The 7th Asian Art Biennial, launched in October 2019, titled “The Strangers from beyond the Mountain and the Sea”, is on view for a few more days at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung. The biennale, which brings together the work of 30 artists and collectives from 16 countries, with nine newly commissioned artworks, is curated by Taiwanese and Singaporean artists Hsu Chia-Wei and Ho Tzu Nyen. The Artist-Curator identity of the pair has allowed for a selection of works that puts greater emphasis on the creative process as well as the finished artwork. Seeing the participating artists as their peers, the two curators were able to establish a personal dialogue with them from the beginning, thus also bringing in a more comprehensive perspective on the creation of art in Asia. Among the artists in the biennial exhibition are Charles Lim, Korakrit Arunanondchai & Alex Gvoijic, Shilpa Gupta, Hiwa K, Lee Ufan, Ho Rui An, Yee I-Lann, Ming Wong, Maya Watanabe and Park Chan-Kyong.
“The Strangers from Beyond the Mountain and the Sea”
Hsu Chia-Wei and Ho Tzu Nyen used their artistic fantasy to delineate the theme of the biennale, titled “The Strangers from Beyond the Mountain and the Sea” . The “strangers” referred to in the title are inspired by the ancient Japanese word marebito, which the Japanese folklorist Orikuchi Shinobu (1887–1953) described as supernatural beings that come from afar with gifts. The beings usually visit the human world on special occasions, and if responded to with appropriate rituals and festivals, the marebito bestow gifts of knowledge and wisdom. The curators go on to explain in their curatorial statement:
We use the term “stranger” as an extension of the marebito, to refer to many “others”. Not only spirits and gods, but also shamans, foreign merchants, immigrants, minorities, colonists, smugglers, partisans, spies, traitors – the stranger is a medium, through which another world may be communicated. Through encounters with strangers, we might confront the outlines of ourselves, the borders of our society or even the boundaries of our species. This is the stranger’s gift. And some gifts are not easy to receive.
The curators set their Asian Art Biennial 2019 exhibition within a spatial context sketched out in a diagram, in which the region of Zomia and the Sulu Sea represent the “mountain” and “sea” respectevily. The two sit at opposite ends on a vertical axis, with another correspondence, Clouds and Minerals, forming another axis. American anthropologist James C. Scott (1936-) describes Zomia as “a broad, elevated region stretching from the highlands of central Vietnam to northeastern India at 300 meters or more above sea level”. Due to its high altitude and inhospitable terrain, Zomia is a difficult region to govern for low-lying states surrounding it. Thus, it has become a sanctuary for a variety of fugitives – partisan fighters of forgotten wars, drug traffickers, ethnic minorities and others – escaping the reach of the nation state.
To the south is an area rich in maritime trade, the Sulu Sea, which has long been a haven for piracy and terrorists. The Sulu Sea is located between the Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea, bordering Borneo to the south and the Philippine archipelago to the north.
The axis “Clouds” and “Minerals” opens up the narratives of human history to the complex relationships between people, objects and technology, through a concept of time and space stretching beyond the human scale. The curators thus address the various discourses and interactions in the contemporary art world, taking the opportunity to re-examine Asia’s decolonisation projects which are yet to be realised.
At the centre of the diagram is “The Void”, representing concepts of nothingness and emptiness, the foundations of Asia’s philosophical thought. The Void is not only a lack or absence, but also a space for emerging possibilities, for creation. The curators explain that the diagram is not a theoretical model nor a storyline, but merely a tool to create “a stage to be inhabited, and activated by the works, thoughts and presences of artists, thinkers and collaborators”. The curators write about the structure of the exhibition, which unfolds in four interconnected chapters:
On the ground floor, the first (Gallery 102) and second (Gallery 103 to 108) chapters bring together artworks that embody the complex entanglement of human histories with stories of mountains and seas, clouds and minerals. On the second floor, the third chapter (Gallery 202) features a cast of human subjects propelled by immense, often non-human, forces to positions beyond the pale of national identities, and the forth chapter (Gallery 203 to 205) is dedicated to visions of human and material transformations.
A ‘Footnote’ written by collaborative researcher Lin Yi-Hsiu opens each of the four chapters. The Footnotes are “a gathering of notes and thoughts that provide possible contexts and subtexts for the artworks, but also suggest interesting detours, or offer little openings to other lines of thought”.
Asian Art Biennial 2019: Commissioned Artwork
In “The Strangers from Beyond the Mountain and the Sea”, there are nine newly commissioned artworks that closely respond to the curatorial premise. Here we look at four of them.
Antariska, an independent historian and co-founding member of KUNCI, a research collective in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, is currently researching on art and the mobility of ideas in Japanese-occupied Southeast Asia. His work for AAB, entitled Co-Prosperity #4, is a continuation of his experiments that develop audiences’ sensory experiences towards the subjects of his research. The artist rethinks the ways in which the public can experience, participate and intervene with history, and through perception and sensory experience, can reinterpret the past from their present. Co-Prosperity #4 is an installation that presents the biographies of Japanese intellectuals that served in the military in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Before them, Japanese artists had been sent to the battlefield to create images of the first Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War. Continuing on that ‘tradition’, about a third of the Japense intellectuals in the Thirties and Fourties were sent to work with the propaganda department in Japanese occupied countries, where they recruited local intellectuals to work for propaganda purposes.
Hong Kong artist Snow Huang works in theatre, contemporary art, sound and music creation, and founded Against Again Troupe at the age of 20 years old. For AAB, he and his troupe created The First Dream, a work that is part of the “Flâneur series” (2016-ongoing), in which the participants walk on their own, without any performers, as they listen to audio files in various corners in a city. The fabricated narratives create a sense of estrangement, as they transform the cityscape into something unrecognisable, unsettling the participants’ perception of reality and their surroundings. The story in The First Dream begins with a music festival involving military troops in Vietnam, taking the listeners to the Millenarian movements in Zomia in early 20th Century, then to a young person in Taiwan with the paranormal ability to see beyond a thousand miles. The young man’s tactile vision leads the viewer through a series of silent dreams, which show how intangible time shapes our tangible world and bodies, as we travel through past, present and future.
Thai collaborative interdisciplinary artists and curators team JIANDYIN (Jiradej Meemalai and Pornpilai Meemalai) have created Friction Current: Magic Mountain Project, which focuses on the phenomenon of forces caused by an interplay of social and political resistance, relative motions, frictions and currents between modern nation states and the stateless Zomia. The artists draw from the cosmic folklore of Zomia highland groups, according to which mountains are wrinkled lands, sewn by special threads, which weave together the region and the continent. Scientifically, this phenomenon is explained with the movement of techtonic plates. In their work, JIANDYIN use two substances, the jadeite formed by metamorphic rocks in reaction with the chemical elements NaAlSi2O6, and urine samples containing the chemicals C10H15N (methamphetamine). The circulation of the two substances functions as a metaphor for the intertwining of the historical, the sociopolitical, the economic and the cultural.
At Asian Art Biennial 2019, Taiwanese artist Ting Chaong-Wen explores Taiwan’s colonial history through a multimedia installation entitled Virgin Land. During Japanese rule, Taiwan witnessed its largest scaled introduction of, and experimentation on, tropical plants. Taiwan was an ideal location for the malaria-spreading Anophele mosquito, for which European colonisers used cinchona tree barks as a cure in South America. Before vaccines could be produced, quinine extracted from the chinchona trees was the only cure for malaria, and provided protection for colonisers to venture further into new, unexplored territories. Islands that presented the threat of dangerous diseases thus became “treasure vaults” for the pharmaceutical industry. Cinchona trees and botany were turned into an “alternative imperial weaponry“, colonisation could extend further, and make profit from new lands. Virgin Land takes the form of a pop-up bar, where fluorescent glass tubes containing a mix of gin and quinine are scattered on the floor. The meaning of quinine as a cure acquires a multivalency, suggesting that coloniality is like a virus in our bodies, permeating through our consciousness.