Hou I-Ting explores the role of women in the workforce

 

Hou I-Ting’s work consistently examines the way the human body is represented in images from distinct historical periods, and she is particularly interested in the depiction of women through different technologies, from photography to augmented reality. Her recent work explores the role of women in the workforce, the products of their labour, and the ways these reflect the various regimes that have ruled her home of Taiwan. Taiwan has a complicated history of Dutch, Spanish and Qing Chinese colonialism, Japanese occupation and Kuomintang martial law, which preceded the global liberal democracy of today.

Hou I-Ting discusses her work

Hou I-Ting, Taiwan b.1979 / White Uniform 2017 / Single-channel video: 11:39 minutes, colour, sound / Purchased 2018. Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Hou I-Ting

White uniform 2017 looks at women’s work in creating a local variant of the bento box — known as bendong in Taiwanese Hokkien and biantang in Mandarin — which has persisted as a cultural legacy of Japanese occupation. Consisting of a short film and a series of photographs, the work was produced in collaboration with the employees of the Taiwan Railways Administration kitchen in Qidu, near Taipei. The film focuses on a group of women as they use stencils to finely cut sheets of seaweed to be placed over rice, reproducing historical designs from the covers of bendong boxes. The accompanying photographs document these designs, which were created during the Japanese colonial period (1895–1945), a time when Taiwan’s railway was intensively developed to facilitate the transportation of natural resources for export. Most designs are innocuous, their Japanese text advertising sandwiches, chicken lunches or bananas from Taichung; however, others are more ambiguous, resembling wartime propaganda.

Hou I-Ting, Taiwan b.1979 / White Uniform No.1 2017 / Type C photographs on paper / Purchased 2018. Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Hou I-Ting

The film also highlights a division of labour between male and female workers. We learn that men, occupying the background of most shots, work on heavier tasks, such as packing and lifting, while the women, hunched over tables, take care of more delicate jobs, like arranging food within the boxes. Intercutting historical footage of Taiwanese rail travel, Hou uses the device of interviews with staff members and their supervisor to emulate the tendency of the mind to wander — during long journeys and repetitive work, alike. Employees detail their working day, with its long hours and budgetary constraints; they explain the history of the bendong, and describe its enduring popularity, in which eating habits and nostalgia play significant roles; they introduce their own recollections of their jobs; and they reminisce about their experiences of railway meals when they were children.

Hou I-Ting, Taiwan b.1979 / White Uniform No.4 2017 / Type C photographs on paper / Purchased 2018. Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Hou I-Ting

Hou was inspired by the persistent practices of homemade and hand-prepared meals in an age of fast food, drawing on the diligence and flair with which Japanese mothers prepare their children’s bento boxes, the complex networks that enable the delivery of tiffin lunches in India, and the unfailing, romantic association of bendong with railway travel.

The kitchen that creates these boxed meals is itself a gendered organisation, pointing to the more complicated, rationalised production lines of ubiquitous fast-food outlets. This only deepens the complexity of the politics into which the artist delves in her work — a configuration of sexual difference and labour relations, colonialism and national identity, collective history and personal memory. With Hou I-Ting’s White uniform, these intricacies are articulated in the simple enjoyment of a packed lunch on a long train ride.

Reuben Keehan is Curator, Contemporary Asian Art. QAGOMA

Hou I-Ting, Taiwan b.1979 / White Uniform No.3 2017 / Type C photographs on paper / Purchased 2018. Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Hou I-Ting

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Free, and curated for audiences of all ages, ‘The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT9) profiles artworks by more than 80 artists, groups and projects from over 30 countries, and is presented across the Queensland Art Gallery and the Gallery of Modern Art.

APT9 has been assisted by our Founding Supporter Queensland Government and Principal Partner the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body, and the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments.

Featured image: Hou I-Ting White Uniform (video still) 2017
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Mao Ishikawa: Photographs from Okinawa

 

A unique selection of vintage photographs from the 1970s and ’80s by Mao Ishikawa document life in Okinawa in the years following the island’s return to Japanese sovereignty and are remarkable for the detail with which they capture their subjects’ social and cultural milieu.

Mao Ishikawa, Japan b.1953 / Red Flower: The Women of Okinawa (details) 1975–77 / Gelatin silver photographs on paper / The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 2018 with funds from Michael Sidney Myer through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Mao Ishikawa

What is now known as Okinawa, Japan’s southernmost prefecture was once part of the Ryukyu Kingdom, a peaceful archipelago that played a vital role in maritime trade in the Western Pacific from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. Although recognised by such powers as China and the United States, the kingdom was unilaterally annexed by Japan in 1872. Following some of the worst fighting of World War Two, Okinawa was occupied by the United States and only reverted to Japanese rule in 1972, two decades after the American military had relinquished control of the rest of Japan. US troops nevertheless remain on Okinawa at the behest of the Japanese government, with their bases occupying around 20 per cent of the main island.

As her memorable comments during the APT9 Symposium made clear — ‘I am not Japanese, I am Okinawan’ — Ishikawa is passionately opposed to the presence of American armed forces in Okinawa but also rejects Japan’s sovereignty over her islands. She maintains that she is not an activist but an artist interested in telling the truth, and she has documented Okinawan life through photography for more than forty years. Her representation in APT9 comprises a selection of images, taken throughout this period, of close friends, soldiers and tourists in a society shouldering much of the burden of the US military presence in the Western Pacific. QAGOMA is fortunate to have acquired vintage prints from two of her most iconic series, Red Flower: The Women of Okinawa 1975–77 (illustrated) and A Port Town Elegy 1983–86 (illustrated).

Ishikawa turned to photography amid the turmoil of Okinawa’s return to Japanese sovereignty. She studied under Shomei Tomatsu, whose unconventional portrayal of postwar Japan had inspired a generation of artists. In 1975, in her early twenties and unable to speak English, Ishikawa started working in a bar that catered to African- American soldiers, at a time when US leisure establishments for the military remained segregated. She began documenting the lives of the uninhibited young women who frequented the bar, and who flaunted convention by dating black servicemen. The images are remarkable for the detail with which they capture their subjects’ social and cultural milieu, along with Ishikawa’s trademark verve, wit and daring.

In 1982, Ishikawa included the photographs in the book Hot Days in Camp Hansen (which also featured the work of fellow Okinawan photographer Toyomitsu Higa). When two of the women featured in the images objected to their use in the book, Ishikawa destroyed the negatives, and the works were thought lost. They resurfaced, however, when Ishikawa’s daughter was sorting through items in the house of the artist’s recently deceased father, coming across near-pristine vintage prints. These were republished (without images of the women who objected), as Hot Days in Okinawa in Japan, and Red Flower: The Women of Okinawa internationally, where they attracted a whole new audience to Ishikawa’s oeuvre.

Mao Ishikawa, Japan b.1953 / A Port Town Elegy (details) 1983–86 / Gelatin silver photographs on paper / The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 2018 with funds from Michael Sidney Myer through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Mao Ishikawa

The Gallery Collection includes eleven of these vintage prints, as well as five from her subsequent series A Port Town Elegy, Ishikawa’s portraits of hard-drinking day labourers from the docks of the Okinawan capital, Naha. In these photographs, she presents her subjects in all the roughness of their daily reality, without sacrificing their humour or spirit of camaraderie. Shot during a period when Ishikawa ran a bar as a single mother, they document a life that has all but disappeared. Like the stunning portraits of Red Flower, they are products of a working method Ishikawa describes as ‘Okinawa soul’ — images based on interpersonal contact, expressing a remarkable intimacy and energy in depicting figures on the margins of society — an approach she continues to this day.

Reuben Keehan is Curator, Contemporary Asian Art. QAGOMA

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Featured image detail: Mao Ishikawa’s Red Flower: The Women of Okinawa 1975–77
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Yayoi Kusama: Life is the Heart of a Rainbow

 

The Gallery presents an expansive survey of works by senior Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who seamlessly intergrates Pop, Surrealism, Minimalism and psychedelia. ‘Yayoi Kusama: Life is the Heart of a Rainbow‘ is on show at GOMA until 11 February 2018.

Installation view of 'Yayoi Kusama: Life is the Heart of a Rainbow'
Installation view of ‘Yayoi Kusama: Life is the Heart of a Rainbow’, GOMA 2017-18 / © Yayoi Kusama / Courtesy: Yayoi Kusama Studio, Inc. / Photograph: Jaala Alex © QAGOMA

In the six years since QAGOMA presented ‘Look Now, See Forever’, Yayoi Kusama’s last exhibition at GOMA, which showcased the most recent developments in her practice at the time, her profile has grown to the degree that she has been proclaimed ‘the world’s most popular artist’,1 and, incisively, the ‘poster girl for the globalisation of contemporary art’.2 Audiences worldwide have flocked her exhibitions, aided by the circulation of simultaneous touring retrospectives in western Europe, Latin America, Asia, Scandinavia and the United States, and the amenability to social media of her particular configuration of space across two- and three-dimensional formats. Kusama’s artistic world, with its seamless integration of Pop, Surrealism, Minimalism and psychedelia, its trademark motifs of nets, dots, eyes and pumpkins, and its psychosexual vocabulary of obsession, obliteration, accumulation, aggregation and infinity, is immensely seductive and, it seems, remarkably attuned to the current moment.

At 88 years old, however, Kusama is an unlikely ‘poster girl’. For all her visibility and marketability, she leads a very simple existence, utterly devoted to art-making. Each morning — weekends included — she makes her way to her studio in a quiet corner of Shinjuku on Tokyo’s west side, where she works through stacks of mail, discusses projects in development with her modest team of assistants, and peruses the art press, before settling down to paint. Kusama prefers to work on a canvas prepared with a single base colour and laid flat on a work bench. She paints intuitively, as patterns and images seem to flow ready-formed from her brush, accumulating in waves across the surface of the picture plane. She often approaches a composition from all sides, so that orientations such as ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ matter less than a general movement from the edge to the centre of the canvas.

Yayoi Kusama, Japan b.1929 / Infinity nets 2000 / The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 2001 with funds from The Myer Foundation, a project of the Sidney Myer Centenary Celebration 1899-1999, through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / © Yayoi Kusama / Courtesy: Yayoi Kusama Studio, Inc.

There are two painterly projects in which Kusama is currently engaged: the ‘net’ paintings that have figured consistently in her practice since the late 1950s; and ‘My Eternal Soul’, a series of hundreds of uniformly scaled, brightly coloured paintings, executed since 2009. Both bodies of work figure prominently in ‘Life is the Heart of a Rainbow’, a focused overview of more than seven decades of the artist’s practice, produced in collaboration with the National Gallery Singapore. The exhibition builds on QAGOMA’s long engagement with Kusama and the National Gallery Singapore’s sustained attention to modern art in Asia. The exhibition explores the development of the artist’s iconic motifs, her engagement with the human body, and her expansive conception of space as each has developed over decades of art-making. At QAGOMA, ‘Life is the Heart of a Rainbow’ is book-ended by better-known aspects of her work — the lofty, polka-dotted inflatables of Dots Obsession 2017, and the ever-popular children’s project The obliteration room 2002–ongoing, which has now been reproduced worldwide. But so central is the process of painting to Kusama’s artistic production that substantial selections of the net paintings and ‘My Eternal Soul’ works figure in the exhibition.

Yayoi Kusama, Japan b.1929 / The obliteration room (installation views) 2002 to present

Yayoi Kusama, Japan b.1929 / The obliteration room (installation views) 2002 to present

Before the first dot. Installation views of Yayoi Kusama’s The obliteration room 2002 to present, GOMA 2017-18 / Furniture, white paint, dot stickers / Collaboration between Yayoi Kusama and Queensland Art Gallery, commissioned by the Queensland Art Gallery / Gift of the artist through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2012 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © Yayoi Kusama / Courtesy: Yayoi Kusama Studio, Inc. / Photographs: Natasha Harth © QAGOMA

The net paintings developed as Kusama attempted to reproduce her experience of looking down on the Pacific Ocean from the air, during her 1957 journey from Japan to the United States. The nets are made up of thousands of tiny loops painted over a monochromatic ground, which meet to shimmering, undulating effect — the product of an immense labour for the artist as she sits close to the canvas, working with tightly controlled movements of hand on brush. Initially small-sized, their scale expanded dramatically after Kusama encountered the imposing canvases of Barnett Newman and other late abstract expressionists when she settled in New York in 1958. They soon came to supplant her surrealist-inflected experiments as the core of her practice. On their debut at the artist-run Brata Gallery in 1959, the net paintings had a substantial effect and were famously collected by Frank Stella and Donald Judd, who would later become leading figures in North American Minimalism, with which Kusama’s work shared many sympathies. Though she has varied her approach to these paintings over time, they could be considered the backbone of her tremendous output, to which she has returned throughout her career, despite varying her medium from oil to acrylic. This strand of her practice is most highly sought after by collectors, with several record-breaking auction sales over the past decade establishing her works as the most expensive by a living female artist.3

Yayoi Kusama, Japan b.1929 / THE MORE WE SEEK THE MORE DISTANT THE BRILLIANCE OF THE STARS BECOME 2016 / Collection: The artist / Courtesy: Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore, Victoria Miro Gallery, London, David Zwirner, New York / © Yayoi Kusama / Courtesy: Yayoi Kusama Studio, Inc.

The ‘My Eternal Soul’ series began as a self-imposed challenge: to produce 100 such works over an 18-month period in 2009–10, to be displayed in major projects with Tate Modern, GOMA and the National Museum of Art in Osaka. On completion, she committed to a second hundred, exceeding the target so quickly that she removed the cap entirely. These works are distinguished by their highcontrast, flat colours, and their interplay of abstract pattern-making and recognisable figures, which include faces in profile, stick figures, flowers, and eyes both open and closed. Their colour schemes, composition and pictorial density vary from one canvas to the next, but they have become arguably more sophisticated as the series proceeds and the artist grows more confident with the format. Nevertheless, they are clearly all manifestations of the same project, and when displayed en masse, their interplay of elements creates an encompassing and vibrant visual field.

‘Life is the Heart of a Rainbow’ presents substantial selections from these two bodies of work, such is the centrality of painting to Kusama’s practice. But even within these displays, there is evidence that two dimensions are simply not enough for her artistic ambition, as the stylistic hallmarks of these works move off the canvas to be reproduced three-dimensionally. As early as 1962, Kusama was working in soft sculpture, sewing and stuffing fabric into protuberances she described as ‘phalli’, which she adhered to domestic items, such as clothing and furniture, extending her net-painting approach to physical forms. Later works make this connection literal, such as the descriptively titled Statue of Venus Obliterated by Infinity Nets 1998. The colours and imagery of ‘My Eternal Soul’ have also found their way into soft-sculptural form, in configurations suggestive of alien fauna.

Such organic and biological forms are in keeping with the artist’s long engagement with the human body. The body was a major preoccupation for Kusama in her performance and fashion work of the late 1960s, which is profiled in the exhibition through selected documentation of her live works and public interventions of the period. In the context of the conflict in Vietnam, the artist sought to assert the beauty of the human form, of love and sexuality, against the horror of war, through a series of psychedelic happenings and public interventions. When, after her return to Japan in the mid 1970s, she deepened her psychological subject matter, biomorphic and botanical forms came to the fore on an ever-expanding scale. It was during this time that pumpkins emerged as a major motif in her paintings, prints, sculptures and installations, their bulbous forms appealing to the artist for their suggestion of fertility, abundance, sensuality and individualism. This period of rich experimentation forms the exhibition’s centrepiece, featuring a range of important, if rarely seen, pieces drawn from collections around Asia.

Installation view of Want to love on the festival night 2017, GOMA 2017-18 / Collection of the Artist / ©Yayoi Kusama / Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore. Installation view at GOMA, 2017 / Photograph: Chloe Callistermon © QAGOMA
Installation view of Yayoi Kusama’s THE SPIRITS OF THE PUMPKINS DESCENDED INTO THE HEAVENS 2017, GOMA 2017-18 / Collection: The artist / © Yayoi Kusama / Courtesy: Yayoi Kusama Studio, Inc. / Photograph: Joe Ruckli © QAGOMA

In the early 1990s, Kusama began to revisit a number of pioneering installations she had developed in the mid-1960s, using intersecting mirrors to create infinite reflections. Growing throughout the decade in size and ambition, Kusama’s installations came to realise a conception of space that had only been glimpsed in her paintings and collages; they now enveloped the viewer’s body in an idiosyncratic sensory universe. ‘Life is the Heart of a Rainbow’ features two new versions of important moments from the artist’s development. Revisiting Kusama’s Peep Show 1966, her recent work titled I WANT TO LOVE ON THE FESTIVAL NIGHT 2015 is a hexagonal structured with external and internal mirrors, whose floor consists of concentric ripples of multicoloured flashing lights. THE SPIRIT OF THE PUMPKINS DESCENDED TO THE HEAVENS 2017 updates the centerpiece of her presentation in the Japanese pavilion at the 1993 Venice Biennale — a mirrored cube, the internal reflections of which create the impression of a vast field of luminous gourds. Also included are popular works from the Gallery’s own collection, including the infinity mirror room Soul under the moon 2002, Narcissus garden 1966/2002, installed in the Queensland Art Gallery’s Watermall, and the large sculpture Flowers that bloom at midnight 2011, an acquisition made with the generous support of the late Mrs Win Schubert AO.

Installation view of Yayoi Kusama’s Soul under the moon 2002, GOMA 2017-18 / Mirrors, ultra violet lights, water, plastic, nylon thread, timber, synthetic polymer paint / The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 2002 with funds from Michael Sidney Myer and The Myer Foundation, a project of the Sidney Myer Centenary Celebration 1899-1999, through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation and The Yayoi Kusama Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Appeal / © Yayoi Kusama / Courtesy: Yayoi Kusama Studio, Inc. / Photograph: Chloe Callistermon © QAGOMA
Installation view of Yayoi Kusama’s Narcissus garden 1966/2002, QAG Watermall 2017-18 / © Yayoi Kusama / Courtesy: Yayoi Kusama Studio, Inc. / Photograph: Natasha Harth © QAGOMA
Installation view of Yayoi Kusama’s Flowers that bloom at midnight 2011, GOMA 2017-18 / Fibreglass-reinforced plastic, urethane paint, metal frame / Purchased 2012 with funds from the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Diversity Foundation through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © Yayoi Kusama / Courtesy: Yayoi Kusama Studio, Inc. / Photograph: Natasha Harth © QAGOMA

Yayoi Kusama first exhibited at the Queensland Art Gallery in the groundbreaking survey ‘Japanese Ways, Western Means’ in 1989, a time when a global reappraisal of her practice was just beginning. Since returning to Japan, her earlier achievements had been overlooked, and the developments in her practice were yet to be seen by the wider world. Over the course of a number of engagements, the Gallery has watched Kusama’s profile grow; ‘Life is the Heart of a Rainbow’ is an opportunity to contemplate the unique and expansive practice of an artist whose commitment to art-making — to realising a singular vision — is tireless.

Delve deeper into Yayoi Kusama’s world

Endnotes
1 Alex Needham, ‘Yayoi Kusama named world’s most popular artist in 2014’, Guardian, 2 April 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/apr/02/yayoi-kusama-worlds-most-popularartist-2014, accessed 28 September 2017.
2 Javier Pes and Emily Sharpe, ‘Visitor figures 2014: The world goes dotty over Yayoi Kusama’, Art Newspaper, April 2015, p.2.
3 Eileen Kinsella, ‘Who are the most expensive living female artists?’, Artnet News, 16 January 2017, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/most-expensive-female-artists-817277, accessed 28 September 2017.

Reuben Keehan is Curator, Contemporary Asian Art, QAGOMA

Tanin no jikan: The simple courtesy of respecting other people’s time

 
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Vo An Khanh, Vietnam b.1936 / Mobile military medical clinic 8/1970 1970 / Archival inkjet pigment print on Crane silver rag paper / Purchased 2010 with funds raised through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Appeal / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © Vo An Khanh

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, the National Museum of Art in Osaka, Singapore Art Museum and QAGOMA have collaborated to produce ‘Time of others’ — an exhibition of artworks drawn from all four museum collections and shown alongside loans and new works. Here, we expand on time as a useful device for considering other cultures and social systems.

As its title suggests, time figures prominently across ‘Time of others’. It is most visible in On Kawara’s iconic ‘date’ paintings, which both record the passage of time and fix its moments, in Heman Chong’s 1001 calendars from future dates both near and far, and in the 24 ticking clocks in Bruce Quek’s bracing installation The Hall of Mirrors 2015. But it is also present in Danh Vo’s 2.2.1861 (2009–ongoing), whose date is about all that will be interpretable to the man handcopying a letter written in a language he cannot understand; as the timespan of the existence of an effaced manifestation of the intersection of historical and social contexts in Saleh Husein’s installation Arabian Party 2013; or as a terrible force in Vandy Rattana’s MONOLOGUE 2013, where the year 1978 manifests itself in the death of a family member in Khmer Rouge-era Cambodia. And it mediates a range of historical narratives: the nineteenth-century geological exploration of Japan; deceit and treason in the Malayan independence movement; conditions in Okinawa at the end of the Pacific War.

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Bruce Quek, Singapore b.1986 / Installation views of The Hall of Mirrors: Asia‑Pacific Report 2015, Gallery of Modern Art / Installation with various objects and publicly available statistics / Photographs: Natasha Harth / © Bruce Quek

‘Time of others’ is a group exhibition produced as a collaboration between four of the Asia Pacific region’s leading institutions for collecting and exhibiting contemporary art: the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; the National Museum of Art, Osaka; Singapore Art Museum; and QAGOMA. Its title derives from the Japanese tanin no jikan, indicating the simple courtesy of respecting other people’s time. Time is something experienced both individually and collectively; encompassing diverse simultaneous existences, it offers a fascinating device for thinking through encounters between people, cultures and social systems.

The project emerged from conversations between curators based at each museum, and sought to deepen this dialogue while profiling the role of public institutions in representing and sustaining cultural practices in the region. Given the distinct contexts across which ‘Time of others’ would be staged — East and West Japan, the city-state of Singapore, and the urbanised east coast of Australia — it was determined that the exhibition’s structure would be somewhat fluid, with artists and works dropping in and out of the project as it moved between venues, with consideration of local audiences, conditions and artistic programs. In all, 25 artists have been involved in ‘Time of others’, with holdings drawn from the collections of all four museums shown alongside loans and new works by invited artists. The Brisbane version of the show is its fourth and final edition, having already toured to Tokyo, Osaka and Singapore in 2015 and 2016.

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Saleh Husein, Indonesia b.1982 / Arabian Party 2013 / Acrylic on canvases, drawings and archival materials / Collection of the artist / © Saleh Husein

Attention to the geographical context of the venues and audiences for ‘Time of others’ extends to the choice of artists, works and themes. The Asia Pacific is a concept that defies easy definition. The notion of a discreet, homogenous continental or maritime unity is foreign to the region. Endeavours to define geographical borders or identity systems of cultural affinities have therefore been invariably based on political agendas and ideological assumptions. Attempts to enforce such systems have, at various times, created psychic fault lines that remain active today, especially when it comes to histories of conflict and repression. While such traumas remain unresolved, the geopolitical conditions of the regions are ever shifting. Engendering both opportunity and disparity at cultural and economic levels, globalisation has accelerated internal contradictions within the Asia Pacific: while the region arguably remains as unacceptable ‘other’ to itself, it is also home to expanding markets and potential political allies.

With respect to this juncture, ‘Time of others’ focuses on the question of how difference and otherness are constructed, maintained or challenged in contemporary Asian and Pacific societies today. ‘Otherness’, here, is considered to operate not along racial, sexual, class or religious lines, where the recognition of difference would revolve around simply representing the subordinated other. Rather, it is posited as a potentiality that operates within individuals and communities, which might enable them to think beyond fixed identities, enabling an ethic of sharing — a politics not of identity, but of assemblage. In this sense otherness, rather than a force of division, can be a source of renewal that may yet allow us to establish genuine understanding through the recognition of difference in its various dimensions.

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Jonathan Jones, Australia b.1978 / lumination fall wall weave 2006 / Electrical cable, light fittings, bulbs on painted MDF board / The Xstrata Coal Emerging Indigenous Art Award 2006 (winning entry). Purchased 2006 with funds from Xstrata Coal through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © Jonathan Jones

For all of the darker historical moments touched on in ‘Time of others’, there is an abiding sense of hope for reconciliation and renewal. This is expressed in gestures such as the melody that can be shared by anyone for any reason created in Lim Minouk’s International Calling Frequency 2011, a riotous archival installation that fictionalises a 1970s punk rock band popular in Indonesia and Queensland in ruangrupa’s The Kuda 2012, or the beautiful potential with which any encounter between cultures is pregnant in Jonathan Jones’s light installation lumination fall weave 2006. But is also encapsulated in a comment by the Martinican poet Édouard Glissant quoted by exhibition co‑curator Che Kyongfa in the exhibition’s beautifully designed catalogue: ‘I can change through exchange with the other, without losing or diluting my sense of self’.

The exhibition is organised by the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, the Japan Foundation Asia Center, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, National Museum of Art, Osaka, and the Singapore Art Museum.

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Highlight: Zhou Tao ‘Blue and Red’

 
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Zhou Tao, China b.1976 / Blue and Red (still) 2014 / Single-channel HD video, 16:9, 24:25 mins, colour, sound, ed. 4/7 / Purchased 2015. Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Image courtesy: The artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou

Recently acquired for the Collection, this video work demonstrates APT8 artist Zhou Tao’s use of editing techniques to combine two separate spaces into a new, meaningful ‘third’ space.

Based in Guangzhou, in China’s highly urbanised Pearl River Delta, Zhou Tao is part of a generation of Chinese artists born after the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) that is now coming to maturity. His primary medium is video, which he uses to document movement within given environments. Nonlinear and highly poetic, Zhou’s artworks combine the unscripted gestures of work and play with deliberate performative acts. Over a series of highly regarded videos the artist has created since 2011, the relationship between everyday actions and performance interventions is treated with increasing subtlety, to the degree that the two become indistinguishable. All this occurs in fascinating settings — a crumbling village amid towering skyscrapers, lush wetlands, a public square under citizen occupation — conflating the human and the topographic at the same time as a confusing artistic and quotidian gesture. Zhou’s more recent works use an editing technique to conflate two separate spaces into a new ‘third’ space where his narratives occur.

Shot between public squares in Guangzhou and Bangkok, Blue and Red 2014 is the fourth and most recent of Zhou’s mature video projects. Interweaving footage of the 2013–14 Occupy Bangkok protests with sequences of state and corporate-sponsored night-time spectacles in Guangzhou, for the first time Zhou directly represents an implied third space: the rusty silt run-off of Dabaoshan heavy metal mine in northern Guangdong province. The LED-washed skin of people in night footage of these urban squares registers as a luminous electric blue, while zinc contamination stains the sands and waters of Dabaoshan an alarming shade of red. Through oblique framing and agile editing, Zhou combines the surface of human skin with that of the land.

Blue and Red eschews cliché in depicting its subjects. Its presentation of the various entertainments of Guangzhou and the occupation sites of Bangkok are intentionally presented against expectation: the convivial games of Cantonese families are shot in such a way that their object is out of frame, directing attention to their abstract movements; and apart from a brief sequence of police confrontation, the Bangkok demonstrations are presented as largely quiet, laconic events, pictured during long passages of waiting and resting. Vast though their contexts may be — the Pearl River Delta megacity, a militarised state, irreversible environmental degradation — the tiny gestures and prosaic associations of daily life captured in these works remain pregnant with meaning.

Blue and Red represents the most recent development in Zhou Tao’s mature phase, which has developed across the video installations South Stone 2011, Collector 2012 and After Reality 2013. The work was commissioned for the artist’s 2014 solo show at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, which is adjacent to the square in which the protests took place, and it was awarded the inaugural Han Nefkins-BACC contemporary art prize. The work also attracted first prize from the Jury of the Ministry at the 61st International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen, and will feature in The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) opening 21 November at both the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) and Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA).

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Zhou Tao, China b.1976 / Blue and Red (still) 2014 / Single-channel HD video, 16:9, 24:25 mins, colour, sound, ed. 4/7 / Purchased 2015. Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Images courtesy: The artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou

The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT)
is the Gallery’s flagship exhibition focused on the work of Asia, the Pacific and Australia.
21 November 2015 – 10 April 2016

Exhibition Founding Sponsor: Queensland Government
Exhibition Principal Sponsor: Audi Australia

Zurag paintings: Mongolia

 

Acquired for the Collection for inclusion in ‘The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art‘ (APT8) 21 November 2015 – 10 April 2016, are four paintings by the most inventive practitioners of contemporary Mongolian zurag. These are a fine introduction to the art being produced in one of Asia’s most exciting new artistic contexts.

APT8 marks the beginning of the Gallery’s engagement with Mongolia, with the inclusion of works by four young Mongol zurag painters who have revived a national cultural tradition by applying it to their own experiences in a rapidly changing society.

Characterised by its ultra-fine brushwork, bright colours, flattened perspective and themes drawn from everyday life, zurag is derived from Tibetan tangka painting, synthesising elements of Chinese guohua painting and the medieval equestrian art of the Khitan people. In this sense, it shares its heritage with many traditional and contemporary art forms, ranging from Persian miniatures to Chinese landscapes and Japanese nihonga painting. The most celebrated example is Balduugiin Sharav’s classic work One day in Mongolia 1911, which hangs in Ulaanbaatar’s Zanbazar Museum of Fine Arts.

After the Mongolian revolution of 1921, zurag focused on themes of secular nationalism, merging with the socialist realist painting that would dominate Mongolian culture from the bloody Stalinist purges of 1930s until the advent of democracy in the early 1990s. Since that time, Buddhist iconography and shamanic images have made an appearance, as they have in post-communist Mongolian culture more broadly. Established as a subject at the Mongolian University of Arts and Culture in the late 1990s, zurag has since been taken up by a passionate new generation of artists who find within it the means of addressing the tensions of daily Mongolian life.

Uuriintuya Dagvasambuu

Uuriintuya Dagvasambuu, Mongolia b.1979 / Path to wealth 2013 / Synthetic polymer paint on canvas / Purchased 2015 with funds from Ashby Utting through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © The artist

Drawing on traditional patterning and the experiences of Mongolian women, Uuriintuya Dagvasambuu’s paintings combine poetic and everyday imagery, creating subtle contrasts between the manufactured and the natural or organic, and between intense detail and flat planes of colour. The graphic and symbolic qualities of Dagvasambuu’s paintings are particularly pronounced, with the inclusion recognisable motifs from traditional Buddhist painting — and East and Central Asian aesthetics in general — as well as psychologically charged imagery of contemporary life.

Gerelkhuu Ganbold

Gerelkhuu Ganbold, Mongolia b.1988 / Soldiers who don’t know themselves 2013 / Synthetic polymer paint on canvas / Triptych: 360 x 200cm (overall); 120 x 200cm (each panel) / Purchased 2015. Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation Grant / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © The artist

Gerelkhuu Ganbold brings a searing dramatic sensibility to zurag painting, producing mural-sized canvases of swirling battle scenes that recall contemporary comics and science-fiction cinema, along with traditional epic painting and the Mongolian genre of equestrian art. Of particular interest to Gerelkhuu is the free and open composition that zurag offers, with an absence of vanishing-point perspective allowing all pictorial elements to be rendered with equivalent detail. His paintings of the famed mounted warriors of the Mongol Empire allegorise life in present-day Mongolia, which the artist characterises as an eternal battle, a daily struggle for money and food while the powerful fight among themselves for influence.

Nomin Bold

Nomin Bold, Mongolia b.1982 / Tomorrow 2014 / Gouache, old scripture sheets on cotton / 194 x 144cm / Purchased 2015 with funds from Ashby Utting through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © The artist

Of the four artists represented, Nomin Bold is the most emphatic in her employment of the composition, materials and techniques of tangka painting. Also notable is her use of collaged pages from Mongolian scriptures and gold-leafing, which ground her extremely fine brushwork and dynamic composition. Her stylised renderings of deities, human and animal figures, and the labyrinthine landscape of Ulaanbaatar offer a satirical edge with an ultimately uplifting tone.

Baatarzorig Batjargal

Baatarzorig Batjargal, Mongolia b.1983 / Nomads 2014 / Synthetic polymer paint on canvas / 100 x 150cm / Purchased 2015. Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation Grant / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © The artist

Baatarzorig Batjargal’s zurag paintings also possess a strong element of social criticism, betraying the influence of Chinese political pop in their use of recognisable historical figures and their juxtaposition of traditional and consumerist imagery. Aesthetically distinguished among contemporary zurag paintings by their fine shading and unusual surfaces, which are often sourced from rural furniture, they are particularly concerned with the loss of traditional heritage through a succession of regimes, from the ascetic culture of Soviet-style communism to the rising inequalities and empty consumerism of US-style capitalism. Batjargal brings epic composition and satirical humour to the serious content on his work.

These paintings, by four of the most inventive practitioners of contemporary zurag, are a fine introduction to some of the key themes and techniques in the art being produced in Mongolia, one of the most exciting new cultural contexts in Asia.

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Reuben Keehan is Curator, Contemporary Asian Art, QAGOMA
Feature image detail: Uuriintuya Dagvasambuu’s Path to wealth 2013