Dear friends and colleagues
We return to Bangkok! How curious that a two-day trip takes four weeks to discuss and write up! It reminds me of Joyce’s Ulysses which recounts eighteen hours in a day but is pretty impossible to read in under a fortnight. This letter may not be of such literary value however.
To resume: we have done the wats, we have grabbed some lunch and got a taxi to the East Asiatic Building, a rather run-down office building, built at start of the Twentieth century, a building very connected to the opening up of Siam, as it was then, to trade and the West. It is a really nice venue: I hope more of it is opened up for 2020, and that they don’t clean it up too much and lose its character or savour. One unusual and welcome aspect of this biennale was that the three headlining artists – i.e. the ones who were most promoted – were all female: Abramovic, Kusama and Lee Bul. I am, though, somewhat unmoved by Lee Bul’s work and especially by this silver room. Am I alone in getting worried when everyone else enthuses warmly about something and one is left cold? What am I missing?
Works by Heri Dono and Huang Yong Ping were scattered through the biennale – all old works, Perhaps Poshyasnanda felt that these artists had not been seen in Bangkok and the biennale was a good opportunity to show them – and I agree with that sentiment. Where there is little opportunity to see art from outside, the biennale must be an occasion to show interesting things from beyond national or regional boundaries. The trend to having Biennales almost exclusively of newly commissioned work is not always what is needed. Anyway, it was a pleasure to see Heri’s angels again – and see their wings flapping slowly.
There were more paintings in this biennale than one normally sees in a biennale. Which I liked – after all I would guess most artists in South-East Asia paint – though maybe not always as an exclusive medium – installation art seems to have grown out of painting, not sculpture in this region. Beyond Heri Dono’s angels there were paintings and a sculpture by Andy Stahl, a London painter but someone who has long had connections with Thailand. It was difficult at first to match the sculpture with the paintings: they were large and visionary whereas the sculpture was a tower of detritus, flecked with paint. But, of course, it was another pagoda shape, and in that it was as transformed or visionary as the images in the painting. I liked that it had a touch of humour, or irreverence, with the toy duck on the peak. And Andy Stahl survived being hung next to a large video of a beautiful woman, the Thai artist Kawita Vatanalyankar, having her hair, tangled with noodles, repeatedly dunked in red sauce or dye. I suppose this is like the equivalent of the theatrical adage of never performing next to children or dogs: never exhibit next to videos of performance artists, especially if they are young, beautiful or handsome.
Nearby was the OP Place, a shopping mall that seemed aimed exclusively at five-star tourists. We were near the Peninsula hotel. Everything was very expensive and there was hardly anyone there – not such an agreeable or atmospheric place to exhibit. The top floor had been given over to artists, about eight of them. There was a wonderful video projection, EARTH, made in 2009-12 by the Singapore artist Ho Tzu Nyen. I had seen it before, but it is a work that would be worth showing any time in a place that had not yet seen it. There were drawings and videos by Filipina artist/dancer Eisa Jocson (of whom we wrote in letter 140); and paintings by the Indonesian artist Moelyono. Moelyono, who is 61 now, has been both artist and political activist. His two hyper-realist paintings, impeccably made and strangely poetic, of children in West Papua (Irian) were presented above the notes for art education he had used in workshops when working with the children. Because he makes so little work and lives far from the main centres of art in Indonesia he is known of, as if he was a rumour, but rarely seen. I would love to see a larger exhibition of his work which, as here, including both painting and activist material.
A tuk-tuk ride across town to Alliance Francaise which only had a painting by Yan Pei Ming (an artist I have never liked) and a video by Tao Hui. They also served wonderful coffee which I really needed by now! The video by Tao Hui (an artist from Chongqing) was curious: a restaging in a car in Tehran of a dialogue about love and marriage by the famous Hong Kong actress Anita Mui. Apart from the obvious paradox – women in Hong Kong have far more freedom than those in Iran – the video, entitled The dusk of Tehran – was curiously elegiac and touching.
Bless them! Because it is down a long cul de sac of a road the Alliance laid on a free tuk tuk that took me straight to my next venue, the BAB box, which I think is part of a yet to be built shopping centre.
What confused me was that parts of the biennale, especially the BACC, were packed with people but other, such as BAB box, were almost totally empty. Perhaps because BAB is in the centre of a building site and there is nothing else to do? Or because the dedicated art crowd is so small? Or, is twenty different sites just too many? It was a shame because the big multi-projector video by AES+F was an intentional crowd pleaser. And the “press your navel, heart and brain to crystals and have a spiritual experience” sculptures by Marina Abramovic were longing for an audience too.
AES+F Inverso Murder, 2015 at BAB Box
What I most enjoyed however were the paintings: beautiful recent watercolours by Francesco Clemente (when was the last time you saw him in a biennale?); some of the paintings by Natee Utarit we talked about in March 2017 (Letter 97) and some curious paintings about death by Sriwan Janehattakarnkit – a sort of Buddhist Dance of Death. We are told in the catalogue that she has retired to consider non-self and death as a way to discover peaceful happiness. (Hmm, she is two years younger than me: I am not ready for that yet!) There was also a big wall painting by Hooptam Laos-Thai, an artist group from Laos and the area of Thailand near Laos who make murals (hooptam). Their work which also had a video was about recreating old stories. One thing I very much liked about this biennale was its inclusivity: you had famous international artists but you also had groups like this or a group of female Muslim artists from Southern Thailand in BACC.
But alas by this point, as I have already told you, I was exhausted: it was past half-seven, and could not face another tuk-tuk adventure, so I did not do the last of my planned venues.
It was, I think, a very good biennale, though I wish I had allowed myself a third day to see it all.
Since December 2014 when I started writing these letters we have visited biennales in Singapore, Jakarta, Jogjakarta, Manila and Bangkok. It seems a good opportunity to sit back and think about biennales in the region (and generally perhaps): what are they for? Who are they for? What should they be doing in the future? Therefore, let’s do that next week.
Wishing you all a very good week ahead,
Tony.