Dear Friends and Colleagues
I have just got back from Shanghai. Among other things I saw exhibitions by Nalini Malani at Arario Gallery, Louise Bourgeois at the Long Museum and the Shanghai Biennale. What do all those exhibitions have in common?
Censorship.
Apparently, Malani was refused a visa and some works impounded. Likewise, I am told, six works by Bourgeois meant for her retrospective were refused entry and about a third of artists invited to the Biennale were rejected or were asked to change their proposal. As many Latin American artists refused to do so, they just were not included in the show. This explains why the exhibition, set in the cavernous old power station seems so sparsely inhabited. Given that there was a Mexican curator and many Latin American artist invited one wondered why there was no work referencing the Wall on the Mexican border. It turns out that “Trump” is also a not to mentioned word (Like Taiwan, Tibet and Tianeman) as well as the relationship between China and America. A Chinese artist who based his work on his personal research on Vietnam war was censored. Any hint of the least possible issue was taken away from the show.
For the record, the Malani show was wonderful and indeed her installation in the Biennale was even more wonderful. As for the Bourgeois show, the giant spider from the Tate looked even more enormous and threatening in the concrete caves of the Long Museum, but otherwise it did seem very much a show curated by Hauser and Wirth. Most things were bronzes cast posthumously or in her final years. There was hardly anything made before 1995 (when she was already 84) and most things were too big, too glossy. Her early wooden sculptures were here but only in the late bronze-casted version, but without the fragility and hand-made quality of the wooden versions these too looked bland. For me the later fabric works on show here lack the intimacy and awkwardness of her better work. All in all, it was too blatantly an exhibition of what was available for purchase, not a true retrospective. One installation had the power to fascinate one, Spider, 1997 with its tattered bits of old tapestry. It reminded one of how strange her work could be.
Which six works were censored I do not know, presumably ones that were too sexual or that the Chinese couldn’t understand – in which case they censor, just in case.
Given this degree of censorship it was very surprising in the Shanghai Biennale to see recent photographic portraits by the Filipina artist Kiri Dalena of political activists with their faces concealed by masks. In the Philippines, a country with a history of political violence and repression, and a president who has little respect for press freedom, anonymity is a sensible precaution.
Many imagine that Shanghai could become the prime centre for contemporary art in East Asia. This degree of censorship may be one contributing reason why that will not happen.
Previous to this visit, I had gone to the CCP awards in Manila. CCP (Cultural Centre of the Philippines) is a concrete brutalist building put up under the aegis of Imelda Marcos (opened 1978). Inside it is now dark, oppressive and little visited. Like the Barbican Centre in London, the ceilings are too low to comfortably house contemporary art. Given which, it is a considerable achievement for the curator Ronald Acacheso to make the annual Thirteen artist awards look unusually like a relatively coherent exhibition! The artists were between twenty-eight and thirty-eight years, less involved, he believed, in painting, more concerned with politics than a previous generation. There was, he saw, a return to figuration but normally through lens based art.
Cian Dayrit showed a whole range of maps, some exploring how marginalised communities see their world. Maps of mining exploitation and land reform struggles. Maps made by individuals of their daily travel, or their home-world. Paper and pens to make your own maps were provided. It is the large fabric maps that have made him popular with collectors but it is better to see them in a wider context of re-mapping or what he calls counter-cartography.
Eise Jocson likewise provided an installation with an option to participate – in this case by drawing one’s own Disney princess. A rather wonderful video showed Filipina women all dressed as Snow White all walking from the CCP to the American Embassy – they are both on the waterfront. (Popular culture here is very Americanised. Disney-fied in fact but also resented and resisted.) Inside her space was also an installation of life size Princess dolls, battered and forgotten.
I am off the see the Bangkok Biennale tomorrow and will tell you about it next month.
Wishing you a good Advent and pleasant Christmas break
Tony