Lee Yong-Baek

PIN GALLERY
798 Art District, No. 2 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District
September 23–November 19

Lee Yong-Baek, Angel Soldier_Video, 2011, still from a single-channel video, 23 minutes.

For Lee Yong-Baek’s latest solo show, the atrium of Pin Gallery has been festooned with garlands of fake flowers and models of soldiers, their bodies camouflaged in floral military gear, interrupted only by black army boots and the occasional white hand clutching a gun. Brushing through this gussied-up zone of hyperreal color, one finds Lee’s video from which it is taken—Angel Soldier_Video (all works cited, 2011)—wherein real figures, again in flower-print fatigues, perform barely discernible movements to a gentle sound track of nature noises. Elsewhere in this expansive solo show are vivid simulacral paintings of fishhooks (Plastic Fish), large sculptural installations of mannequinlike figures and their molds, a mixed-media Culture Wall of notes and political criticisms, and a room lined with the motion-sensitive works constituting Lee’s “Broken Mirror” series, wherein virtual glass (depicted on a monitor in a wooden frame) breaks violently as the viewer approaches. Thus, the assembled works lead visitors along a varied path of sensations and perceptions, from visual intrigue and shock to impressions of emptied, disorientated humanity.

Lee’s work is enjoying particular attention on the heels of its presentation in the Korean pavilion at the Venice Biennale. It is important to understand what conditions his practice, which elaborates on existential themes such as religion, the sociopolitical ego and its origins and conflicts, and the consuming nature of (virtual) reality. Lee’s mother lost her siblings and father during what the artist calls a period of “military dictatorship”—the First Republic of Korea under Syngman Rhee, who was in office from 1948 to 1960; At that time an art student, the twenty-one-year-old Lee witnessed the riots and tear gas of 1987 in Seoul. Sensing that Korea’s art at that point had fallen, in his words, into a “political, social, and educational slumber,” the artist sought to raise questions that would rouse the discipline and open up “neutral” aesthetic spaces—unfettered from ideology and beyond preexisting borders—from which to create anew. Thus illuminated, these pieces represent a unique and finely tuned response to the environment by an artist with a deep personal investment in his art’s concerns.

— Iona Whittaker

Yang Jiecang

TANG CONTEMPORARY ART 唐人画廊
798 Art Zone, No. 2 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang Di
November 8–November 30

View of “Tale of the Eleventh Day,” 2011.

Deeply affected by the Cultural Revolution, Yang Jiecang joined the Red Guards in the 1970s and learned calligraphy. After studying Zen and Taoism in the 1980s, however, he began making increasingly experimental work. Deconstructing Chinese traditions such as ink painting, the artist came to use the tools of those media as basic elements in his practice, particularly in his first sustained body of work, the abstract “One Hundred Layers of Ink” paintings, 1988–1999, which eroded any possibility for representation or poetic expression. In recent years, though, Yang has returned to a figurative style, unexpectedly using meticulous brushwork in succinct pieces.

His current show, “Tale of the Eleventh Day,” features the sixty-two-foot-long painting Stranger than Paradise, 2011, which depicts beautiful rolling hills. The title refers to the menagerie of animals populating the landscape––tigers, rabbits, bears, dogs, birds, and others––all having sex in bizarre combinations. Augmenting this Edenic scene, three hundred pairs of ceramic copulating animals rest on white pedestals of varied heights. In the center of the gallery hangs a screen that shows a film of the artist repeatedly smashing his head into the camera lens. The impact is synced with a gong noise that seems to provide a unity to the space.

This art’s miscegenations are not limited to the animal kingdom: Cultural hybridity has deeply influenced Yang’s creations. Regardless of size, strength, or habits, these animals are basking in the joys of sex, thereby asserting that if our own class hierarchies were suddenly thrown into confusion, the result could be harmony or chaos. Here Yang seems to say that if you’re optimistic, you’ll always find hope. He shows us desire, filtered through a faith in human equality.

Translated from Chinese from Lee Ambrozy.

— Anthony Yung

Zhou Zixi

SHANGHART BEIJING 香格纳画廊 (北京)
261 Cao Chang Di, Old Airport Road, Chaoyang District
December 16–January 20

Zhou Zixi, Late Spring and Early Summer, 2011, oil on canvas, 31 x 39”.

Zhou Zixi’s “Late Spring and Early Summer” opened in Beijing in the middle of December, long after the warmth of both seasons had been forgotten. The exhibition features twenty-six new oil paintings by Zhou, many of which quietly depict the numbness of urban China’s lived environment.

The paintings mostly show anonymous urban surroundings, plain enough to lack traces of cosmopolitanism but dense with infrastructure, suggesting the horror of modernization. It Is Said That We Should Look Up to the Sky, 2011, depicts milky sky, only a patch of it visible between the apartment buildings that tower over the view. The title suggests levity and hope, yet the painting’s content is chilling: Apartments covered with heavy window bars are stacked like cages on top of each other, the sky beyond it completely devoid of color.

Figures in Zhou’s paintings are either singular, engulfed in a distant solitude, like the man who lies down on a couch in Empty Room, 2011, or grouped ominously, as in Dependents’ District, 2011, which shows uniformed police and public security officers loitering on a street. Perspectives are often blinding in their man-made banality: The exhibition’s title painting, made in 2011, primarily depicts a concrete road and wall, stretching as far as the length of the canvas allows. The hand of urbanization is never far away, though. End of the Street, 2009, takes a morass of churning gray clouds as its principal subject, but the street lamps and traffic lights that poke up from an unseen horizon below are an inescapable reminder of the banality of civilization, even as the threat of nature looms above.

— Angie Baecker

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

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
November 26–February 10

Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Power Boy (Evening), 2011, Epson print on paper, 59 x 89 1/2".

British critic Jonathan Romney once wrote in The Independent, “We shouldn’t mistake Apichatpong [Weerasethakul]’s true nature as a hyper-sophisticated modernist with complex, innovative ideas about time and narrative,” but he didn’t elaborate on what this actually means, and he concluded his article by reminding us of the magical and bewitching aspects of the lauded artist’s works. It’s arguable that the enthralling qualities of Weerasethakul’s films and installations have generated enough discourse that the possibilities for description have been exhausted. However, Weerasethakul’s compelling aesthetics can challenge any sustained discussion of the contextual and historical significance of his oeuvre.

For Tomorrow for Tonight (all works 2011) is a largely enigmatic and often humorous take on Weerasethakul’s concerns with superstition and animism in Thailand. Consisting of three video projections, a monitor, and a series of photographs, these beautifully composed works depict a woman (played by Jenjira Pongpas) in a dilapidated interior spooked by otherworldly presences, the same woman in repose, a mud-splattered man, and a guy emanating colored light amid a nighttime landscape. On the small monitor plays the short video Workstation, in which the resigned woman, who also appears to be in pain, is attached to an electronic device and attended to by two men working on a metal apparatus embedded in her leg. Her lips move and she gesticulates but there is no sound. This scenario’s offhand realism oddly breaks the spell that the other works cast, bringing us back to the real world of pain or injury.

The verisimilitude of Workstation contrasts with the supernatural qualities of the other pieces, and viewing these two bodies of work together helps Weerasethakul’s methods and references come to the fore: digital manipulation, the shabbiness of Pongpas’s home, the Caravaggesque lighting of her portraits, and the subdued homoeroticism. Here we might begin to wonder less about the ways we experience Weerasethakul’s works, and more about the decisions he makes as an artist, and the reasons behind those choices.

— Brian Curtin

Anri Sala

KAIKAI KIKI
Motoazabu Crest Bldg. B1F
October 14–November 10

Anri Sala, Tlatelolco Clash, 2011, still from a color video, 11 minutes 49 seconds.

At one end of Anri Sala’s current solo exhibition is Le Clash, 2010, a video that depicts three forlorn individuals circling a notorious but now defunct punk music venue in Bordeaux. One carries a music box while the other two stand next to a barrel organ, both instruments playing variations on the Clash’s early-1980s classic “Should I Stay or Should I Go.” At the opposite end of the gallery is another video, Tlatelolco Clash, 2011, which was filmed in Mexico and again features a barrel organ. Here, a group of people are shown, each holding a perforated sheet of music featuring the score of the aforementioned Clash tune. Though the sheets are encoded with the same musical score, when cranked through the barrel organ each yields in a different intonation, rhythm, and tempo of the song. The fragmentary, halting refrains coming from both videos chime with and against each other, drifting in and out of sync, like a wayward canon slowly meandering further and further from the familiar melodic theme of the song’s chorus. Despite the identical script—or “syntax,” as Sala has it—on which the performance is based, each member of Tlatelolco’s band of organ players enacts an original, authentic performance that gives a voice to the “unscorable” elements of the music.

While Le Clash captures how individual articulations of a deceptively simple Clash chorus are always “remembered” differently, each time at slight odds with the others, in Tlatelolco Clash Sala maps this idea onto history, exploring the composition of historical memory, especially within the context of physical space. Sala believes architecture and spatial environment are as important to the performance of sound as sound itself, and he has thus chosen to film this performance against a backdrop of stone ruins interspersed with tall residential buildings—new developments allegedly built on top of the site where the Aztecs lost while battling against Cortés during the Spanish conquest and where snipers led a student massacre during the riots of 1968, just ten days before the Mexico City Olympics. Tlatelolco’s fractured landscape, whose cracks have witnessed momentous ruptures in Mexico’s history, provide an analogy for how Sala’s new works are not created through a bricoleur’s act of patching together, but rather, that they are made from the off-kilter dissonance that results from the attempt to reconcile disparate memories of a single, originary event.

— Darryl Wee

Tomoko Yoneda

SHUGOARTS
1-3-2-5F Kiyosumi, Koto-ku, 12306;135-0024 東京都江東区清澄1-3-2-5F
October 29–December 3

Tomoko Yoneda, Former House of General Wang Shu-ming, the Chief of Staff Under Chiang Kai-Shek, Cidong Street, 2010, color photograph 32 x 25”.

Tomoko Yoneda, an artist known for her cool allegorical photographs of sites of historical trauma, recently turned her lens to a series of Japanese-style houses in Taipei. These homes had belonged to families associated with the imperialist Japanese government and were built between 1895 and 1945, during the colonial occupation. (They include, for instance, the residence of General Wang Shu-Ming, chief of staff under Chiang Kai-shek and a Japanese house at the Beitou Hot Springs, known then as the “Hakone of Taiwan.”) The coexistence of the past and the present in the residences, now abandoned or used by the heirs of immigrants from mainland China, is powerfully rendered in the works. In some photos, the faint daylight entering uninhabited space emphasizes the blankness of a place that has lost its historical moments; in others, the ghostly views of a garden captured through the frosted glass and curtains contrasts with the dark door frames, and indicates the presence of the past that gives spiritual grace to the site.

Citing traces of cultural hybridity––such as the blending of Japanese architectural space with Art Deco designs and fragments of a Chinese poem calligraphed on a door––Yoneda here documents the ambivalent results of cultural exchange. Her pictures suggest lost time through a focus on the evocative fragments of ruins and the ephemeral, capturing both the haunting aura of the sites and the dominant aesthetic theme shared by the classical Japanese and Chinese cultures. Originally photographed for the 2009 Kuandu Biennale in Taipei, but making their Japanese debut with this show, the photos demonstrate Yoneda’s ability to transmit the tangible experience of the specific site and its referential capacity.

— Midori Matsui

“Countdown”

CULTURE STATION SEOUL 284 (문화역서울 284)
Seoul-si Jung-gu, Bongnae-dong 2-ga 122
August 11–February 11

Park Chan-Kyong, Manshin, 2011, nine-channel video installation, dimensions variable.

The Seoul Station, a major railway station built in 1925, witnessed the sociopolitical upheaval of modern Korean history until it closed in 2004. Last year it was resurrected as “Culture Station Seoul 284,” named after its historical site number by the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism. The space’s inaugural exhibition showcases thirty-five local artists. Utilizing the building’s architecture as medium to examine changes in culture, the “Countdown” project successfully explores themes of the past, present, and future.

Situated inside the women’s waiting room is Park Chan-Kyong’s Manshin, 2011, a nine-channel video installation that documents a famous female mudang (shaman) performing a ritual. One monitor shows a traditional hat floating over the sky or on the sea, places imbued with magic energy. Another screen shuffles images of folk art and shamanist drawings. Here Park also presents songs of the mudang, which allows the works themselves to have a ritualistic quality; they appears as investigations into the birth and death of the station and evoke the forgotten fantasy of an ideal Korea, a utopia. In the former Executive Room, which was previously reserved for the exclusive use of Korean presidents, U Sunok’s installation Waiting Room, 2011, includes a video of a poem being recited by artist who is seen walking slowly inside the room. The action seems a meditation on the moment of staying and the subsequent moment of leaving, as well as on the illusiveness of memories of a space.

Outside, the old Daewoo building across from the station becomes a canvas for the projection of Kim Sooja’s video Bottari Truk – Migrateurs, 2007. For this work, the artist gathered used clothes and quilts from migrant groups, tying them into bundles and transporting them on trunks. The piece evokes the station’s past life, full of movement and exchange, as well as its recent derelict state and its future as a cultural beacon.

— Yulhee Kim

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, SYDNEY
140 George Street, The Rocks
December 16–February 12

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Pulse Index, 2010, digital microscope, pulsimeter, projectors, computers, custom-made hardware, and software, dimensions variable. Installation view, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.

Visitors are welcomed to Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s exhibition by a conveyor belt with a computerized scanner where they are invited to place all sorts of small objects that they can find in their pockets. Once these pass under the scanner, images of the items are then projected on the conveyor belt alongside objects of other participants. Please Empty Your Pockets, 2010, is one of the thirteen artworks in this first solo exhibition of Lozano-Hemmer in Australia, throughout which the artist uses records and repetition of data such as sound and images captured by means of advanced surveillance or biometric technologies.

Most of the pieces on view generate collective and poetic experiences; for example, Microphones, 2008, is an installation of vintage microphones modified to record the voice of a visitor and immediately play the previous person’s contribution, creating a sense of copresence. Lozano-Hemmer’s deployment of new media in this show creates striking forms of relation between art and audience. Pulse Index, 2010, is a particularly affecting installation that depicts an animated skin landscape of visitors’ fingerprints, which have been captured by a sensor equipped with a digital microscope and camera, then projected as a composite that pulses at the pace of participants’ heartbeats. Visitors become the artwork itself: They act as performers improvising sounds, jumping, or making funny movements with their bodies to activate the pieces. In effect, “Recorders” is a site full of technology that functions as the interface for the encounters of art, self, and the kinetic force of collective memory.

— Claudia Arozqueta

MDE11

MUSEO DI ANTIOQUIA
Carrera 52 # 52-43 Medellin Antioquia
August 31–December 9

Chto Delat, The Tower: A Songspiel, 2010, still from a color video, 36 minutes 51 seconds.

“It’s time we thought about the educational role of art.” So says the priest in The Tower: A Songspiel, 2010, a film by the Russian collective Chto Delat that is one of the highlights of MDE11, an ongoing citywide event in Medellín, Colombia. Centered on the recent debates and protests over the controversial Gazprom skyscraper to be built in Saint Petersburg, the comical Songspiel (German for “song-play”) features a variety of impassioned pleas from members of the country’s elite, whose task is to “educate” a diverse range of the populace on the tower’s importance. In turn, the film’s representatives of the Russian workforce—including blue-collar workers, youthful girls, and a socialist rebel—all respond to these “educational” pleas in song, each of their stances solidifying a distinct position of defiance.

Effectively situating politics and knowledge in relation to how a public becomes informed, The Tower is perhaps the most compelling instantiation of MDE11’s theme: education. MDE11’s dynamic programming, which is taking place in museums and independent spaces throughout Medellín, includes panel discussions, workshops, concerts, and exhibitions divided among three categories: “Studio,” “Laboratory,” and “Exhibition.” The Museo de Antioquia—the venue exhibiting The Tower, among many other works—represents the curators’ vision at its most mature and is the location where the artists most explicitly mimic pedagogical strategies. Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook “instructs” by teaching a class about death to corpses in her series “Conversation with Deaths,” while Mark Tribe resurrects Cesar Chavez, Angela Davis, and Stokely Carmichael with videos from his “Port Huron Project” series, in which actors “modeled” the orators’ respective Vietnam War–era speeches at their original sites of delivery throughout New York.

In the independent space Casa Tres Patios, Dinh Q. Lê presents among other works, Dear Mom, 2011, in which he asked street vendors to write letters to his mother in Vietnam assuring her of his safety. The ensuing letters about Medellín are affectionately exaggerated, perhaps overcompensating for Colombia’s reputation as a dangerous country. More important, Lê’s letter writing exacerbates the tension between traditional forms of academic pedagogy and more experimental forms of public performance, a welcome dynamic that is felt throughout MDE11.

— Micah Malone