June 28, 2008

Political art made in a repressive context, cultural upheavals, post colonial legacies, and urban-rural physical and social conflicts are just some of the issues that have given a hard to ignore palpability to Asian art. Its volatile, often unpredictable, content underscored with ‘protest’ is catapulting it into the limelight in the western democratic countries of the First World.

A fresh assortment of the provocative and challenging, coming in from Asia was showcased to prominence recently in a new international festival featuring some of the best contemporary visual artists from mainland China, Hong Kong, India, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan.

Exploring the issue of ‘protest’ in a wider sense, UK’s first Asian Art Triennial opened at various locations and venues around Manchester in April 2008 with an innovative programme that echoes Manchester’s strong political and social history. Concluded on June 1, Asia Triennial Manchester (ATM08) showed new and exciting works that not only mirror views about Asia and Manchester and the links between them but also challenge stereotypical viewpoints of contemporary Asian artistic practice.

ATM08 is the vision of Shisha, an international agency for the promotion of contemporary South Asian crafts and visual arts. For the past 6 years, Shisha has championed new and dynamic visual cultures from South Asia and beyond to the UK, including new commissions by Subodh Gupta, Rashid Rana, Atul Dodiya, Imran Qureshi and Pushpamala N. For ATM08 Shisha continues to develop this, placing newly commissioned work and forging a dialogue not only with the selected artist, but also with the international arts community.

The international programme featured stunning venue-based exhibitions, surprising site-specific new commissions, innovative residencies and extraordinary publicly sited work by Asian artists. None of the work exhibited has been seen in the UK before and for some of the artists ATM08 was their UK debut.

The Asian Art Triennial was held in partnership with Castlefield Gallery, Cornerhouse, Chinese Arts Centre, The International 3, Manchester Art Gallery and Manchester Metropolitan University.

Castlefield Gallery was working with Channel A from Taiwan and p-10 from Singapore who came to Manchester much before the inauguration of ATM08 to formulate a piece of art that was heavy on technology, web broadcasts, social engagement with the local public and publication. Channel A (Hongjohn Lin and Ella Raidel) re-invented the identity of 18th century bogus Taiwanese, George Psalmanaazaar, as an estate agent, exploring the notion of fantasy and property.

Chinese Arts Centre has initiated both a residency and exhibition programme. The artist’s residency was with a Hong Kong artist, who spent March to May 2008 in Manchester reacting to the city and its communities. For the exhibition, the Centre worked with two mainland Chinese artists, Chen Shaoxiong and Qiu Anxiong, who both use Chinese ink painting in an experimental way.

Using their daily life story and a modern city portrait, they created new ink paintings and animation, which illustrate a sense of insecurity of the rapid urban development in China. The themes of people, cities and time are prominent in Shaoxiong’s work, whilst Anxiong showed animations in response to the world’s potential energy crisis.

Cornerhouse staged ‘What do you want?’ with artists Tejal Shah, Jasmeen Patheja, Shilpa Gupta, Surekha and Shaina Anand, all living in India and working amongst a new generation of artists with activist concepts. The exhibition and community project challenged traditional cultural opinion, contemporary political issues and controversial social situations, the artists used photography, performance, sculpture, video and new media to analyse problems faced by Indian women and those living within conventional family structures.

The International 3’s project featured Chinese artist Han Bing whose work uses photography, video and performative social interventions to question everyday living and the impact of human progress. For ATM08, Bing involved a 100 local people in the European premiere of a surprising outdoor performance featuring a cabbage on a stick. ‘Walking the Cabbage’ is an ongoing performance art piece that has taken Bing across China to USA, Japan and Europe. By inverting quotidian practice, Bing foregrounds the lowly cabbage — the Chinese comfort food and bottom line staple of the poor — as a signifier of the nature of the times in ‘modernising’ China.

For the nouveau riche, the humble cabbage as a sign of basic material stability (once horded by urban residents en mass to get them through the winter) has been replaced by the pampered pedigreed pet.

What do the objects we attach to ourselves say about how we define our identities and values in this rapidly changing world? How do our mundane everyday practices and routines serve to constitute our shared sense of the normal? Han Bing poses these questions with his public performances of Walking the Cabbage, which are conducted as everyday practice across a diverse array of social spaces and in public places everywhere, inciting the emergences of the ‘Cabbage-Walking Tribe’ who question the authority of the norm and bring our attention back to the way the world is shaped by our everyday actions.

Manchester Art Gallery presented contemporary work by two Korean artists, Gwon Osang and Choe U-ram. Gwon Osang makes extraordinary life-size sculptures of people. He uses hundreds of photographic images to build up the surface appearance of his models, including the face, their hair and their clothes. The process gives his beautifully crafted figures both photo-realist and surreal qualities.

Creating new work inspired by his recent Manchester residency, Gwon’s new sculptures were displayed in unexpected places around the gallery. Choe U-ram uses precision cut and polished metals, machinery and electronics to create stunning kinetic sculptures inspired by sea creatures and plant life. Two of the artist’s enormous robotic works, Urbanus Female and Urbanus Male, were exhibited for the first time in the UK in the gallery’s glass atrium.

While the study of visual culture in Asian countries is a growing sub-field, art historians have given little attention to visual responses to social and political issues. Conversely, visual culture is almost completely neglected in studies of contemporary events by historians, sociologists, and political scientistsrt fests like ATM08 play their part in bringing this important aspect of contemporary South and Southeast Asia into scholarly perspective, showing multi-faceted visual responses to socio-political issues and events.

The artist’s role as social and political activist is highlighted when their work is placed at the heart of debates on political and cultural upheavals and social justice. Visual art plays a didactic role as well, utilised to instruct and propagandise. Such efforts underscore the fact that visual practice is an integral part of social dialogue as a whole, shaping opinion and stimulating debate in ways equally significant as, though different from, literary forms of social debate. — By Salwat Ali