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The Spring issue of ArtReview Asia takes a closer look at how stories are created. And how those stories might also become known as ‘history’. Depending, of course, on who records them, the ways in which they’re framed and how much authority lies with the one who tells it. This issue focuses on artists and other cultural figures who grapple with this, and who are attempting to reframe histories in order to think up possible futures.
Ayoung Kim (this issue’s cover artist), for example, works with the ‘speculative fiction’ genre and uses digital imaging technologies, game engines and generative AI to create virtual worlds that highlight the labour market’s imbalances and exploitations of its workforce. Focusing on her recent trilogy of world-building videos, Delivery Dancer (2022–24), Harry Choi explores the ways in which Kim’s work is informed by a practice that has ‘sought to reassemble existing narratives of varying scales into performances and installations in order to construct alternative, peripheral histories’. In the latest instalment, titled Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse (2024), Kim does this by centring the story of two ‘gig economy’ workers who attempt to navigate an ever-evolving dystopian digital landscape created by generative technology.
Meanwhile, exploitation of another kind comes under fire in Mark Rappolt’s essay on the current cultural and critical exchanges among South Asian and Gulf countries. The trend, it seems, among curators and institutions globally, is to ‘correct’ art history ‘by reversing the erasure of the Global South from a history written in and by the Global North’. ‘Moral authority is all curators, critics and other arty types seem to want to accrue these days,’ writes Rappolt, ‘It’s a narrative that gets deployed a lot these days when the general rhetoric surrounding culture and, well, everything else, revolves around victims and perpetrators.’ But what you can’t do, argues Rappolt, is correct some parts of history (the arty parts) and not others (those pertaining to the exchange of goods and people), some injustices but not all. Even if, leaving a few things for later generations to correct is what keeps institutions going.
And that which goes unseen is revealed in the performances and ink drawings of Tripuri artist Joydeb Roaja. Growing up in the Chittagong Hill Tracts and as part of the Indigenous community more generally in Bangladesh, Joydeb’s work is informed by the history of a region marked by violence, oppression and military rule by the Bengali state. ‘The overarching portrayal of the region is often its scenic beauty – mountains, forests and rivers,’ reflects the artist Munem Wasif. ‘But Joydeb is one of the few artists who has broken that paradigm, bringing politics and personal anecdotes from his childhood into his performances and drawings.’ A new series of work, The Future of Indigenous Peoples (2024) is on show as part of the Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane, and highlights how Indigenous bodies, particularly that of the Pahari community, are constantly surveilled, whether by the media or by the military.
In the latest ‘Eternal Returns’, a new series in which ArtReview Asia republishes (and annotates) key texts that have influenced art and the thinking around art, Yuwen Jiang and Mark Rappolt take a close look at an excerpt from Japanese scholar and art critic Okakura Tenshin’s Ideals of the East: With Special Reference to the Art of Japan (1903). Marked by his own imperialist and nationalistic views, the text ‘insists on the value of Asian aesthetics and philosophy in the face of a Western narrative that presented its own values as more advanced, more contemporary and more powerful than anything else that might have been going on’.
Elsewhere, Tyler Coburn visits Zamanbap, a collective of performers who are trying to define ‘contemporary art’ in Kyrgyzstan. Operating out of Chingiz Aidarov’s house, in the country’s capital Bishkek, Zamanbap came together following a stroke that left Aidarov with limited mobility. Some of his collaborators from Art Group 705, a ‘nomadic theatre’ founded in Bishkek in 2005, traded their modes of performing in public space for those scaled to the intimacy of the home,’ writes Coburn. ‘Zamanbap art takes cues from Jerzy Grotowski’s poor theatre and Ramis Ryskulov’s tricksterish approach to poetry and art, creating gamelike scenarios’ and bending the traditions and conditions in which art is created, shared and observed.
Also in this issue, Deepa Bhasthi questions whether Diljit Dosanjh, the Panjabi singer who’s fast becoming a global superstar, is still able to say anything meaningful about where he comes from; Max Crosbie-Jones has a close encounter with Thailand’s new ‘art forest’, observing that it might yet take some time for this utopic enterprise to bloom; Sarah Jilani considers what the phrase ‘contemporary art’ really means in Oman; and while to the outsider, the Vietnamese art scene might seem invisible, Lorenza Pignatti finds that by forgoing the traditional Western markers of art, one will see a collaborative network of artists and curators busy at work. Plus book reviews and exhibition reviews from around the world including the 7th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, Dancing with All: The Ecology of Empathy at 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, and the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art.
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