Dear friends and colleagues
On the fourth of June this year I was in Shanghai to meet with Ding Yi to discuss any final adjustments to the book I had written with Wang Kaimei about him and his work. It was an opportunity to also go see the exhibition The Challenging Souls at the Powerhouse Museum which brought together Ding Yi, Lee Ufan and Yves Klein. In the morning on our journey there my companion periodically showed me text messages or images that she was being sent. Some were of candles burning. All were about the same thing, however coded or disguised. One read “6.40” or “6.04”.
Had the sender just run six minutes and four seconds? Maybe, but what was certain was that it commemorated the thirtieth anniversary of the day when the Chinese government sent the army in to clear Tiananmen square of protestors, killing many of them.
At the exhibition itself people looked askance at one young man wearing a jacket with the number “30” emblazoned on its back.

However surreptitious or candid they were being, I respect all these brave people keeping alive the memory of a tragic moment in Chinese history when hopes were crushed. To keep that memory alive is to assert that repression has not yet fully triumphed.
BTW. If you are wondering what the big blue thing at the bottom of the second image is, it is a ginormous version of a 1960 work by Yves Klein entitled Dry Blue Pigment which measured a mere 120 by 100 centimetres. (He may have made larger versions.) It derives from his pigment pur of 1957 where a rectangle of blue powder pigment was spread on the floor, “levelled and groomed by a small rake”.[1] If he was still alive would Klein have sanctioned it being made the size of an international swimming pool?
Well, firstly, he had made very large works for the Music Theatre in Gelsenkirchen; secondly, Rotraut his second wife who was a collaborator for his late works authorised it; thirdly, as you can see above, the Powerhouse is enormous. Nevertheless, I didn’t feel I was looking at a “real” Yves Klein, it seemed to me more spectacle than art. I went “Wow, that is big!” not “Blue, Blue, Blue”. I am, I should say, much influenced by having seen the beautiful and accurate recreation of Klein’s 1961 show in Haus Lange, the Mies van de Rohe house in Krefeld used as a Kunstalle. His works look amazing in a domestic setting, they do not need to be epic.[2]
Recreating art works can be a very problematic thing.
Last Saturday, as one of the opening event of the Sixth Singapore Biennale a 1971 work by the Filipino composer José Mecada, Cassettes 100, was recreated in the National Gallery of Singapore.
Andrea Mapili, the granddaughter of the composer who had been involved in a 2017 recreation of the work in Manila[3] and then recreated it in Toronto says of this piece, “Cassettes 100 features 100 tracks that include indigenous sounds of the Philippines—nature sounds and voices—played on simple cassette players held by 100 non-professional artists in a 30-minute performance. The sounds are layered on top of one another, meant to be listened to at the same time. The performers mingle with the audience. The original performance was in 1971, in the lobby of the CCP (Cultural Centre of the Philippines), a very opulent space. At the time, the performance was considered a radical social act; featuring ethnic sounds, regular people and low-fi equipment, it presented a whole new way of looking at art, in a space used to entertaining western ideas of art. And it represented the Philippine experience, and Filipino people.”[4]
CCP was one of Imelda Marcos landmark projects. A brutalist building contemporary with the Hayward gallery but much larger and even more charmless. When we look at an image of the culmination of the 1971 performance where the performers all fall down, we can see it is messy and rather chaotic.

We can see why in the context of the Marcos cultural policies it was experienced as a “radical social act”.
Was the Singapore recreation a “radical social act”?
One artist from the Philippines I met there got the giggles and walked away, another remarked that everything always gets cleaned up in Singapore, then pointed out the performers were supposed to mingle with the audience, here they were not. I bumped into a well-known Singaporean artist. “This is atrocious,” he said.

What was wrong? The context is of course wholly different. If the National Gallery of Singapore is a problematic building it is so in a totally different way to CCP. There was no edge to doing it here unless you tweaked the performance to specifically Singaporean concerns and taboos. And the performance was so neat and self-conscious, so anodyne and twee. The performers wore nice white T-shirts not everyday clothes. Two groups went down the staircases pausing periodically and making stagey gestures in unison – they had been well choreographed and rehearsed – which was actually a problem. Reaching the bottom, they moved around in well-executed circles, not mingling with the audience. It did not look like the happening that it should have looked like[5], more like equestrian dressage.
At this time thinking of what is happening not just in Hong Kong but Bolivia, Chile, Barcelona and so many other places, to take a work that was so resonant with socio-political meaning and make it so formalist and polite was, to put it mildly, disappointing.
Next week I will talk more of the biennale proper, but till then, all best wishes,
Tony
- Sidra Stich, Yves Klein, Hayward. Gallery/Catntz, 1995, p. 92 ↑
- But then again having attended an opera at Gelsenkirchen I know the effect of sitting during the intervals beside his giant mural is not overwhelming. It is more like listening to a very, very slow crescendo – like an emotion swelling inexorably up inside you. A person at our table told us every time she came to the opera house the Klein was more beautiful. ↑
- It was also recreated at CCP see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNdZMk13zD0 for a video documentation of this. The piece makes better sense with the balconies of CCP. Again, one sees no “mingling” ↑
- Andrea Mapili, granddaughter of composer, who organized a re-enactment of the work in Toronto in 2017. https://www.artscape.ca/2017/12/06/remounting-cassettes-100-in-canada ↑
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For the record I did see happenings and radical theatre at University in the early Seventies. For example, by Les Tréteaux Libres. This was nothing like!