On the surface, artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul's video of a night journey through a temple doesn't seem to be in dialogue with photographs of Sakhalin island by Japanese Tomoko Yoneda. Nor does there seem to be any connection between Field Recordings' video work documenting migrant workers on the banks of Shanghai's Huangpu River and MAP Office's incredibly detailed imaginary map of "future Hong Kong".
In a current group exhibition, "Tell Me A Story: Locality And Narrative", at Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, such stories abound; they come in different clothing yet are often laden with overlapping concerns.
Curated by Amy Cheng and Hsieh Fong-Rong, the show features Au Sow-Yee, Chen Chieh-Jen, Guo Xi and Zhang Jianling, Haejun Jo and Kyeong Soo Lee, MAP Office, Field Recordings, Su Yu-Hsien, Koki Tananka, Watan Wuma, Tomoko Yoneda and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The result is 11 stories reflecting each artist's distinct regional culture.
Rockbund Art Museum director Larys Frogier recently told Life that the idea originated from his experience working as jury chair of the Hugo Boss Asia Art, an award for emerging Asian artists conceived and curated by the museum. Along with other jury members, he's found there's a strong interest by many Asian artists on the practice of narration, particularly through video and performance.
"I was saying to the team that maybe we should try bringing this debate to the scene here," said Frogier. "The way artists working in Asia are telling stories related to their memories is very interesting. I think there's something very specific. When you talk about narration in Europe, they have different ways of doing it -- it's more deconstructed or abstract in a way."
The video works featured in the exhibition are not abstract, yet they are not necessarily simple and straightforward. Apichatpong's video work, for example, is poignant yet elusive, incredibly similar to his feature films. If there's any one overlapping thread between these artists telling completely different stories, it's a sense of desire to make sense of their present by either going back to the past or fast-forwarding to the future.
Apichatpong's Fireworks (Archives) falls into the former category. The viewers are taken on a night journey to see a series of sculptures inspired by Buddhism and Hinduism, and we only catch glimpses of them through flashlights, fireworks and camera flash before the video falls back to complete darkness. Apichatpong said the sculptures are at Sala Gaewgu, a temple in Nong Khai.
"Back in the day, the head of this temple commissioned a lot of sculptures for his temple -- massive concrete depictions of mythical animals and beings," explained Apichatpong. "What interests me are the hundreds of his portraits on the wall. Unlike other monks in the Northeast, his eyes are fully open. To me these photographs of the stare are an act of rebellion. He used religion as redemption, or revenge. The fact that his temple is never recognised by the state shows his independence."
During the communist era, some of the sculptures were destroyed by the army because they were suspected of being used to store weapons. Apichatpong said the site is symbolic of a revolt, echoing the history of the Northeast itself, and the animal and human figures seem to be in a state of both liberation and suffocation.
Larys Frogier, director of Rockbund Art Museum.
On the same floor, the photographic series by Japanese photographer Tomoko Yoneda is of serene Sakhlin, a large Russian island in the North Pacific Ocean that was once a shared sovereignty between Russia and Japan. It was at one time home to Japanese manufacturing workers and their families before the island was seized by Soviet forces after World War II. It's similar to Fireworks (Archives), in that it's also an examination of a space laden with turbulent history, but in a more quiet and passive manner.
On the fourth floor, work by another Japanese artist Koki Tanaka also deals with the legacy of war, but on a lighter note. His installation objects in the space range from basketballs to video installation. From 1946 to 1952, the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art was occupied by the US military, and the exhibition halls were used as basketball courts for leisure. While Apichatpong and Yoneda revisit their sites of interest through video and images respectively, Tanaka does so by inviting the Japanese students to engage in a dialogue in that very site again, and the impact of American culture on Japan is explored through bits and pieces of the conversation.
"The main link between these artists is their interest in social challenges, and the overlapping layers of history, both collective and private," said Frogier. "So when you go through the show, you'll see that they raise often some contradictory ways to approach politics and society, but also try to mix private, emotional elements into their works, so you'll always find it to be both political and poetical."
Such mix of the political and the poetical can be found in Field Recordings' five-channel video work Let The Water Flow. One the one hand, with a view of imposing skyscrapers in the background, it's a story of political and economic boundaries faced by migrant workers living on boats anchored to the banks of the Huangpu River. On the other, however, the focus is so directly on the daily lives of these characters -- interviews about their personal histories, the cooking scene onboard, prolonged shots of reflections on the water that feel almost philosophical -- that it's almost a celebration of a lifestyle just the way it is.
Set opposite Let The Water Flow is an imaginative geography, Hong Kong Is Land, by MAP Office. While Field Recordings talks about the current state of being through documentary, MAP Office does so by looking very much ahead of time. Shown as part of the exhibition "Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms For Expanding Megacities", at MoMA in New York last year, the collective responds to urbanisation and population crises of the near future by coming up with elaborately drawn, huge panels featuring eight artificial islands of Hong Kong. Whether it's the Island of Resources, which houses necessary basic resources like medicine, the Island of Endemic Species, for the conservation of biodiversity, or the Island of Memories, for storing memories after death, the work is at once absurdly playful and poignantly realistic and practical.
Such echoes continue throughout the museum's six floors, whether it's Malaysian artist Au Sow-Yee's exploration of "cultural subjectivity" of Malaysia through her installation and video work or Taiwanese Watan Wuma's examination of his aboriginal origins through his own body in a performance.
The stories told at Rockbund Art Museum make one collective story about a journey that's simultaneously stuck in the past and longing to move forward.
"Tell Me A Story: Locality And Narrative" is on display until Aug 14 at Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai.
Field Recordings' Let The Water Flow.
Hong Kong Is Land by MAP Office.
