entry, there is an overwhelming sense of space: Rajorshi Ghosh’s four architectural installations in this show are spare, inviting viewers to project their imaginations, at high tide, onto the rigid mathematics of a room. “Rooms by the Sea” reconstructs the essential workings of the psyche through a seascape. The source of this idea is in a wall text that quotes Salman Rushdie’s 1991 speech at Columbia University, in the wake of the fatwa issued against him: “I’ve lived in that messy ocean all my life. I’ve fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea . . . is the sea by which I was born and which I carry with me wherever I go.” His voice ripples across the seemingly humid room.

The most curious work on view is site-specific to a corner: Rooms by the Sea #1, 2007–12. The longitudinal video projection appears as a door left very slightly ajar, allowing one to gaze on a slice of virtual horizon. Its deliberate, closed composition reflects the false boundaries of nations, while the water, boundless and undividable, becomes symbolic for Rushdie’s (and the artist’s) freedom to create. Ghosh’s ocean, though universal, has been filmed not in his own country—India—but from a pier in Santa Monica, where he currently lives. The work metaphorically evokes the furthest point of the Western world and the beginning of the East. The same line that blurs also creates points of exile and access.

On a smaller scale, another section of the show shores up a similarly fragmented, existential experience. The photographic series “Studies in Framing (Rooms by the Sea),” 2012, imposes black, geometric abstractions of muntins and mullions on a seascape, leaving them saturated with a simultaneous sense of escape and imprisonment, infinity and mortality. Thus Ghosh elevates architecture to art: His structures are only habitable in the mind, and his images transcend the rational. The viewer’s imagination is realigned and renovated, so that upon exit, one turns the corner with an altered perspective.

— Himali Singh Soin

Rebecca Horn

NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART
Jaipur House, India Gate
April 7–May 20

Rebecca Horn, Notebook Samarkand (detail), 2001.

Rebecca Horn’s heartfelt impressions from Uzbekistan are collected in Notebook Samarkand, 2001, a book of poems and untitled photographs, currently on view as part of her first solo exhibition in India. The diary-size hardback sits on a block, setting up the mood for the fourteen selected photographs that hang on the walls. Each image seems, as the artist states in her collection of poetry, “dipped into the liquid gold of the morning.” In one, an old woman smiles toothlessly. In another, young boy dressed for prayer peers shyly out at the viewer, and in yet another, a middle-aged man, wearing a round Uzbek hat and denim jacket, laughs, the moisture from his slightly intoxicated tongue almost transcending the glass of the photograph’s frame. The photographs are life-size and capture their subjects so closely and with such precision that the viewer feels confronted with same corporeality the lens of Horn’s camera must have seen. Each image is exposed twice, resulting in a layering of the sky, trees, and mosques, and the subjects that inhabit these spheres. Horn’s poetry mirrors this, as in the line, “under the dome of the sky,” which reflects the confusion of architecture and natural landscape. This play of perspective captures life in Samarkand with a nostalgic complexity that might otherwise be revealed only in an involuntary surge of memories or daydreams.

Each photograph is in dialogue with the colors blue and gold, hues that consistently emerge in her poetry as well: “People in samarkand / Their smiles combine the sun and gold in blue.” Heightening the intensity of the imagination of this place of dust and laughter are wisps of black and gold that Horn paints onto every photograph—they seem like thoughts, ether, filaments of light, or at times camera grain. The paint also becomes the writing on the walls of unnamed edifices. One of the photographs shows an old woman waving at the camera, with the text of a tomb superimposed on her body, the larger history of the city and her own wrinkles harmonizing to tell a tale of passed time. Similarly, Horn’s book is itself a double exposure, twinning her art with a visual proclamation of the people—or, in her own words: “Budding flames erupt / from the ancient walls / The handwriting of fire / Spreads signs on invisible wings.”

— Himali Singh Soin

Lee Bul

MORI ART MUSEUM
Roppongi Hills Mori Tower, 6-10-1 Roppongi, Minato-Ku
February 4–May 7

Lee Bul, Infinite Starburst of Your Cold Dark Eyes, 2009, stainless steel, mirror, aluminum, copper, crystal, wood, nickel-chrome wire, plastic, acrylic, 75 x 32 x 21”.

It seems fitting that Lee Bul’s largest midcareer retrospective to date is organized by the Mori Art Museum, and therefore suspended fifty-three floors above the horizontal urban sprawl of the Japanese capital. Tokyo, after all, fired the imaginations of many notable cyberpunk writers and theorists––such as Jean Baudrillard and William Gibson––whose work, in turn, has inspired Lee’s enduring interest in cyborg forms, truncated and altered bodies, and utopian buildings and architecture. The Secret Sharer, 2012, a jagged-edged sculpture depicting Lee’s faithful canine companion of seventeen years, holds court in one gallery, spewing a shambolic mess of acrylic beads, crystals, plastic trinkets, and glass shards from its mouth. The piece is a marked contrast to the studied formal beauty of her earlier polyurethane and fiber-reinforced plastic Cyborg sculptures, 1998–2004, but shares a similar aesthetic sensibility and choice of material with the “utopias and dreamscapes” in a vast mirror-floored room installed with building models, abandoned towers, and dilapidated scaffolds that reference the utopian architectural theories of Bruno Taut and the latticed shell structures of Vladimir Shukhov.

Despite the exhaustive scope and ambition of the exhibition, one can’t help but feel that Lee is at her best when the frequently overwrought appendages that sprout from her myriad forms are whittled down to the spare dimensions that give her work a severe, icicle-like beauty. For instance, Infinite Starburst of Your Cold Dark Eyes, 2009, a bristling stainless steel torso whose chest has been impaled by an exploded core of wooden splints and armatures, deftly combines the modernist utopian language of modular, expandable architecture with the existential anguish of a disintegrating body, forcefully implanted with prosthetic parts and overrun by the machinery of invasive technologies.

— Darryl Wee

Mithu Sen

GALERIE STEPH
39 Keppel Road, Tanjong Pagar Distripark, #01-05
January 10–February 25

Mithu Sen, A Pair of Fangs, 2010, watercolor, ink, fabric, gold foil, and collage on handmade paper, 11 x 14 1/2".

For her first solo show in Singapore, Mithu Sen has arranged nearly thirty individual works into a single large-scale display on one wall of this gallery. Primarily composed of framed drawings and small, locally sourced tchotchkes that sit playfully on the frames, the individual pieces build up to a crescendo around the large work on paper Chandelier Sucks (diptych), 2011. The Bengali artist is also a poet, but unlike Cy Twombly or Raymond Pettibon, she has not filled her images with words. Instead, erotic and animist imagery form the basis of her visual language.

Sen’s artistry lies in the poetry of the fragment. In A Pair of Fangs, 2010, a tiger morphs into a hand with two fingers folded back; the fingers act like teeth and draw blood from the hand. Heads explode and fluids gush in her lexicon; the tongue also appears to be a key organ here. In Gossip of My Studio Table I, 2010, one such organ is drawn––long, pink and pointy––onto a photograph of Albert Einstein as well as onto a fox painted next to him. Sen’s work is filled with such raunchy humor and surreal wit. Likewise, her choice of materials––a blend of watercolor, ink, fabric, gold foil drawing, and collage––reinforces the playfulness and fluidity of her imagery. While her figurative approach recalls neo-expressionists like Francesco Clemente, the rich preternatural imagery of the subcontinent’s Hindu religion appears to be another likely source of inspiration. In spirit, though, she seems closest to Meret Oppenheim, an artist who also had an impulse to scratch at an unconscious unease. This is yet another point, perhaps, where poetry occurs.

— Sherman Sam

Bae Young-whan

PLATEAU
Taepyeongno2-ga, Samsung Life Insurance Building
March 1–May 20

Bae Young-whan, Pop Song 2–Youth, 1999, pills, iodine, cotton balls, bottle caps, industrial glue on canvas, 64 x 51".

For Korean artist Bae Young-whan, materials are of utmost importance. Consider Pop Song 2–Youth, 1999 (part of the series “Pop Song”), which consists of dried petals, pills, cotton balls, and bottle caps, all adhered with industrial glue to a canvas—together the objects spell out the lyrics of a what might be a one-hit wonder. Bae’s fascination with quotidian objects has earned him a reputation as a “people’s artist,” though labels seem to matter less than the overall aesthetic to the artist, whose work, from the beginning, has possessed a deeply romantic sensibility.

Central to much of Bae’s work are the lyrics themselves—often trite meditations on rebellious or amorous tribulations. Each set of lyrics helps imbue his work with a sense of melancholia specific to youth while, on more abstract level, gesturing at a collective human innocence and its inevitable clash with the harsher realities of daily life. Marginalized communities have always been of interest to the Korean artist, and Sigh of Fukushima, 2012, which documents his travels to the site of nuclear disaster, illustrates his capacity to depict devastating political conditions with a tender, humanistic lens. The first line in the video is “How are you?”—a strikingly uncomplicated entrée into dialogue that speaks to the artist’s goal of facilitating dialogue and compassion through artistic production. Building on this theme is Abstract Verb, 2012, a two-channel video inspired by the Buddhist idea that true revelation can be achieved only by exercising the mind rather than through written or spoken language. On each screen, a gauzy white shirt floats through darkness, visualizing the cadence of the background music.

— Yulhee Kim

Lin Guan-Ming

IT PARK
41 YiTong St, 2fl
February 11–March 10

Lin Guan-Ming, The Dreams, 2012, still from a three-channel video installation.

The young Taiwanese artist Lin Guan-Ming is known for his dreamily beautiful video installations––such as In the Memories of, 2006; Time (Inspire and Expire), 2008; and The Fable, 2010––which show painterly, poetic, and often surreal images of everyday life. In the Memories of, for example, portrays an upside-down view of a fishing net floating on the surface of water so that the net appears to be mysteriously hovering in the middle of the peculiar scene.

Lin’s latest solo show, “Star,” features three new videos that likewise blur lines between reality and fiction, and also refer to his personal biography. In each work, Lin appropriates or restages segments from advertisements and music videos in which his father played the leading role. Memories Have Been Gone as We Grown Up, 2012, is a looped work that gradually shifts to soft focus as his father’s face becomes blurry to the point of abstraction. The work feels sentimental and nostalgic, and emphasizes how quickly such footage can seem dated. For the two other videos (On the Road and The Dreams, both 2012), Lin reenacted scenes from advertisements with his father, filming them so as to only give a sense of the original. Here Lin continues to employ his unique visual style, which is sober and detailed. But with his new interest in advertising, he shows us how the quickly accelerating pace of images creates an odd friction with the passing of time in our real lives.

— Yaji Huang

Chim↑Pom

PROJECT FULFILL ART SPACE
1F., No.2, Alley 45, Lane 147, Sec. 3, Sinyi Rd
March 3–April 15

Chim↑Pom, REAL TIMES, 2011, still from a color video, 11 minutes 11 seconds.

Chim↑Pom’s irrepressible energy permeates the collective’s first solo exhibition outside Japan, “Beautiful World – SURVIVAL DANCE,” curated by Huang Chien-Hung and co-organized with Mujin-to Production. Known for their controversial social projects, the six-member Japanese group create interventions that deliver pointed commentary.

A case in point is a photograph from their 2009 project Making the Sky of Hiroshima PIKA!, which greets visitors to the exhibition. The sky-written word pika (flash) over the A-Bomb Dome, perhaps the most recognized memorial in Hiroshima, generated protests but was also a reminder of the tragedy. A more recent work, prompted by the Tohoku earthquake, carries the same merging of warning and remembrance. Footage shows how as part of 2011’s LEVEL7 feat. “Myth of Tomorrow,” Chim↑Pom added a small painted panel depicting the smoking Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, to seamlessly blend with Taro Okamoto’s revered Myth of Tomorrow, 1969, a well-known antinuclear mural in Tokyo’s bustling Shibuya Station.

Chim↑Pom and residents of Japan’s Soma City shout for houses, fish, girlfriends, and just a return to normal life amid the tsunami’s wreckage, in the video KI-AI 100, 2011. You want to join in. The work is a cheerful counterpart to the somber video REAL TIMES, 2011. Filmed a month after the initial explosions, REAL TIMES shows two Chim↑Pom members in protective suits walking through the restricted zone near Fukushima Daiichi, gazing on the still-smoldering nuclear reactors, and spray-painting in red on a white flag a nuclear warning sign, which they then plant at the overlook. In Taipei, Chim↑Pom filled garbage bags with the exhaust of the city’s ubiquitous mopeds and wore protective gear through the local airport—again highlighting the playful effectiveness at the heart of their work. Through the giggles, cheers, and shrieks of Chim↑Pom’s members, we watch and listen to works that elicit surprise, disgust (SUPER RAT, 2006), dread, and joy, all the while being drawn into the group’s sobering critique.

— Leslie Ureña

“Revolution vs. Revolution”

BEIRUT ART CENTER
Jisr El Wati, Building 13, Street 97, Zone 66
February 3–April 13

Vyacheslav Akhunov, Doubt, 1976, ink on paper, 12 x 8”.

Since the Beirut Art Center opened its doors three years ago it has become a kind of game to guess how this former factory space will be reconfigured for each new show. Solo exhibitions have tended to be muscular––an elegant curved wall for Fouad Elkoury’s autobiographical ephemera; a long, wide corridor for Chris Marker’s “Staring Back”––while group shows have mostly left the space open for different works to correspond. How strange, then, for the current exhibition, inspired by the uprisings in the Arab world that began in 2010, to evoke none of the public squares, roundabouts, or urban alleyways where the demonstrations have taken place. The show’s layout is deliberately awkward and antisocial, offering no spaces for people to gather; it dead-ends with Tacita Dean’s Czech Photos, 1991–2002, and Marysia Lewandowska and Neil Cummings’s Economy of Love, 2012. These works make demands on your time, but once you are done with them, you have to turn back and retrace your steps to leave.

All of this makes the architecture of the exhibition a strange and subtle critic of its own subject––which is, in brief, the capacity of contemporary art to respond to political crisis. “Revolution vs. Revolution” addresses itself to the events of the so-called Arab Spring but does not deal with them directly, opting instead for an inspired genealogy of art made elsewhere in the aftermath of great historical ruptures: Abbas on the Iranian Revolution, David Goldblatt on apartheid South Africa, and Hai Bo on the cultural revolution in China are a few examples here.

Inevitably, a show that establishes a rule eventually breaks it, and so Fadi Abdallah’s Something Dies Within Us Today, 2012, presents two poems and three texts reflecting on past and present upheavals in the Arab world. Like Phil Collins’s mesmerizing film marxism today (prologue), 2010, or Boris Mikhailov’s rueful photographs for the series “Red,” 1968–75, and Vyacheslav Akhunov’s undercutting of propaganda for the poster project Doubt, 1976, Abdallah’s writings are tentative and unsettling, questioning not only what is gained but also what is lost when political orders are turned upside down. It is as if he, and the exhibition overall, are warning viewers: History never comes full circle, and revolutions are always incomplete.

— Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

“Brute Ornament”

GREEN ART GALLERY
Al Quoz 1, Street 8, Al Serkal Avenue, Unit 28
March 19–May 5

View of “Brute Ornament,” 2012.

Curated by Murtaza Vali, this exhibition of recent works by Kamrooz Aram and Seher Shah could easily be mistaken for yet another critique of modernism’s ideologies, myths, and utopian flops. However, it distinguishes itself by adopting a distinctive approach to the highly analyzed canon, using modernist tropes––such as the grid, chevron, and line––to reexamine history.

Shah’s drawings deconstruct modernist architecture by combining geometry with notions of repetition and pattern that are often associated with ornament. The gridded fields in many of these works, particularly in Emergent Structures: Capital Mass, 2011, resemble overpopulated cities. Overlaid on their orderly formations are geometrical black motifs that dominate the surface, as if to place the imaginary sites under siege. Similarly in Aram’s paintings, gestural decorative flower motifs compete for space with large monochromatic shapes. In Aspirations in Black and Red, 2012, for example, thick brushstrokes sweep over floral depictions and keep the viewer’s gaze in a constant state of flux. Still, the work is balanced by a flat, red sphere that hovers over the picture plane.

While the show successfully engages the role of ornament in the development of modernism, its strength lies in its ability to take on more than one theme. Indeed, the works also open up a compelling, if anxious, conversation about their status as precious and perhaps merely decorative objects. “Brute Ornament” poses important questions about the values, frameworks, and desires projected onto these pieces, as well as who exactly is projecting these concerns. These queries in turn promote self-reflection, for the audience and society.

— Dina Ibrahim

“What Should I Do to Live in Your Life?”

SHARJAH ART FOUNDATION
Sharjah Arts Area
March 8–May 12

Minouk Lim, New Town Ghost, 2005, still from a color video, ten minutes, fifty-nine seconds.

The title of this exhibition, “What Should I Do to Live in Your Life?” poses a good question in a world so clusterfucked by globalization that unresolved issues of identity and belonging often rumble precariously under shifting geopolitical terrains. With this in mind, curator Claudia Pestana has invited Lee Kit, Minouk Lim, João Vasco Paiva, Part-time Suite, and Yuk King Tan to inhabit the rooms of the stately Bait Al Serkal building, a converted family home on the port of Sharjah, as a link to Hong Kong and Seoul—also port cities—where the participating artists are either from or based. Arranged in cabinet-style solo presentations, subtle, conceptual works negotiate globalization-in-practice, from the circulation of people, as in Tan’s 2004 Island Portrait of sixty-one Chinese workers building the Cook Island National Courthouse in the South Pacific, to goods, as in Lee’s recontextualizing of brand names—Vaseline, Nivea, and Massara—in a karaoke video installation Sing Anyone of Then, or All of Them, 2009. The result is a curatorial exchange between a city host and its invited guests, extending the Sharjah Art Foundation’s recent focus on artist residencies (and cultural diplomacy).

Of course, intercultural connectivity has its issues, as pinpointed in Lim’s visceral hymn to urban redevelopment in New Town Ghost, 2005, a video following a young slam poet and drummer performing around the Yeongdeungpo district in Seoul on the back of a truck. This city-under-construction could be located anywhere—from Hong Kong to Dubai—filled with identikit skyscrapers and residential high-rise complexes, giving breadth to the rapper’s periodic, breathless, megaphone-amplified invocation: “Oh, my complex.” Yet in the face of hyperurbanization (and homogenization), voice and drum are reduced to whispers in what one might describe as a David and Goliath encounter between the nuances of the locality and the drive to globalize—a binary the artists in this exhibition are visibly caught in the middle of. Here, the question changes: How do we live in this life? Part-Time Suite has a suggestion in video Loop the Loop, 2009: three group members walking the edges of a city rooftop connected to one another with rope. If globalization is about living together, then we face this question collectively.

— Stephanie Bailey

“Parallel Collisions”

ART GALLERY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA
North Terrace
March 2–April 29

Marco Fusinato, Imperical distortion, 2012, aluminum frames, fluorescent tubes, electrical cables, microphone cases, microphone, speakers, dimensions variable. Installation view.

The Twelfth Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art is appropriately titled “Parallel Collisions,” and the central aim of cocurators Natasha Bullock and Alexie Glass-Kantor is to bring the past into dialogue with the present. The exhibition features twenty-one artists working within three conceptual frameworks: “redux,” “incursion,” and “the tracking shot.” The biennial is shown across the entirety of the temporary exhibition spaces and incorporated into the gallery’s Elder Wing of Australian Art, home to precolonial, colonial, and early-twentieth-century art.

The subtle insertion of contemporary photography, sculpture, sound, and video works within the stately salon-style hangs of the Elder Wing successfully marries the historical and contemporary, allowing new interpretations and relationships to develop between works. In the first room, Rosemary Laing’s photograph groundspeed (Rose Petal) #17, 2001, depicting a floral carpet laid within the Australia bush is placed opposite an 1835 colonial painting by John Glover (A View of the Artist’s House and Garden, in Mills Plains, Van Diemen’s Land) depicting the artist’s own cottage garden against a backdrop of mountainous wilderness. These two landscapes interrogate Australia’s history of European settlement by recapitulating it.

Susan Jacobs’s Snake Drawing, 2011–12, directly responds to traditional bronze sculptural works. In what the curators termed an “incursion”, the artist used live snakes writhing in sand and cast the remnants of their movements into bronze. The accompanying video, by turns beautiful and unsettling, conflates the movements of the snake with the artist’s hands, referencing the centuries-old symbolism. Downstairs in the temporary exhibition wing, the architecture itself echoed the cinematic notion of the tracking shot. In Marco Fusinato’s immersive installation Imperical distortion, 2012, a single handclap ignites a terrifying explosion of fluorescent lights and noise marking numbers of human births, deaths, and dying stars––signaling a different form of collision.

— Jane Somerville

Yvonne Todd

CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY
404 George St
February 10–April 1

Yvonne Todd, Sandy Cube, 2011, color photograph, 56 x 42 1/2".

Corporate portraiture is a term not often used in the lexicon of fine arts. It brings to mind a bygone world of family businesses, printed newsletters, and primitive websites. New Zealand–based artist Yvonne Todd has taken this underrepresented aesthetic and created the high-gloss photographic series “The Wall of Man,” 2009, in which CEOs pose with smug and unthreatening smiles. In actuality, these are not CEOs; they are older male actors who have responded to an advertisement placed by the artist. Todd’s work creates a sense of unease, even when it’s veiled with the banality of a corporate world portrayed through staged poses.

Installed next to this series is “Seahorsel,” 2012, where we see the languages of dance and staged advertising images intersect with the artifice of an imagined seaside community concocted by the artist. The series relies on an assemblage of costumes and props—in this case, fleshy unitards and kitschy seaside decorations, to fabricate a fictitious destination. There is a sense of motion in each of the works, coming to a head in Sandy Cube, 2011, where a young woman, in a soft white cape and stockings, releases handfuls of sand while gazing sternly into the camera. The works seen together begin to form a picture of a crisp, unfriendly environment where perfect hair is just a wig and comforting rituals have lost their meaning.

Curator Serena Bentley has cleverly constructed a space where the high-gloss sheen, scale, and piercing imagery of these works reinforce the sense that they constitute authentic documentation of the imagined places they depict. By toying with our perceptions, with questions of what we accept and understand, Todd allows us to play in her fictional world even as we try to understand the politics of its artifice.

— Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris

“Old Genes: Artists Reading Len Lye”

GOVETT-BREWSTER ART GALLERY
Queen Street
December 10–February 26

Phil Dadson, Osmosis, 2011, still from a color video, 6 minutes 15 seconds.

New Zealander Len Lye’s Jazz Age films and kinetic sculptures were formative accomplishments in international modernism. The preservation—and reactivation—of Lye’s global legacy has been placed in the safe hands of New Plymouth’s Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, whose latest Lye-related exhibition shows that his buoyant, experimental spirit is alive and well. Curated by Tyler Cann, “Old Genes: Artists Reading Len Lye” presents four contemporary responses to the late artist’s work, interspersed with some of his own pieces. For example, in Phil Dadson’s video Osmosis, 2011, young people wearing polka-dotted caps (one of Lye’s signature looks) enter the Auckland Art Gallery and start to bob and weave in sync with Lye’s kinetic sculpture Universe, 1976: a wobbling band of steel that rings out when it strikes a ball hung directly above it. Gradually, these gallerygoers start to make odd noises—clicks, pops, snorts, and raspberries—a kind of Three Stooges riff; the video nods to Lye’s twin fascinations with movement and language. Tessa Laird’s Points of Agreement, 2011, is a similarly intelligent translation: a series of “facsimiles” in which she hand-copied pages from Lye’s notebooks, which were themselves copied from Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913) and illustrated by Lye with images of African, Pacific, and Maori art (Laird adds her own touches, with knowing references to her artistic peers and contemporary theory). The result is a densely layered, funny reclamation of Lye’s Pacific heritage, his relationship with psychoanalytic theory, and the debate about modernism’s appropriation of “primitive” artifacts, which still generates plenty of heat in this part of the world. As Cann suggests in his accompanying essay, all the works in the show owe Lye a genetic debt, but each produces its own mutations. The single thread running through them is a subtle sense of play—with Lye’s history, but also with modernism’s strange and unresolvable place in South Pacific culture.

— Anthony Byrt

Anna Bella Geiger

MUSEO DE ARTE CONTEMPORÂNEA DE NITERÓI
Mirante da Boa Viagem, s/nº
December 10–February 26

Anna Bella Geiger, Com Pinga Vermelha (Pier and Ocean),1990, oil and acrylic on canvas, 63 x 51 3/16".

This tight little show—mounted in the tight little modernist gem of a building by Oscar Niemeyer—offers an illuminating cross-section of one of Brazil’s more incisive postwar artists. Born in Rio, Anna Bella Geiger studied in New York in the 1950s, returning there briefly to teach at Columbia in 1969 before settling definitively in Brazil. Though she staked out an early career as an abstractionist, Geiger has gone on to engage with media ranging from assemblage to engraving to video. This exhibition consists mainly of canvas paintings and works on paper, by turns large and small, figurative and abstract, in oil and acrylic. A group of three smoldering chartreuse monochromes from the early 1950s reveal Geiger’s attention to the transitional phases between biomorphic figuration and Abstract Expressionism. At once tightly packed and flattened in a shallow plane, the small canvases reveal a certain deftness with the language of abstraction as it evolved out of Cubism.

At first glance, some of her figurative acrylics from the 1980s, such as her “Pier and Ocean” series, seem to ride the wave of a wider, international current. Yet her interest in figuration dates back to at least the mid-1970s, when her work increasingly bridled against the censorship and repression of Brazil’s rigid dictatorship. Completed around the time when Geiger spearheaded some innovative work in video (she was one of the first to use the medium in Brazil), the Pop-ish paintings Ideology and About Art Say It with Us: Bureaucracy, both 1976, provide a commentary at once ironic and direct in its stance against official state propaganda. In the context of these same works, the no less mordant Adventurism, 1976, takes on the hypocrisies of the art world itself, and—evoking the visual language of Colonial American wood-block prints—figures a group of men staking out new land for discovery (and, it is presumed, exploitation).

— Ara H. Merjian