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ArtReview Asia has been hard at work on its Summer issue – to the point where it thinks it might deserve a rest. Yet art, the thing it spends most of its time thinking about, sits in an unusual meeting point between labour and leisure. Which may be why so many artists are interested in the relationship between the two, between the graft of human capital and the abstraction of financial capital, between power and privilege, and exhaustion and dilettantism. The Thai artist Kawita Vatanajyankur, who features on the cover, has made various performances and videos in which she integrates herself into the tools and machinery of work, whether a vacuum cleaner, a toilet brush, a flying shuttle in a loom, a sickle or a spade. If these comment on the ‘labour saving’ motive of industrialisation (in reality, capital saving), then her latest work, Mark Rappolt finds, sees history repeating itself as she hooks herself up to muscle stimulators attached to AI command. Endurance and physical hardship, and the relationship of the body to the environment, propel the epic walks of Chinese artist Cheng Xinhao, some as long as 900 kilometres, stretching the length of his home province of Yunnan. It is, he tells Max Crosbie-Jones, a form of ‘performative madness’, which might be a good way to describe so much postcapitalist labour. Tenzing Dakpa, the second-generation Tibetan photographer, is also interested in how human activity affects the landscape, and how work and intimacy mix, not least in his images of his parents as they toil away in the hotel the family runs. “Seeing my parents work, you realise that there’s a lot to do with the hand,” Dakpa says.
Vietnamese collective Art Labor creates spaces for leisure with the ephemera of labour. Visiting a happening staged by the group, Adeline Chia discovers something akin to a fete, featuring traditional food removed from the industrial agricultural complex; sculptures made by Jarai artists from the roots of abandoned coffee trees; drawings with coffee grounds and kites from old gunny sacks used to transport beans; and a space to sleep, using the kind of hammocks often carried by itinerant labourers. The fun has a radical intent: what if our downtime wasn’t defined by a financial imperative? It is this kind of carnivalesque turning of power relations that roots the subversive ‘ass festival’ in rural Kodagu too; though how long this Indigenous tradition of South India can survive cultural homogenisation remains to be seen, writes Deepa Bhasthi. Elsewhere in India, Suraj Yengde recalls visiting a youth festival at which the defiant performance of ghazals, songs that are often about forbidden love, presented a similar challenge to power and social convention.
ArtReview Asia’s work doesn’t end there, with previews of exhibitions from Tokyo to Amsterdam, Guangzhou to Los Angeles; and its critics have been out casting their eyes on group shows ranging from Liu Ding & Carol Yinghua Lu’s 8th Yokohama Triennale to Timeless Curiosities, a survey of art’s relationship to tech and memory, at Istanbul Modern. They took the tools of their trade (pen, paper, a sturdy pair of shoes) to see solo shows by Marisa Srijunpleang, Qian Qian, Farah Al Qasimi, Wong Ping and Tamiko Nishimura, and made time for books by British-Indian writer Salman Rushdie; actor Keanu Reeves and science-fiction auteur China Miéville; Manila-born, Oakland-based artist Stephanie Syjuco; Turkish curator Fatoş Üstek; and American writer Maggie Nelson. If the sound of all this works up an appetite, Fi Churchman finishes the issue with a history of and recipe for Qiao Guo.
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