Reorienting: Japan Rediscovers Asia

Art in America, Oct, 1999 by Ann Wilson Lloyd

Chen Shunchu (Taiwan) installs black-and-white portraits of friends and family in outdoor settings, placing the photos along the exteriors of ruined buildings or aligning them in rows of tilled garden soil, and then reshooting the whole in color to achieve a romantic, elegiac quality. Amanda Heng (Singapore) undertook a highly personal quest to reconnect with her aging mother, from whom she had become estranged through choosing an unconventional artist's life within Singapore's patriarchal society. Heng's series of color shots of the two embracing is touching, but ultimately the mother's face remains impassive. The work becomes a poignant metaphor for the price of forsaking Mother Culture.

Manit Sriwanichpoom (Thailand) is both an activist and conceptual photographer whose satirical series "This Bloodless War" mimics famous photojournalist images of terrorist and war scenes in Asia. These are based on performances by the artist's friends, usually Thai art-world types. His staged shots of refugees fleeing with Versace shopping bags, for instance, indicate that Asia's invading forces are now economic. An infamous gun-to-the-head execution scene from the Vietnam War is reenacted by a Thai collector, shown taking out a Thai artist. Another work by Sriwanichpoom is a videotaped performance by his artist/poet friend Pink Man, who wanders about popular tourist sites dressed in a bubble-gum-pink suit, pushing a pink grocery cart or carrying a bouquet of pink balloons. The point is to lampoon the Thai government's overhyping of tourism, with shocking pink symbolizing officialdom's "lies and deception," according to the catalogue text.

Other Triennale artists are also concerned with their countries' recent ideological junctures with invading foreign values. The Chinese video artist Feng Mengbo's room-size video arcade gives players the chance to rescript propaganda from the Cultural Revolution; the Taiwanese Wu Tienchang offers an electronically kitschified portrait (with lights and sound) of an old-fashioned Taiwanese girl wearing glitzy sunglasses; magic-realist paintings by Filipino Alfredo D. Esquillo, Jr., contain often-humorous montages of contemporary and sacred imagery; the Indonesian painter Chusin Setiadikara presents a traditional Balinese market-day scene which is wryly encroached upon by the Starship Enterprise from the "Star Trek" TV series. Michael Lin, a reverse-expatriate who grew up in the U.S. but has returned to Taiwan, displays interest in both the past and the indigenous Pop-art qualities of everyday Taiwanese products. His tatami-mat bench is covered with a pleasing array of bright-colored pillows in traditional patterns that he has also re-created elsewhere as paintings.

The Korean performance and multimedia artist who calls herself ium does large-scale fashion-style photography and videos of herself modeling extravagant, futuristic sculptural costumes of rubber, vinyl and metal. These works sometime make reference, via titles such as The Four Gracious Plants--Orchid or The Four Gracious Plants--Bamboo, etc., to traditional Korean symbolism and ideals. Television characters are another source, and a catalogue text cites as pivotal her generation's 1970s television and pop culture. This installation makes one think of Mariko Mori, but the chameleonlike guises of Madonna may be the primary model for both.