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exhibitions

2024

The more we get together

Oct. 18 - Nov. 16
FAR–NEAR, New York
curated by Ariane Fong and Janette Lu
with works by Hsu Tsun-Hsu, Lotus L. Kang, Gordon Matta-Clark, Kishio Suga, Lynne Yamamoto

The metabolism and translation of personal experience into artistic mediums is its own form of interpretation, creating allegories drawn from fragments of the past, from streets, monuments, and contested lands, from places and decades, spilling out over the edges. Such allegories, for their “conviction of the remoteness of the past, and a desire to redeem it for the present,” make no claim to a complete picture, instead composed of many pieces.¹

Memory, much like identity, is uncontainable. As the phenomenology of life and our access to lived experience, memory is difficult to discuss in its entirety or even archetypally. Its fluidity and contingency are wholly relational (to borrow from Éduoard Glissant), subject to interpretation and requiring expression. (To lose it is, perhaps, to lose oneself.) Yet memory, unlike identity, is permitted to contain multitudes, to be indescribable, to remain an ever-changing, ever-growing thing. When shared, it is subject to little expectation; stories have gaps, things left unsaid, or new interpretations over time. Memory is formed by the senses and the mind, captured only ever in part, yet both personal and collective.

Piecing together sculptural and filmic fragments, The more we get together presents the notion of self as an allegory of memory. Looking out over Canal Street,
the exhibition considers the apparent contradictions of
history and sentiment, material and memory, politics and belonging, bringing such questions outside traditional gallery surrounds. Drawing together works by Gordon Matta-Clark, Hsu Tsun Hsu, Lotus L. Kang, Kishio Suga, and Lynne Yamamoto, the exhibition considers traces of collective memory, personal histories, and self-presentation.

The exhibition borrows its title from a photographic series by Hsu Tsun-Hsu (許村旭), taken between
1988 and 1998, which captures moments of both urban
mundanity and turbulent social change in the decade
following the lifting of martial law in Taiwan. The images in the series are dark, absurd, and playful, both quotidian and extraordinary. Across a thirty-year career as a photojournalist, first for Taiwan’s principal newspaper, the China Times (中國時報), and later foreign media (Agence France-Presse and the Financial Times), Hsu’s subject matter covered historical and political events. A voracious documentarian, the vast majority of Hsu’s photographs never made it to print and were set aside for more than thirty years. The images presented here are selected from his personal archive, taken on assignment amidst historic and transformative moments, capturing both the banal and sensational.

After the lifting of martial law in 1987, Taiwan entered a new period of artistic making and postcolonial research, now in the absence of formal censorship. Hsu’s images capture the period immediately following, which brought sweeping congressional reform in 1990, legislative protections for human rights and free speech in 1991, and the first democratic presidential election in 1996. In one image, a man holds a framed portrait and a handful of incense, a black ribbon pinned to his sleeve in mourning. The portrait is at once recognizable as Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國), the president who facilitated the end of the military dictatorship in Taiwan, who had just been buried the same year, 1988, in Cihu (慈湖). A crashed truck in the background alludes to the unrest during this period.

In this series, Hsu’s twelve photographs are fragments of the decade, in its beauty and obscenity, carrying forward these moments into our contemporary landscape. The artist’s selection, in what it does and does not show, is displayed non-chronologically, foregoing journalistic narrative in favor of subjective experience.

City Slivers (1976) is Gordon Matta-Clark’s piecewise video of the urban condition of New York. In its making, Matta-Clark obscured the lens of an anamorphic camera with opaque matte strips, recorded in flashes, and rewound the film, imposing filmic slivers edge-to-edge and side-by-side. The film tracks are simultaneous, viewed as everything happens in parallel. The video records sections of the city, vertical strips of different moments emerging from the darkness of the screen, as a visual corollary of Matta-Clark’s anarchitecture. The viewing experience mirrors the memory of a walk through the city with glimpses of cars, pedestrians, and daily phenomena, connected yet seemingly out of the blue. Landmarks appear on occasion, namely the Empire State Building, until the matte closes over the lens like stage curtains.

Like Matta-Clark’s literal cuts of disused buildings, City Slivers rejects voyeuristic viewership of the city, wavering continuously between different scenes without a narrative. Only at the conclusion of the video, concealed by the hazy film, does Matta-Clark reveal its significance. In the coda, a vertical string of text scrolls through the frame; it reads “He just hit the pavement… face down.” Appearing between celluloid flares, the text may be a reference to the artist’s twin brother, who fell to his death from their shared apartment shortly before the film was created. Life, grief, and memory are laced into the arbitrary composition of the work.

Grandfather’s Shed, Lana’i City, Island of Lana’i (2008-2010) by Lynne Yamamoto is modeled from a shed belonging to the artist’s grandfather, a place where he would make objects in a tradition akin to art, although he did not describe it as such. An office worker for the Dole pineapple plantation, he had constructed the shed from salvaged materials as a space to experiment, becoming a studio for his works re-interpreting traditional Japanese art. In recreating the shed, Yamamoto considers the relationship between her grandfather’s makings and her own practice, recalling the time he spent sequestered under the modest roof.

Yamamoto first fashioned a paper model of the shed, which she then scanned and produced in unpolished white marble. The walls are gently corrugated, hinting to the metal the artist’s grandfather had used, while uneven edges and a folded lip on the ridge of the roof, vestiges of the paper’s materiality, remain in the marble form. The sculpture is a reminder of paper beginnings, a metonymic recreation of the original structure in Lāna’i City. Casting the shed in marble, Yamamoto reminds us of associations of value and the relationships between place, memory, and material. Concretized anew, the shed memorializes place and history in a hybrid form that is both a monument to her grandfather’s artistic practice and the delight of making, as well as the contested land of Lāna’i.

The Dole pineapple plantation in Hawaii began on a government-issued homestead, shortly after the coup d’état of the Hawaiian monarchy, led by none other than Sanford Dole. The plantation soon became the largest in the world, first expanding from O’ahu and Maui, then purchasing the entire island of Lāna’i. This development created and subsequently monopolized the pineapple industry, driving industrialization and overseeing an influx of Japanese laborers migrating to the islands. More than a century of plantation agriculture and exploitations of labor have irrevocably changed the island’s ecosystem and land ownership.²

Yamomoto’s sculpture is twofold, addressing both its personal significance and transcendent forms of belonging. For The more we get together, Yamamoto has created a site-specific pedestal in maple wood. Low to the floor and mounted on wheels, the pedestal introducing a new viewing height for the work to re-present it in a changed context.³

Lotus L. Kang’s Tract V (2024) is a chime, a school of small anchovies cast from bronze and aluminum strung together. With its resemblance to drying goods hanging for preservation, the chime gestures to subsistence and culinary tradition. Activated with movement, the chime produces its own melancholy pitch, reverberating with literal and phenomenal resonance.

Signaled by its title, the work is an allegory for the body and its interconnected systems, from blood vessels and nerve fibers to digestive passages, suggesting a kind of lyrical metabolism which draws sustenance from an unnamed source. Ending mid-air, the nylon threads seem to engage with the surrounding space, like weightless fasciae.

Kang’s practice is informed by inherited knowledge, in the forms of literary and historical inquiry, latent memories, and the artist’s own being. In her installations and sculptures, the notion of the self is not a container or calcification, but a flowering of thought. Numbered in their order of making and actively accumulating, each Tract is an artistic simulacrum for the self, expressive of the body as a dispersed, unfinished entity, seeking to know itself. In series, they repeats this process, beginning another search for what is lost in translation.

Best known for his site-specific installations, Kishio Suga (菅木志雄) is one of the central figures of Mono-ha, an artist group and movement active in Japan through the 1960s and 1970s. Most often translated as “School of Things,” Mono-ha was concerned with the interrelation of things and their visual and physical encounters in the everyday environment, borrowing raw, commonly found materials in response to widespread development and industrialization across Japan. Centered upon precepts of balance, tension, and interdependency, Suga’s installations combine natural and industrial materials, translating them from their intended contexts into ephemeral, often precarious assemblages. Materials and space, transformed by their association with each other, refigure the relationship between thing and perception.

In Linked Space—Z (2010), Suga connects two sealed vessels with an arc of wire. Beneath the arc lies a circle of thirteen stones, placed as if to create a small hearth or mark a sacred place. The small stones and strand of wire offset the dense concrete and articulate an open space at the center of the work. There is a certain balance to its sculptural symmetry, a poetry to its gathering of loose parts.

In 1969, Suga began writing under the pseudonym Katsuragawa Sei. Assuming the voice and alter ego of a critic, Suga reflected upon the relationships between language and philosophy, using linguistics and semiotics to consider ephemerality, equilibrium, and movement in space. In this mode of authorship, Suga critiqued assumptions behind land art (of Robert Smithson, and others) and conceptual art (including his own), advocating for a more radical push in these forms. Into the following decade, Suga’s writing often continued as fragments, appearing as exhibition listings in art journals or as accompaniments to his visual work.

In 1978, just before his presentation at the 38th Venice Biennale, Suga published “Interim Abode and Fixed,” an essay on the relationship between moving and his artistic practice. Unlike his philosophical texts from earlier in the decade, the essay is diaristic, written as if in conversation, and a personal reflection on his approach to participating in a new artistic forum. Its translation has been reproduced here as a closing to the exhibition text.

“It’s only very recently I realized finding a place to live for yourself and deciding to make your home there’s something that may look simple but actually isn’t.

I say so because at the end of last year I moved into my current place in Tamagawa Gakuen, which unlike everywhere else I’ve moved before isn’t the kind of house you just up and leave for some other place the moment you don’t like it. If there were some ruckus going on around, I’d have to buckle down and eliminate the problem, as now there’s no running away like before. That it came to this is because, speaking of my old days of drifting, I’ve put an end to the drifting and gotten fixed in one place.

Of course it’s not like before was so exaggerated as drifting, as all I was doing was staying as long as I liked doing what I liked in a place I liked, though since I always had the casual feeling of it being an interim abode, I found there was a sensation of, like, being interim to my conduct as well. There should not be anything interim to one’s actions. But I suspect there was a time when I used to be in sway to that sensation. If you want another word for this sensation of being interim, you could try calling it “untrue,” “feigned,” “informal.” To someone from Osaka it might be something along the lines of “jury-rigged.” In any case you can’t shake the sense of it being slapdash, half-hearted.

Now I don’t mean to say all the things I produce there will be untrue or half-hearted just by an abode’s being interim. Although I can’t state that the place has no influence, it’ll also differ for each individual character or given situation. But in my case, to exaggerate somewhat, with my feeling of having to be able to leave quickly for anywhere as soon as anything came up (which is of course grounded in unfixity), there’s no way I couldn’t think about how to easily break the finished works back down to their original elements and ditch them in the surrounding nature at any time.

So now I’d say at least in my current situation this perception of being interim no longer comes out into the open, as I’ve gotten fixed and am sticking to that lifestyle. And yet if you ask whether there’s been any change to the substance of my work, there really hasn’t, as my use of stones or trees for elements still shows no sign of evolving.

Only the one big point of departure from my interim abode period is that my ways of getting elements and grasping [field]sites have changed. Previously I’d utilize elements I could get wherever I went, or I’d turn some place at hand into the [field] site for an event, but these days making use of what’s on hand has come to be a nuisance. In my personal opinion this is mostly due to my getting fixed. For at a certain point it’s not like my neighbors are just going to let my eccentric behavior be. Since getting fixed I’ve made it a point to do things not in the neighborhood but at places as far from home as can be. And I think it’s inevitable that I should have to go farther and farther away in search of those places. Soon enough walking distance will be no good and I guess I’ll have to go by train or car, but what else is there to do?

Although Robert Smithson used to set out on “expeditions” to do artistic work in the natural environments where he went, I’ve never thought of doing anything so extravagant. Somehow when I hear the word expedition it reminds me of the Christian Crusaders, and I start to envision something that requires an almost ascetic stoicism. It’s true, when I face the ocean from a desolate shore, or stand all alone amid the stillness of the forest, I do catch a sense of fear creeping over me. But for the time being I can’t tell how that reflects in the creative drive.

When I roam about my neighborhood it’s really nothing more serious than a walk, but sometimes I wonder whether it mightn’t be possible to extend this active process in terms of both time and distance. In which case, since anywhere you go would be unknown landscape, enjoying the anticipation of what you’ll encounter there could be the privilege of those who choose the same methods as me.

I’m fully planning on keeping this enjoyable part in mind when I participate in this year’s Venice Biennale in July. I’m thinking of it as like suddenly being struck by the urge to do something right there along the course of an extended walk. All while reflecting on the differences in climate, in humanity, that even the same stone, the same tree carries with it.”

Kishio Suga, “Interim Abode and Fixed” (1978), trans. Andrew Maerkle, in Kishio Suga: Writings, (Skira editore, Blum & Poe, Mendes Wood DM, 2021), 217-218
First published in Japanese as “仮住まいと定着” (“Karizumai to teichaku”), 美術手帖 (Bijutsu
Techō), no. 435 (July 1978), 10-11

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Quote from Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism” in October, Vol. 12 (Spring, 1980), pp. 67-86.

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Britannica, T., Editors of Encyclopaedia, “Liliuokalani,” Encyclopedia Britannica, August 29, 2024. Britannica, T, Editors of Encyclopaedia, “Hawaii summary,” Encyclopedia Britannica, February 23, 2011.

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Notably, Yamamoto has also contributed significant organizational and advocacy work as part of Godzilla, an anarchic collective of artists, curators, and writers active through the 1990s. Based in New York, the group bridged art and advocacy for immigrants from Asia and the Pacific, looking to gather resources, opportunities, and visibility for many. Itself the subject of new exhibitions and dialogues in New York, Godzilla was a key artistic network, working in partnership with other peripheralized communities and movements. Its archive and history have contributed to many political imaginaries.

2022

Exchanges

May 10 - Jul. 24
Slought, Philadelphia
curated by Ariane Fong and Janette Lu
with works by Raviv Ganchrow, Elia Vargas, Amy Yao

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