Isaac Chong Wai

Living and working between Berlin and Hong Kong, Isaac Chong Wai’s interdisciplinary approach spans site-specific performances, video, installation, painting and photography to probe knowledge systems, histories, continual societal shifts and global phenomena poetically and conceptually. Chong attends to the centrality of the body in shaping understandings of who we are and the world around us to explore themes dealing with powerlessness, violence, collectivism, leaderlessness and mourning.

 (which translates as New Guard), we see the artist filmed from behind, breathing onto a pane of glass from the viewpoint of Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theatre, gradually obscuring the image of the Neue Wache building beyond and the renowned sculpture 

 (1937–38) by Käthe Kollwitz that is exhibited inside. The Neue Wache was originally built in 1818 for Frederick William III of Prussia as a royal guardhouse and memorial to the 1813 wars against France. In the years since, the building’s memorial function was rededicated numerous times from the perspective of different political affiliations: it functioned as a memorial to the victims of the First World War, as a site for commemorative celebrations by the Nazi armed forces and, in East Germany, as a memorial to the victims of fascism. Since 1993 it has served as the Central Memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany to the Victims of War and Dictatorship.


Chong’s edited video collects the traces of his breath on the window, eventually covering the entire scene. The work probes how, in the present, we continuously seek to preserve and commemorate the past. 


 (2015), breath serves as a metaphor for past lives, and also to refer to an intrinsic relationship we have to the world, of breathing as a marker of being alive. In this video, you used breath to blur and mask the rear facade of the Neue Wache building in Berlin. The building houses an enlarged replica of 

 by Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945). The then German chancellor Helmut Kohl’s choice of Kollwitz’s pietà gave rise to a lengthy and lively discussion on whether it was a suitable memorial to the victims of the Nazis, particularly as the original sculpture was made in 1937–38 in response to the First World War. How did you first arrive at using breath as a painting tool and as a metaphor for the blurring of the visible and invisible?



Isaac Chong Wai: 
I was working at the Maxim Gorki Theatre, and one of its windows faces the back of the building housing the memorial by Kollwitz. I worked there during the winter, and, as for everyone who visits the theatre and views the Neue Wache from this position, traces of one’s breath are left on the glass, blurring what is seen. This was the beginning of the work: breathing on the glass pane of the window and imagining how this blurry image reflects hazy memories of people. It also extends to connotations such as how, as human beings, we need the living body in order to remember.


I tried different ideas when making the work, and you can see from the video that my movement, from left to right, mimics reading or even writing, although you don’t see any text. Maybe this can also be likened to a paintbrush moving across a canvas slowly and building up or accumulating paint in a way that blurs, but at the same time creates, an image.



JD: 
I’m interested in how you use something as ephemeral as breath to create new meaning, particularly by obscuring or distorting what is seen, and how that relates to the written and the drawn, the said and the unsaid, and the body as well.



ICW: 
I was thinking of mortality and breathing, and the way breath comes and goes. It is ephemeral. But then, of course, the video has been edited so that this action I initially carry out is made permanent. Every single frame in the video was edited so that the vestiges of each breath remain, until the entire shot blurs the image of the memorial beyond. The work is reflecting on the ephemerality of the human body. I’m not saying that each breath ‘represents’ a body or a life; it’s more about the quality or the attributes of the body and how this connects to memory and building something to aid acts of remembering. 


We build things through architecture: a building to memorialize, a sculpture in tribute. In this video I deal with the transient nature of breath and use it to build a collage, but this collage is one that’s impossible to achieve in the physical or real world. In the end, it’s an artificially created collage, and somehow, by creating in this manner, ephemeral traces come together to make this overall blurring possible. When I say blurring, I am also referring to the blurring of memory. How is the body forgetting while simultaneously trying to remember?

JD:
You’ve alluded to this active way of giving permanence to something that isn’t permanent. As we’ve discussed, breath is an indicator of life, and this really speaks to a notion of being present in a moment. The work is performative and about absence and presence; it also, importantly, probes the conditions of memory work by asking who is remembered and who is memorialized through architecture, through buildings and monuments. In your use of breath to blur out a memorial honouring war victims, perhaps we can think of breath as a form of resistance in the shadow of war and loss of life. Given the current debates and contestation around monuments and monumentality, do you frame this work as a form of protest? Maybe protest isn’t quite the right word, but is the gesture of breathing to erase a prominent monument a catalyst for reconsidering the things we remember and the people we immortalize through public sculptures, particularly as this relates to a war memorial in this instance?



ICW: 
I believe there are certain forms of resistance in the work, whilst trying, as you say, to make the ephemeral permanent. Addressing the idea of performance, this often comes up as a reading of the work due to the involvement of the body. This is quite different from how sculpture as memory works. There’s still a performative element, related to how people behave in front of sculptures – quiet, contemplative, sad. I was thinking more about how one can engage with history, as well as how to dispute or contest it. How blurry history is, and the fact that we are asked to remember, but who are we actually remembering? Victims who have no faces; some, we don’t even know their names. What exactly are we remembering when a memorial calls upon us to remember? I’m not saying that I’m offering an answer in the work, but it’s trying to question the involvement of the body in acts of remembering and the politics involved in the process.



JD: 
You described the movement from left to right as mimicking different modes of communicating, like writing, reading or painting. There’s also a sequential repetition occurring as you increasingly blur the back of the monument with your breath. Your back is also turned away from the viewer until you walk away from the frame: we don’t usually see the reverse of statues and monument, we face them. We behave, as you rightly identify, composed and respectful, particularly around war memorials and sites representing traumas. At the beginning of the film, it looks as if you’re looking for or anticipating something; gradually, however, by following your movements, we begin to notice this blurring out of the window. Your video is silent. We just see your body. We don’t hear any sound; we don’t hear the physicality of your actions. What was your decision-making in removing the sound of you breathing onto the glass?



ICW: 
When I was editing the video, I didn’t think too much about sound. I always felt that it wasn’t needed when I was considering the work. Why? I would say that probably the inference comes from memorials or ritualistic performance and how, when it comes to mourning and paying homage to victims, we often use silence. In reality, though, these spaces are never completely silent – it’s more that we don’t speak and are still, but you’ll still hear people breathing. I also didn’t want people to focus on the voice or sound I was making and instead focus on the image.



JD: 
I’m interested in what you’ve said about sound and silence because when we look at histories of performance art and durational performance, there’s often a lot of emphasis on sound and changes in sound or breath over performances that take place over a period of time, and documenting that. I’m thinking here of durational works from the 1970s and 1980s like the joint work by Marina Abramović and Ulay, 

One Year Performance 1980–1981 (Time Clock Piece)

 and so on. I wondered why there is an absence of sound, when its presence would give a sense of the physicality of the repeated gestures we see in the video.



ICW: 
I wasn’t aiming to document a performance with 

; it was more about looking at what kind of image I could create through this action of breathing onto a glass window. Could this mean it has performative elements to it? Yes. In this and my other video works, I use silence quite often. Perhaps the works dictate it.



JD: 
Silence’s centrality and an absence of sound determined by the work itself.



ICW: 
Yes, I’m still working through why this recurs.



 is performed for the camera. I’m interested in knowing more about your relationship to performance art and how the work offers an embodied viewing experience for audiences following your movements and gestures onscreen.



ICW: 
When I have an intention to create a video piece that includes performative elements – whether through movements, gestures or postures – because it is witnessed by the camera, I don’t have audience interaction in my mind or a sense of an audience. It’s quite different from performing live for an audience, where there’s a certain intensity resulting from performer–audience interactions. With video, as we discussed previously, there’s this idea of permanence through capturing on film, and there are a lot of other things such as sound and editing that become absolute. Live performance doesn’t allow for that, and it’s a space I’m still working on and navigating.

JD: 
It’s been eight years since you made this work, and in that time there has been extensive debate about monuments and monumentality globally: calls for the falling of monuments, particularly of problematic and contested figures memorialized in public spaces. When you made this work, you were sort of responding to a specific context and a specific time in your life. But your video is now framed against this wider debate, at a time when a critical eye is being cast on the subject – a rethinking of monumentality and who is being memorialized. How do we engage with this idea of constructing public monuments to represent or evoke collective memory? And how did you approach this as someone who is not German, although you’ve now lived in Germany for many years?



ICW: 
The first thing that comes to mind is how traditional monuments are often sited in very vast public spaces, and the monuments themselves are typically life- or larger-than-life-sized. It suggests a kind of projection whereby we use our own bodies as a prototype to create another body, in another material, so that it can remain permanent and last forever. But in doing so, I think we forget that our bodies themselves are the memorial. This is one of the reasons performance come into play in this context: not necessarily to challenge monuments, but at least to serve as a way of recognizing or questioning this romantic idea of permanence. There needs to be a critical review of this human idea of the body’s permanence, and our arrogance towards histories as permanent.


Some amazing artists have created really powerful public sculptures and monuments. For example, Jochen Gerz, whose work is explicitly about ‘counter-monuments’. There’s also the article ‘The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today’ (1992) by the writer James E. Young. This is more the context I was thinking within.


Living in Germany, I wrestle with my position in relation to its pre- and post-war history. I didn’t have direct experience of it, and so I found myself trying to understand my relationship to it. In what ways can I engage with it? And thinking back to the time of my first encounter with the sculpture, I also began to consider memory and remembering through a transnational lens, across borders.



JD: 
I read a quote recently by the writer Don DeLillo: ‘Maybe there is no death as we know it. Just documents changing hands.’ I thought about this in relation to history, monumentality, memory and ways of remembering. All these things are constantly shifting and never fixed. There are also systems that enforce how and what we should remember. I see ephemerality and performance as much-needed critical tools to help us probe some of what is deemed the fact of passed-down knowledge. Perhaps your video work functions as an intervention that calls on us to keep looking – at what we see and what we’re told to see as well. There’s a disruption between seeing and how to remember. Would you agree with this position?



ICW: 
History is veiled with the mask of objectivity, while historicity is influenced by hegemonic power, which favours, most of the time, the majority, while marginalized people are not represented or discussed. It is important to always question the system that tells us what and how to remember, without forgetting the power of collective memory. Memory doesn’t work like documents; it entangles emotions. It would be scary if memory were no longer personal.

BIOGRAPHIES 

Neue Wache

screening

Martha Atienza

Yee I-Lann

During the spring of 2019, I was invited to organize a residency programme on Ara Dinawan, an island approximately 6 kilometers south of Kota Kinabalu, on the west coast of East Malaysia on the island of Borneo. At the time, my understanding of the region was rather limited, primarily coloured by distressing narratives of deforestation in Kalimantan (the Indonesian part of Borneo) and a steady stream of Chinese propaganda reports concerning illicit activities in the South China Sea. It was a moment of transition for me personally as well. I had recently concluded a three-year endeavour – curating a project space nestled within the hutong neighbourhoods of central Beijing – and embarked on the ambitious project of establishing an art institution from the ground up, funded by a prominent Chinese corporation. Throughout this period, the concept of community was never far from my mind. As a curator in Beijing, I had strived to immerse myself in the local artistic community, but breaking free from the gravitational pull of Western artistic paradigms and their values proved to be a formidable challenge.

Before launching the residency, I went on several research trips to reach out to artist professionals, institutions and even the Sabah Tourism Bureau. One of those memorable encounters was with Yee I-Lann, a Kota Kinabalu-born artist who had returned to her hometown in 2016 after many years abroad. She welcomed me into her studio and took me to her grandmother’s land, then we dined at a local family-run restaurant. We also bathed in a river, though I cannot recall its name. At the time, Yee had already begun her weaving project with women from the boat-dwelling Bajau and Sama Dilaut communities based in the Sulu-Celebes Sea around Semporna, as well as Dusun and Murut women from the inland district of Keningau. Their major product was 

, a traditional Southeast Asian floor mat woven from bamboo, pandan and other plants. Embodying the importance of traditional, local craftsmanship, a 

, usually placed on the ground for food sharing, opens a unique space for domestic, transgenerational or romantic conversations, blurring the boundaries between inside and outside, guest and host, domestic and public. As a cultural object, the 

 symbolizes Borneo as a conduit for trade and culture connecting many different worlds, dating back to the Chinese ceramics trade in the Song dynasty (eleventh century) and continuing through the Sultanate of Sulu in the fifteenth century and the subsequent periods of colonial rule.

In Western culture, one classic image of womanhood is Homer’s Penelope sitting by the hearth, weaving to maintain the home while anticipating her husband Odysseus’ return from his two-decade expedition. Such an image reflects a distinction between public and private and is often invoked in feminist critique to reject the notion of ‘home’, which the theorist Iris Marion Young argued is a site of social inequality, particularly concerning gender roles and responsibilities.

 As the philosopher Jürgen Habermas noted, the concepts of public and private in ancient Greek society created a distinction between the realm of legal discussion and decision-making in the 

 (city-state) and the personal property of land and slaves in the 

(household), owned by the male head of the family. Thus the binary of public and private in Western culture located women’s position and identity within society and allowed domestic space to be used as a tool of oppression. Despite these associations in Western culture, the image of weaving can be critically empowering in non-Western frameworks. As a form of intelligence, 

 weaving, developed over generations, is akin to a coded language or local knowledge shared only by community members. This skill empowers the weaver to preserve the cultural heritage of her community and shape its future. When weavers from different communities unite to create a 

, it is both a bonding experience and a way to collectively challenge the schooling and administrative language systems that were imposed upon them by colonial cultural norms and religious institution.

 (2021), a group of weavers unfurls a brightly coloured ribbon of 

, stretching the 60-metre-long textile over the waters surrounding Omadal Island, where a cluster of stilt houses is home to a Sama Dilaut community. Members of this historically marginalized group live in an environment where the concept of home is not fixed and boundaries are fluid. Their concept of home is not bound up in a dualistic division between public and domestic due to their mobile way of life and wide distribution across the Southeast Asian archipelago. Despite being a fast-growing ethnic group in Sabah, many Sama Dilaut are still stateless. In a non-representational fashion, the act of unrolling a 

 engages with the politics of being at home, signalling the reciprocal bond between community members and the significance of sharing food, resources and care to guarantee everyone’s survival. This act signifies the community’s identity but also fosters a sense of kinship and its world view of interconnectedness, as the Austronesian root 

 indicates, meaning ‘together’, ‘same’ or ‘kin’.

As the poet Adrienne Rich noted, it is important to acknowledge one’s own ‘politics of location’, which means taking a distance from Western feminism’s enforcement of a universal approach to women’s experiences and prioritizing knowledge production accountable to the specific context in which one is situated.

 Like Yee, Martha Atienza positions herself in her homeland, which is Bantayan Island in the Philippines. Born to a Filipino sea captain father and a Dutch mother, and based in both Bantayan Island and the Netherlands, her positionality provides an embodied pivot from which her artistic practice and activism materialize and extend across various contexts. Collaborating with her brothers, the locals of Madridejos and overseas Filipino workers, Atienza has spent a decade making films that document fishing communities and their heritage, such as the performative underwater re-enactment of the annual Ati-Atihan Festival, initially rooted in native animist traditions honouring the ancestral spirits known as 

, which transformed over time as Spanish missionaries introduced a Christian dimension, venerating the Santo Niño (Christ Child). She has mentored the island’s youth, sharing her tools and knowledge to help them document changes in their hometown. During an interview with Han Nefkens,

 Atienza mentioned how young people view their lives differently through a camera lens, which creates a distance that allows for reflection on one’s identity. During the Covid-19 pandemic, she co-founded GOODLand, an organization committed to protecting the fishing community and its future from the devastating impact of land privatization for tourism, industrial fishing, marine resource depletion and environmental degradation on the island.

Panangatan 11°09′53.3″N 123°42′40.5″E 2019-10-24 Thu 6:42 AM PST 1.29 meters High Tide, 2019-10-12 Sat 10:26 AM PST 1.40 meters High Tide 

(2019), is a 307-minute-long black-and-white documentation of an island at high tide. Shot from a moving boat, the other boats, houses, individuals, families and lifeforms of the tidal zone unfurl in a tableau before the camera’s gaze. The video’s meditative pacing draws attention to a place inseparable from the larger world. The Philippine archipelago is among the most vulnerable to the effects of global warming. Suffering from rising sea levels and temperatures as well as extreme rainfall and other major weather events, inhabitants have been relocated off the shore, which has deprived them of their land and access to natural resources. The deliberately deadpan calm that inheres in the video seeks to rouse us from the protracted nightmare of our environmental reality, revealing the profound and unsettling truth about the violent nature of governmental technocracy and the hidden environmental consequences of extractive activities worldwide. Rooted in the historical exploitation of natural resources, a failing capitalist system has been unable to address climate change.

Immersed in the Sulu Sea, the Celebes Sea, the Java Sea, the South China Sea and the Philippine Sea, an intricate tapestry of interconnected bodies of water, both Yee’s and Atienza’s videos unfold precarious coastal ecosystems. Situated beneath and above the winds respectively, Borneo benefits from its location outside the typhoon zone while the Philippines, conversely, bears the brunt of many storms. Their position of being home is imbued with a fundamental ecological consciousness. For their sea nomads, fisherfolk and marginalized communities, the concept of home is tenuously shielded against the pervasive incursions of neocolonialism, but being financially and socially marginal in global capitalism does not always equate to ecological vulnerability. Most Indigenous communities possess an ancestral and communal knowledge and set of practices that enable them to steward the earth’s resources to a degree that often surpasses the capabilities of government-run conservation systems. This wisdom is deeply interwoven into their cultural traditions and seamlessly integrated into their daily existences; it is a nuanced, time-honoured methodology honed over centuries. Their knowledge is not a commodity or a mere programme that can be extracted or replicated beyond the boundaries of their ancestral homelands.My residency, titled ‘offshore’, ran for a duration of six months, extending until the end of 2019, just before the onset of the initial wave of the global pandemic. It hosted fifteen groups of artists, for many of whom this experience marked their final opportunity for transnational travel for the following few years. On this island, situated on the marginality of the world, unforgettable friendships were formed. During this time, the Indonesian government announced its ambitious plan to shift the nation’s capital to Kalimantan. It was a moment that compelled me to acknowledge that when we become a part of this environment, embracing ecological consciousness and enacting meaningful change often reveals itself to be more straightforward than our initial perceptions might suggest. Even in moments of passive unawareness, an underlying desire to tread more lightly permeates our actions within the world. Far from being hermetically sealed or immutable, this world allows us to grasp the essence of a place, a memory, a piece of knowledge or an enduring truth. It is a world of being home.

NOTES

BIOGRAPAHY

Panangatan 11°09'53.3"N 123°42'40.5"E 2019-10-24 Thu 6:42 AM PST 1.29 meters High Tide 2019-10-12 Sat 10:26 AM PST 1.40 meters High Tide

Tikar Reben 

Home Unrolled

Rei Hayama

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

What does it mean to carry death into new life? Releasing violence from our bodies and our lives is a process of liberation and a death ritual. I do a daily burn, sending messages and intentions, with incense and offerings every morning. On moon cycles the burns happen on a fire pit. For a few years now, I have been hosting burns in my garden: friends come over on new moons and full moons to release things into the flames. Some of them burn letters from ex-lovers, others burn email printouts from abusive employers, toxic legal papers, random objects, notes to the universe, traumas and stories we want to release and intentions we want to call in. I have adapted this ceremony from ones I witnessed and took part in with my family in Singapore, Indonesia and Bahrain, encountering many myths and rituals using light and fire to mark seasons, life cycles or holy days, functioning for us as a way to find order in the world.

I have long been fascinated by traditions of burning votive objects as a form of honouring the dead: joss paper ‘ghost money’, replica Rolexes, houses, luxury cars, passports or laptops burnt to send to ancestors. Smoke rising from the flames, elements supporting us in our efforts of transformation, transporting things beyond this world. I have thousands of photographs and videos attempting to capture what I see in the flames. Since cameras began recording, humans have been trying to capture the presencesbeyond this world through this elemental light: spirits and ectoplasmic manifestations, ghostly apparitions derived from the light penetrating the film surface to create human-shaped projections. In the alchemy of lens, light and film there has always been a spiritual impulse. The world of moving images is an ideal space to transport objects and ideas to reach the other world, for people to try to see beyond this reality. On-screen and in our cameras there is a collapse of time and place, supporting a movement away from the harshness of the crises we are living through.

How do we live with catastrophe? How do we navigate ongoing crises in the wake of so much violence from centuries of colonization and the horrors of climate collapse? What does it mean to live with the ghosts of this relentless grief? Many artists, especially from East and Southeast Asia, have responded to histories of violence, war and oppression through narrative and aesthetic explorations of animism, as a non-hierarchical practice of human–spirit communication. The three works presented here evoke light, fire and memory, figuring animistic rituals and beings while engaging with questions of materials, objecthood, political memory and legacies of war.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s work draws on imagery that moves between the supernatural and science fiction, often based in the myth-laden Isan region of northeast Thailand, where he grew up. His experimental work takes place where borders – ones delineating territory and those dividing the living and the dead, human from animal, dream from reality – dissolve through the frame. In 

(2014), he explores relationships between light and political memory. Night occupies the screen as we take a stroll through a jungle garden littered with concrete sculptures. This is Sala Keoku, a temple site and sculpture park created by the mystic, spiritual leader and artist Bunleua Sulilat that fuses Buddhist, Hindu, animist and secular styles. Menacing, fantastic sculptures of animals and divinities, dogs on scooters, cows and garlanded pigs are illuminated intermittently, the enveloping night disrupted by pyrotechnics, strobes and digital camera flashes. Accompanied by a percussive soundtrack of crackles and explosions that merge with the sound of gunfire, 

is immersive, unsettling and deeply hypnotic.

Figures walk through the garden, a woman on crutches and a young man taking pictures in silence. These are Jenjira and Banlop, two central characters from one of Weerasethakul’s most openly political films, 

 (2015), which also features Sala Keoku park, about soldiers experiencing an epidemic of a sleeping sickness, a commentary on military dictatorship and the long history of political oppression in Isan from the Thai central government. In 

, the two characters appear and disappear like ghosts amid the disorienting flash of fireworks and flares. They walk alone in various scenes, then we see them sitting on a bench holding hands; as the lights flash, the same couple is replaced by an image of a Sulilat sculpture depicting two skeletons embracing, one of the many haunting images linked with the history of war and genocide associated with the spread of communism in the region (indeed, the temple park itself was raided and partially destroyed by the army for being a suspected communist hideout). Death haunts this short video, but its subject is the persistent flashes of light, the fireworks animating the landscape and the statues in the park – a protest against the enveloping darkness that attempts to obscure the evidence of the violence that is inscribed on the land. For Weerasethakul, the statues are a form of revolt against the country’s long history of oppression. The militarized forced ‘Thaification’ of the northeast region has, in the artist’s opinion, led the inhabitants to ‘dream beyond’ mundane realities. Amid the flashes of lights, the actors blend with the illuminated statues, gods and animals so that together ‘they commemorate the destruction and the liberation of the land’.

As Weerasethakul presents statues revolting, we also see monuments and statues as protagonists in Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s 

 (2020). The film follows the story of the last five humans on earth, young children who are washed ashore on a deserted island and sail the seas in search of objects left over from the ruins of human civilization. The children call themselves the ‘boat people’, referring to their mode of transport but also proudly reclaiming the derogatory term used to describe the refugees who fled Vietnam by sea after the Vietnam War, which resulted in a migration and humanitarian crisis that lasted from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, an experience that Nguyen’s own family endured. The island location is in fact Bataan province, on the coast of the Philippine island of Luzon, where the artist shot the film following an artist residency. Bataan has its own complex, violent history, being the site of the so-called Death March of Filipino prisoners of war in 1942, during occupation by Imperial Japan, as well as a landing site for refugees arriving on boats from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in the 1970s. The five children of the film are led by a young girl, who is named throughout as ‘the last woman on earth’, who proclaims they are sailing the world, ‘seeking the stories of our ancestors, of who we once were’. As the children explore this deserted land, they encounter relics and objects from past times, finding commemorations of migration and death as well as Buddhist and Catholic statues. Walking through museums and memorials, they follow the traces of the material culture of a land that has experienced the hard edge of war and colonization. They make wooden replicas of the found objects, which they burn, releasing their ashes into the ocean, echoing the different ways that burning is used ritualistically in Southeast Asia.

Encountering the severed head of a Guanyin bodhisattva statue on a beach, ‘the last woman on earth’ begins a discussion on death, objects, afterlife and intergenerational knowledge with the deity statue. The little girl shares her compassion for the objects she encounters, describing the burning of replica objects as an act of liberation and a gesture of release, offering to create a replica of the statue to assist the deity’s own release. ‘I do not need you to give me my freedom’, she responds. As the children carve replicas of objects they find on the island and in the abandoned museum, we as viewers are confronted by our cultures of remembrance and the role we play in holding and honouring objects that echo violent political memory.

‘When men die, they enter into history. When statues die, they enter into art. This botany of death is what we call culture.’ These are the opening lines of 

(1953)by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, one of the most iconic films on the subject of colonialism and art. Here, statues have been looted and captured in museums; instead of fulfilling their symbolic functions within their own traditions, they have been transformed into commodities by colonizers. Are these objects of war, like those encountered by these children from the future in 

, also our way of colonizing the past? Is it better to burn them? Are these objects spirits in themselves, and when are they just replicas? Who liberates whom; does burning a statue liberate us from the histories that hold us?

Last year I was at a workshop with filmmakers discussing the restoration of 

 a film by the Lebanese guerrilla filmmaker and documentarian Christian Ghazi, who made some of the most iconic and avant-garde films of the Palestinian resistance in the 1970s. The documentarian’s films were so politically volatile that authorities burned them all in an arson attack on his home in the 1980s, leaving him with no record of his decades of iconoclastic filmmaking or his many hours spent documenting important figures and voices of the Palestinian resistance. In the last fifteen years some traces of Ghazi's films have been located, and painstaking work has been undertaken by the organization Nadi Lekol Nas in Beirut and other filmmakers in the region to copy film to film, to restore the fragments that have been found. In Rei Hayama’s

 (2009), we see the repeated scene of a girl appearing in a forest, hands digging soil and burying dead insects, and then running away.The film is made on Single-8, Fujifilm’s 8mm film stock, and this first film work by Hayama, produced a year after Fujifilm announced that they would cease to produce or develop Single-8, was made without a camera. Much like the work of Nadi Lekol Nas to restore burnt film fragments, the artist takes a film fragment documenting herself as a child and duplicates the print by hand. As each iteration unfolds, the visual fragments of the repeated scene deteriorate, the colours fading and the grain increasing. As we watch the child perform a ritual of commemoration and endings, the medium itself embodies its own ending, manifesting a spectral aura within the very fabric of the film. Capturing the tender fragility of decay in the superimposition of time on material itself, Hayama makes a powerful work about memory, the possibility of light and chemicals to support remembrance. Here we see the artist’s animistic way of connecting to the film, a spirit in the darkroom exposing hidden worlds laid over, under or inside the visible one.

BIOGRAPHY

A Child Goes Burying Dead Insects

The Boat People

Fireworks (Archives)

Dreaming Beyond

Andrew Thomas Huang

Andrew Thomas Huang is an artist and film director who imagines worlds rooted in Chinese mythology and vernacular fantasies. Huang has established himself with the music videos he has made for artists such as Björk, FKA twigs and Atoms for Peace. In 2019 he was nominated for a Grammy Award for his music video for FKA Twigs’ ‘Cellophane’. He is currently working on his first feature film, 

 (2019) is an absorbing short film that weaves together semi-autobiographic and fantastical elements to follow an ordinary Asian American restaurant worker’s extraordinary sexual awakening. It begins in a typical Californian Chinese joint, where the young employee receives the Rabbit God, who arrives as a mysterious patron. Their encounter then blossoms into an affair that opens for the young man the doors of a painful yet liberating process of knowledge and acceptance.

The Qing dynasty myth of Tu’er Shen traces the story of a Hokkien soldier who was executed for spying on his male lover. The ruler of the underworld decided that since the soldier’s crime was one of love, he would be ordained as Tu’er Shen, the Rabbit God, the patron deity of gay love.

We’d like to start by asking you to reflect on the diasporic condition and how it influences your gaze towards spaces of origin, the spaces that culturally inform your background. How do you relate to them from the specific experience of the diaspora?



 
Someone once described to me the experience of being part of a diaspora as having a ghost limb, and I thought it was very accurate. It’s like having a phantom limb, reaching back to some sort of origin that doesn’t really exist, yet you feel compelled to reach for it anyway. It’s something felt rather than seen. Also, as someone who doesn’t speak the language of my ancestry – my family speaks a Southern Chinese dialect that is dying out, which is the reason I didn’t learn this specific dialect – I think when you are severed from the language, members of any diaspora are reliant on sense memories, taste, touch and smell. I think that 

was an attempt to recreate and evoke those memories and a way to tap into a larger mythological context, as well as the instances of queerness that I could find in Chinese mythology, and bring them to life in a contemporary way.



 in relation to a trip that you took to Taiwan, where you had the chance to visit the shrine dedicated to the Rabbit God [Tu’er Shen]. Could you share a bit about that trip and your encounter with the guardian of the shrine?

 
Visiting Wei-ming Temple was really special. I fully admit that I was intimidated to go, because I had made a film about their deity and I knew that the film might come under some scrutiny. They invited me to screen it at the temple, I think from a combined level of curiosity and genuine appreciation, but also some inquisitiveness about why I had chosen that particular deity. The one critique I got from the master of the temple [Lu Wei-ming] was that he asked me if next time I could make a happier film. Which, you know, I understand; but actually that was also an awakening for me, because [I realized that] as someone born and raised in the West, race, racial issues and the identification of being a part of a larger diaspora means we face certain cultural and political issues that are maybe different from the ones you experience growing up in a more homogeneous place like Taiwan. So I don’t think I could fully expect everyone at the temple to understand the emotional place that this film was coming from, and clearly I don’t understand the full context of their world either. In the end, they gifted me a beautiful little talisman and said, ‘The Rabbit God is in this talisman, so take it.’ So I think there was genuine goodwill and appreciation from both sides.



As somebody living in the USA, and given the growing conflicts in the country and the toxicity of its public and political spheres, how do you negotiate your engagement with your multiple identities within the context of current debates in American society?



That’s a good question. I’ve been thinking a lot about how, throughout history, we’ve had situations where we have these kinds of short-lived blossoming periods of queerness – usually before some sort of political shutdown of that. I’m thinking of Weimar Germany or other moments where a period of queer blossoming is suddenly followed by extreme austerity and conservatism. I think this is a cycle that repeats. What’s happening in the US right now is incredibly embarrassing; at the same time, we have a social progressivism that is maybe also at a new height. And society is incredibly asymmetrical right now with all the wealth disparity. I guess this is my way of saying I still think visibility is really important, and as artists we still have a responsibility to be brave and make work that asserts our existence. There’s so much work to do. I’m not someone who typically attends large Pride events as I’m more introverted, I guess, when it comes to that, but I do think it’s important to always remember Pride as a movement of resistance and not just corporate rainbow flags. It’s actually meant to be a time of challenging power structures, and it’s important that we remain critical.



We’re interested in who your heroes and heroines are, who guides your positioning across these issues.



What an important question! I’m forever a fan of the filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul. I’m also a fan of the artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen, I think his work is so thoughtful and beautiful. I’m in Oslo now, so I can’t help but think of Tori Wrånes. WangShui is a brilliant artist and friend of mine who I know you’ve worked with. I’m thinking of a lot of friends, or at least internet friends, like Martine Gutierrez, Jenkin van Zyl, Lucy McRae, Rafa Esparza, Justin Shoulder and 011668. And other filmmakers like Terence Nance, Miranda July and Kahlil Joseph. I just discovered someone new recently, her name is Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi and she showed an installation at the Berlin Biennale in 2022 that I thought was really incredible. The cosmological map of my influences is so vast, it’s hard to list all of them.



Alongside your heroines, it would be interesting to know who your influences are. Who are the people who helped you grow into who you’ve become as an artist?



Well, if we’re going to talk big influences, I have to list some pop culture sources, so Jim Henson and the Muppets, as well as the fantasy films he made in the 1980s, when they started to become more interior and mystical and strange. Those films got me into puppetry and filmmaking in general. Also, the Muppets are totally queer.

There’s something about the idea of making something up in a frame and performing a character by proxy, and not actually having to show my image, that became an entryway into theatre, film and art making. That really changed me. I also grew up loving films by Terry Gilliam, and Tim Burton’s early work. Chris Cunningham’s work, too, has been a north star for me. One of my favourite films of all time is 

 (1992) by Sally Potter. That film is incredible; it took her nine years to make it. I would say that film alone is something that has been really influential for me. Also, Sergei Parajanov is a massive influence.



We’re huge fans as well. We’re currently working towards showing his works in two exhibitions – the films and also the collages. We’re collaborating with the museum in Yerevan that takes care of his estate.



 (1965) is really special to me, and of course 

When did you first watch those films, at what time in your life?



 until maybe 2018, and I’ve seen parts of 

(1985). I know there are more films that I haven’t seen, but I love his language, his logic, and the world.



You also work across scenes and economies, and worlds. You’re also hugely successful in the music video industry. How does this work in terms of your creative process, what’s the relationship between your different personas?



 
Speaking of cosmological influences, I’ve been a fan of Björk since I was twelve, so it’s been an honour to work with her and continue to learn from her. I think straddling multiple industries is a blessing, I feel very privileged to do it. It can feel a little lonely sometimes because – I’m sure you witness this as curators as well – trying to merge disparate things in different, distinct economies that aren’t suited or designed to fit together is kind of exhausting. For example, fashion film is rarely successful. That doesn’t mean we don’t have successful fashion films, it’s just that, as an economy, the fashion world often moves too quickly to allow a well-done fashion film to be made. And I would say that’s increasingly the case with music videos, too. I think music videos are far from dead, they’re still very much alive, but the economy has become ever faster and cheaper. I also think that fewer musicians are capable or willing to collaborate these days – not like how they did in the 1990s – which is why I’ve been doing them less. The music industry is super violent in its demand for content all the time. I’m so grateful for my collaborations, they’ve taught me so much about what it means to be an artist. But when it comes to my own work, film is my main priority.

I’m still on my quest to make my movie. The studio that was going to fund it decided to pull the plug in May. It’s a film I’ve been working on for seven years, and now I have to start over. It’s really challenging, but I’m more determined than ever, and every discipline I work in is a lesson in being adaptive to what resources you have. It took Sally Potter nine years, so what’s another two? What’s another, you know, five? I guess, to answer your question, I’m enriched by every kind of vector of sphere that I work in, and it’s what keeps me excited and engaged.



Do you feel there’s a distinction pertaining to how, in the more commercial world, there are more compromises to be made, while in your visual arts practice there’s more of a space of freedom? Or do you not necessarily see it that way?



I think there’s some truth to that. I think that’s why I continue to make fine art, because there are times I’m so tired of the compromises. I don’t even know if it’s always compromises – sometimes it’s just that the commercial world requires a certain strategy, to raise money. Well, actually, all spheres require such a strategy to navigate, but there’s an art to dealing with corporate funding or studio funding, particularly in the commercial world. I hope that that enriches fine art, because it reminds you of the power structures that control what we make. I think art can be enriched by these other practices of working in other politics and other economies.



 
What else are you working on at the moment?



I’ve been writing a lot. Writing has forced me to slow down. One thing is just reinventing my movie with the budget in mind. But I’m also doing other narrative writing projects in order to grow. I need a different garden. When it comes to visual art, I really love the immediacy of it, but writing for me is becoming more of a long-term investment, and it can spawn even more visual work. If I have a story that I can live by and die making, then I’ll have years’ worth of visual work to make. So I’ve been thinking a lot more about poetry and the written word and how important that is to me; growing up, and earlier in my career, I didn’t have the confidence, but I think now I do.

I continue to draw almost every day in some form, and I’m talking to musicians about maybe doing some collaborations. But I’m very picky. I’ve written and sold a television show that has similar themes to 

, except with a whole world full of young diasporic heroes. And there are many more mythological gods and ghosts in this world, so I hope that gets made. I’ve also been thinking a lot more about the performing arts. I’ve been taking clown classes because it seems the only appropriate way to deal with the insanity of the present. I think there’s a lot to be learned from comedy and from returning to a child’s state, which is the ultimate gift of clown work.



Well, I met an instructor from Lithuania. She grew up in a circus and she also studied butoh. She’s also a psychotherapist, and she leads a number of courses that usually have the aim of getting you into a psychedelic trance state without drugs. You can do private lessons or group lessons, and we meet at a mountaintop at dusk. One of the courses was on sexual slapstick and about the history of sex work and comedy and how the two are very closely linked. She’s already taught us so much. For example, I didn’t know this, but apparently the original butoh theatre movement was funded by a group of performers who ran strip clubs in Tokyo. As someone who’s been very shy about being on camera or in front of people, it’s been very liberating, and I’m invested right now in growing and trying new things because I have to, to stay excited.

That’s a great question! The actor who played the lead character is Teddy Lee. He struck me immediately because he’s just so romantic and had the sensitivity needed to play that character. The actor who played the Rabbit God, his name is Jeff Chen, also so talented. I’m grateful to them both for allowing me to be vulnerable with them and vice versa. I had never shot something this personal before and also never shot anything that involved physical intimacy on-screen. The scene where they meet in the back room and make love was actually filmed out in the middle of a street – we had to tent it off and make it look like it was night-time. You could hear traffic, and the actors had to pretend that all these distracting stimuli were not there. It was also rushed; we didn’t have a lot of time. Obviously, some time has passed now, and I look back at the film and see all these things, like what if we had taken more time in certain moments or framed things differently? But also, part of the vulnerability of making art is making choices and exhibiting the work and making mistakes publicly. There are things that I wished I could revise, but at the same time this film was a learning experience for me, and if anything, the biggest lesson was how intimate and vulnerable this work is. Making 

 took so much out of me emotionally, and it’s so rewarding because of how close it is to me. I’m very grateful to those two actors for holding that space for me.

You’ve talked about how there’s a border crossing, the breaking of a taboo, when you introduce the knife, the idea of self-infliction or self-flagellation.



Yes. The master at Wei-ming shrine said that self-harm goes against filial piety, so it’s kind of frowned upon in the Taoist perspective. I didn’t know that. I’m definitely humbled by that correction. But maybe that’s also where there was a collision of cultural contexts. I really hate gore and violence on-screen, so I initially didn’t like the idea of the character cutting himself (and I hope no one thinks that I advocate self-harm). But then it just kind of made sense poetically: his flesh is a door, and the knife is the key to opening it so that he can reclaim his body for the first time in a world that has historically denied him access to it. By transgressing his own skin, literally, in the auto-erotic sense, he is penetrating himself as a way of becoming deified, and the Rabbit God is there as a witness to hold his hand through it. That was a moment of both poetic and literal border crossing; a cultural collision where I appreciated the education, and at the same time, having the freedom to make erotic work and make work that’s transgressive is maybe something that could only have come about from growing up in the West and absorbing Western literature and art. So I’m still proud of the narrative choice, but I also respect that education and information from the temple.

You mentioned poetry: building on our previous question about your heroines and influences, it would be great to hear about some of your literary references and the poetry that has shaped your path.



The first person who comes to mind is Toni Morrison. I read 

 (1970), her first novel, when I was fifteen, and it was a huge racial awakening for me; she named something I had always felt but never quite vocalized, and she did it so perfectly. As for my other literary heroes … a book that I loved was 

(1987) by Bruce Chatwin, about walking and being able to psychically map your environment through singing. Anne Carson’s 

 (1998) is a great one. I’m a huge fan of the contemporary writerAkwaeke Emezi. Her book 

 (2018) I highly recommend. I’m also a huge fan of someone I’m collaborating with right now, her name is K-Ming Chang. She’s Taiwanese American and she’s co-writing my movie with me. Her novel 

 (2021) is phenomenal. I think she’s a genius. Think that’s what comes to mind right now.

BIOGRAPHIES

Andrew Thomas Huang 

Kiss of the Rabbit God (兔兒神)

Kiss of the Rabbit God

Sin Wai Kin

I write: ‘In Sin Wai Kin 5-minute video 

, a mouth in drag make-up lip-syncs while a voice-over reads a short poetic reflection on the generational and institutional transmission of gender norms – forceful utterances instigating the becoming of the gender it calls forth.’

In speech act theory, this kind of naming is considered performative: ‘It’s a boy’; ‘A girl!’ Illocutionary utterances

 readily roll off the tongue, seemingly neutral, innocuous, but essential to the formation of a shared ideology. The uttering of the sentence is itself a form of action that acquires a ‘force’ via repetition, attrition, the recurrence of the same narrative: ‘So pretty/ Says a mother/ So precious/ Says a nurse/ So quiet/ Says a father/ Our little girl.’

Different kinds of utterances present different kinds of behaviour. ‘I promise to deliver this text by the deadline’, for example, is a commissive type of illocutionary act, an aspiration entirely dependent on the resolve of the one who promises. In speech act theory, orientations to the world are syntactically modelled: ‘Some illocutions have as part of their illocutionary point to get the words … to match the world, others to get the world to match the words. Assertions are in the former category, promises and requests are in the latter.’

My use of assertive sentences in this essay, commissioned in response to Sin’s video, is constitutive, descriptive of what ‘is’ (‘The uttering of a sentence is’; ‘orientations to the world are’). They perform knowledge on a topic I know little about other than what I learned as a former art history student who attended (more than ten years ago) an MA in performance theory, in a class where I was required to attend drag shows and write papers on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s understanding of paranoid versus reparative reading. I haven’t engaged with speech act theory since then, but I suspect that my obsession with language in my own writing – how it acts on the page – is informed by a time when I also began questioning the relationship between criticism and its subject, as well as the hierarchies inherent in writing ‘about’ an artwork. How can a critical response do more than just reflect meaning? (Interrogative sentence type, a speech act too?)

By quoting Searle, I test the reach of my sentences, their authority. I take on the persona of the critic whose voice historically disappears behind the artwork or pretends that language is what it appears to be: a commentary, reflection, a formal analysis written by a person with unadorned lips. I expand my initial description: ‘The face shimmers with a thick layer of powder, two fake moles diametrically positioned on each side of the mouth. Scintillating light refracts from diamond-encrusted hoops, a blond wig in the backdrop, eyes off frame, mouth marking each word with pronounced lyrical pathos.’

I often wonder (indirect speech act) about the ethics of writing ‘about’ an artwork; if, for example, my introductory paragraphs are redundant considering that the voice-over in 

 already lays out the theoretical terms of its aesthetic project:

‘In fact (committing to an uncertain assertion), there are two mouths in this video: one introducing the vocabulary of the field it engages (‘speech act’, ‘illocutionary’, and so on), and a close-up, single-shot image of a mouth in drag. An invisible mouth and a hypervisible, highly adorned one, with gradations of colours extending beyond the lips’ ‘natural’ outline, from dark red to a black contour marking its external limits. A mouth uttering audible content and a mouth that, by uttering inaudible content, becomes organ, lips, teeth, weapon, saliva dampening the intervals of sentence-making, a powerful muscle (an intentional expression).’

I continue: ‘The first mouth, the one responsible for the propositional content of the video (the voice-over), is troubled by the apparatus of language-making – inaudible but deeply physical articulations complicating the likely transparency of an utterance. The image, the second mouth, resists being reduced to the propositional content (the voice-over); it exceeds it, or perhaps it is precisely (exacting adverb) their proximity, their seemingly (ambivalent adverb) illustrative relationship, that estranges them and widens the gap between utterance and meaning, the same way that criticism is never strictly ‘about’ a subject but is made of stylistic and formal choices, digressions, particularities revealing more about the orientation or preoccupations of the writer than the artwork per se. When it takes the artwork’s lead, art writing can begin thinking with particulars, setting aside the anxiety of having to reveal an essential truth about the work that would pre-empt its opacity.’

I loop the video repeatedly, add a few references: ‘The mouth, an art historical trope, appears as an ambivalent, often misogynist critique of pop culture in the paintings of Gerhard Richter or Tom Wesselmann, for example, where it stands both as erotic fixation and as a rejection of the glossiness associated with the evils of consumer culture. Despite its highly symbolic status, the mouth can also be approached durationally, for how it acts or moves rather than what it represents, such as with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s 

 (1975), a black-and-white, rather austere video in which a mouth attempts to form the eight Korean vowel graphemes. Fading in and out of visibility, Cha’s semantic reflection estranges the mother tongue while resisting diasporic longing. It is more preoccupied with practice than recollection, with (re)birthing language without any attachment to loss’ (my use of quotation marks annulling any performative potential).

‘The mouth in Sin’s video stares straight at me, the viewer, like an eye. The closeness feels directional, agitated. Like Cha’s video (albeit also very different), 

 externalizes rather than internalizes loss (melancholy). It theatricalizes (gender and cultural) belonging by confusing the relationship between subject and object (mother and daughter), viewer and performer: Is the lip-syncing mouth looking at a mirror (also the viewer), rehearsing for a performance? Does the mouth belong to a mother, a daughter, a performer singing to themselves, for others? ‘Until she can look in the mirror/ And say with uncertainty/ On her own to herself/ So pretty/ So precious/ So quiet.’ The mirror reflects back a foundational rift, a glitch or doubling amplified to the point of distortion (figurative sentence). What is seen is not what it appears to be; an image is inverted in language: ‘I am not a woman, I am not a woman, I am not a woman.’ The repetition or doubling of an image enables a transformation – signifiers subversively rearranged towards the creation of another self-image. An image extricates itself from another one in order to live its own autonomous life. Selves (the performer, the mother, the daughter, the viewer) are confused and reinscribed in joyful negation. All that is inherited – jewellery, lipstick, conventional beauty standards – is both embraced and rejected by way of the mouth.’

I am a woman (a critic, a writer) negotiating her mother’s patriarchal inheritance. (Return to the first person with the addition of ‘personal’ information, as opposed to a more ‘critical’ tone.) I am a woman (assertive illocutionary act) staring at her mother staring at her daughter in the mirror. I have not countered my mother’s utterances with my own. I have not proclaimed out loud my emancipation from the gender norms I have inherited or severed myself from my unhealthy attachment to them. There is something important about speaking back (a speech act) to what we seek to oppose (a negative reinscription via queer sociality). To counter the force of an utterance with another one: ‘I am a woman’ (so pretty, so precious, so quiet), ‘I am not a woman.’ Sin troubles our identifications by acknowledging that in order to disavow inherited norms, we must first recognize and expose what was once internalized (subtle slippage back to the critical).

The gender norms I have internalized manifest themselves conventionally. On my lips, I wear a coral shade of pink; on my eyes, discreet mascara. Nothing on my skin. My visibility is unnoticeable; I blend in easily. On both sides of my mouth, I straighten creases resulting from forty years of facial expression using cosmetic fillers. I pay money to keep my mouth as camouflaged as possible, tether my present reflection to what it once was.

My response to Sin’s video is informed by my own aborted speech act, a daughter’s missed emancipation. By exposing my identifications, I ask the ‘critic’ to acknowledge her own implications in the work (‘asking’ – a directive speech act). Sentences are not as neutral (locutionary, basic production of meaningful sentences) as they may appear, or the position between subject (the writer) and object (the artwork) is closer than it appears to be. Grammar codifies the rules of engagement, and artworks such as 

 display the incongruities between a self and its mirror reflection (‘I am not a woman’), words and their signifiers, personal and critical modes of writing.

Without eradicating difference, voices – the voice-over and performer, daughter and mother, critic and writer – gradually disidentify with the positions that define them, avowing that they are also formed by the norms they most despise. ‘The voice-over in 

 is twofold; it belongs to the artist and it belongs to the voiceless yet powerful mouth in drag. Mouth number one is also mouth number two. The critic’s locutionary sentences call attention to their own presence and become gradually indistinguishable from the voice of the writer’

By way of conclusion, I return to more assertive utterances: ‘By classifying language according to its different types of behaviour, speech act theory establishes a linguistic system whose goal is to lay claim to the workings of language.’ Expand on my previous assertion: ‘It ignores that language has its own sentience, that despite the social nature of its inscriptions, it cannot always be willed to behave the way it is expected to. The distance between what it says and what it does is far wider and more slippery than previously imagined. Undomesticated, garnished, extraordinarily physical, the mouth makes things happen without any words.’ Conclude the text here.

Word of Mouth

Extract from Illocutionary Utterances, 2018

Illocutionary Utterances

Takahiro Inamori

Joan Jonas

I have been thinking recently about the shifting cycles of day into night, night into day; the anxiety of the sun rising when you have yet to sleep, or the stories people tell you about cities where it is always twilight; moments when the sun may rise and seem to plunge us deeper into darkness, or the moon roils, burning at 6,000 degrees. Circadian rhythms; working the night shift. Cities that never sleep; people who have forgotten how to. Cold, lifeless satellites. Hot, burning lights. What difference, what meaning is made in a simultaneous present tense.

This is now a place you visit. Logged, saved somewhere, cookie data. Like you, it will change with the hours. It will loop, sure, like your days; sunrise to sunset, even the broken clock right twice a day. The mean time of when the sun crosses over the meridian, say. But it will change. It is live. It is alive. Perhaps you are the dead one. Come back later.

 (2004–5), a figure is performing in a white skirt and a papier-mâché wolf’s head, superimposed onto the blazing lights of Las Vegas. They move like an animal in the night, on their knees or on all fours. They are prowling and stalking, until coming to rest under a most iconic image of Southwest America: the neon cowboy, tipping his hat with a cigarette in his mouth. This is night-time. Neon sparkles. Endless dancing. The wolf lights will be here from sundown to sunrise, dancing perpetually.

In the slow hours of the day, we squint at a horizon. The very threadbare ends of night give way to day; from a highway, lights are blurry: Takahiro Inamori’s 

 (2004–5). Can an image, no matter how live, ever be 

 anything? Time is stretched and slowed, softly imperceptible. It is a slow coming-to. Wolves dance at a distance. We are waking up, supposedly. The great American century rendered as visual data. The sunrise seems to last for hours. Eventually, it will give way again to the night-time lights.

Joan Jonas, 

 (2004–5), will play from sunset to sunrise, BST.
Takahiro Inamori, 

 (2004–5), will play from sunrise to sunset, BST.
Both works will be viewable from 8 June to 15 July 2023.
Works selected by P. Staff.

Biographies

Wolf Lights

jyouban

Wolf Lights / jyouban 

Tony Cokes

We watch a haunted world on YouTube, Instagram. I wasn’t on TikTok at the time of George Floyd’s murder but I’m sure I would’ve watched it there, too. These cannibalistic viewing habits are rewarded vis-à-vis some interchange between our brains’ chemistry and algorithms we don’t fully understand. As we scrutinize the non-breathing neck of George Floyd, we are acted upon. We become algorithmic agents, or agents of the algorithm.

With his head pinned to the ground, Floyd becomes an agent of radical change. ‘To radicalize anything starts at a point of rupture,’ says Myung Mi Kim to interviewer Yedda Morrison. ‘Change can’t just happen along a continuum that has already established itself, or it wouldn’t be change. Likewise, you wouldn’t have the kind of alertness about it being change, because it would be somehow naturalized or even perhaps neutralized in its potency – as if it’s just part of something that has already occurred.’

 That change must take us north of what we already know poses a fatal complication for empathy, which asks that we know one another. How can we empathize with what we cannot even conceive of? Culturally, empathy may have outstayed its welcome, radiating now the naive connotation to which sympathy and compassion have fallen prey. The postmodern promise of a safer, more robust world facilitated by our empathic imaginations has failed, died.



What does it do to you to see one life squelched under the weight of another’s? With a pirated gaze, to witness Floyd’s agonizing breath? It was the kind of belligerent act that after all 

 lead to a societal breakdown. In the conversation that is the genesis of Tony Cokes’s 

(2020), Saidiya Hartman affirms that to see such images, such acts, is ‘deeply, deeply traumatising’.


I was happy to see that the cool-kid energy of Cokes’s video works was matched by his in-person presence. For quite some time, I watched him entertain a circle of adoring twenty-somethings, who all occasionally broke out into affable laughter, before I made my move. Wordlessly, I coaxed a copy of 

‘Oh, this is you?’ he said without a pause, as if he’d been expecting me.

‘Yes.’ I suppose I didn’t have much else I wanted to convey. Someone had already shown them to him, my poems about his work. Bar Laika was loud, too loud for conversation, I reasoned to myself. I thanked him for his work and sat back down.

It’s different watching Cokes’s work privately. Alone in a room at Video Data Bank, or sprawled on my stomach in my bedroom (his embrace of YouTube and Vimeo as a video artist is in alignment with his overall pop sensibility). Together with other intellectual-creatives in a minimal, slick café named after the first dog to go into space, Cokes’s work was almost impossible to absorb. I’d never read his videos as single-channel works, or as works that wanted a captive audience. To sit there silently in a room with others placed a kind of undue pressure on the works’ slideshow-style information delivery. It begged their incessant musical accompaniment to act like a soundtrack, as though we were all at the movies, which it simply isn’t. My paper straw got soggy in a mocktail. This was a time we now call ‘pre-pandemic’.

I should be so lucky to see Tony Cokes dance one day. I can picture him at the block party I happened upon on a walk home in 2020, my anxiety about standing in proximity to others overcome by my need to be part of whatever was happening there. I was alone, I danced alone, but felt together-with. The relief was palpable in the air, the house music providing exactly the right kind of euphoria, of release we all craved from our enclosures. Not just the enclosure of our homes but of our very own bodies, which were newly susceptible in ways we did not understand. This unplanned catharsis made me proud to be among New Yorkers that year, their resilience, their joy.

It is difficult to speculate as to why Cokes would opt for such a menacing tune to double over this insightful conversation. It causes a tonal confusion. Watching 

, I decide the psychic onslaught of Cokes’s musical choices is not at all warranted. Everyone would agree on this, emotionally speaking. I’m willing to say that, to stake that claim. The environment of a club, not that of a Clinton Hill café nor my bedroom, warrants a bass drop. Dubstep’s chainsaw-like aggression should be constrained to underground arenas, its anger and atonality held apart from civil society, broad daylight. So much more disorienting to consider that a white man made this track, Caspa’s ‘Ohh R Ya’ (2007). Yet dubstep’s wobblers, like warblers, routinely administer Cokes’s high-energy fantasies. The works’ exuberance, 

, takes the form of a kind of faux-stupidity, Cokes’s tongue-in-cheek attitude rendered in these inappropriate musics. Their aesthetic abrasion (disrupted/disruptive prosody) mimics the echoes of abolition in the streets.




One winter in college, I interned with Meow Wolf, a now multi-million-dollar arts venture. Walking along the side of the road in a stretch of Albuquerque without sidewalks, a dark sedan nudged up beside me, rolling forwards ever so cautiously so as to match the pace of my walking exactly. A man jerked the window down.

I briefly entertained whatever abyss awaited me in that car, the total abandonment of my body to the ‘party’.

I felt a smidge of despair as the car disappeared out in front of me, like I had missed my one and only chance to live another kind of life. Would it have been so easy? To start over? Cokes’s work, more valiant than me, chooses to abandon itself to its own subjectivity-annihilating party.

Let us imagine, for the rest of our time together, Tony Cokes at a house party. Tony’s party. It’s his party, and we may or may not be invited.




Over the last few months, I’ve been learning to reinterpret our species as inferior to, or at least incidental to, the more-than-human world. Environmental activism has always stung of a particular brand of whiteness, but I’ve since learned better. I found an entryway that feels authentic. I was on a retreat with the scholar William Edelglass called ‘Wild Mind, Wild Earth: Zen Wisdom and Poetry in a Time of Ecological Crisis’, and something about his long, slow delivery on Buddhist animism – and the uniquely desperate psychic state I reached on the retreat – coalesced into a deeply felt understanding about our (humans’) place in the world. Edelglass belongs to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, which I have had less exposure to over the last sixteen years of spiritual practice. Mainly my training is in Mahayana (Zen’s asceticism has always comforted me; I’m a monastic at heart) and Vedic traditions like Advaita Vedanta, which a cute boy on Scruff called ‘too empirical’.

I’ve typically avoided the Tibetan schools for their propensity towards figuration; I’m not very visually minded. The same can be said for Cokes, apparently, though my lack of interior visuality draws me to the literary tradition, whereas Cokes seems to have his footing in two worlds, art and writing.

Similarly, the animal and plant worlds are together putting pressure down on us. (The trees also contemplate people’s destruction.) We should terminate this world in favour of an uglier, ruder (‘rude bwoy!’), riotous one. We should grapple each other to the ground. We should no longer be filled with these ungovernable messes/masses of thinking.

My point here is that there are contaminants in the water, as in the quiet ecological disaster in Kentucky, which has been underreported by the mainstream media. The radiant green waters of Appalachia an unspoken and invisible wound. As in the dissipation of corpses into the ground, or the centuries-old Native monuments casually, if unknowingly, destroyed by corporate architecture.

When I visited Columbus, Ohio, everyone kept talking about the new Intel factory. Many jobs coming, assured my Uber driver. An entire city subsumed by the celebration of industry, a strange festivity not unlike the antiheroic beats of dubstep.

What precedes the impetus to destroy something? Or someone?

Akeroyd Collection

Programme