art – micheal do

dedicated to a happier year

November, 2020

Living in a society defined by profit, power, and dehumanisation, it seems as if our feelings were not meant to survive. Much of contemporary art today is made in this vein; preoccupied with aesthetics at the expense of life outside the gallery. Particularly now, where few words, if any, can describe the heft and strangeness of pandemic life, the space to feel — and express our feelings — is even more necessary. In recognition of this, artist Jason Phu has created a project that expresses shades of feeling, documenting the things we feel, but don’t articulate.

_{Jason Phu, be as strong as a mountain and as fluid as a river they said. they were wrong, the mountain was a mound of old tv monitors and the river was a dry bed of ox bones, 2020, photograph, photographed by Sly Morikawa, 80 x 120 cm, framed. Image courtesy Chalk Horse.}

_{Sly Morikawa, yev – psyklz clubsport, 2020, photograph. Image courtest Sly Morikawa.}

In collaboration with photographer Sly Morikawa, best known for her ethereal portraits saturated with glamour and sex, what we used to be, where we used to go Jason Phu’s research into Chinese history, culture and mythology. Across twelve photographs — whittled from five-hundred images — Phu has imagined this folklore through his peculiar, but recognisable punk-graffiti-irreverent aesthetic. In a soft focused haze, Phu dismantles these histories, sifting through what matters most to him and plunging these scenes into the borders of narrative. Phu notes “there are strands of mysteries in the show. It’s a reference to us as creatures, to the big bang, the future, the expansion of the universe and how an artist might interpret that. It’s about all these grand narratives, and the petty, small ones. That’s what I enjoy the most… the big and small in the same place, not where things are big or small, but just exist.”

In be as strong as a mountain and as fluid as a river they said. they were wrong, the mountain was a mound of old tv monitors and the river was a dry bed of ox bones (2020), eight colourful figures, dressed in fluorescent cloaks wear roughly hewn cardboard masks decorated with long strands of hair — a reference to Chinese antiquity, where long hair constituted Confucian piety and respect. These sages, shot in a suburban swimming pool, are a manifestation of the Chinese dragon King — the god of weather and water. Unlike the original folklore’s four dragons, Phu has multiplied them into eight dragons — an act of mistranslation that reflects the ever-changing whittling down and workings of oral history traditions like the Chinese diaspora culture of which Phu belongs. He says, “that’s the thing about ancient mythologies. They’re mutable, especially when retold in the new country. There is a shallow shell of authenticity from the mainland that is frozen in time and doesn’t exists anymore.”

In the daytime counterpart of this tale, imagine being the eight dragon kings of all the seas with all the power of the forces of nature and mystical powers of everlasting life and wisdom of the ages and still drowning in your own soup of feelings and left-on-read messages, 2020 depicts the same water dragons with a different and stranger unremarkableness that drains them of any higher spiritual authority. In this contradiction — depicting serious subject matter through the comical pointlessness of the everyday — lies the magic of these works. The jumble of individual jokes, references and poetry of the titles correct, contextualise, and revise each other. If you are deeply attentive to the chaos, your mind will be quieted by the subtlety of the works.

_{Jason Phu,}_{imagine being the eight dragon kings of all the seas with all the power of the forces of nature and mystical powers of everlasting life and wisdom of the ages and still drowning in your own soup of feelings and left-on-read messages}_{, 2020, photograph, photographed by Sly Morikawa, 80 x 120 cm, framed. Image courtesy Chalk Horse.}

_{Image: politics and history of men’s hair in China. Courtesy Nancy Duong.}

It is jumble of artistic strategies which stirred Morikawa and Phu to collaborate. Phu describes this collaboration ‘a bit more fun, a bit more intuitive’ than his recent history projects, including The Burrangong Affray at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, where the artist explored Australian Chinese race riots during Australia’s gold rush in 1860 – 1861. While the stakes might seem lower, without having to carry the load of academic research, field work and community stakeholders, what we used to be, where we used to go still carries Phu’s hallmark sense of complication and expansion — blurring conceptions of identity, community relationships and history. Into this mixture of conceptual interests, he drops into the ingredients of deadpan humour, non-sensical narrative, biographical details and poetry in order puzzle, awaken and torment his audiences as they spend time with these compositions.

Through mutual respect, the artists were able to find a familiar dialect, fusing the gap between their different backgrounds — fashion photography and fine art respectively. Phu tells me, “Sly brought a whole new language to the project, how to talk to the models, how to position them. Those instructions are like brushstrokes. It was a nice collaboration; giving up control.” By working together, the pair have created a time capsule of a moment in culture and their own lives. The result is a set of images that explore identity through poetic metaphors, critical intelligence and a humour and irreverence that is never heavy handed or laboured.

_{Jason Phu, what we used to be, where we used to go (installation view), Chalkhorse Gallery November 2020. image Credit: Docqment.}

Gliding through different registers, mythologies and moods, each scene in what we used to be, where we used to go forms a loose web that adds up to a wider picture. By leaning into the photographic medium, Phu has tapped into a new language to express the ideas of his practice. And in doing so, these works open a new emotional register; straining with unacknowledged feeling and a mystery that speaks to the current moment. It is this sense the knowing and unknowing of these scenes that gives this series their potency. This is classic Jason Phu — something new from something gone.

END.

This text was originally commissioned by Chalk Horse.

gods who walk among us

October 2020

_{John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Still), 1972. Image courtesy BBC.}

As English theorist and writer John Berger reminds us Ways of Seeing (1972), in the secular age, sacred art is considered more in terms of its provenance than its message. Yet despite this, sacred art — artworks with religious content or spiritual connotations — have significant currency in our contemporary world. Perhaps a rather corporate analysis, but sacred art examines how societies negotiate shared space and identity — and how these formulations are defined and defended. It is against our tumultuous coronavirus realities, and this desire to understand collective identity and ask, ‘who are we?’ that artist Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran has created his latest project Avatar Towers (2020) for the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

_{Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, Avatar Towers, 2020. Installation image with artist. Picture courtesy Sullivan+Strumpf.}

The concept ‘avatar’ from which the project’s title borrows is derived from Sanskrit, the sacred language of Hinduism. First appearing in the English world in the eighteenth century, an avatar is an incarnation of a deity, and is closely associated with Vishnu, a principle deity. Hindu belief holds that his ten incarnations — which include a fish and a half-man and half-man-lion — would restore order on Earth when humanity descends into chaos. From these celestial beginnings, the concept has since been absorbed into the language of the online, including multiplayer computer games like Second Life and platforms like Twitter, Tumblr and Slack. Founder of Second Life, Philip Rosedale defined an avatar as “the representation of your chosen embodied appearance to other people in a virtual world.” In this way, virtual avatars exist, appear and behave at the complete discretion of their users — enabling online users to embody the role of god.

_{Still from Second Life, virtual reality game.}

Located in the gallery’s entrance vestibule — its main entrance — Avatar Towers comprises of a monumental tableau of seventy bronze and clay figures organized within and around a five-meter roughly hewn together structure topped with a ceramic stupa — a mound like structure that holds relics used for meditation. Taking over this threshold space, these avatars, rendered in Nithiyendran’s recognizable punk-queer-maximalist aesthetic, are ceremonious in their monochromatic and polychromatic mystery. They appear turbocharged with glaze, contorted into impossible proportions, pummeled by the artist hands and fired by the kiln — characteristics which hint at the cacophony of internal stories held within each figure. Veering back and forth between fantasy and reality, these characters function as a sort of portal: a hall of mirrors that distorts and transforms meaning, sparking of rushes to the imagination as we explore Nithiyendran’s universe.

_{Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, Terracotta Figure 8, 2020 (left) Terraacotta Figure 6, 2020, 19 x 12 x 11 cm (right) Photo credit: Mark Pokorny.}

Within the installation, Nithiyendran has selected two stone sculptures drawn from the gallery’s collection: a stone Javanese Ganesha — a deity which personifies wisdom and intellect — and a stone Gandharan Buddha — which represents the ideal state of ethical and intellectual perfection attained through kindness. The inclusion of these sacred objects provides a powerful locus for the project — highlighting the parallels and differences in sculptural languages used to portray deities throughout Asia, while connecting Nithiyendran’s contribution to the field of figurative religious sculpture. Today, where religion has seemingly been overtaken by less lofty dogmas — including the cult of the celebrity, wanton consumerism and a desire to shock — their inclusion in this installationreminds us that contemporary art, despite however untraditional can hold the old fashioned aura of spirituality, a quality largely relegated to the fringes of art criticism and production today.

_{Standing Buddha, ca. 3rd–4th century, culture: Pakistan (ancient region of Gandhara). Collection: MET, New York.}

The work will be placed in the vestibule of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The placement of the work in this location (where all visitors must pass) reflects a growing desire for public institutions to open their traditionally conservative doors to new cartographies of practice outside of dominant Western narratives. By manifesting and exhibiting an installation which can be read as a quasi-religious non Judeo-Christian shrine, Avatar Towers re-territorialises the cultural and physical space of this sandstone institution — and arguably its most important space, its entrance — from the dominant white narratives that have marginalised and misrepresented categories of difference.

_{Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, Avatar Towers, 2020. Installation image. Picture courtesy Sullivan+Strumpf.}

This spirit of cultural intersection and hybridity has long formed the bedrock of Nithiyendran’s engagement with ceramics. He notes, it is a “medium burdened with a history of politeness and good manners … as a contemporary artist, I want more. I want to be challenged and encouraged to engage with the world in critical and uneasy ways. I want art that reflects the social, technological and philosophical developments and concerns of our time and place.”[1] In continuing this spirit, Nithiyendran has experimented with industrial automotive spraying processes to create rich monochromatic finishes. He explains, “I was thinking about painting as a language, philosophy and a gesture and thinking about glaze in relation to that. The auto spray mimics glaze in this way and I wanted to experiment with this technology. It’s not possible to get these sorts of finishes from traditional kiln processes and I’m unwilling to confine myself to these glazes.”[2]

Of the sprayed avatars is a monochromatic hot pink fertility figure. Fertility figures — which exist all throughout antiquity across different cultures — have historically been represented as women. However, Nithiyendran has decided to render this figure, among several, as gender neutral or multigendered. This dissolution of longstanding binary understandings of gender speaks to Nithiyendran’s desire to reimagine structures, histories and aesthetics to create space for multiple voices, readings and realities.

Ultimately, Nithiyendran chorus of characters exist to lure and entrance audiences into his technicolored ceramic world pregnant with counter-narratives for our current pandemic related uncertainty. Through the metaphor of the avatar, Nithiyendran manages to both recognize the aesthetic, political and spiritual dimensions of art and spirituality, without reducing the project to either. In this way, Avatar Towers engages in a discussion of collective identity, raising questions of what divides and unites us. How do we negotiate separation and intimacy? And ultimately, who are we and what is our collective place in the world?

How we choose to answer these questions will ultimately shape new forms of togetherness — and isolation.

END.

This text was originally published in S+S Magazine.

References:

[1] Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran [online]. Journal of Australian Ceramics, The, Vol. 57, No. 1, Apr 2018: 44-[45]. Availability: <https://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=529057343940793;res=IELHSS> ISSN: 1449-275X.

[2] Interview with artist