PAWEL ALTHAMER ANDRE DE DIENES TOM HOLERT

CARL ANDRE PHILIP-LORCA ARNOUD HOLLEMAN

ART ORIENTÉ OBJET DICORCIA CARSTEN HÖLLER
ANNA ARTAKER MIKE DISFARMER RONI HORN
TAUBA AUERBACH HAROLD EDGERTON TEHCHING HSIEH
MORTON BARTLETT WALKER EVANS HUANG YONG PING
THOMAS BAYRLE EYE GLASS SHOP HEUNGSOON IM
HANS BELLMER HARUN FAROCKI SANJA IVEKOVIĆ
E. J. BELLOCQ JEAN FAUTRIER JIKKEN KOBO /
NAYLAND BLAKE HANS-PETER FELDMANN EXPERIMENTAL
PETER FISCHLI & WORKSHOP
JONATHAN BOROFSKY
DAVID WEISS YASMINE KABIR
IRINA BOTEA
LEE FRIEDLANDER KAN XUAN
KERSTIN BRÄTSCH
KATHARINA FRITSCH BONGKYU KANG
GLENN BROWN
AURÉLIEN FROMENT JACOB KASSAY
JAMES LEE BYARS
PAUL FUSCO LEANDRO KATZ
DUNCAN CAMPBELL
CYPRIEN GAILLARD MIKE KELLEY
JAMES CASTLE
RUPPRECHT GEIGER EDWARD &
MAURIZIO CATTELAN NANCY REDDIN
FRANZ GERTSCH
JACQUES CHARLIER KIENHOLZ
HERMANN GLÖCKNER
HYEJEONG CHO HANYONG KIM
JEAN-LUC GODARD
BYUNGSOO CHOI SANGGIL KIM
GU DEXIN
KWANGHO CHOI KONRAD KLAPHECK
GUO FENGYI
ANNE COLLIER ALICE KOK
JOÃO MARIA GUSMÃO &
ROBERTO CUOGHI PEDRO PAIVA KOKDU (FROM THE
COLLECTION OF OCK
KEREN CYTTER YANGAH HAM RANG KIM)
JOHN DE ANDREA DUANE HANSON JEFF KOONS
BERLINDE DE YDESSA HENDELES TETSUMI KUDO
BRUYCKERE
THOMAS HIRSCHHORN
 CONTENTS 10000 LIVES

1 CURATOR’S INTRODUCTION 10,000 Lives, the 8th Gwangju Biennale presents a sprawling
investigation of the relationships that bind people to images and
images to people. With works by 134 artists—realized between 1901
7 BIENNALE HALL . GALLERY 1
and 2010, as well as several new commissions—the exhibition brings
35 BIENNALE HALL . GALLERY 2 together artworks and cultural artifacts to examine our obsession with
65 BIENNALE HALL . GALLERY 3 images.
85 BIENNALE HALL . GALLERY 4
126 BIENNALE HALL . GALLERY 5 Today we suffer from an acute form of iconophilia, a pathological
129 GWANGJU FOLK MUSEUM / FOLKLORE EDUCATION CENTER fascination with images. Billions of images are produced and consumed
139 GWANGJU MUSEUM OF ART every day: more than 500,000 images per second are uploaded to a
single website; Americans alone take an average of 550 snap shots per
152 YANGDONG TRADITIONAL MARKET PROJECT
second; by the age of forty, a person will have watched an average of
50,000 hours of television. We live in a world suffocated by images,
154 SPONSORS and yet we still seek comfort in them: we congregate around images,
155 LENDERS TO THE EXHIBITION adore them and crave them. We consume images and destroy them,
156 VENUES carrying out wars in their name.
157 VISITOR INFORMATION
158 IMAGE CREDITS & PERMISSIONS The exhibition title is borrowed from Maninbo (Ten Thousand Lives),
160 GWANGJU BIENNALE FOUNDATION / SPONSORS the 30 volume epic poem by Korean author Ko Un. Conceived while Ko
was in prison for his participation in the 1980 South Korean democratic
161 CREDITS
movement, Maninbo is composed of over 4,000 poems—portraits in
words describing every person Ko Un has ever met, including figures
from history and literature.

As with Maninbo, the exhibition unfolds as a gallery of portraits or as

a family album. Encompassing a diverse range of media, 10,000 Lives
presents a series of case studies that explore our love for images and
our need to create substitutes, effigies, and stands-in for ourselves
and our loved ones. 10,000 Lives tells the story of people through the
images they create and the images they leave behind, but it also follows
the lives of images themselves, tracing their endless metamorphoses,
from funerary statuary to commercial propaganda, from religious icon
to scientific tool, from a mirror of ourselves to a projection of our
desires.

Along with the work of contemporary artists, the exhibition includes

historical works, found photographs, and cultural artifacts that
exemplify the multifaceted existence of images, placing them within
a wider cultural context and, at times, blurring the line between

1
documents, relics, and art works. It is a biennial conceived as a and circulated. The experimental films of Jikken Kobo and Katsuhiro
temporary museum—opening outwards to embrace history, the Yamaguchi take the machine of vision apart: the act of seeing becomes
exhibition cultivates the exercise of memory, wandering through more an adventure for the eyes, while in Artur Żmijewski’s new video, blind
than one hundred years of history. people paint the world as they see it.

In the BIENNALE HALL, five separate galleries branch off to reflect In other cases, images annex new territories to the domain of the
themes recurring throughout the exhibition. The exhibition begins visible. Harold Edgerton’s stroboscopic shots and Eliot Porter’s
in GALLERY 1, presenting works that deal with photographic naturalistic views are examples of scientific photography that have
representation, posing, and the construction of the self through radically reinvented the way we see things, mapping new physical and
images. From Mike Disfarmer’s penny-portraits to Sanggil Kim’s aesthetic dimensions.
records of online communities, and Heungsoon Im’s videos, in 10,000
Lives, people line up in front of the camera, ranked like tin soldiers or Exploring the technology of vision, many works in the exhibition
pinned down like a gorgeous collection of butterflies. Celebrities and examine the ties—at times loving, at times violent—between cameras
illustrious nobodies appear in the photographs of Andre de Dienes, and subjects. In Christopher Williams’s photographs, the apparatus of
Hanyong Kim, and Namhan Photo Studio, while Peter Fischli & vision is literally taken apart: lenses are cut open, cameras inspected
David Weiss align thousands of snap-shots on a light table twenty- from each and every angle, to reveal the mechanics whereby images are
seven meters long, presenting reality in all its sublime banality. In the constructed. In the works of Harun Farocki, João Maria Gusmão &
paintings and drawings of Franz Gertsch, Maria Lassnig, and Jakub Pedro Paiva, Carsten Höller, and Mark Leckey, one detects a concern
Ziółkowski, faces and psychologies are dramatically revealed. with the act of seeing, so much so that it has to be carefully analysed.

Filmmaker Wu Wenguang distributed video cameras to rural Chinese The reception and consumption of images represent a crucial
workers and asked them to film their towns: the hundreds of hours preoccupation for artists and image makers today. Hans-Peter
recorded by the farmers capture everyday life at the margins of the Feldmann, Shinro Ohtake, Seth Price, and many others, accumulate,
Chinese empire, composing a choral encyclopedia. Swarming with collect, and organize found images and fragments of visual culture. As
pictures, the exhibition becomes an image-making machine: Franco the line separating the production of images from their consumption
Vaccari invites visitors to pose and photograph themselves using grows thinner, these artists look at how images are fabricated and
a photo booth in the exhibition galleries. By manipulating historical distributed through media.
photographs, and with the collaboration of an army of volunteers,
Sanja Iveković creates a living memorial to the participants of the May GALLERY 3 brings together works that deal with the representation
18 Gwangju Uprising of 1980. of heroes and martyrs, exploring the ways images are used to create
myths, preserve the memory of victims, or bear witness to war and
In a world gorged on images, recycling, appropriation, and repetition oppression.
have become survival strategies that can assume a therapeutic
function. Anne Collier, Aurélien Froment, and Peter Roehr A key work in the visual lexicon of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the
appropriate and rearrange existing images. Sherrie Levine and Rent Collection Courtyard is a display of over 100 sculptures made to
Sturtevant question ownership and copyright by replicating works by educate the Chinese population about the abuses of the feudal system.
other artists. Created between 1965 and 1978 by students, artists, and faculty of
the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, the tableau illustrates the conflation of
GALLERY 2 explores the mechanics of vision through optical illusions art, politics and collective beliefs—the power of images to educate and
and para-scientific imaginaries. Analyzing how visual experiences stir revolutions. It is presented in its entirety in the Biennale, and for
are inscribed in our eyes and bodies, artists like Tauba Auerbach, the first time ever in an Asian country outside China.
Thomas Bayrle, Bridget Riley, Paul Sharits, Stan VanDerBeek, and
Haegue Yang, raise questions about how images are constructed

2 3
In their video biographies, Duncan Campbell, Leandro Katz, Liu Wei, its demise. In YangAh Ham’s video, actors adore an effigy made of
Rabih Mroué, and Hito Steyerl describe the moment in which a private chocolate, while Harun Farocki documents processions and pilgrimages
figure becomes a public image, a simplified but instantly recognizable to sacred statues.
icon. The paintings of Jean Fautrier, the Intifada posters collected
by the magazine Useful Photography, and sculptures by Katharina Gallery 4 is also populated by life size polychrome sculptural works
Fritsch and Thomas Hirschhorn analyze the iconography of martyrdom. by John De Andrea, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Duane Hanson,
The funerary portrait of a young demonstrator, painted by Byungsoo Jeff Koons, Bruce Nauman, Oh Yoon, and others. Part-replicant,
Choi, was once a focal point for throngs of mourners and now stands part-idol, these hyper-realistic figures are brought together in a
as proof of the power of images to bring people together. Wunderkammer that resembles a mad scientist’s laboratory, a forge
in which to put together a new golem. Inspired by Mike Kelley’s now-
Some of the most complex images in this exhibition are the portraits legendary 1993 exhibition titled The Uncanny, this section brings
taken at Tuol Sleng, Security Prison 21 in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, together contemporary artworks, polychrome religious sculptures,
which preserve the memory of thousands of victims murdered by the Pol mannequins and dolls, medical instruments and stuffed animals. This
Pot regime between 1975 and 1979. These photographs are some of is an unauthorized, partial reconstruction and unannounced tribute to
the most touching and ethically complex images in recent history: the Kelley’s extraordinary show, recreated from the few publicly available
regime photographed each prisoner, knowing they would be sentenced photographs of the 1993 installation. Changes, variations, and
to death—the portraits now stand as the only survivors. elements of creative reinterpretation were introduced, stretching the
borders of the original exhibition to include new artworks, as well as
Can images save us? The idea that images have healing powers is artists and cultural objects from Asia.
present in the work of Swiss clairvoyant Emma Kunz and Chinese
healer Guo Fengyi, who infused an almost desperate faith in images. GALLERY 5 strikes an irreverent tone, presenting idiosyncratic
With their medicine drawings and therapeutic abstractions, they perspectives on the structures of cinema and television. Taekyu Park
created pictures that they hoped could save the world. is the only remaining movie poster painter in Gwangju. His large hand-
painted standups of seminal films tell the history of Korean cinema. A
GALLERY 4 looks at religious figures and idols, fetishes and dolls. video installation by Zhou Xiaohu depicts a corporate office turned
The centerpiece is Partners (The Teddy Bear Project), a vast archive upside down, in which workers are suspended from the ceiling in an
of over 3000 photographs of people holding teddy bears, compiled by absurd situation that comically conflates contemporary capitalism with
the curator and collector Ydessa Hendeles. Her installation reveals inverted social values.
the viral power of images, their ability to propagate themselves, build
up mass and draw a following: images are choral phenomena with an THE GWANGJU FOLK MUSEUM brings together works that address
epidemic power. The Teddy Bear Project is thus also the history of a the interaction of images and memory. Henrik Olesen charts a hidden
craze: through thousands of images, Hendeles captures the expansion history of artists and artworks while Andro Wekua reconstructs,
and consolidation of a trend, an irrepressible desire to be just like entirely from memory, a personal record of his native town. Kwangho
everyone else. The funerary Kokdu collected by Ock Rang Kim were used Choi photographs his family’s happy memories but also records the end
in burial rituals to accompany the living and the dead. In both cases, of life, the deaths of elderly family members and the rites and rituals
images are presented as children of nostalgia—we cling to them to ward that attend the grieving process. Alice Kok’s video messages reunite
off loneliness. families long-separated by international borders, vividly recording the
power of images to make the absent present.
Sometimes the love we invest in images proves to be too much. The love
of images often conceals a deep fear of them. Gestures of violence THE GWANGJU MUSEUM OF ART focuses on self-portraiture and
and iconoclasm appear in the defaced photographs by E.J. Bellocq images as projections of the self. Presenting disparate approaches to
from the early twentieth century and in Huang Yong Ping’s fractured autobiography, the self-generating surveillance machines of Dieter
Buddha. Cyprien Galliard’s new video looks at Egyptian statuary and Roth and Tehching Hseih demonstrate our irrepressible desire

4 5
to strike a pose, to stand in the footlights of the image, exposing
ourselves to the gaze of our fellow creatures.

In the works of Roni Horn, Cindy Sherman, and Ryan Trecartin, a new
sense of collectivity is introduced, which corresponds to a completely
renovated perception of the self. The characters that populate this SANGGIL KIM
exhibition seem both multiplied and consumed in a flood of images,
portraits, and masks. It is a gallery of faces whose proliferation runs
parallel to a process of attrition and disappearance: self-portraits from
ANNE MIKE
which the self seems to have been erased by a process of repetition. COLLIER DISFARMER
BRUCE
Seungtaek Lee’s monumental, double self-portrait suggests a divided NAUMAN
self, either that of the artist or of his nation. SANJA
IVEKOVIĆ
ANDRE
DE
Familial relationships are described and reconfigured in the works of DIENES
PAWEL
Roberto Cuoghi and Andy Warhol, while Morton Bartlett, who worked ALTHAMER
ARNOUD
outside the traditional confines of the art world, created private HOLLEMAN
universes in which fetish-like dolls were his closest friends. MIKE NAMHAN
KELLEY PHOTO
STUDIO

Throughout the exhibition, artworks, cultural artifacts, vernacular KONRAD

KLAPHECK
images, and everyday objects are displayed side by side. This cabinet E. J. BELLOCQ

of curiosities clearly manifests the obsession that has fueled our HEUNGSOON IM

figurative impulse for centuries, the desire to create images in our own CHRISTOPHER FRANZ GERTSCH
WILLIAMS
likeness. After all, the history of art—and the history of images—could
most simply be described as a history of people looking at people, of
eyes staring at bodies. LEE
FRANCO MARIA
FRIED-
VACCARI LASSNIG
LANDER

PETER FISCHLI &

Massimiliano Gioni DAVID WEISS

Artistic Director, Gwangju Biennale 2010 AURÉLIEN JAKUB

FROMENT ZIÓŁKOWSKI

WU WENGUANG

WALKER EVANS

SHERRIE LEVINE

MARK LECKEY
STURTEVANT

PETER ROEHR

6 BIENNALE HALL
7 . GALLERY 1
 SANGGIL KIM BRUCE NAUMAN

(b. 1974 Gyeongsan, South Korea) Sanggil

Kim’s deadpan staged tableaux and Over the course of his career, Bruce Nauman has
(b. 1941 Fort Wayne, U.S.A.)

cool, dispassionate architectural views share a common thematic executed work in a wide variety of media. Often playful, ironic, or even
interest in the character of twenty-first century urban life, particularly flippant, these stances cleverly belie Nauman’s serious engagement
in Seoul. Through both their formal rigor and lack of visible human with issues surrounding how the body occupies and moves through
presence, Kim’s ongoing series of architectural photographs space, the complex contingencies of language, and the traditionally
documenting the upheavals in Asia’s endlessly protean metropolises understood roles of the artist. To this end, Nauman has filmed himself
suggest a landscape constructed by a dispassionate alien hand. executing dance-like, self-imposed directives in his empty studio,
Similarly, the early staged photographs from Kim’s Motion Picture Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square, (1967-1968), created
series speak to the effects of this alienating urban environment on a spiraling neon sign that declares, with ambiguous seriousness The
those who inhabit it, exuding a palpable sense of boredom and anomie. True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (1967), or
In his most recent series, Offline Communities, Kim has brought ambiguous sculptural works that address the human form, as in
together individuals who share their passions for esoteric areas of 10 Heads Circle/Up and Down (1990).
interest (The Sound of Music, Star Wars, Burberry plaid) in dedicated
forums on the Internet, and had them sit for a group portrait in the Poke in the Eye/Nose/Ear 3/8/94 Edit (1984) harkens back to an
real world. Often, the occasion of Kim’s portrait is the first time that earlier series of super slow motion videos Nauman made using an
these individuals have met face-to-face, despite having formed close- industrial, 4000 frame-per-second camera in the late 1960s, in
knit online communities over a period of months or even years. As such, which he manipulated his body in simple ways that were theatrically
Kim’s project is both an attempt to visualize otherwise wholly virtual exaggerated by the extreme slowness of the film’s playback. As the
communities, and to fashion the creation of an image into an occasion title suggests, in this film Nauman pokes himself in the eye, nose, and
for the alleviation of the alienation that haunts his earlier work. CW ear with his own finger. The actions would seem almost childish, as if
Nauman were exploring a body with which he is unfamiliar, but the slow
playback lends an air of foreboding deliberateness and violence, as
Nauman repeatedly pokes himself in the eye, implying an attempt to
stop the flow of images—destroying the senses and inducing a state
of blindness. CW

off-line_alaska malamute internet community, 2005

C-print, 180 × 220 cm
Poke in the Eye/Nose/Ear 3/8/94 Edit, 1994
Video, 52:00

8 9
 SANJA IVEKOVIĆ MIKE DISFARMER
 

Sanja Iveković’s work examines and critiques the

(b. 1949 Zagreb, Croatia) Born to a family of German immigrants
(b. 1884; d. 1959 Heber Springs, U.S.A.)

structuring forces of visual culture and mass media, particularity as in rural Arkansas in the early 1880s, Mike Disfarmer took pains to
they relate to the representation of gender and politics. Much of her distance himself from his roots. Though his given name was Michael
work is composed of appropriated materials that Iveković repurposes Meyers, a surname that means “dairy farmer,” he changed it to
and recontextualizes in order to expose their ideological functions. Disfarmer in 1939 in an attempt to set himself apart from his farming
Iveković is known for her performance work and her engagement with family. Sometime in the 1930s, Disfarmer taught himself photography
the form of the public monument. In The Rohrbach Living Memorial and set up a studio in the back of his mother’s house in the small rural
(2005) she created a temporary, performative monument to the Roma town of Heber Springs, Arkansas where he set to work perfecting his
victims of the Holocaust, for whom no permanent monument has yet technique. Disfarmer later established a portrait studio on the town’s
been erected. Based on a photograph of a group of Roma taken as Main Street, where he worked as a full-time “penny portrait” photo-
they were waiting to be transported to a concentration camp, Iveković grapher, using a cumbersome and antiquated glass plate camera.
restaged this tableau by asking the residents of the Austrian city of
Rohrbach to perform the “living memorial” by reenacting the scene Disfarmer’s portrait studio soon became the town’s central attraction.
from the early morning hours until noon. For the Biennale, Iveković From the mid-1930s until the late 1940s, Disfarmer documented large
has developed a new version of her living memorial to commemorate swaths of the town’s population, creating images that occupy a strange
the victims of the Gwangju People’s Uprising of May 18, 1980. On the middle ground between the starkly typological and the empathetic.
Barricades is a memorial enacted by volunteers who stand in place of Almost four thousand glass plate negatives were rescued from
statues representing the victims, humming a song that was a marching Disfarmer’s studio after his death in 1959, but none saw the light of
anthem during the uprisings. Nearby, a slideshow of 545 photographic day until 1973, when they were brought to the attention of Julia Scully,
portraits collected from family members of the victims will be presented an editor at Modern Photography magazine. In 1979, Scully published a
on 10 monitors. Iveković has performed a small violation of the book of Disfarmer’s work, and his pictures were immediately recognized
iconography of portraiture, closing the sitters’ eyes to signal that the as a remarkable addition to the history of photographic portraiture.
victims have found their final rest. CW Taken as a whole, Disfarmer’s portraits convey a sense of community
while celebrating the subjects’ individuality—they are a kind of family
album that forms a unique record of a time and place that would have
otherwise been overlooked. CW

On the Barricades, 2010

Digital photographs/performance

Untitled, ca. 1940-1945

Gelatin silver prints, 14 × 9 cm

10 11
 ANNE COLLIER ARNOUD HOLLEMAN

Anne Collier’s studio photographs engage directly

(b. 1970 Los Angeles, U.S.A.) (b. 1964 Haarlem, Holland) As
an artist and writer, Arnoud Holleman’s
with processes of image making and photographic seeing. Often re- extraordinarily diverse output is connected by a strong thematic
photographing images from books or record covers, Collier draws concern with the life and significance of images. Often this concern is
attention to the artifice of the image, particularly as it relates to its manifested through acts of appropriation that transform an image’s
physical support and to her appropriative strategies. Developing Tray meaning through a shift in context, or a removal of contextual
#2 (2009) presents a photographic print of Collier’s own eye as it sits elements. This concern with the lives of images has also led him to
in a photographic developing tray. This self-reflexive image creates a create works that explore the historical prohibitions on image making.
conceptual feedback loop that is characteristic of Collier’s work: we One such work is Untitled (Staphorst) (2003), a slowed-down loop
are looking at an image that is about looking, which could have been of 1960s film footage of the fundamentalist Protestant enclave of
made using the same darkroom equipment it depicts. Staphorst in the Netherlands. In the film, the village’s inhabitants are
seen shielding their faces from the camera. Their actions bring to mind
In the slide installation Woman With A Camera (35 mm) (2009), Collier the superstition that photographic image making devices can steal a
inflects her visual investigations with fraught psychological content, part of one’s soul or life essence, but it is more likely that these pious
engaging not only with the mechanics of vision and representation, but villagers are simply taking the Bible’s second commandment to a logical
also their operations in the world. Taken from a scene in the 1978 film extreme. Not content to simply abstain from the creation of unholy
The Eyes of Laura Mars, the individual slides present a tightly framed images themselves, they hope to avoid the transformation of their
shot of the actress Faye Dunaway as she peers through the viewfinder bodies into images at the hands of the camera operator, of becoming
of a camera, her eyes widening in surprise and horror at what she sees. idols by proxy. But Holleman’s principle interest in the footage is
Addressing the act of seeing, the potential violence implicit in the cultural, not religious, and it is telling that the villagers’ gestures seem
gaze, and the possible power of representation to spill over into reality, so foreign to most viewers. Holleman notes that contemporary culture
Woman With A Camera, like much of Collier’s work, is concerned more has inverted religious bans on imagery; “to see and be seen via the
with the processes and power relations inherent in image making than image has become a cultural and existential duty.” CW
with the choice of photographic subject. CW

Woman with a Camera (35mm), 2009 Untitled (Staphorst), 2002

Slide projection Video, 4:30

12 13
 ANDRE DE DIENES NAMHAN PHOTO STUDIO

(b. 1913 Turia, Romania; d. 1985, U.S.A.) As

a young man, Andre De Dienes spent (PORTRAIT OF PRINCESS PARK CHANJOO, b. 1914, d. 1995, Seoul, South Korea) Princess
Park
several years traveling around Europe before settling briefly in Tunisia, Chanjoo was born in Seoul in 1914. The granddaughter of a well-known
where he bought his first camera. In 1933, De Dienes traveled to Paris politician, Park attended the prestigious Kyung-gi Women’s High School
and worked for a period as a photographer with the Associated Press. and later married Lee Woo, the fourth head of the Unhyeon Palace and
Encouraged by the famed couturier Edward Molyneux to become a a member of the Imperial family of Korea. Park and Lee were married
fashion photographer, De Dienes found success in the industry and in Japan, where Lee had been relocated by the Japanese government
with the help of an editor at Esquire magazine, immigrated to America as part of the process of Japanese education that was forced on all
in 1938, working for numerous high-fashion magazines in New York. members of the Imperial family. They had two sons, Lee Chung and Lee
Jung, before Lee was forced to relocate to Hiroshima for compulsory
In 1944, De Dienes moved to Hollywood, where he hired nineteen-year- service in the Japanese Army, where he was killed in the atomic bomb
old Marilyn Monroe, then Norma Jeane Baker, for her first modeling blast in 1945. After her husband’s death, Park returned to Korea,
job. Soon after, they took a five-week road trip together around living at one of the Imperial family’s palaces in Seoul that she managed
California and the American Southwest. Pictures from this trip landed to retain despite the Korean government’s appropriation of almost all
on the covers of magazines around the world, and were instrumental former Imperial properties after the end of Japanese occupation in
in launching Monroe’s career. In Marilyn Shows What Death Looks Like September 1945. Park died in 1995 in her private residence in Seoul,
(1946), De Dienes photographed Monroe with a blanket draped over where she had lived after her palace was sold, in 1992.
her head and torso, holding her hands up to her face in a playful, peek-
a-boo-like pose. In the photograph, this simple act of disappearance The photograph of Princess Park that is included in the Biennale
takes on an ominous feel, one that is made all the more poignant in shows the future princess as a toddler, holding a small doll. Too young
light of Monroe’s untimely death. But rather than disappearing from to stand on her own, the child’s body is supported by the hand of a
the world of the visible, Monroe’s celebrity has ensured that she will figure otherwise concealed off-camera. This intervention—necessary
live forever as an image. CW to keep the young Park from moving during the photographer’s lengthy
exposure while still showing her in an individual, noble portrait—gives
the picture a feeling of both tenderness and threat. Girding her waist
and assisting the young child to pose, the protective gesture of this
disembodied hand extends to both girl and doll, while the young Park
unknowingly mirrors this gesture as she clutches the doll to her chest.
CW

Untitled (Marilyn Shows What Death Looks Like), Photo of Princess Park Chanjoo
1946/2010 in her Infancy, ca. 1915
Gelatin silver print, 35 × 27 cm Photograph, 16 × 12 cm

14 15
 PAWEL ALTHAMER MIKE KELLEY

(b. 1967 Warsaw, Poland) Pawel

Althamer’s sculptures, videos, and Mike Kelley’s vast output over the past three
(b. 1954 Detroit, U.S.A.)

performances explore the fragility and contingency of the body—often decades has taken myriad forms, chiefly video, performance, painting,
his own—within the wider sphere of social and political contexts. He and photography. He explores the grotesque and fantastic elements
has often submitted his body to extreme states, either physically or lurking within the popular consciousness, drawing on everything
psychically. In one early performance work, Althamer sealed himself from the youthful drama of high-school yearbooks to popular films,
inside a body-sized plastic bag that slowly filled with cold water cabaret performances, and the legacies of Pop art to produce dizzying,
(Water, Space, Time, 1991), in another, with the help of hypnosis and overwhelming installations.
hallucinogenic drugs, he explored the inner landscape of his mind (The
So Called Waves and Other Phenomena of the Mind, 2003-2004). Rose Hobart II is a sculpture that essentially depicts one of the
artist’s earlier sculptures, A Continuous Screening of Bob Clark’s
His sculptures engage with the body less directly, often through the Film “Porky’s”, 1981, the Soundtrack of which has been replaced
logic of substitution. His human-scale sculptures, representing himself with Morton Subotnik’s Electronic Composition “The Wild Bull,” and
or members of his family, are constructed from hair, straw, intestine, Presented in the Secret Sub-Basement of the Gymnasium Locker Room
and cloth—visceral, rough-hewn materials that seem poised on the (2002). A floor sculpture of peculiar geometry, painted black and
threshold between embodiment and decay. For the Biennale, Althamer emanating an audio track from The Wild Bull by Morton Subotnik, Rose
has created a new version of Auguste Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais, Hobart II draws further connections between Thomas Edison’s Black
entitled Brodno People, made with the help of people from a working Maria movie studio and the system of progressive revelation in Plato’s
class neighborhood of Warsaw. Rodin’s sculpture tells the story cave metaphor. The piece invites viewers to crawl inside via its low
of six leading citizens of the town of Calais, France, who, in 1347, entry points, upon which they encounter a looping video of the famed
volunteered themselves as hostages to King Edward III of England in nude shower scene from the film Porky’s, slowed down and manipulated
exchange for lifting an eleven-month siege on their city during the to stress the film’s highly-wrought acting. Entering Kelley’s piece
Hundred Years War. Althamer’s version emphasizes the social and on hands and knees, viewers mime the voyeuristic behavior of the
political circumstances of the work’s production by foregrounding characters in the film who crawl beneath the floor of the women’s
collective practice over individual authorship. Like totems or idols from shower room for an illicit view. BT
a personal religion, his figures appear almost as placeholders for the
artist’s body and those of his loved ones, as if their presence might
somehow ward off the inevitable decay of the flesh. CW Rose Hobart II, 2006
Wood, metal, carpet, acrylic paint, and video projection, 183 × 452 × 609 cm

Self-portrait, 1993
Mixed media, grass, hemp fiber, animal intestine, wax, and hair
189 × 76 × 70 cm

16 17
 E. J. BELLOCQ FRANZ GERTSCH

The life of photographer Ernest J. Bellocq is

(b. 1873, d. 1949 New Orleans, U.S.A.) Franz Gertsch is known for his monumental,
(b. 1930 Mörigen, Switzerland)

shrouded in rumor. Conflicting reports describe him as a curmudgeonly hyper-realist paintings and woodcuts of his friends, family, and the
eccentric semi-dwarf and as a dandy from an aristocratic Creole family. landscape around his native Switzerland. Derived from photographs
Whatever the case, Bellocq is now remembered as the compassionate that Gertsch enlarges onto canvas, his paintings mix the casual feeling
documentarian who photographed the prostitutes of New Orleans’s of snapshots with the rigorous precision of old master paintings. In his
Storyville district, where prostitution was locally legalized from 1898 to earlier works, which mostly depict Gertsch’s bohemian friends posed in
1917. But it was not until after his death that his photographic negatives casual tableaux, the meticulous attention to detail and the grand scale
were discovered, hidden in a drawer of his desk and subsequently of the canvases have an ennobling effect on his subjects, creating
purchased and printed by the photographer Lee Friedlander. ramshackle icons of the punk milieu. But the transformative property
of Gertsch’s paintings also works the other way, as in his well-known
Bellocq’s portraits are marked by a startling intimacy that has fueled series of portraits of punk icon Patti Smith, which have an intimate,
the fires of speculation surrounding his relationship with his subjects incidental quality that belies Smith’s towering presence as a musician.
and spawned a number of fictional imaginings of his life. Beyond the
photographs’ candor—which reveals an intimate and playful relationship In Self-portrait (1980), Gertsch turns inward, rendering his own
with his subjects—what is most striking is that several of the glass- likeness in unflinchingly detail. Illuminated by a camera flash that
plate negatives have violent scratches over the subjects’ faces, leaving throws a harsh shadow on the wall behind him, Gertsch’s enigmatic
black voids in the resulting prints. The cause of this act of iconoclasm expression is both pensive and apprehensive, as if caught off guard.
is unknown: they may have been defaced by Bellocq himself, either in With its mixture of monumental scale and incidental detail, Gertsch’s
a fit of jealous anger, or to protect the privacy of his sitters, or by his self-portrait seems to be an acknowledgment of the tension between
ashamed brother (a Jesuit priest), or even by one of his sitters. The the painted image’s claim to immortality, and its subject’s inevitable
details are lost to history—what remains are variously tender, erotic, disappearance. CW
mysterious and disturbing documents. CW

Self-portrait, 1980
Acrylic on unprimed canvas, 257 × 391 cm

Storyville Portrait, ca. 1912

Gelatin silver print on gold toned printing out
paper, 19 × 23 cm

18 19
 CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS KONRAD KLAPHECK

Christopher Williams repurposes the formal

(b. 1956 Los Angeles, U.S.A.) The son of an art historian dismissed from his
(b. 1935 Dusseldorf, Germany)

vocabulary of commercial product photography to reflect on the teaching post by the Nazis in 1934, the painter Konrad Klapheck grew
industrial production of images. In his images, an object (or group of up in the shadow of the war. In high school around the early 1950s, he
objects) is placed squarely in the middle of the frame on an evenly lit, discovered painting and modern literature, and was influenced early on
white backdrop, as though announcing nothing more than its existence. by Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp. In 1961, Klapheck was introduced
His images of diverse consumer objects (candy bars, cameras, bicycles, to André Breton and his circle of French Surrealists, and the following
automobile tires) come with lengthy explanatory titles, listing seemingly year made the acquaintance of René Magritte; both proved decisive
superfluous details (technical specifications, component parts, site of influences on his work.
manufacture) for each object. Designed to inundate the viewer with the
overwhelming complexity of industrial production, the captions provide Klapheck cultivated an idiom of close observation of modern,
clues to their wider interrelation: the shared industrial processes, mechanized objects, rendered with some outsized emotional, or
economic conditions, and systems of distribution underlying almost obliquely narrative, quotient that anthropomorphized or psychologically
everything in today’s globalized society. accentuated these machines or industrial objects. Keys, faucets,
typewriters, or telephones, rendered in a smooth, stylized realism, in
Williams’s photographs engage with the technology of commercial vivid and pastel colors on flat backgrounds, came to stand in for the
photography and the obscure industrial systems of which it is a part, absent narrative actors. The objects seem alive within their own realm,
addressing the gap between the visible world and the network of pulsing and swollen with emotion. Deceptively laced with Freudian
invisible relationships that produce it. In his series of camera lenses symbolism, the works’ titles lead the viewer to far-off, frequently
and cutaway models of photographic equipment, Williams lays bare psycho-associative readings of the work, as in Motherly Girlfriend, the
the photographic apparatus itself, leading us to question the very 1966 painting of a curved, sloping bathtub spout, gleaming in dark
structures underlying his work’s seeming self-evidence. CW chrome. In his later portraits, rounded, simplified people live among and
activate these mechanic shapes while the objects take on human form,
each animating the presence of the other in a bout of discomfiting
surrealist perplexity. BT
Cutaway model Switar 25mm f1.4 AR. Glass, wood and brass. Douglas M. Parker
Studio, Glendale, California, November, 17, 2007-November 30, 2007, 2008
C-print, 85 × 95 × 4 cm

Motherly Girlfriend, 1966

Oil on canvas, 70 × 88 cm

20 21
 FRANCO VACCARI MARIA LASSNIG

In 1972, Franco Vaccari set up a photo booth at

(b. 1936 Modena, Italy) Over the past six decades, the Austrian painter
(b. 1919 Carinthia, Austria)

the Venice Biennale as part of a work entitled Leave On The Walls A Maria Lassnig has produced a body of work of deep psychic complexity
Photographic Trace Of Your Fleeting Visit, (1972). Over five thousand around the space of the human body. Her self-portraits are brutally
visitors complied with the work’s directive; having their pictures taken frank and, as with her images of others, verge on the grotesque.
in the photo booth and affixing the resultant strip of photographs to Lassnig’s notion of “body awareness painting” dictates that she only
the wall. As the exhibition progressed, however, Vaccari ran into some depict those parts of herself that she can truly sense while painting,
trouble with the Venetian police, who were concerned about some of resulting in figures with deformed, limbless edges and haunted,
the activity going on behind the photo booth’s floor-length curtain. grimaced expressions. Lassnig’s method allows her to know herself
In order to curtail what they believed to be inappropriate behavior, the through the act of painting.
police took scissors to the curtain, shortening it to a more revealing
length. Lassnig employs a flat pictorial style, with garish, if sometimes muted,
colors against solid backgrounds, often with only the sparest of
For the Biennale, Vaccari has been invited to restage this work, which contextualizing elements. The images are base and visceral: characters
is a kind of image-generating machine that creates a visual history confront their material being and their flawed behavior at the same
of its use and of the show itself, but which also relies entirely on the time, resulting in corpulent, malleable bodies attacking one another,
participation of the viewing public and their willingness to donate crushing small objects in their hands, or being preyed upon by cruel
an image to the gallery walls. In this regard, the work can be seen as circumstances. In her early eighties, after decades of avoidance (and
precursor to the relational artworks of the 1990s, which focused on engaging in painting’s rivalry with the camera), Lassnig began using
creating works that remained incomplete without the direct engagement photography to help her paint, cautiously engaging in its intrinsic
of the viewer. Within the context of contemporary culture, the work illusionism. These recent works have had more recognizable pictorial
takes on a new set of associations in light of social networking and space and context, but no less psychological charge. Through positions
photo-sharing websites, where users voluntarily share their images and orientation of the figure, gesture, or gaze, Lassnig’s works often
with a wide audience on an almost daily basis—a cultural development address the viewer directly, who is implicated as a key to deciphering
that would no doubt have been foreign to viewers in the early 1970s, meaning. Though sharing in the psychologically dense Viennese
but which is now a prominent aspect of our image-saturated media genealogy of expressionism, Lassnig’s images also partake of a more
environment. CW phenomenological tactic, where the act of her representation is the
continued deciphering of that very thing. BT

Leave On The Walls A Photographic Trace Of Your

Fleeting Visit, 1972 Language Grid, 1999
Exhibition in Real Time with Photomatic Kiosk Oil on canvas, 200 × 150 cm

22 23
 JAKUB ZIÓŁKOWSKI PETER FISCHLI & DAVID WEISS

(b. 1980 Zamość, Poland) Jakub

Ziółkowski’s phantasmagorical drawings (b. 1952 Zurich, Switzerland; b. 1946 Zurich, Switzerland) Peter
Fischli and David Weiss
roil with mutant life: plants sprout giant eyeballs, patchwork bodies have worked together collaboratively since 1979. In that time, they
threaten to slough off their skins or tumble into piles of dismembered have produced a distinctly playful oeuvre, working in a range of media
parts, internal organs make their way outside, objects grow hair, faces including photography, video, sculpture, installation, and performance.
distort as if infected with some unspeakable virus. In Ziółkowski’s Their work is marked by an interest in the transformation of everyday
world, the body is always in peril and nature is always a threat. Mixing objects and situations into ones that evoke a childlike sense of
the tortured physiologies of expressionism with fantastical menageries mischief. They have created whimsical, strangely poignant arrangements
that seemed pulled from the works of the early Dutch painter of kitchen utensils and various edibles balanced precariously on one
Hieronymus Bosch, Ziółkowski has created a nightmare landscape all another (Equilibres—A Quiet Afternoon, 1984-1985), transformed
his own. their studio into the site of a single, epic chain reaction (The Way
Things Go, 1987), and carved and painted meticulous reproductions of
In History of the Eye (2010), created for the Biennale, Ziółkowski has everyday objects using polyurethane (Floss (Raft), 1982).
interpreted Georges Bataille’s controversial short pornographic novel,
Story of the Eye (1928). First published under a pseudonym and not In Visible World (1986-2001), Fischli and Weiss have culled three
publicly attributed to Bataille until after his death, the book presents thousand images taken over the course of almost twenty years of
the depraved sexual exploits of two teenagers in a series of surreal traveling and sightseeing. They are familiar images, anodyne almost
vignettes, which are often fetishistically focused on disembodied to the point of anonymity: images of airports, mountains, flowers, and
eyes. These “eyes” are often tortured or demolished during the act sunsets. It may seem strange that they bothered to take these pictures
of base bodily pursuits, actions that reflect assertions in Bataille’s at all, since there are so many just like them, ready to be appropriated.
philosophical works that the bodily should take precedence over vision. But their status as personal travel photographs imbues the images
Ziółkowski, with his focus on the corruptibility of the flesh and the with the kind of affection reserved for souvenirs—they are objects
base realities of embodiment, seems a fitting illustrator of this tale, that remind us of our existence in a certain place, for a certain time.
which has become one of the most notorious works of philosophical Seen in this light, these banal images reveal themselves in all their
obscenity since the Marquis de Sade. Equating the act of seeing with complexity: both individual records of journeys taken and products of
desire itself, the violence enacted in Ziółkowski’s History can be seen a collective visual understanding, they represent an unexpected fusion
as an attack of pornographic and forbidden images against all forms of of the personal and the universal. CW
censorship. CW

Visible World, 1986-2001 (installation view)

History of the Eye, 2010 Light table with 3000 photographs,
Oil on paper, dimensions variable 83 × 2805 × 69 cm

24 25
 PETER ROEHR WALKER EVANS

(b. 1944 Frankfurt, Germany; d. 1968) The

German artist Peter Roehr produced (b. 1903 St. Louis, U.S.A.; d. 1975 Old Lyme, U.S.A.) Though
he is now remembered
a radically innovative oeuvre of film, sound, and works on paper in as one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century,
his sadly brief career. Making text blocks consisting entirely of the Walker Evans initially aspired to be a writer. In 1926, after dropping out
letters M or N, or the left parenthesis sign, Roehr hijacked the typing of Williams College and taking odd jobs in New York City, he moved to
keyboard, forming small spaces of internal infinity that were, at the Paris in an attempt to gain entry into the city’s vibrant literary scene.
time, misread as concrete poetry, but should be seen as pushing into After one year in Paris, he returned to New York, where he befriended
new realms of abstraction and minimalism. His austere, obsessive film a group of literary luminaries, among them Hart Crane and Lincoln
loops operate in a similar manner, repurposing the imagery of popular Kirstein. In 1928, Evans took up photography and quickly made a name
advertising and media into short, bluntly reiterative meditations, for himself as a photographer. His first published photographs, taken of
presaging many contemporary currents of artistic production. Roehr’s the Brooklyn Bridge, graced the cover of Crane’s seminal collection of
tactics were seriality and endlessness. As he said of his practice: poems, The Bridge (1930).
“Neither successive nor additive, there is no result or sum.”
In 1935, Evans was contracted by the United States government to
Roehr’s film work drew from the pool of popular advertising and make photographs in connection with the efforts of the Resettlement
television: shampoo commercials, wrestlers, and automobiles driving on Administration (RA), which soon became the Farm Security Administration
highways. Extracting small sections of these anonymous, commercial (FSA). Evans’s unsentimental images of rural life during the Great
films at key narrative moments, he sutured them into loops, forcing Depression, made under the FSA’s auspices, led writer James Agee
them to endlessly recur, which changed and charged their visual and to select him for an assignment for Fortune magazine about three
auditory meaning. Latent characteristics emerge through the hypnotic sharecropping families in Alabama, for which Evans would make some of
interrogation of form and sign: images take on new scales, marginal his most famous photographs. Over the course of three weeks, Evans
details become central, emotions and expectations are frustrated. The and Agee assiduously documented the bleak lives of their subjects,
repetition plays tricks on the mind: at each new start, we are willing to with Evans capturing the spare interiors of their homes and their looks
suspend our disbelief and brace for the possibility that the narrative of determination and desperation. The story was ultimately rejected by
will progress this time, as when a skipping record magically restores Fortune, but Evans and Agee went on to publish their work as a book
itself without intervention. Of course, that never happens here: time is entitled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which has since become one
stuck in neutral. The reorganization of otherwise untouched sources of the most enduring documents of the era. As Evans was still working
becomes, in Roehr’s hands, a truly transformational gesture. BT under the aegis of the FSA when he produced these images, they now
form part of the prints and photographs collection at The Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C., which houses more than fourteen million
other images. CW

Negro Church, South Carolina, 1936

Film-Montagen I-III, 1965 Gelatin silver print, 20 × 25 cm

26 27
 SHERRIE LEVINE STURTEVANT

(b. 1947 Hazleton, U.S.A.) Sherrie

Levine first came to prominence with (b. 1930 Lakewood, U.S.A.) Elaine
Sturtevant, who creates artwork under the
Douglas Crimp’s influential 1977 exhibition Pictures at Artists Space moniker Sturtevant, has spent her career producing what appear to be
Gallery in New York. In the show, Crimp identified a new generation exact copies of other artists’ works. Sturtevant masters the techniques
of artists—later dubbed the Pictures Generation—who were using used by the artists whose work she reproduces (printmaking, painting,
innovative strategies of appropriation to comment on various aspects sculpture, and photography) and engages in a kind of re-performance
of existing visual culture. Levine is probably best known for her series of the original’s production, creating a new set of meanings in the
After Walker Evans (1981), in which she re-photographed Walker process. Since the 1960s, Sturtevant has produced facsimiles of iconic
Evans’s iconic, Depression-Era photographs of Alabaman tenant works by Felix Gonzales-Torres, Roy Lichtenstein, Marcel Duchamp,
farmers, presenting the appropriated images as her own. Though the Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and others, often before the artists or
series was controversial when it was first shown, it has since become their works entered into the art historical canon. Her conceptual
emblematic of these new appropriative strategies. strategy worked to stretch the Duchampian idea of appropriation to
its rational conclusion, calling into question Modernist notions of
Levine’s reproductive gesture is not just a simple act of artistic originality and artistic genius.
plagiarism. Rather, by re-presenting Evans’s work and adding her own
authorship as an addendum, Levine enacts a subtle and sophisticated For her series of Andy Warhol’s Flowers, Sturtevant obtained the
shift in the work’s meaning, opening it up to new interpretations. Her original silk screens from Warhol himself. Her Flowers would seem
gesture can be read as a feminist undermining of one of photography’s indistinguishable from Warhol’s in both their appearance and their
most revered patriarchs, a critique of the practice of anointing production, as Warhol’s studio assistants often produced the silk
documentary photography as art, and as Postmodern critique of screens without his intervention. However, the fact that Sturtevant,
Modernist notions of originality and artistic autonomy. Whatever the and not one of Warhol’s assistants, produced these Flowers
interpretation, Levine’s treatment of these photographs succeeded fundamentally changes their status as objects. Never simply copies,
in giving the images a new life that extended beyond Evans’s original Sturtevant’s works could be termed unoriginal originals, creating
intentions, and the set of meaning that were ascribed to them in new meaning by placing old forms into new contexts. In this way, they
their time. For the Biennale, Levine’s reproductions will be exhibited share a conceptual affinity with contemporary “knock-off” culture,
alongside new prints from Walker Evans’s original negatives from the which similarly raids the storehouse of the past, copying and hijacking
Library of Congress, to further point towards their ambiguous status “original” works to create new ones. CW
as copied originals. CW

After Walker Evans, 1981 Warhol Flowers, 1990

Gelatin silver print, 20 × 25 cm Silkscreen, acrylic on canvas, 305 × 305 cm

28 29
 AURÉLIEN FROMENT WU WENGUANG

(b. 1976 Angers, France) Aurélien

Froment’s work engages with the processes (b. 1956 Yunnan, China) Documentary
filmmaker Wu Wenguang is one of the
of memory and learning, often through the use of games, puzzles, leading voices in contemporary Chinese cinema, and a strong advocate
and other forms of interactive mediums to address the evocative and for a realist approach to the medium. In two early works, Bumming in
associative powers of images. A key influence for Froment is the work Beijing (1990) and At Home in the World (1995), Wu documented the
of German educator Friedrich Froebel (inventor of the kindergarten) daily life and rituals of a down-and-out group of artists newly adrift
who famously promoted the intersection of learning and play as a in the complex social landscape of post-reform China. His handheld
pedagogical strategy. In the video Théâtre de poche (2007) a magician camera work, unscripted interview footage, and landscape of bleak,
conjures an array of disjointed images, which he proceeds to arrange rural poverty set them apart from the kind of documentary films
in the air around him, as if on an invisible screen. The work calls to that had been previously made in China. In subsequent projects like
mind the nineteenth century music hall performances of Arthur Lloyd Jianghu: Life on the Road (1999), which documented a traveling troupe
(the subject of another of Froment’s works), who was known as “the of itinerant circus performers, Wu pioneered a spontaneous realism
human card index” because his act consisted of him producing, as if of recording things only as they actually happened, often passing
by magic, whatever document or image an audience member requested the camera off to the subjects and being filmed himself, erasing
from out of his voluminous coat. The arrangement of the images is also distinctions between author and subject. In the past two decades,
reminiscent of art historian and cultural theorist Aby Warburg’s now- Wu has turned to digital video technology to liberate his work from
lost Mnemosyne Atlas, for which he collected and arranged images the expense and labor of cinematic production, a move which has
from an eclectic range of sources, not according to type or visual also allowed for a more immediate connection to lived experience and
style, but as idiosyncratic illustrations of thematic aspects of the real time. Recently, Wu has pushed these possibilities still farther,
work, tracing the influence of classical antiquity on Renaissance art. with his ongoing Chinese Villagers’ Documentary Project, which put
Though Froment’s image arrangements do not share Warburg’s specific cameras into the hands of regional locals (solicited through local
didactic intent, they do share his gregarious approach to the visual, in newspaper advertisements) to record and comment on their specific
which disparate images can come together to activate new meanings. villages. Realizing that non-professionals could provide a perspective
CW that no outsider ever could, Wu spearheaded this project, eventually
producing feature-length videos detailing the quotidian realities of
rural life. Committed to the most authentic rendering of reality that he
can produce through cinema, Wu gathered footage from villages where
most people had never even seen video cameras, turning the subjects
Theâtre de poche, 2007 themselves into filmmakers. BT
Video, 12:27

China Villagers Documentary Project 1-4,

2006-2007
Videos, 8 hours

30 31
 MARK LECKEY LEE FRIEDLANDER

Mark Leckey’s videos and performance lectures have

(b. 1964 Birkenhead, UK) Lee Friedlander has spent over sixty years
(b. 1934 Aberdeen, U.S.A.)

marked him as a kind of amateur cultural anthropologist, who remixes documenting the social and physical landscape of America. His
popular and subcultural phenomena with artistic tropes and references numerous bodies of photographic work include portraits of legendary
from “high” culture to create beguiling, idiosyncratic hybrids. One of jazz musicians, humorous and spatially complex street photographs,
Leckey’s most sprawling, ambitious works is his performance lecture candid, often playful self-portraits, natural landscapes, and
Cinema in the Round (2007-2008), in which he attempts to explain his idiosyncratic nudes. He is recognized as one of the seminal figures
experience with images (particularly moving images) that possess a in twentieth century photography, and was included, along with Gary
peculiar, evocative tangibility. Over the course of the lecture, Leckey Winogrand and Diane Arbus, in John Szarkowski’s landmark 1967
employs an eccentric list of cultural sources including the paintings of exhibition New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Philip Guston, Felix the Cat cartoons, and James Cameron’s blockbuster In 2005, his work was the subject of a major touring retrospective that
Titanic (1997) to explore the tendency of certain images to “impose … was organized by the Museum of Modern Art.
a sense of their actual weight, density, and volume, of their physical
being in the world.” Leckey argues that the images that make up his Friedlander created the photographs that make up The Little Screens
personalized history share a tendency to “oscillate between image and while traveling around the United States in the 1960s. These
object” and engage with the viewer on a bodily level, inviting a kind photographs are haunted by the luminous presence of disembodied
of palpation with the eyes, or a visual touching. As a result, Leckey’s faces—some recognizable, some anonymous—as they were broadcast
taxonomy presents us with an alternative mode for perceiving images, on television screens in empty and often featureless hotel rooms
one that engages with their physicality and urges us not only to look, across the country. Characterized by photographer Walker Evans as
but also to experience. CW “deft, witty, spanking little poems of hate” in an article published
in Harper’s Bazaar in 1963, the photographs seemed to speak to
a particularly American anomie—a sense of alienation provoked by
the perception that human relationships were becoming increasingly
Cinema in the Round, 2006-2008 situated in the virtual space of the screen. CW
Video, 42:21

Florida, 1963
Gelatin silver print,
35 × 28 cm

32 33
 HEUNGSOON IM
JIKKEN KOBO

(b. 1969 Seoul, South Korea) A

video artist from Seoul, South Korea, Heungsoon
Im explores the rifts in Korean culture opened by changing economic THOMAS BAYRLE HAEGUE YANG PAUL SHARITS

and political conditions, often focusing on issues of class conflict

and property. Adhering to a style of critical realism informed by KATSUHIRO
YAMAGUCHI
documentary practice, he employs video, photography, and urban
geographic research to examine flows of capital, architecture, and the
ATARU SATO
lives of the working class, who are increasingly excluded from cultural
recognition and social production. In the two-channel video Memento
BRIDGET RILEY
(2003), two sequential narratives unfold on adjacent screens, inter-
KERSTIN RUPPRECHT TAUBA
woven by virtue of their parallel characters and activities. The left BRÄTSCH GEIGER AUERBACH

screen presents a slideshow of old family photographs, depicting the

artist and his family in all stages of life. Jangan-dong and Dapsimni,
the areas in Seoul where the artist grew up, are set in the backdrops, STAN VANDERBEEK

and their effaced rural past can now only be evoked by these personal
souvenirs. On the right screen, a steady, locked-off camera shot
CARSTEN
documents a trip to a professional photographer’s studio for a HÖLLER
GUO FENGYI
formal family portrait. The family members—older now, but familiar
from the still images on the left—slowly assemble and act out their
roles, while taking directions about how and where to pose from the
photographer’s assistant. Memento sets in motion two divergent modes SETH PRICE KAN XUAN
of image production: on one channel, a portrait of the Im family created
GLENN BROWN
through the aggregate collection of snapshots, on the other, through
the theatrical production of a single image. The capacity of images JACOB KASSAY

to convey character, time, and narrative resonates in the small space

between the two. BT IRINA BOTEA JOÃO MARIA
GUSMÃO +
PEDRO PAIVA 
HANYONG KIM

ELIOT
PORTER

HAROLD
EDGERTON
Memento, 2003 HANS-
Video, 15:00 PETER
FELDMANN ARTUR ŻMIJEWSKI

SHINRO OHTAKE

JOÃO MARIA
DAHN VO GUSMÃO +
PEDRO PAIVA 

DUNCAN HARUN FAROCKI

CAMPBELL

34 BIENNALE HALL
35 . GALLERY 2
 STAN VANDERBEEK BRIDGET RILEY

(b. 1927, d. 1984 New York City, U.S.A.) Stan

VanDerBeek was once a major figure (b. 1931 London, UK) British
painter Bridget Riley was a pioneering figure
of the New York avant-garde, associating with luminaries like Claes in the Op-Art movement of the 1960s, which foregrounded pure visual
Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Robert Morris, Allan Kaprow, and Yvonne Rainer. experience within the language of abstraction, and which was heavily
The subject of a retrospective at Anthology Film Archives in 1977, influenced by rapidly evolving media technologies and scientific
VanDerBeek worked as an artist-in-residence at NASA and at MIT, discourse. Riley first came to international acclaim in 1965, in the
and exhibited at major museums and international art events. After group exhibition The Responsive Eye, at the Museum of Modern Art
his death in 1984 at the age of 57 his work was largely forgotten, but in New York. Three years later, she represented Britain at the Venice
thanks to recent efforts by artists and his family, VanDerBeek is again Biennale—the first woman ever to do so. Her complex, optically rich
becoming more widely known. patterns—initially painted in black and white—were designed to
activate neurological and physiological aspects of vision. Producing
Initially recognized for his experimental animation work, VanDerBeek oblique geometric shapes in seemingly endless, variable repetitions,
developed a fascination with technology later in life, becoming one Riley’s works can produce sensations of movement or even colors within
of the first artists to work seriously with computers. This interest the static image; sometimes, their overwhelming opticality induces a
in technology, coupled with VanDerBeek’s affinity for the work of kind of vertigo. Though composed of purely optical information, without
Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, led to the conception pictorial or representational suggestions, Riley’s canvases can evoke
of his most ambitious unrealized project, the Movie-Drome (1965). images, sensations, and emotions within the mind of the viewer. Her
VanDerBeek’s idea was to create an international, networked image- work has been said to focus on the so-called “mind/body problem”:
bank—accessible and customizable by the local publics—for the the tension between mental state and physical sensation in perceptual
presentation of images and video. Had VanDerBeek’s idea been experience. Throughout her career, she has remained focused and
realized, it would have created a rough prototype of the Internet, committed to “the splendors to which pure sight alone has the key.”
but the outlandish expense and attendant technological roadblocks Today, Riley’s idiom of abstraction has found currency with a new
ensured that the project remained a dream. A model Movie-Drome was generation of artists, who are building on her foundations in exploring
constructed from material salvaged from an abandoned grain silo, the farther reaches of optical and perceptual possibility. BT
where he staged encompassing multi-media events using film and slide
projectors to fill the interior with a rotating collage of images. He later
created smaller, moveable versions called “Electric Assemblages,” a
version of which is featured in the Biennale. CW Painting with Two Verticals, 2004
Oil on linen, 193 × 264 cm

Found Forms, 1969/2010

16mm film transfers, video
projection, slide projection,
dimensions variable

36 37
 ATARU SATO THOMAS BAYRLE

(b. 1986 Chiba, Japan) Ataru

Sato’s densely rendered pencil drawings pulse Thomas Bayrle is best known for his distinctive
(b. 1937 Berlin, Germany)

with mutant energy. Strange hybrids of the organic and the inorganic, “superforms,” dizzyingly complex images that appear to be computer-
the real and the fantastical, they seem to be a product of a mind generated, but which Bayrle has drawn, painted, and screen-printed by
overloaded with images, gestated in and born out of the primordial hand since the early 1960s. Bayrle’s use of complex patterning in his
soup of popular culture. Sato has said of the production of his images: printmaking, photo-collage and design work upsets normal perception,
“Like undulating waves, all things in sight approach me and draw and influenced the German Pop movement after such foundational
back. And I’m lost as to what I scoop up.” But, however random his figures as Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter. Fascinated by the idea of
collection process for his source material, some visual elements return the mass, Bayrle’s early works critiqued Western-style consumerism
repeatedly, as if they haunt corners of his mind that he is unable to and exhibited an aesthetic and political affinity for Chinese communism.
ever fully sweep clean. Images and stylistic tropes from Anime comics But over the course of the 1960s, his stance became more ambivalent
and cartoons, a staple of Japanese boyhood, mix with darker, grown as he embraced a more nuanced allegorization of the rapid advances
up visions of hanged and faceless bodies, tortured lumps of flesh, of (post-) modernity. Prefiguring the aesthetics of computer imaging,
and sexually predatory succubi (female demons who seduce men while his work can be seen as a visual lodestar for the nascent forms of
they sleep). Like the strange and symbol-rich dreamscapes of the globalization. Mao (1966) is a kinetic painting on wood (outfitted with
Surrealists, Sato constructs his drawings by plumbing the depths of an engine) in which party members are slowly transformed into a Maoist
the unconscious—both his own, and society’s—and cobbling together star and then into the face of Chairman Mao himself. CW
the hidden detritus that he dredges up. CW

Stalin (Red), 1970

Flower Vase, 2006 Silkscreen print on colored
Pencil on paper, 108 × 77 cm cardboard, 85 × 60 cm

38 39
 KATSUHIRO YAMAGUCHI HAEGUE YANG

(b. 1928 Tokyo, Japan) Throughout

his long career, Japanese multi-media (b. 1971 Seoul, South Korea) Haegue
Yang’s works consist of delicate,
artist Katsuhiro Yamaguchi has been a fearless adopter and pioneer purposeful arrangements of everyday objects and devices—venetian
of media technologies, and a key force in cultivating (popular) blinds, light bulbs, fans, heaters, air conditioners, electric wires—which
aesthetic sensibilities in post-war Japan. In 1951, he co-founded envelop the senses and create abstract narratives. Yang’s installation
the experimental media production group Jikken Kobo, and began works often form a kind of playground for perceptual experience.
producing complex, optically exploratory films, often suffused with an A room of Yang’s sculptures might offer such sensations as being
almost magically real visuality. His Adventure of the Eyes of Mr. R. S., caressed by a cooling breeze or the radiating heat of a portable heater,
a Test Pilot (1953) is a stark but seductive black and white slide show patterns of light filtered through a thicket of entangled venetian blinds
with voice-over and dramatic, symphonic score. Sequentially gaining or odors wafting through the room from a scent emitter. Since 2006,
visual momentum, the images depict various small glass shapes on Yang has created collections of apparatuses and objects that share
a white background, scattering light beams and casting mysterious a certain provisional, fragile quality but which nevertheless manage
shadows, creating a miniature world. With shifting perspectives that to maintain cohesion and aesthetic balance. One of these collective
suggest an aerial view, the camera seems to pan over these small groupings, Series of Vulnerable Arrangements—Concern Towards
models, producing a whimsical flight over a city of geometric, modernist Personal Limits (2008), consists of a series of sculptures assembled
architecture. In the 1960s, Yamaguchi began to embrace video art and out of what appear to be clothing racks or stands for medical
technologically based installations. At the 1968 Venice Biennale, he equipment that have been festooned with all manner of materials—
built a light-based sculpture called Bridge, and in 1969 participated in Mardi Gras beads, Christmas lights, seashells, tinsel, colored electrical
Electro-Magica, a major international exhibition of new media art at the cords, light bulbs, and various other detritus. In light of the work’s
Sony Building in Tokyo. In 1972, Yamaguchi founded Video Hiroba, an subtitle, the sculptures take on a curious anthropomorphic cast,
artist collective that was part of a growing scene of video and media becoming, perhaps, proxy representations of different guises that Yang
practitioners in Japan. Throughout all this experimentation, Yamaguchi might assume in order to discover the contours of her own limits.
retained his core artistic interests in cosmic, poetic visions and radical Taken as a kind of injunction, this practice of projection might extend
visual modes. In recent years, he has returned to painting, both as a to the viewer as well—perhaps they are works that ask us not to
way to seek a simpler practice and as a more critical response to the expand on our sensory understanding, but to expand on our sense of
role of digital and virtual technology in contemporary life. BT ourselves through these strange, vulnerable proxies. CW

Series of Vulnerable Arrangements—Concerns Towards Personal Limits, 2009

Installation with 7 light sculptures, dimensions variable

Adventure of the Eyes of Mr. R.S.,

a Test-Pilot, 1953
Video, 4:55

40 41
 JIKKEN KOBO/ EXPERIMENTAL WORKSHOP PAUL SHARITS
(SHOZO KITADAI, KIYOJI OTSUJI, KATSUHIRO YAMAGUCHI)

Jikken Kobo, or the Experimental Workshop, was a Japanese

(1951-1958) (b. 1943 Denver, U.S.A. d. 1993 Buffalo, U.S.A.) Paul
Sharits was an experimental
collective of artists, musicians, and writers active from roughly filmmaker associated with the Structural film movement in America. An
1951-1958. They were pioneers of electronic music and employed a early protégé of the pioneering filmmaker Stan Brakhage, whose hand-
heterogeneous, inter-disciplinary approach to media, performance, painted films expressed an interest in film’s materiality, Sharits created
spectacle, and art that synthesized a diverse range of practices. The film works that used a variety of methods to reflect on the process of
composers Joji Yuasa and Toru Takemitsu, critic and theorist Shuzo filmmaking itself. One of Sharits’s most common filmic techniques was
Takiguchi, and media artist Katsuhiro Yamaguchi were among the the creation of a stroboscopic effect (also known as a “flicker” effect),
founding members. The group forms a key node in the story of the achieved through rapid editing and the periodic insertion of single
postwar avant-garde, having independently arrived at radical cultural frames of opaque film among the film’s exposed frames. This created a
practices that were simultaneously being developed by artists at Black filmic flicker visually reminiscent of the action of the shutter of
Mountain College in North Carolina, and the Independent Group in a motion picture camera.
London.
In the 1970s, Sharits began to experiment with large-scale installation
In 1955, the Workshop produced a promotional film for the Japanese works, incorporating strategies from his earlier films. Shutter Interface
bicycle industry called Ginrin (Silver Wheel). Though technically an (1975) employs four film projectors, each connected to a separate
advocacy film for a mainstream commercial sector, it was the product sound system, that project overlapping frames of flickering color. The
of a radical visuality: a little boy falls asleep while reading a children’s speakers emit a series of tones corresponding to the opaque frames
book about cycling, and the rest of the film is his bizarre, hallucinatory of each film. The result is a frenetic aural and visual experience that
dream of flying bicycles, spinning chrome wheels, floating ball- verges on sensory overload. As with many of Sharits’s films, the
bearings, and kaleidoscopic multiple exposures. The sound track mixes initial cacophony of sound and image resolves, with patience, into a
eerie wind chimes, signaling the lone, lost protagonist, with operatic, meditative experience. Sharits, in fact, described his works as akin to
uplifting scores lifted directly from Hollywood. A spectacular cinematic Buddhist mandalas—elaborate symmetrical images that are used as
gesture, Silver Wheel showcases both Japan’s 1950s cultural optimism aids in meditation—that have been extended into the dimension
and the collaborative possibilities between corporate industry and the of time. CW
avant-garde that existed before the visual language of capital had
calcified. Seen today, the voice of the artists emerges most clearly:
though ostensibly cultural propaganda, it is really a visual treatise on
dreaming as a different way to view the world. BT

Ginrin (Silver Wheel), 1955 Shutter Interface, 1975

35mm film transferred to DVD, 11:57 Four 16mm film projections

42 43
 TAUBA AUERBACH KERSTIN BRÄTSCH

(b. 1981 San Francisco, U.S.A.) Tauba

Auerbach’s multi-faceted output includes (b. 1979 Hamburg, Germany) Kerstin
Brätsch’s paintings, collages, sculptures,
painting, drawing, design, and sculpture. Recuperating and expanding performances, and collaborations all support and interact with each
upon the legacies of Op Art, Auerbach explores the interstices among other: paintings can be the backgrounds for performances, collages
contemporary technology’s competing systems of vision: computer the products of collaboration, a sculpture the display mechanism for
graphics, print production, typography, digitized video, and television a publication. Creating these interrelationships is key to Brätsch’s
broadcasting. Her works find hidden beauty in the artifacts of these practice, which cross-pollinates issues surrounding abstraction,
processes: textures, creases, dot patterns, low-bit graphics, and figuration, distribution, and information, while specifically adhering
static. Through persistent re-workings of letterforms and type designs, to none of them. Equivocation is employed as strategy: her work is a
she also articulates the shifting meanings between words and word hedging of bets, a spreading of resources, leaping between media as
signs. Dense with undulating patterns and colors, Auerbach’s works her ideas demand.
only sometimes resolve themselves into the clarity of a recognizable
form. The large-scale abstract paintings of Brätsch’s Psychic Series
approach the pictorial or descriptive (hair, larvae, TV static, shards
Her new series of Untitled Fold Paintings—large acrylic paintings of of glass) by combining discernible shapes and blended backgrounds,
creases and folds—produce optical illusions that activate the process but without imaging anything specific. Inspired by her time in New York
of viewing. The appearance that the canvas is itself folded is often and its vast array of professional psychics, these works can be read
in conflict with a close inspection of the work’s surface. The form is as portraits of the mediums themselves, or of personages psychically
an illusion of changing depths, and what seems to be a patterned channeled. In certain paintings, faces are nearly discernible, as if in
repetition often mutates across the face of the work, never repeating some kind of turmoil: dissolving, collapsing, and appearing from out of
itself exactly. Her calculated system of chance occurrences and formal nothingness. Others are sheer patterns, fields of color bars creating
repetitions draws from her wider interests in science and mathematics. spatial distinctions. The works give form to the invisible, the absent,
Inviting a certain perceptual and phenomenological confusion, the lost: an unverifiable source here finds an indecipherable outlet, not
Auerbach’s works insist on producing an image within the mind of unlike the static of a television receiving no signal. BT
a participating viewer, where perception and apprehension are the
product of an active collaboration. BT

Untitled Fold Painting II, 2009 Untitled, from Psychic Series, 2007
Acrylic on canvas, 132 × 102 cm Oil on Paper, 180 × 263 cm

44 45
 RUPPRECHT GEIGER GUO FENGYI

(b. 1908, d. 2009 Munich, Germany) Rupprecht

Geiger was an abstract painter (b. 1942, d. 2010, Xi’an, China) The
Chinese artist Guo Fengyi was a healer,
and sculptor known for his innovatively shaped canvases and intense shaman, and visionary whose striking, idiosyncratic ink drawings
fascination with the color red. The only child of the painter Willi Geiger, reflect her translation of mystical sensations. Her fantastical pictorial
Rupprecht was originally trained as an architect and practiced his representations of uncannily anthropomorphic characters—divine
trade at various firms in Germany until the beginning of WWII, when spirits, magical beings, the structures of cosmic energies, gender-
he fought briefly on the Russian front and served as a military painter specific physiological systems—are delicately rendered in thousands
in the Ukraine. After the war, Geiger moved back to Munich and began of finely inked brushstrokes on large sheets of rice paper or cloth.
making abstract paintings. One year later, he helped to form the The images are almost channeled through her, effacing the difference
group Zen 49, an organization of like-minded painters who practiced between vision and transcription; as she once said, “I draw because I
Farbfeldmalerei (color field painting), a style whose simplicity and do not know, I draw to know.”
straightforwardness had, they believed, a kinship with Zen meditative
practices. During this period, Geiger created monochromatic geometric In 1987, Guo retired from her industrial chemical job due to illness,
canvases that broke with the normative rectangular format, taking the and the meditative, physical practice of qi-gong became a method of
form of circles, rhombuses, and other irregular shapes, years before healing herself. Her drawings derive from Chinese mythology, history,
similar innovations were made in the United States. and philosophy, and are made under the trance of her qi-gong healing
studies as direct transcriptions of these meditative visions. Though
In the 1970s, Geiger began a decades-long engagement with the color formally untrained in art, her increasingly revelatory visions produced
red, in all its hues and densities. To make these vibrantly colored works, a wide array of drawings, and over the years her work has addressed
Geiger would often apply his paint with a spray technique that gave his wider medical issues. In her series of drawings related to the SARS
surfaces a sumptuous depth and consistency. Perhaps the culmination illness, an epidemic that swept through southern China in 2002-
of this work is Rote Trombe (Red Whirlwind, 1985), an installation- 2003, Guo depicts the virus as gruesome, human-animal hybrids that
style sculpture that takes the form of a massive funnel of red fabric. emerge from nothingness. In tall, vertically oriented scrolls, the beasts
When viewed from below, the work presents an all-encompassing field duplicate themselves in mirrored-reverse from top to bottom, much like
of red, allowing the viewer to meditate on the essence of Geiger’s the jack or queen in a deck of cards. Guo’s mystical practice lends the
idiosyncratic visual obsession. CW images a shamanistic dimension, they are said to have an aspect of
fortune telling layered within them, revealing destinies, and encoding
aspects of the future. As such, people have turned to these drawings
as healing tools, as icons of illness and health, and possible maps from
Rote Trombe, 1985 one to the other. BT
Dyed nylon, 400 × 700 cm

Image of Luoshu Book, 1990

Drawing on paper, 124 × 88 cm

46 47
 CARSTEN HÖLLER JACOB KASSAY

Carsten Höller holds a doctorate in biology, and

(b. 1961 Brussels, Belgium) (b. 1984 Buffalo, U.S.A.) While
in the Visual Studies department at SUNY
has utilized his science training to create works that explore the Buffalo, Jacob Kassay was interested in the more experimental,
nature of human perception and the biochemistry of human emotions. sometimes camera-less realm of photography, as well as the paintings
The vast majority of Höller’s works contain an element of viewer of Ad Reinhardt or Piero Manzoni, whose works seemed to evolve
participation—artworks as laboratory experiments, with the viewer throughout the real-time experience of viewing. Kassay’s silver-plated
as test subject. Engaging with Höller’s work might involve wearing mirror paintings strike a unique balance between photography, painting,
specially designed mirrored glasses that turn the world upside- and sculpture. Gessoing and painting his canvases with solid blocks of
down (Upside-Down Glasses, 2001), being submerged in a sensory color or various mediums, Kassay then sends them to undergo a silver-
deprivation tank (Psycho-Tank, 1999), sliding down an enormous, plating process, involving several chemical baths and spray-applied
spiraling slide (Test Site, 2006), or experiencing close-eyed visual layers of silver ions. The resulting metallic sheen is neither clear nor
hallucinations as a result of a wall of specially calibrated flashing uniform, but rather a mottled, nested set of reflective surfaces, each
lights (Light Wall, 2000). Höller’s works challenge viewers to engage slightly clouding out the others, reflecting back a ghostly, attenuated
with art on a physiological level, and to reflect on human processes of image of the beholder.
perception and embodiment.
These silver-on-canvas works began as a test process for new
In Infrared Room (2006), Höller arranges a series of infrared cameras paintings that he didn’t like, and Kassay initially plated the canvases
in a darkened room to record the presence of gallery visitors. These he felt were unsuccessful. But when they returned as alchemically
recordings are then projected back into the same space but with a changed objects, he began experimenting with different methods
barely perceptible delay. At first, the work appears to be merely an of applying the gesso or paint as a way to control the outcome of
elaborate mirror. Gradually however, the subtle projection lag becomes the plating process. The works still bear the oxidized traces of the
apparent, and the mediated nature of the reflection becomes unnerving chemical process in their scarred, darkened edges, the remnants of
as the delay between action and image creates a disconnected self- locations on the canvas without paint or undercoating. Originally, he
image, a kind of out-of-body experience. The use of infrared cameras— thought of them as monochromatic, since they were all sprayed as
which record a spectrum of light normally outside of the human optical one whole object, but in fact, their surfaces change and shimmer as
register—heightens this strange sensation, creating a double sense of they are viewed. In giving back a rough glimpse of the viewer through
perceiving what would otherwise remain invisible. CW a process of chemically applied silver onto a pictorial ground, they
encode an optical experience derived from photographic logic, but
absent of photography itself. BT

Three-fold Delayed Infrared Room, 2004

Infrared cameras, video projectors, Untitled, 2009
dimensions variable Acrylic and silver deposit on canvas, 127 × 97 cm

48 49
 KAN XUAN GLENN BROWN

(b. 1972 Xuancheng, China) Kan

Xuan’s work is concerned with the nature and Glenn Brown’s assiduously rendered paintings cut
(b. 1966 Hexham, UK)

possible failures of representation. In the video Object (2003), she a twisted path through the annals of art history. Using sources as
filmed various objects being dropped or poured into a container of diverse as Picasso, Dali, Fragonard, and Rembrandt, Brown remixes
water. As each material meets the water, Kan whispers to the viewer pre-existing works to fit his own brand of mutant classicism. One of
whether it appears grey, black, or white in the monochrome space of Brown’s most frequent sources is the work of German-born British
the video (for example, “Coca-Cola is grey”). This cognitive dissonance painter Frank Auerbach, whose thickly impastoed, expressionist
between the seen and the known, between representation and reality, paintings have become something of an aesthetic touchstone for
is precisely the point. Beginning with the particulars of the represented Brown’s work. While Brown’s paintings roil with gestural energy, what
objects, Kan expands this question outwards to speak broadly about appear to be impassioned brushstrokes and confectionary accretions
the nature of image making itself. of paint are the result of a painstaking process of trompe l’oeil; the
canvases are in fact flat and slick, like those of an old master painting.
Or Everything (2005) can be seen as a rejoinder to the arguments of As a result, Brown’s paintings can feel as if they are encased in amber,
iconoclasts, who believe that idols or representations of deities and rendering once-living gestures frozen and death-like. Adding to this
holy figures divert us from the true essence of that which they depict. eerie feeling is the fact that many of Brown’s subjects look sick or even
The video portrays a series of Buddha figures whose likenesses have zombified—skin is rendered in putrescent greens and blues, flowers
been made to tremble in the space of the video, seeming thus to exist seem blighted by mysterious, malevolent diseases, faces liquefy and
in a borderline state between presence and absence. This liminal state congeal into disquieting psychedelic lumps. Half Dr. Frankenstein and
is key to understanding not only the nature of religious imagery, which half pasticheur, Brown’s paintings reanimate old images and give them
is designed to act as an intermediary step between oneself and the a strange new life. CW
true nature of the deity, but also the nature of the image itself: while
the image can never be what it represents, it can act as a tool or token
that aides in the apprehension of that which exists beyond it. CW

Searched Hard for You and Your Special Ways, 1995

Oil on canvas, 89 × 75cm

Looking looking looking for…, 2001

Video, 2:58

50 51
 HAROLD EDGERTON ELIOT PORTER

(b. 1903 Fremont, U.S.A.; d. 1990 Cambridge, U.S.A.) In

1931, while completing a (b. 1901 Winnetka, U.S.A.; d. 1990 Santa Fe, U.S.A.) Eliot
Porter taught himself
doctorate in electrical engineering at MIT, Harold Edgerton developed photography as a teenager, when he began photographing the
and perfected the use of stroboscopic light to create ultra high- landscape around his parent’s island summer home in Penobscot
speed photography. Edgerton soon realized that his photographic Bay, Maine. Porter continued to pursue photography while attending
technique had potential aesthetic, as well as scientific, interest and Harvard University, where he worked as a biomedical researcher after
began making photographs of everyday phenomena that occur faster earning degrees in chemical engineering and in medicine. In the mid
than the eye can perceive. Outside scientific circles Edgerton is best 1930s, Porter’s brother Fairfield Porter—a well-known realist painter
known for these images, which began to appear in publications and working in New York—arranged for Eliot to meet the photographers
exhibitions around the world, including Photography 1839-1937, the Ansel Adams and Alfred Stieglitz. After Stieglitz exhibited Porter’s
first photography exhibition ever mounted at the Museum of Modern work at his New York gallery, An American Place, Porter left his job at
Art in New York, organized by Beaumont Newhall in 1937. Harvard to focus on his photographic explorations of nature.

In addition to the accolades Edgerton garnered for his work in high- Porter put his keen technical aptitude to good use by teaching himself
speed photography, he was also widely recognized for developing elaborate photographic process and techniques, occasionally even
scientific and military applications for stroboscopic imaging. Edgerton inventing new ones. His passionate interest in photographing birds
served in Italy, France, and England during WWII as a technical prompted his embrace of color photography in the 1940s, when
representative for the US Army Air Force, developing and directing the he became one of the first nature photographers to do so. He
use of stroboscopic photography in nighttime aerial reconnaissance, an taught himself the laborious process of dye-transfer printing, which
innovation for which he was awarded the Medal of Freedom in 1946. In was better able to represent the colors of the birds’ plumage, and
1947, along with long-time collaborators Kenneth J. Germeshausen and constructed elaborate lighting rigs and scaffolds that allowed him to
Herbert E. Grier, Edgerton invented a camera (dubbed the Raptronic) record the birds in flight with his cumbersome large-format camera. The
as part of their work with the Atomic Energy Commission. The Raptronic resulting photographs were unlike any that had come before them: they
was designed to photograph the rapidly changing states of matter at were both exacting documents of the natural world and beguiling works
the beginning of nuclear explosions. At the time, it was the fastest of art, revealing details invisible to the naked eye. CW
camera in the world, capable of photographing at speeds of up to ten
billionths of a second, and rendering the invisible visible. CW

Antique Gun Firing, 1936 Osprey, Great Spruce Head Island, Maine, 1954
Gelatin silver print, 51 × 61 cm Kodak Dye-transfer print, 51 × 61 cm

52 53
 ARTUR ŻMIJEWSKI JOÃO MARIA GUSMÃO & PEDRO PAIVA

Artur Żmijewski’s confrontational video works

(b. 1966 Warsaw, Poland) The Portuguese artists João Maria Gusmão and
(b. 1979, 1977, Lisbon, Portugal)

unflinchingly engage with historical and bodily trauma, often through Pedro Paiva have produced a body of 16mm films and installation works
the creation of scenarios that draw normally hidden suffering or conflict that explore existential and philosophic questions with poetry, economy,
to the surface. Żmijewski is particularly known for his works that deal and humor. Staging short, semi-narrative scenes with intentionally
with the legacy of the Holocaust and some of the daily difficulties low-tech special effects, the films often revolve around a lone
facing disabled people, often in ways that evoke complex or seemingly character enacting a simple, repetitive task, which open the work up to
contradictory emotions. For Singing Lesson 2 (2003), Żmijewski fundamental issues of choice, action, and belief. Blunt absurdity is a
arranged for a group of teenagers from a school for the hearing commonly deployed tactic: in Attempt at Liquid Sculpture (2007), water
impaired to perform choral selections from Bach in a church in Leipzig, is poured slowly over a sculptural armature, suggesting an impossible
with inevitably dissonant results. Like much of Żmijewski’s work, it is a attempt to use it to make a solid form; in The Torch Man (2007) a man
scenario that is in some ways cruel, an illustration of the brutal reality appears to hold a flame in his bare hand as he guides viewers through
of what he calls “the impossible remaining impossible.” At the same time, a darkened cave. For the installation Eye Model (2006), an ostrich egg,
the undeniable pride that can be seen on the faces of the choristers projected spotlight, wooden table, and glass lens are arranged within a
mitigates any impulse towards pity. This tangled emotional scenario, in camera obscura, producing a fanciful interpretation of the process of
which one is forced to acknowledge the reality of suffering in a way that vision. In the dark of the room, the floating orbs, light beam, and cast
evokes empathy but denies refuge in sentimentality, is for Żmijewski shadows—recreating the path of light through the retina—suggest a
more in keeping with the true nature of hardship and suffering. basement planetarium, or a nineteenth century science experiment.
Poking at the philosophical implications of vision, the work conflates
For the Biennale, Żmijewski has created a new work that involves people the vastness of space with the miniature mechanics of the eyeball.
living with blindness. He has asked blind volunteers to paint the world Undergirding Gusmão and Paiva’s diverse practice is a mining of
as they see it, and to give visual representation to the invisible, or to the sprawling legacies—even fictional ones—of philosophy, and an
what is generally thought of as invisible. In the context of the exhibition, exploration of alternate epistemologies and their still-provocative
which is so much concerned with the way images change our relationship futures. In their films and installations, our lost knowledge systems,
to the world, blindness confronts us with the question of what it is like despite being outdated by technology, are still filled with the potential
to live in a world without images. CW for meaning, wonder, and insight. BT

Eye Model, 2006

Untitled, 2010 Camera obscura system with table, ostrich eggs,
Video lens, and spotlight, dimensions variable

54 55
 HARUN FAROCKI SHINRO OHTAKE

(b. 1944 Neutitschein, Czechoslovakia) Harun

Farocki began his filmmaking career (b. 1955 Tokyo, Japan) Since
Shinro Ohtake’s first solo show in 1985, his
in Berlin in the 1960s with a series of agit-prop anti-Vietnam War films, multi-layered works in painting, sculpture, and bookmaking have
which were inspired in part by the critical theories of the Frankfurt become an influential presence in Japanese contemporary art.
School. Later films retained the political concerns of these early works, Responding directly to the mass media and contemporary urban life,
but eschewed didacticism in favor of a more direct documentary style, Ohtake’s works are characterized by their voracious, maximalist
reminiscent of cinéma vérité. Many of these later films shifted towards accumulations of found materials, which balance the slap-dash and the
a more general engagement with themes surrounding the increasing considered, pairing short bursts of feverish energy with methodically
saturation of society with media and imaging technologies, and, in layered imagery. This sense of purposeful chaos also translates into
particular, how these changes have led to a corresponding increase in Ohtake’s work in music, where he has created tightly coiled noise rock
social control and dehumanization. with his influential band JUKE/19, as well as with his current band
Puzzle Punks, which he formed in collaboration with Boredom’s front
In 1990s, Farocki began creating multi-channel immersive video man Yamataka Eye in 1995. One of the most prominent and consistent
environments designed for exhibition in an art context. In the Biennale, facets of Ohtake’s practice has been his ongoing series of Scrapbooks,
Transmission (2007) concerns sites of pilgrimage, where contact which he began to make in 1977. Like a traditional scrapbook, these
with sculptures and monuments provides healing, luck, or catharsis, books hold mountainous collections of found materials that Ohtake
while Immersion (2009) concerns an immersive war simulation program collages and paints over to create complex, stratified compositions on
designed to help treat veterans of the Iraq War suffering from post- each of the books’ pages, rendering them into quasi-sculptural objects.
traumatic stress. Though disparate in their subject matter, both works However, unlike a traditional scrapbook, his works have no specific
share a concern with the potential healing power of images. At the diaristic function. Instead, they function more as a series of cultural
same time, rather than simply extolling the power of images to heal, crystallization points, where Ohtake’s labor transforms the cast-off
Transmission can also be seen as a tragic meditation on our inability sweepings of visual culture into heightened versions of themselves. CW
to comprehend those forces and events that are larger than ourselves
without the aid of mediating objects, while Immersion reflects on the
increasingly mediated nature of warfare, which turns even the grisliest
images of violence into just another scene in a video game. CW
Scrapbook #33, 1983, London/Africa (Kenya), 1983
138 pages, 56 × 22 × 15 cm

Immersion, 2010
2-channel video installation, 20:00

56 57
 HANYONG KIM DUNCAN CAMPBELL

(b. 1924 Seongcheon, Korea) Hanyong

Kim began his photographic career (b. 1972 Dublin, Ireland) Duncan
Campbell’s films employ a documentary-
in 1947 at Pictorial Korea, a monthly magazine in Seoul. After the style approach, though with a self-reflexive understanding of the
outbreak of the Korean War, Kim fled south to Pusan, South Korea, impossibility of fully reconstituting history. Blending archival footage
where he worked as a freelance photojournalist for the Pusan Daily. with both written and filmic original material, these highly subjective
Kim worked at the paper for a number of years, occasionally as a films address aspects of the tumultuous history of Campbell’s
war correspondent, but he also worked to maintain and expand a native Ireland, specifically the Northern Irish Troubles. In Bernadette
small studio of his own. Gradually, Kim built his personal studio (2008), Campbell creates a portrait of the charismatic Bernadette
into a thriving business, producing all manner of photographs, from Devlin, who, in 1969, when she was just 21 years old, became the
advertising images for large clients such as OB and Pilak Dairy Co. youngest women to ever serve as a member of the British Parliament.
Ltd. (for whom he produced Korea’s first color advertisement) to artful Known for her confrontational manner and implacable devotion to
nudes, experimental portraits, and landscape views from around the justice and independence in Northern Ireland, Devlin quickly became
world. a hero to those devoted to the cause of Nationalism. Campbell’s film
For the Biennale, Kim will present a selection of his advertising provides an impressionistic portrait of Devlin’s unlikely political career,
photographs, but stripped of their advertising copy. Shorn of their weaving together footage that shows her both as an impassioned
intended function, the pictures become heightened versions of leader and a media celebrity. But this documentary-style collage of
themselves: we notice the exaggerated methods of display (product archival material gives way at the end of the film to a fragmentary
labels clearly legible, faces smiling at the camera, hair and makeup meditation on the nature of Devlin’s dual life as an individual and
always perfect) and the artifice of staging and lighting. These an icon of Nationalist resistance. As her monologue begins, an
elements combine to transform his models into blank, ideal versions interviewer asks, “You say you worked against the image—who was the
of themselves. The photographs lay bare the grammar of advertising real Bernadette?” Devlin gives a succinct reply, saying that she was
photography, in which the uniqueness of the individual is downplayed in just another young person growing up under a system of injustice in
favor of generic expressions of delight in the theater of consumption. which she didn’t want to grow old, but as the subsequent monologue
CW unravels, it becomes clear that the reality is far from simple—once one
becomes an image, it is hard to remember what the real really was. CW

Untitled, n.d. Bernadette, 2008

C-print, dimensions variable Video, 37:10

58 59
 DANH VO HANS-PETER FELDMANN

(b. 1974 Ba Ria, Vietnam) Danh

Vo’s work investigates history through its (b. 1941 Dusseldorf, Germany) Hans-Peter
Feldmann first began archiving and
trace remains, and his installations often rely on the bundled gravity of recontextualizing images appropriated from the vast storehouses of
seemingly minor objects, which enunciate their full meaning within Vo’s visual culture as part of his artistic practice in the 1960s. Feldmann
spare constructions of relationship and syntax. Trinkets are rescued playfully corrals images from magazines, catalogs, books and other
from obscurity; the web of the world’s conflicts and cultural legacies printed matter into seemingly arbitrary categories, delimited in the
are made palpable through their tiny presence. Vo, a Vietnamese refugee works’ wry, deadpan titles: All The Clothes of a Woman (1973-2002),
who grew up in Denmark, has produced an array of projects exploring Legs (2008), Flower Pictures (2006), One Pound Strawberries (2004),
the peripheral, often personal legacies of the Vietnam War and the long Pictures of Car Radios Taken While Good Music Was Playing (2004).
historical trajectories that frame it. These collections have been exhibited as multiples, in the form of books,
postcards, and posters as well as in grids or loose clusters on the wall.
Vo is a selector, arranger, and conductor of an orchestra of found
objects: the poetics in his projects emerge from their collective Feldmann’s 9/12 Front Page (2001) is a room-sized collection of
voice and intertwined resonance. Vo’s seemingly simple, sentimental the front pages of international newspapers from the day after the
conceptualism transforms everyday objects into vessels of extraordinary September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center towers in New York.
weight and meaning through the subtlest possible gesture, a strategy The newspapers take a range of approaches to the tragedy, with sober
he shares with Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose work Vo admires and headlines like “US Attacked” (The New York Times) and “The New War”
about whom he has written. In the Biennale, a found Civil War flag (Le Figaro), declarations of doom as in “Apocalypse” (The Daily Mail), or
(deaccessioned from a Massachusetts Historical Society), a paper expressions of fragile hope, as in “Still Alive” (The Evening Standard).
dress emblazoned with logos from Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential The layout of the pages also varies widely, from the full-page image on
campaign, and a brightly colored, wall-mounted animal mask all trace the cover of The Times, to the small thumbnail on the cover of Mundo.
different uses of the red/white/blue color motif in American political The images, however, are oddly consistent: the instantly iconic pictures
propaganda. Setting these objects into relief are two makeshift grave of the South Tower erupting in flames and of the towers crumbling to
markers for Vo’s grandparents, white crosses with English spellings of the ground in a cloud of dust. Feldmann’s work can thus be seen as a
their Vietnamese names. Signifiers of the West’s long history of religious meditation on the representation of history through images—how certain
imperialism in South East Asia, though also authentic family relics, these images can become instant icons or immaterial monuments, and how such
two ready-mades set off an array of connections in relation to the Nixon images can in turn transform our perception of historic events. CW
paper dress, which was produced against the background of America’s
escalating war in Vietnam. BT

Untitled, 2010
Civil War era flag, hand-painted with 9/12 Frontpage (detail), 2001
blood stripe, 300 × 200 cm 151 newspapers, 60 × 40 cm

60 61
 IRINA BOTEA SETH PRICE

(b. 1970 Ploiesti, Romania) Irina

Botea’s video works often engage with (b. 1973, East Jerusalem) In
both his writing and his artwork, Seth Price has
Romanian life and history, particularly as they relate to the legacy of engaged closely with our relationship to images. Price has focused
Communism and the revolution. In 1989, Romanians revolted against his efforts on issues surrounding image reception and distribution,
their oppressive Communist government, lead by Nicolae Ceauşescu. especially in relation to the increasing prevalence of digital media. A
Over the course of the weeklong revolution, violent riots culminated key aspect of these concerns, thematized in Price’s work, is digital
in the trial and execution of Ceauşescu and his wife, Elena, by firing imagery’s lack of any traditional, stable relation to its support—as, for
squad. Much of the rioting and confrontation occurred in front of example, a painting would have to the canvas on which it is painted.
television cameras, and the revolution became known around the world Unmoored, the digital image becomes a specter that is both absent and
as the first to unfold live on television. In Auditions for a Revolution present, freely circulating and constantly changing.
(2006) Botea restages televised scenes of the 1989 Revolution—
further lifted from filmmaker Harun Farocki’s 1993 film Videograms of Untitled (Hostage Video Still) (2008) and the series Addresses
a Revolution—using a group of students in Chicago. The students, who (2006) most aptly represent the multifaceted implications of the
do not speak Romanian, are instructed to recite news announcements dematerialized digital image. Both deal with the infamous video of
and revolutionary slogans phonetically, unaware of their meanings. This the beheading of American journalist Daniel Pearl at the hands of a
gap between what is said and what is understood acts as a structuring militant Pakistani group, which was widely circulated on the Internet
metaphor throughout the work, pointing to our necessarily incomplete following Pearl’s execution. Untitled (Hostage Video Still) features a
understanding of mediated events and to the facets of experience that digitally altered frame from the video that shows one of Pearl’s captors
are lost when events are rewritten as historical memory. CW holding his freshly severed head aloft, while the Addresses series is
a collection of screen prints made from images of Caravaggio’s David
with the Head of Goliath (c.1609-1610) downloaded from the internet.
Both are icons of violence, which seem strangely reminiscent of one
another. Though the video execution recalls the Caravaggio image,
strangely, the Caravaggio image seems also to recall the video of
Pearl’s future beheading. Characteristically contemporary, these
Auditions for a Revolution, 2006
Video, 24:00 disembodied images, when digitized and filtered through the Internet,
become part of the same code—they have lost their spatial and
temporal bearings and are now merely part of the broader field of the
visual. CW

Hostage Video Still, 2006

Sign ink on polyester film,
dimensions variable

62 63
 GU DEXIN

CARL ANDRE TUOL SLENG PRISON PHOTOGRAPHS

LEANDRO
KATZ PAUL FUSCO LIU WEI GUSTAV METZGER

KATHARINA SERGEY USEFUL HITO

FRITSCH ZARVA PHOTO- STEYERL
GRAPHY

THOMAS RABIH
HIRSCHHORN MROUÉ
EYE
BYUNGSOO CHOI GLASS
SHOP
JEAN FAUTRIER

ZHAO SHUTONG, WANG GUANYI

AND THE RENT COLLECTION
COURTYARD COLLECTIVE

MARK OVERPLUS
LECKEY PROJECT

64 BIENNALE HALL . GALLERY 3

 OVERPLUS PROJECT ZHAO SHUTONG, WANG GUANYI AND THE RENT COLLECTION
COURTYARD COLLECTIVE

(Kang Sun-Ho, Kim Yong-Jin, Park Sung-Wan, Jung Da-Un; established 2008) Overplus
Project In 1965,
(Collective at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Chongqing, Sichuan Province, China)

is comprised of a group of students from Gwangju, South Korea, who a group of students and teachers at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute
create works that comment on the contemporary culture of image in Chongqing were commissioned by the provincial government of
surplus. Recently, the members of Overplus have taken to making Sichuan to create a series of 114 life-sized sculptures depicting
portraits in public parks around the city of Gwangju. With this action, the exploitation of the peasant farmers at the hands of a wealthy
Overplus contributes yet more images to a culture that has already landowner, Liu Wen-tsai. The sculptures were to be installed in the
reached the point of supersaturation—a project consistent with courtyard of Liu’s former manor house, which was converted into
the group’s name, which connotes excess and superfluity. However, a museum of class struggle following the creation of the People’s
Overplus makes it clear that their intentions do not merely lie in Republic of China. Originally rendered in humble materials such as
gestures toward cultural overload, but are rather aligned with a form wood, clay, and straw, the sculptures were arranged in a series of
of cultural healing. By painting portraits, the members of Overplus narrative tableaux in which the exploitation and suffering of the rural
hope that they can help the sitters reconnect with their sense of self, population culminate in a scene of uprising and revolt.
a sense that is too often atomized or repressed by the machinations
of image culture. For the Biennale, Overplus is offering a free portrait After its first public exhibition in November 1965, Rent Collection
service in the park outside of the main exhibition hall. CW Courtyard drew much praise from the Maoist government, who
immediately recognized the work’s persuasive potential. In 1966, at
the start of the Cultural Revolution, Rent Collection Courtyard was
declared by Mao’s wife Jiang Qing—entrusted with direct control over
culture through the Central Committee of the Cultural Revolution—to
be a model artwork for the orientation of the visual arts. In subsequent
years, the collective produced exhibition copies from more durable
materials to be exhibited throughout China, but the 103 figure 1974-
1978 copper-plated fiberglass edition is the only one that survives
today. In recent years, contemporary Chinese artists have repeatedly
returned to this work of Socialist Realism, which unites traditional
Chinese, Soviet, and Western elements. CW

MARK LECKEY (see p32)

The March of the Big White Barbarians, 2005 Rent Collection Courtyard, 1974-1978
Video, 7:00 103 copper-plated fiberglass sculptures, life size

66 67
 BYUNGSOO CHOI RABIH MROUÉ

On June 9, 1987 Yonsei University student Lee

(b. 1960 Seoul, South Korea) (b. 1967 Beirut, Lebanon) Rabih
Mroué’s work in theater, performance, and
Han-yeol Lee (1966-1987) was struck in the head by a police tear video is concerned with the political and sectarian conflicts in his native
gas canister while attending a pro-democracy rally in Seoul, and later Lebanon, particularly as they were enacted during the Lebanese civil
died from his injuries. Lee’s death quickly became a rallying point for war (1975-1990). His video On Three Posters (2004) is a reexamination
members of the democracy movement, and his funeral drew crowds of a controversial earlier performance work, Three Posters (2000),
estimated in the millions. One of the major focal points of Lee’s funeral which Mroué executed in collaboration with novelist and playwright
was a large memorial portrait of the fallen activist painted by the artist Elias Khoury. This earlier work was an examination of three separate
and fellow democracy-fighter Byungsoo Choi. A truck displaying the takes of a video made of Jamal Sati, a fighter in the military wing of
portrait followed the mourners on their route from Seoul to Gwangju, the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP), in which he announces his future
where the young man was born. After the funeral, Choi’s painting was martyrdom in a suicide bombing that he will conduct against Israeli
publically displayed at Yonsei University as a memorial, but it was occupying forces in Southern Lebanon. Unearthed in 1999, fourteen
quickly attacked and destroyed by Seoul police forces, which sought years after Sati carried out his mission and the final edit of the tapes
to downplay Lee’s death. Choi painted an identical portrait to replace aired on Lebanese television, the uncut rehearsal tapes show his subtle
the one that had been destroyed, but soon after it was replaced, this mistakes, corrections, and adjustments of tone, diction, and wording. In
second portrait was slashed with knives, an act of vandalism that the original performance, Mroué screened these three unedited tapes,
many also attributed to the police. The slashed painting was eventually bookended by three similar martyrdom announcements performed by
repaired, and is on view in the Biennale, affixed to a truck in the same Mroué himself, which were broadcast to the audience via live television
manner as during Lee’s funeral. Over the course of its two iterations, feed, and a prerecorded interview with Elias Attallah, a leading figure in
Choi’s image has acted as both a social crystallization point and as the LCP who was responsible for Sati’s mission. In Mroué’s reexamination
an icon, as a focal point for throngs of mourners and as a cipher for of his earlier performance, he investigates the manner in which Sati’s
the democratization movement as a whole. It thus became a target of videos blur the boundary between representation and reality, life and
aggression by those who fear the power of images. CW death, as well as the way in which his actions, and the actions of the LCP
as a whole, have been recontextualized in light of the failure of the Left
in Lebanon and Palestine and the adoption of their tactics by radical
Islamists. CW

Portrait of Han-yeol Lee, 1987 On Three Posters, 2004

Drawings, paintings, and truck, dimensions variable Video, 18:00

68 69
 JEAN FAUTRIER THOMAS HIRSCHHORN

(b. 1898 Paris, France; d. 1964 Châtenay-Malabry, France) Jean

Fautrier’s near-abstract Thomas Hirschhorn is best known for his sprawling
(b. 1957 Bern, Switzerland)

paintings of nudes, animal carcasses, and landscapes evoke a world installations and provisional structures, which he constructs using
of darkness and violence. His Hostages paintings (Les Otages) refer a signature repertoire of such quotidian materials as packing tape,
specifically to the Nazi atrocities of World War II—when Fautrier is fluorescent lights, cardboard, and mannequin parts. Bracingly raw
reputed to have overheard the cries of people tortured and executed and confrontational, his works often incorporate violent images of the
by the Nazis from his studio on the outskirts of Paris—but are also ravages of war—exploded bodies, severed heads, charred and mangled
intended as universal representations of the victims of war. remains—that are largely kept from the public eye. Embedded Fetish
(2006) is one such work, for which Hirschhorn has gathered a series
Born in Paris in 1898, Fautrier spent his formative years in London where of graphic images of the victims of suicide bombings and paired them
he studied at the Royal Academy. After serving in the French army for with a collection of mannequin heads bristling with screws. Given
three years (1917-1920), Fautrier began his career as a painter. His the context, the tortured heads immediately recall the grisly wounds
oeuvre has been difficult to classify because he often worked in isolation inflicted by bomb shrapnel, especially since bombs used in suicide
from the major schools of painting, but his distress over the outbreak attacks and in IEDs (improvised explosive devices) are often packed
of WWII pushed his painting style in a darker and more aggressive with ball bearings, nails, and screws. At the same time, the heads also
direction. In the 1940s, Fautrier invented a new process of painting, recall Kongolese nail fetishes—magically charged wooden sculptures
replacing traditional oil paint with a haute pâte (high paste) technique, into which nails were driven in order to cure or ward off evil. As such,
which involved applying a thick handmade plaster or impasto to paper Hirschhorn’s piece takes on a double meaning: it is simultaneously a
mounted on canvas, as in the Hostages series. Exhibited for the first collection of sorrows, a memorial to bodies shattered by conflict, and a
time in 1945, directly after the war’s end, the twisted and pockmarked grouping of modern-day idols that attempt, perhaps in vain, to ward off
sculptural busts and torturously rendered canvases of disembodied further violence and salve the wounds of war. CW
heads of the Hostages were immediately recognized for their importance
as both a deeply personal attempt to come to grips with atrocity and as
a form of public memorial and testimony. CW

Embedded Fetish, 2006

Wood, adhesive tape, screws, nails, printed matter,
painted mannequin heads, 420 × 875 × 40 cm

Otage, 1943
Mixed media, 46 × 38 cm

70 71
 USEFUL PHOTOGRAPHY HITO STEYERL

(Edited by Hans Aarsman, Claudie de Cleen, Julian Germain, Erik Kessels, Hans van der Meer, (b. 1966 Munich, Germany) Hito
Steyerl’s film works focus on the use and
Useful Photography, a periodic publication
Photographs by Ad van Denderen) circulation of images, particularly the blurring of boundaries between
put out by the KesselsKramer publishing initiative, collects and truth and fiction. Within the hall of mirrors of contemporary image
recontextualizes images sourced from a wide variety of corners of the culture, Steyerl points out that the fictional image has just as much
contemporary image culture, both obscure and commonplace. Issues power to shape the real as the real image has to shape the fictional.
have included a collection of images taken from online auction websites November (2004) creates a complex portrait of Steyerl’s childhood
(#002), photographs of missing persons taken from the archives of the friend, Andrea Wolf, who, as an adult, was executed by the Turkish
National Missing Persons Helpline (#003), and a collection of images government for her supposedly terroristic activities as a member of the
from photographic training manuals that show fledgling photographers’ PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party). At the beginning of the video, Steyerl
common photographic “mistakes” (#009). Each of these idiosyncratic presents a series of fight scenes taken from an unfinished film starring
typologies asks us to look at images that we might otherwise overlook, herself and Andrea, which they made together as teenagers. This early
or see as merely utilitarian, and view them in a new light, not merely as film shows the duo adopting the poses of radical feminist outlaws,
curiosities of visual culture, but as a vital and unexplored facet of it. which they had cobbled together from Russ Meyer-style exploitation
movies and martial arts films. Later, the poses would translate into
For the fourth issue, the editors of Useful Photography collected Andrea’s real life, as she became a martial arts-trained militant in
images taken by Dutch photojournalist Ad van Denderen of posters Turkey—a fiction that became reality. After Andrea’s death, yet another
made by Palestinian activists in the West Bank. The posters contain layer of ambiguity is added to the protean picture of Steyerl’s lost
portraits of the dead—suicide bombers, militants, Intifada fighters, friend: believed to have been unjustly murdered, Andrea becomes
and bystanders killed in the conflict. They act as memorials and serve a martyr for the PKK cause, her image gracing placards at protests
to glorify the dead, fuelling the anger and furthering the Palestinian and rallies across the globe. With this transformation, Andrea has
cause. This iconography, unlike traditional forms of martyr imagery, completed a strange cycle, from image to reality and back again. As
fulfills its purpose though its startling plentitude. Pasted on buildings Steyerl observes: “First we picked up and processed traveling images,
and walls in public spaces, and remaining only until they are covered global icons of resistance. Then Andrea became herself a traveling
over or ripped down, the posters shed light on a new form of the image, wandering over the globe. An image passed on from hand to
iconography of martyrdom, one that is cheap, distributable, and hand, copied and reproduced by printing presses, video recorders and
relatively immediate. CW the Internet.” CW

Useful Photography #004, 2004

Photographs by Ad van Denderen November, 2004
Inkjet prints, 45 × 60 cm each Video, 25:00

72 73
 KATHARINA FRITSCH SERGEY ZARVA

(b. 1956 Essen, Germany) By

enlarging, replicating, arranging, and color-coding (b. 1973 Kivol Rog, Ukraine) Sergey
Zarva’s work melds the traditions of Social
social objects both sacred and secular, Katharina Fritsch activates their Realism and expressionism to examine the legacy of Communist rule
latent psychological resonances, hidden associations, and art-historical in Russia. Zarva often creates his works by painting over documents
trajectories. Her works replicate the familiar in a haunted, unfamiliar from the Soviet Era, transforming them into deformed versions of their
way, often using cast polyester resin and solid acrylic colors to former selves. Zarva first employed this strategy using a collection
mediate or charge our sense of connection to a common form. Fritsch’s of his own family’s photographs, which he altered to create a mutant
contribution to Skulptur Projekte Münster in 1987—a life-size figure of family album that evoked life in the Soviet Union, and the often-
the Virgin Mary, painted a loud shade of bright yellow and erected on obscured pathologies of familial relationships. For his next series
a pedestrian street—provoked harsh reactions, and was defaced with of overpainted works, Zarva turned to a collection of mid-twentieth
graffiti over the course of its installation. century covers of the illustrated magazine Ogoniok, one of the oldest
weekly magazines in Russia. In Zarva’s hands, the cover photographs
St. Katharina and 2nd Photo (Ivy) (2006-2007) depicts the martyred of the much-beloved magazine are distorted into expressionistic
saint with customary symbolism, clutching a group of lilies and wearing grotesqueries—the faces of politicians and peasants alike are molded
a crown of thorns, but painted entirely over in a dense, matte black. through Zarva’s overpainting to become twisted, bruised, and vaguely
Posed in front of a blue silkscreened image of ivy leaves and without simian. Thus transformed, the covers of Ogoniok—once a banal and
a pedestal, the saint stands face to face with the viewer, an unusual reassuring presence in Soviet life—evoke a dark fantasy world. Like
position for religious statuary. This juxtaposition produces a host of Zarva’s work with his family’s photographs, this series strives to
relationships: between the author and her namesake, the sculpture and summon the realities of life under Soviet rule that were glossed over in
the image, the icon and its historical narratives, and the viewer’s direct Ogoniok’s pleasant photographic platitudes, and to hint, perhaps, at
encounter with a religious figure. By setting up an engagement between the ugly realities of the human soul. CW
viewer and icon at a known, intimate scale, Fritsch allows the humanity
embedded in the icon to emerge. At the same time, by shrouding the
figure completely in black, St. Katharina regains an air of mystery,
further complicating the work’s internal tensions between human, icon,
and living image. BT

St. Katharina and 2nd Photo (Ivy), 2006-2007

Polyester, acrylic, and oil-based ink and acrylic on plastic panel
Sculpture: 168 × 38 × 33 cm, Silkscreen: 280 × 400 cm

Ogonyok, 2001
Mixed media on paper, 34 × 24 cm each

74 75
 PAUL FUSCO LEANDRO KATZ

(b. 1930 Leominster, U.S.A.) Paul

Fusco first gained experience as a (b. 1938 Buenos Aires, Argentina) The
day after Ernesto “Che” Guevara was
photographer while serving in the United States Army Signal Corps in executed by Bolivian soldiers commanded by General Rene Barrientos—
Korea from 1951-1953. After the war, Fusco studied photojournalism who Guevara and a group of loyal guerilla fighters had been trying
at Ohio University, and then moved to New York where he was hired to overthrow—members of the Barrientos government held a press
as a staff photographer for LOOK magazine. During his time at LOOK, conference to prove Guevara’s death, permitting a small cadre of
he traveled widely for photographic assignments at home and abroad, reporters and photojournalists to view his body. Among those present
photographing to raise awareness of the lives of the people he was photojournalist Freddy Alborta, whose photograph of Guevara’s
documented, from impoverished coal miners in Kentucky, rural life in the body would become instantly iconic, published in newspapers and
American south, to people living in countries along the length of the “Iron magazines around the world and quickly compared by eminent British
Curtain.” He joined Magnum Photos in 1973. art historian John Berger to both Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of
Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632) and Andrea Mantegna’s Lamentation Over the
In 1968, LOOK sent Fusco on assignment to cover the funeral of Robert Dead Christ (ca. 1480).
F. Kennedy after he was assassinated. Fusco covered every aspect of
the funeral, from the requiem mass at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New Produced just over thirty years after Guevara’s death, Leandro Katz’s
York to Kennedy’s eventual burial in Arlington National Cemetery in film El Día Que Me Quieras (The Day You’ll Love Me, 1997) is an
Virginia. But Fusco made his most iconic photographs during the train extended meditation on Alborta’s famous image, as well as a lament
ride that ferried Kennedy’s body from New York to Virginia and provided for the loss of the revolutionary figure that it depicts. Centered on
thousands of Americans along the train’s route with an impromptu venue an interview that Katz conducted with Alborta, the film explores the
to express their grief. Taken from the moving train, Fusco’s photographs strange process of making the final image of a legendary figure.
capture fleeting glimpses of a public in shock at the loss of yet another Guevara’s fame and the sensitivity with which Alborta photographed
public figure in a string of high-profile assassinations that marred the his body combined to create a photograph that leads a double life: it
turbulent 1960s, a decade in which the newly pervasive presence of the is an image that is both an endpoint, in that it depicted the death of a
mass media wielded the power to transform people into icons, making it man, and a kind of beginning, in that it adds yet another layer to the
all the more difficult to accept their untimely, violent deaths. CW image of that man in the public consciousness. Far from being a mere
bureaucratic formality, for many Alborta’s photograph became an icon
of Guevara’s martyrdom. CW

Untitled, from RFK Funeral Train Rediscovered, 1968

C-print, 46 × 69 cm

El Dia Que Me Quieras

(The Day You’ll Love me), 1997
Video, 30:00

76 77
 CARL ANDRE GU DEXIN

(b. 1935 Quincy, U.S.A.) Carl

Andre is a pioneering Minimalist sculptor, known (b. 1962 Beijing, China) Gu
Dexin began his artistic career as a painter and
for his gridded, modular arrangements of materials, which often lay flat became highly regarded among fellow painters even though he was not
on the gallery floor. His pared-down works take up industrial materials formally trained. In the 1980s, he became involved with the Chinese
and processes to create sculptural forms that directly address the avant-garde groups Stars Group and No Name. However, in the mid-
body of the viewer, either through their sheer physical presence, or in 1980s, Gu abandoned painting in favor of the creation of elaborate
the manner of symbolic surrogates. Many of his tiled floor pieces are installation works that incorporated symbolically charged and non-
meant for the viewer to walk across, taking this logic a step further by traditional materials such as plastics, raw meat, bananas, and even
engaging the viewer’s body directly. For War & Rumors of War (2002) pig brains. Gu is notoriously averse to providing explanations of his
Andre has arranged a series of raw timber blocks in a square spiral. The works, but the dueling themes of artificiality and decay suggest that
crude wooden blocks become anthropomorphic stand-ins: perhaps they his primary goal is to mount a critique of contemporary society. Gu’s
are soldiers, arrayed in recondite formation in defense against some 2009–05–02 (2009), which takes its title from the opening date of
unknown enemy, or steles erected in memory of the dead, as suggested the exhibition for which it was conceived, is a case in point. The work
by the ominous title derived from the Biblical passage, Matthew 24:6. consists of a row of painted panels that encircle the gallery, written in
A more benevolent reading of Andre’s mysterious arrangement is also blood-red paint the Chinese characters exclaim, “WE KILLED HUMANS
possible: a rough mandala or a provisional meditation maze like the one WE KILLED MEN WE KILLED WOMEN WE KILLED THE OLD WE KILLED THE
found on the floor of Chartres Cathedral in France, the piece might also KIDS WE ATE HUMANS WE ATE HUMAN HEARTS. WE BEAT PEOPLE UNTIL
be seen as a tool to aid in the contemplation of the horrors of war, with THEY TURNED BLIND. WE SMASHED PEOPLE’S FACES.” The aggressive
the hopes of avoiding them in the future. CW brutality of the text suggests a sense of societal dissimulation that is
only hinted at in his earlier works, implying that violence, brutality, and
death lurk behind society’s pleasant façade. 2009–05–02 is the last
work of Gu’s career; in what can be read as a gesture of quiet protest,
Gu has consciously withdrawn from the art world and ceased making
art, refusing to add new images to a world already filled with them. CW

War & Rumors of War, 2002

90 Australian hardwood timbers, 90 × 379 × 350 cm overall
2009-05-02, 2009
Wooden panels, red lacquer, dimensions variable

78 79
 TUOL SLENG PRISON PHOTOGRAPHS GUSTAV METZGER

(1975-1979) From1975 to 1979, over fourteen thousand people were (b. 1926 Nuremberg, Germany) Born
into a Polish-Jewish family in Nuremberg,
tortured and executed by the Khmer Rouge in and around a former high Germany, Gustav Metzger was taken to Britain in the late 1930s under
school in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, which was converted into a detention the auspices of the Refugee Children’s Movement (Kindertransport),
center and renamed Tuol Sleng Prison soon after the end of the 1975 a rescue effort undertaken by the British government to extricate
civil war. Entrance to the prison, which was known primarily by the code thousands of predominantly Jewish children from Germany and German-
name S-21, for Security Prison 21, was effectively a death sentence—of occupied territories on the eve of WWII. Both of Metzger’s parents
the thousands who passed through its doors, only twelve inmates are and a number of his relatives perished during the war, and since that
known to have survived. Before their execution, each prisoner was time Metzger has lived in exile in London, where he has worked as both
forced to confess to a litany of imagined offences against the Khmer an activist and a producer of politically incendiary artworks. Metzger
Rouge—often extracted by means of torture—in order to legitimate their was also the founder of the loosely organized Auto-Destructive Art
punishment in the eyes of the regime’s bureaucracy. Prisoners were also movement, whose first symposium in 1966 counted artists Jonathan
forced to implicate friends, family, and co-workers, who would then be Latham, Yoko Ono, and Hermann Nitsch among its participants.
rounded up and subjected to similar interrogation.
For his ongoing series Historic Photographs (1994- ), Metzger creates
Upon admission to Tuol Sleng Prison, the prisoners were photographed enlargements of images related to various historical traumas, to which
for the Khmer Rouge’s records by sixteen year-old Nhem Ein, the he adds sculptural elements that force the viewer to engage physically
prison’s “photographer in chief.” When the Vietnamese army liberated with the images. For example, To Crawl Into—Anschluss, Vienna, March
the prison in 1979, they discovered over six thousand negatives, 1938 (1996) consists of a monumental enlargement of a photograph
most of which depicted the incoming prisoners posed, mug shot-style, of Austrian Jews being forced to scrub down a city street in front of
against a white background with numbers pinned to their clothes. In a crowd of jeering onlookers, which Metzger has laid on the floor and
1994, American photojournalists Doug Niven and Chris Riley selected covered with a tarp. In order to see the image, the viewer must crawl
approximately one hundred of the negatives for publication in the book under the tarp, and directly across the surface of the image, as though
The Killing Fields (1996). Their efforts brought wide attention to the one of the condemned street-scrubbers, or on a penitent pilgrimage. CW
photographs, a small selection of which were subsequently presented at
the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The ethical complexity of these
images makes such presentations difficult as some critics object to
their inclusion in art exhibitions. The concern that such images will be Historic Photographs: No. 1:
Liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, April 19-28 1943, 1995/2009
viewed as art and that their historical context will be obscured is largely Photograph mounted on Foamex board and rubble, 150 × 211 cm
misplaced: although they are documents of the Khmer Rouge’s brutal
campaign of genocide, the images radiate a potent sense of their
subjects’ suffering in the face of unspeakable injustice. In spite of
their original purpose, these images stand as testimony to the lives
and the deaths of these prisoners, and have become poignant, though
inadvertent, memorials. CW

Unidentified Prisoners, S-21 Prison,

Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 1975-79

80 81
 LIU WEI EYE GLASS SHOP

(b. 1965 Beijing, China) An

independent filmmaker living and working in (Se-Ra Park, JI-Yeon Yi, Jin-A Cha, b. 1984, 1983, 1983 Seoul, South Korea) Eye
Glass Shop
Beijing, Liu Wei graduated from the China Central Academy of is a South Korean artists’ collective whose members—Se-Ra Park, Yi-Ji
Drama in 1992 and completed his studies in Philosophy at Beijing Yeon, and Jin-A Cha—create collaborative works that attempt to both
University in 1995. One of Liu’s key concerns is the tension between fuse and juxtapose their distinct points of view. Their practice begins
the politicization of cultural memory and the tangible sensations of with a set of constraints, rules, or instructions that are formulated
personal experience, particularly in today’s rapidly changing China. collectively, but which are then executed by each artist individually. As
Two recent video projects, both dealing with the 1989 Tiananmen a result, each of their projects is composed of three unique vantage
Square uprising, have addressed the collapse of public memory in points on the same overarching endeavor—like a story retold by three
the face of state power. In A Day to Remember, the artist approached different participants in the same event, the plot stays the same, but
people in Tiananmen Square and at Beijing University on June 4th, the details often vary widely.
2005, asking them if they knew what day it was. It was the anniversary
of the incident, but everyone he spoke to either gave evasive answers For the Biennale, Eye Glass Shop has been commissioned to expand on
or declined to comment. In Unforgettable Memory (2009), Liu again a previous project in which each member of the group created diaristic
adopted the tactic of the documentary film interview, this time showing lists of the events of their lives for a period of one week. For this new
people a copy of the iconic photograph of the man standing in front of work, the overall strategy remains the same—each artist has set out
a line of army tanks in Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989. Again, Liu to create a portrait of her life through the accumulation of singular
is met with resistance: no one wants to talk with him, either because events, actions, and details. However, the timeframe for the project
they refuse to discuss taboo political topics or because censorship has been greatly enlarged. The artists of Eye Glass Shop have created
in China has erased this image from history. Liu finds a lacuna in an eight-month portrait of the year-to-date, from January 1, 2010
the public consciousness, one that doesn’t comport with archival until just before the opening of the Biennale. Recalling the sprawling,
documents, images, personal histories, and graves of the victims. A obsessive works of Hanne Darboven, Eye Glass Shop’s chronicles
muted critique of officially enforced history, the work ruefully admits straddle the line between writing and drawing, detailing the warp and
that no resolution is possible: “People’s memory turns into a vacuum. weft of three separate lives caught in freeze frame. CW
The bygones are twisted into a blurred picture: true memory is gone,
illusion remains.” BT

Unforgettable Memory, 2009 No Date, No Data, 2010

Video, 12:45 729 notebook pages, 30 × 21 cm

82 83
 JONATHAN BOROFSKY
PAUL MCCARTHY
NAYLAND BLAKE
HANS BELLMER CYPRIEN
GAILLARD
JOHN DE ANDREA
HERBERT LIST
ART ORIENTÉ OBJET
EDWARD KIENHOLZ AND
NANCY REDDIN KIENHOLZ
OH YOON MAURIZIO
CATTELAN
KARL SCHENKER
PAUL THEK EMMA KUNZ
TETSUMI KUDO TINO
JOHN MILLER SEHGAL

BERLINDE DE
BRUYCKERE
JEFF KOONS
BRUCE NAUMAN
ZHANG
LAURIE SIMMONS
ENLI
JACQUES CHARLIER

DUANE MATT TONG

HANSON MULLICAN BINGXUE

YASMINE BONGKYU
KABIR KANG
KOKDU
DOLLS
ANNA LIU
ARTAKER ZHENG

YDESSA HENDELES
HERMANN
(TEDDY BEAR PROJECT)
GLÖCKNER

KAN
XUAN
JAMES LEE
BYARS

YDESSA HENDELES
(TEDDY BEAR PROJECT)
JAMES YANGAH
CASTLE HAM

SEUNGTAEK
LEE

JEAN-FRÉDÉRIC
SCHNYDER
TOM HOLERT
HARUN
FAROCKI

HUANG YONG PING

84 BIENNALE HALL
85 . GALLERY 4
 KAN XUAN (see p50) JEAN-FRÉDÉRIC SCHNYDER

(b. 1945 Basel, Switzerland) Jean-Frédéric

Schnyder works in a wide variety of
media—painting, sculpture, woven tapestry, drawing, photography—to
create artworks that engage with banality, kitsch, and the everyday
using styles borrowed from outsider and folk art practice, as well as
the decorative arts traditions of his native Switzerland. Schnyder
often creates work in large thematic groupings, adding weight to the
otherwise banal subject matter though the insistence of repetition. In
the past, Schnyder has created series’ comprised of baby carriages
made out of walnuts (Little Baby Carriages, 2004-2005), dancing mice
(Thirteen Dancing Mice, 1978), ninety paintings of the interiors of
Or Everything, 2005
Video train station waiting rooms (Waiting Rooms, 1988-1990), more than
one thousand photographs of two relatively featureless Swiss streets
(Baarerstrasse/ Zugerstrasse, 1999-2000), among many others.

HARUN FAROCKI (see p56) Schnyder’s 1987 self-portrait, Stigma, is a kind of folk art reimagining
of Albrecht Dürer’s much earlier Self-portrait (1500), in which he
depicted himself as a Christ-like figure. Here, Schnyder has retained
the religious connotations of Dürer’s painting, depicting his hands
raised to the viewer as if to expose the (absent) stigmata alluded to in
the work’s title, but has imbued it with added comedic pathos. Unlike
the young and lordly Dürer, Schnyder appears before us frail, naked,
and unidealized, an icon of human fallibility and mortality. CW

Transmission, 2007
Video, 43:00

BRUCE NAUMAN (see p9)

Hanging Heads #5 (Pink Andrew with Plug/Yellow

Rinde, Mouth Closed), 1989 Stigma, 1987
Dental wax, wood, hanging wire, 31 × 15 × 15 cm Oil on canvas, 200 × 150 cm

86 87
 SEUNGTAEK LEE HUANG YONG PING

(b. 1932 Kowon, Korea) Seungtaek

Lee’s sculptures and environmental (b. 1954 Xiamen, China) Having
founded the Xiamen Dada group in the early
interventions take their inspiration from elemental natural forces, 1980s, Huang Yong Ping left China for Paris in 1989 to participate in
as well as libidinal drives and bodily processes. Much of his work the exhibition Magiciens de la Terre. The Tiananmen Square massacre
in environmental intervention, which shares a kinship with both occurred while Huang was in Europe, where he decided to remain.
American Land Art and Korean shamanic traditions, embraces chance Originally a painter and performance artist, Huang’s work in recent
and ephemerality in its attempts to form a collaborative partnership decades has tended toward epically-scaled sculpture, employing
with natural phenomena such as fire, water, wind and smoke, each of skeletons, wood, sand, and even live animals in elaborate installations
which Lee has made the subject of a series of works. In addition to that often derive from contemporary political events and ancient
these elemental works, Lee has also intervened in the landscape to Chinese ritual forms.
create massive, painterly abstractions that employ watercolor, moss,
and a host of other materials to transform the land into a canvas. In In Huang’s Intestine of the Buddha (2006), a statue of the Buddha sits
a series of works that he dubs “provocations,” Lee turns the focus of at the back of the room, characteristically smiling, while a group of five
his examinations of the natural away from the landscape and towards taxidermied vultures tear out and eat his intestines. Simultaneously
the bodies that inhabit it, creating works made out of human hair, and recalling the mythic trials of Prometheus and the very real destruction
sculptures that sprout giant sexual organs. of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan by the Taliban in 2001 (which
Huang has elsewhere dealt with more explicitly), Intestine of the
In the monumental, double self-portrait The Artist To Be Out of Breath Buddha is fundamentally iconoclastic: the image of the Buddha is
(1991), Lee has bound together bales of old clothes into spindly, multi- stripped of its enlightenment and made flesh, in effect turning the icon
limbed armatures that sprout two massive, scowling heads. These into a magically-real version of what it once signified. But the icon’s
twisted, body-like arrangements are displayed sprawled out on the floor, newfound humanity is under attack by the stuffed vultures that, in
as if suffering from exhaustion, and are tenuously connected by a length death, have found a second life as the agents of imaginary narrative. BT
of black and white checked wooden beam, something of a signature for
Lee. At first, this tortured array seems suggestive of two warring sides of
the artist’s personality that have managed to reach a fragile equilibrium.
Lee’s larger output from this period deals in large part with the division
of Korea, and the representation of a divided self can be read as an
Intestine of the Buddha, 2006
allegory of a state torn apart by war and ideological differences. CW
Wood, silk and 5 taxidermied vultures, 168 × 400 × 780 cm

Stone Buddha Wearing Ringer Necklace, 1968

Painting on Photograph, 200 cm x 160 cm

88 89
 YDESSA HENDELES TOM HOLERT

(b. 1948 Marburg, Germany) Ydessa

Hendeles has cross-woven the roles of (b. 1962 Hamburg, Germany) For
years, art historian and cultural critic Tom
curator and collector, expanding their definitions to include artistic Holert has collected pictures of people carrying pictures, primarily
practice in her unique blend of curating and collecting as artwork. sourced from news media coverage of protests, rallies, and memorial
Hendeles’s large-scale exhibitions involve a lengthy research process gatherings. As Holert points out, in an era of digitization, these
and advance specific, idiosyncratic theses. Staged at the Ydessa images “may seem archaic in that they emphatically, even fetishistically
Hendeles Art Foundation in Toronto, Canada, these exhibitions feature highlight the objecthood and materiality of visual objects.” Indeed, the
work from Hendeles’s own collection, and much of the preparatory people in these pictures seem possessed with an ardor for the singular
labor for a given show includes scouting out and purchasing the works images they carry in a way that seems antithetical to an image culture
to be included. based on flow, flux, and ephemerality. As Holert remarks, “In the image
carriers, the relationship between bodies and images is so evident as
For Partners (The Teddy Bear Project), Hendeles collected, over a to seem a manifestation of a desire to be seized by the images as one
period of years, more than 3,000 photographs of teddy bears dating seizes them.”
from roughly 1900-1940. These photographs are presented in a floor-
to-ceiling, two-storey installation designed to evoke a library or It is easy to understand, and even to empathize with the actions of
archive room. The images are arranged in categories that reflect the the bereaved, who clutch images of their loved ones as if they had
peculiar ubiquity of the teddy bear as a symbolic object: children, the power to bring them back from the dead, or, in some cases, hold
men and women, soldiers, and elderly people holding teddy bears, aloft images of the fatal tragedy itself, as if they were offering to
people dressed up as teddy bears, or teddy bears in the background both literally and figuratively bear the weight of the event’s memory.
of significant social moments. First shown in Toronto in 2002-2003, But the image-bearers that populate rallies and protests are more
Partners (The Teddy Bear Project) later traveled to the Haus der Kunst complex entities: our understanding of them is wholly contingent on
in Munich and the National Gallery of Canada. In 2009, Hendeles the functions of the media apparatuses that provide a stage for the
finished her PhD dissertation in art history at the University of expressions of solidarity that they enact under the banner of their
Amsterdam, framing the critical and curatorial context around Partners carried images. In other words, the images held aloft by protestors may
(The Teddy Bear Project). Beloved and invested with emotional, familial create a sense of visual cohesion between what would otherwise seem
relationships, and subject to the very real political and historical to be a hopelessly atomized agglomeration of individuals. CW
forces of their time, these teddy bears transcend their status as
transitional objects and become totems: images encoding the actual
lived experiences of their owners. Living and dying along with them, yet
persisting as resonant objects, these bears have become metaphors
for the functioning of images themselves. BT

Carrying Pictures, 2010

Partners (The Teddy Bear Project), 2002 Video, 11:03

90 91
 YANGAH HAM JAMES CASTLE

(b. 1968 Seoul, South Korea) YangAh

Ham’s video Adjective Life—Out of Frame (b. 1899, d. 1977, Garden Valley, U.S.A.) James
Castle was born deaf and mute to a
(2007) shows a group of young people playfully interacting with a bust farming family in rural Idaho. Schooled for only five years, Castle never
of a man that has been carved out of chocolate. They caress it, pose learned to read or write, and communicated with his family through a
with it, lick it, kiss it, scratch it, and eat it. They treat it like a sacred kind of semi-private rudimentary sign language. Castle’s family was
thing—as if it contained the power to heal them, absolve them of content to allow him to pursue his passion for making art, which he
blame or sin, or bring them exultation. Like the statue of Saint Peter in developed at a young age. Having no access to traditional art making
Saint Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, whose foot pilgrims touch or kiss materials, Castle began drawing on scraps of paper using a sharpened
to gain indulgences from the church, or a Kongolese nail fetish that stick and ink made by mixing soot from the wood-burning stove with
enacts its power by way of sympathetic magic, Ham’s bust seems to water or spit. He used string to bind hand-made illustrated books and
harbor secret powers that speak to a life beyond its material existence. sew together rough figures of people and animals made from salvaged
But its material (chocolate) is imbued with significance as well. cardboard. As his work progressed, Castle employed linear perspective
Sensuous and, above all, sensual, the chocolate from which the bust is to create countless drawings that incorporated aspects of his daily
carved charges it with an erotic energy that spills over the boundaries life. Many of Castle’s painstakingly rendered scenes contain strange
of the religious notion of the fetish, and into the psychosexual, figures—dubbed “friends” by scholars of his work. In addition to his
Freudian one. drawings, Castle also made a large number of cardboard “friends,”
which resemble dolls or even small idols. Whether effigies of people he
Given the multi-faceted suggestiveness of Ham’s bust, it is interesting encountered or imaginary companions created to stave off the feelings
to note its subject: it is the likeness of an international curator of of isolation, Castle undoubtedly found comfort and companionship in
contemporary art. This detail renders the piece almost parodic, these lovingly rendered figures and the world of images he created. CW
transforming the performers’ actions from those of religious devotees
or sexual fetishists into the caricatured actions of artists approaching
one of the contemporary idols of the art market. CW

Adjective Life—Out of Frame, 2007

Video, 6:50

Untitled, n.d.
Mixed media sculptures, dimensions variable

92 93
 JAMES LEE BYARS HERMANN GLÖCKNER

(b. 1932 Detroit, U.S.A.; d. 1997 Cairo, Egypt) James

Lee Byars combined aspects (b. 1889 Cotta, Germany; d. 1987 East Berlin, German Democratic Republic) Hermann
Glöckner
of poetry, Buddhism, and mystical philosophy into a multi-faceted was a painter, sculptor, and assemblage artist who created much of
artistic practice. Inspired by an extended stay in Japan from 1958- his artwork in secret, hidden away from the prying eyes of the various
1968, and fascinated by the work of Joseph Beuys, Byars produced oppressive regimes that held power over his native city of Dresden
sculpture, performance, poetry, paper constructions, and installations. for most of his career. After fighting in WWI, Glöckner gravitated
He combined the sculptural forms of American Minimalism and the towards the abstract forms and revolutionary politics of the Russian
performative public engagement of the Fluxus movement with traditional Constructivists, a prominent aesthetic force in interwar Germany.
Japanese concepts of simplicity, ephemerality, and eternality. The Glöckner worked in seclusion for most of WWII, until his house was
philosophical tenets of Zen Buddhism and the rigidly compressed destroyed in the Allied bombing in February of 1945, forcing him to
language forms of haikus and koans were his guiding formal examples. relocate to Loschwitz. After the end of the war, Glöckner continued
A student of philosophy and literature, he also produced public to work in secret because the government of the German Democratic
readings of Gertrude Stein texts and sculptures based on the theories Republic (GDR) forbade abstract formalist practices and allowed only
of Ludwig Wittgenstein. the state-sanctioned realist art they believed furthered the cause of
socialism.
Byars’s onyx sculptures, The Figure of Question is in the Room, The
Figure of the First Totally Interrogative Philosophy, and The Figure of Beginning in this period and continuing until his death in 1987,
the Spherical Text (1987), reference Wittgenstein’s ideas of analytical Glöckner focused on creating small sculptural assemblages,
philosophy. An homage to Wittgenstein himself, the works continue constructed from cast-off materials: bits of string, wood scraps, match
Byars’s explorations of death and memorial: the raw stones, sliced boxes, a tin pitcher, and other detritus. Humble in both material and
and marbled like slabs of meat, stand upright like human figures. At size, many of these works were created as maquettes, to be reproduced
the same time, they act as grave-markers or steles—one of the most at a larger scale with more durable materials when freedom of artistic
fundamental sculptural forms—re-embodying and reanimating lost expression was once again allowed in East Germany. Unfortunately,
lives. BT these large-scale works were for the most part never realized, as
Glöckner died two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Though
forbidden to produce the work as he intended, what he left behind are
testaments to the persistence of human creativity—an artistic universe
that fits on a tabletop. CW

The Figure of the First Totally

Interrogative Philosophy, 1987 Symmetrical Composition, 1977
Onyx, 165 × 60 × 44 cm Montage, pharmaceutical boxes, 7 × 6 × 6 cm

94 95
 LIU ZHENG ANNA ARTAKER 

(b. 1969 Wuqiang Hsien, China) When

Liu Zheng began his epic, seven-year (b. 1976 Vienna, Austria) Anna
Artaker studied philosophy and art in Vienna,
project The Chinese in 1997, he set out to create a portrait of his and her practice explores the relationships between photography,
native country that would reflect the tumultuous reality of its rapid historiography, and representation. In recent projects, she has
modernization. The resulting images fuse the documentary sensibility re-indexed and re-captioned archival imagery to recuperate and
that Liu perfected during his six-year tenure as a photojournalist for highlight the roles women played in twentieth century avant-garde
the Workers’ Daily newspaper with a poised artistic sensibility that art movements, and made a small textual monument to the list of
recalls a wide variety of historical photographic touchstones, ranging inventors and software engineers who worked on Adobe Photoshop,
from August Sander’s encyclopedic People of the 20th Century to the now ubiquitous image-processing software. Her film 48 Heads
Diane Arbus’s stark portraits of social outliers. By turns touching, from the Merkurov Museum (2008) focuses on the work of Soviet
acerbic, and disturbing, Liu’s project delves deep into the heart of sculptor Sergey Merkurov, who originally trained under Auguste Rodin
the contemporary Chinese condition, and shows that it throbs with a in Paris, but found success in Russia producing monumental public
fractious vitality. The selection for the Biennale focuses on some of his sculptures and death masks of party officials. The Merkurov Museum,
haunting pictures of wax works, statues, and masked and costumed in Gyumri, Armenia, holds a collection of these masks, which includes
figures that crop up periodically throughout The Chinese, as ghostly the faces of V. I. Lenin, Sergei Eisenstein, Maxim Gorky, and many
reminders of the country’s often traumatic past. Photographs such Soviet party functionaries, such as Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the
as Actors in a Film about the War Against the Japanese (2000) and secret police. Death masks are direct, primal images—indeed, they
Waxwork in the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum (2000) directly were first known simply as imago, or images—and have a long cultural
address the scars to the national psyche incurred during the Second history as mementos, official portraits, or religious objects, and have
Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), specifically the 1937 massacre of a close connection to funerary sculpture. In the nineteenth century,
an estimated 300,000 people in the city of Nanjing. Other works, like these wax or plaster casts also played a role in the pseudo-science of
Buddha in Cage, Wutai Mountain, Shanxi Province (1998), Yungang phrenology, as people attempted to deduce broad sociological truths
Grottoes (2002), and Quianling Tomb Stone Figures (1998) depict from physical traits. Artaker connects these twin histories of usage,
mutilated or uprooted statuary and suggest that historical traumas filming the state-sanctioned portraits in a manner that highlights their
run even deeper, the scars of which are borne out on China’s ancient physiognomic traces. Her technique is borrowed from (and homage to)
effigies. CW the Austrian filmmaker Kurt Kren’s 1937 film 48 Heads from the Szondi-
Test, in which the rapid editing of a similar sequence of expressionless
portraits of psychiatric test-subjects is used to subvert the test’s
loaded meanings. In probing the political, scientific, and historical
possibilities of what a face might reveal, Artaker questions the nature
of images through the image-making mechanism of cinema itself. BT

Buddha in Cage, Wutai Mountain, Shanxi Province,

1998, from the series The Chinese, 1995-2000 48 Heads from the Merkurov Museum, 2008
Ultra Giclée print on fine art paper, 46 × 46 cm 16mm film, 8:00

96 97
 BONGKYU KANG YASMINE KABIR

(b. 1935 Hwasun, Korea) We

all have an idealized image of a village in (b. Bangladesh) Yasmine
Kabir is an independent filmmaker whose films
countryside. Though each village is, of course, distinct, they are focus on social and economic issues in her native Bangladesh. My
linked by familiar scenes, which give village life its texture: an old man Migrant Soul (2000) is a damning indictment of the labor exportation
walking on a path between wheat fields; drying persimmons glowing in market in Bangladesh, portrayed through the tragic story of Shahjahan
sunset light; a mother, in simple clothes, holding her swaddled child; a Babu, for whom the video is also a kind of memorial. In 1993, like over
curious boy tentatively poking a beehive with a stick; snow falling on 244,506 other Bangladeshis, Babu went abroad in search of work
glazed vases. Such visions may be idealized, but they have nonetheless so that he could make money to send home to his family. Ferried to
carved a niche for themselves in the cultural mindset, and have become Malaysia with the promise of well paying hotel work, Babu quickly
a point of pride among rural people who still adhere to traditional ways realizes that he has fallen victim to a criminal labor trafficking
of life. Of course, while these well-worn visions of rural life do have a organization. Through anguished audio tapes and letters that Babu
basis in reality, they are far from a complete picture. In Kang Bongkyu’s sends to his family, we hear that the organization—handsomely paid
photographs of village life, we are given a glimpse of a existence with his widowed mother’s only savings—has stolen his identification
populated by shamans, folk entertainers, and stalwart, hardscrabble papers and is forcing him and his fellow workers to work backbreaking
people who have had the trials of rural existence etched onto their construction jobs for little or no pay, under constant threat that they
wizened faces. will be turned over to the notoriously brutal Malaysian police force for
working illegally. Babu’s distraught and impoverished family pleads
In Kang’s photograph that is included in the Biennale, we see a with his Bangladeshi handlers for his return, only to be met with
simple room that shelters a collection of life’s bare necessities: a dismissiveness, brutality, and false promises. Informed that her son is
folded dining table, a few threadbare garments, and a pair of meager coming home, Babu’s mother keeps vigil at the airport until news of his
sleeping mats. On the wall hangs a collection of photographs, tokens death reaches her. Babu died in a Malaysian immigrant internment camp
of remembrance depicting absent family members who have either fled after being rounded up in a police sweep, two years after he left home.
their hometown for local metropolises, or have been stolen away by A portrait of the lives of a family caught up in the nefarious forces of
death. The photographs lend Kang’s image a palpable air of melancholy, globalization, Kabir’s film is heartbreaking, and is made all the more so
speaking not only to the inevitably passing of familial relations, but to because the story that she tells is by no means unique. CW
the fading of traditional ways of life. HS

Family, 2007 My Migrant Soul, 2000

Gelatin silver print, 120 × 106 cm Video, 34:00

98 99
 KOKDU FROM THE COLLECTION ZHANG ENLI
OF OCK RANG KIM

(ca. 1890-1940) Kokduare small, carved-wood sculptures, mostly dating (b. 1965 Jilin Province, China) Zhang
Enli’s spare, delicate paintings often
from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, designed to adorn render isolated domestic objects and empty interiors in ethereal veils
Korean funeral biers. These highly ornate biers were used to transport of color that lend them a melancholic, haunted air. An almost palpable
the bodies of the deceased from their villages to the ancestral burial sense of human absence pervades even the most fragmentary and
grounds, which were often located in the mountains. An elaboration elliptical of Zhang’s paintings. Container (2005), a bone-colored
of ancient burial practices, kokdu functioned as talismans to aid the bathtub seen from above, signals a history of past use, while Trunk
passage of the deceased from our world to the next. Though the Kokdu (2006) depicts a perspectivally skewed wooden box with a discomfiting
take many forms, including that of birds, plant life, and mythical beasts, funerary air, whose awkward contours suggest the psychologically
they commonly appear as diminutive, doll-like figures that fall into one fraught nature of its potential contents. Even his imploring, fragmented
of four basic typological categories: the guide, who leads the deceased views of trees and hushed still lives suggest the lingering presence of
along the route of death and is often rendered so as to appear in someone no longer present.
motion; the guard, who protects the deceased from evil spirits and
takes the shape of an armed, goblin-like creature; the caregiver, In Circulez! Il n’y a rien à voir the sense of absence and nostalgia
who cares for the dead as if they were still alive and which is often a hinted at in other works is brought to the fore. A combination of
stationary female figure; and the entertainer, who takes the form of painting and installation, the work features the shadowy outlines of
a musician, clown, or acrobat, and is designed to ease the sadness furniture and objects from Zhang’s former apartment in Shanghai.
elicited by death. Like the biers themselves, the Kokdu were supposed The title’s declaration, which translates as “Move along! Nothing to
to be burned after the burial ceremony so they could join the deceased see here,” is familiar from countless police procedurals. As a result,
in the next world. However, due to the cost and labor expended on the Zhang’s shadow apartment takes on the feeling of a crime scene, as if
creation of the elaborate biers and their talismanic Kokdu, villagers the ghostly outlines delineated not merely furniture or picture frames
began to reuse them. Preserved when their original purpose was to but the outlines of some past trauma. CW
be destroyed, the Kokdu can be seen to exist in a permanent state of
limbo, frozen in a liminal state between life and death. CW

Circulez! Il n’y a rien à voir (with Moshekwa Langa), 2007

Painting installation

Kokdu, from the collection of Ock Rang Kim

Carved wood, paint, dimensions variable

100 101
 DUANE HANSON   MATT MULLICAN

(b. 1925 Alexandria, U.S.A.; d. 1996 Boca Raton, U.S.A.) In

the mid-1960s, sculptor (b. 1951 Santa Monica, U.S.A.) Matt
Mullican is the center of his own
Duane Hanson began producing extraordinarily realistic human figures sprawling, diverse artistic cosmology, which, after some four decades
cast in fiberglass and resin, arranged in politically charged tableaux of production includes drawings, paintings, performances, and
that came directly from the social upheaval of the times. Back-alley sculptures. In Sleeping Child (1973), a pillow on the gallery floor
abortions, racial violence by police, and the war in Vietnam were all supports the “head” of a blank wooden board, projecting a ghostly
depicted in eerie, frozen detail. The objects were cast directly from live image of innocence scuttled by its own construction. Mullican’s broad
models, meticulously painted to maintain blemishes and realistically artistic research, theoretically focused but physically unwieldy, probes
uneven skin patterns, and dressed with clothes bought from second- fundamental questions of representation itself: how much is enough,
hand shops. Though grouped with the rising tides of Pop art, Hanson what shapes can it take, and whether or not it is even necessary.
himself professed more admiration for nineteenth century French Mullican often invents characters and draws them in hypothetical
realism. situations: his ongoing Bulletin Boards series collate massive amounts
of research, photographs, and peripheral drawings to display a complex
In the 1970s, Hanson’s cast figures became more peaceful, when, flux of scenarios, propositions, conclusions, or consequences. He
instead of social or political upheaval, Hanson arranged them in scenes has also repeatedly performed under hypnosis, as the main character
of prosaic, middle American consumerism. Moving his subject matter at stake in Mullican’s practice is Mullican himself. Indeed, his name,
toward generically recognizable American “types” (cheerleaders, frequently repainted over the years in propaganda-styled signs,
tourists, amateur photographers, shop-keepers), Hanson began to has itself become a semiotic totem. His work is an endless, self-
place the works themselves openly in the exhibition space, such that produced library, but his compulsion to catalog and analyze objects
they often blended in with the crowd. In Flea-Market Vendor (1990), and experiences is so extraordinary that it effectively produces its own
a large middle-aged woman, dressed for the bright Florida sunshine, form of chaos. BT
sits calmly in the exhibition space on a folding chair, a bright flower-
print handbag at her side. In this disjunct of exhibition space and
object, Hanson’s life-sized polychrome bronze sculpture reveals its
eeriest self: the piece approaches the aesthetic automata, confusing
audiences when it doesn’t move or react to the crowd, and testing the
psychic space of our recognition of the real. BT

Flea Market Vendor, 1990 Untitled (Doll and Dead Man), 1973
Polychromed bronze, life size Two gelatin silver prints, 25 × 20 cm each

102 103
 JEFF KOONS LAURIE SIMMONS

Jeff Koons is known for his wry, affectionate

(b. 1955 York, U.S.A.) (b. 1949 Long Island, U.S.A.) Since
the 1970s, Laurie Simmons has produced a
engagement with popular cultural forms. Though he originally worked large body of photographic work that employs ventriloquist dummies
with appropriated objects and documents culled from everyday life and puppets as surrogate actors in a dense narrative landscape of
(such as vacuum cleaners, advertisements, and basketballs), in human emotion. Her early work featured miniature puppets set in
the 1980s Koons began to employ the help of master craftsmen to domestic interiors, whose aesthetics were culled from popular images
fabricate increasingly luxurious versions of kitsch objects. Cutesy of 1950s American suburbia. Recreating cultural mythologies in doll
balloon animals, collectable decorative figurines, topiary sculpture, sizes, Simmons set her puppets among pastel walls, checkered floor
an inflatable pool toy—often rendered in larger-than-life size—are all tiles, and perfect living rooms, subtly implying social and psychic
crafted under Koons’s careful supervision using the finest materials turmoil by employing typologies of stereotypical American characters
and the most labor-intensive processes, sometimes over a period like grim working fathers and cheery, if vacant, housewives. She
of years. The resulting sculptures are sumptuous to the point of repurposed the commercial and artificial aspects of color photography
perfection, creating a pointed sense of aesthetic dissonance between to amplify the imaginary, fictive dreaminess of her sets and puppets.
their references to high and low culture. But for all of their seeming Girl Vent Press Shots (1990), a grid of twenty-five appropriated
irony, the sculptures exude an undeniable sense of the artist’s love. portraits of female ventriloquists, each with their respective dummies,
reveals and foregrounds the backstage workings of Hollywood’s
These craft heavy works were first shown concurrently at three fantasy production machine. Throughout her career, Simmons’s practice
separate commercial galleries under the exhibition title Banality. has centered around two core themes: the puppet or dummy as a
Promoted through a series of related ads in major art magazines, Koons flexible metaphor for lying and truth telling, and the Pygmalion myth,
was pictured in elaborate tableaux, as if announcing a high-profile where constructed figures can transcend their form and take on human
international product launch rather than an art exhibition. Among characteristics and emotions. BT
the works was Ushering in Banality (1988), an enlarged decorative
figurine of a prize pig being pushed forward by a little boy and
accompanied on either side by winged cherubs. It is a cloying image,
but one that speaks to a brand of sentimentalism rampant in consumer
culture. It can be seen, like most of Koons’s sculptures, as a kind of
contemporary Golden Calf, placed upon the altar of one of our most
cherished aesthetic positions: banality. CW

Ushering in Banality, 1988 Girl Vent Press Shots/part II (detail), 1989

Polychromed wood, 99 × 170 × 89 cm C-print, 25 × 20 cm

104 105
 BERLINDE DE BRUYCKERE JACQUES CHARLIER

Berlinde De Bruyckere’s sculptures grow out of

(b. 1964 Gent, Belgium) (b. 1939 Liège, Belgium) Intentionally
avoiding a signature style, the Belgian
the sculptural tradition of representations of bodies in fragmented, artist Jacques Charlier has instead cultivated a wide range of artistic
twisted, or inchoate states, which stretches back from Hans Bellmer’s activities: painting, sculpture, installation, written text, works on
haunted, tangled dolls and Auguste Rodin’s piecemeal bronzes to paper, music, film, and performance. Maintaining an artistic identity
Michelangelo’s tortured slaves and the Roman marble of Laocoön and as a detached observer of the art world’s foibles, Charlier adopts and
his sons. De Bruyckere’s earliest mature works, made just after she adapts various meanings and processes, proudly referring to himself
graduated from art school, consisted of evocative arrangements of as a general wholesaler of Belgian humor. His earliest works, from the
worn blankets, a material that she began to work with after seeing 1960s, were commissioned photographs of generic urban scenery,
images of survivors of the Rwandan genocide swaddled in blankets made under official auspices and accompanied by his own text—a move
in refugee camps. Soon afterwards, she began to add wax casts of that signaled both his belief in conceptual practices and his irreverent
body parts to her melancholy arrangements, transforming them from critique of them. In the 1980s, Charlier began a series of installations
metaphorically charged memento mori into visceral embodiments of the that tested aesthetic taste by combining extreme ends of divergent
reality of death. In her most recent work, De Bruyckere has employed art-historical moments. Making large-scale, faux-Cubist or -Futurist
wax casting in the creation of twisted, headless figures that seem to paintings, Charlier often set them within sculptural tableaux that
be in states of decay or trauma. Many of these figures even sprout suggest strange, fragmented narratives. His installation Tragic Painting
branch-like appendages, which prop up their hobbled bodies and (1991), consists of one large abstract painting, a colorful mass of
threaten to engulf them, victims of some unspeakable, metastasizing swirling shapes, in front of which is a mannequin dressed in a tuxedo.
blight still undiscovered by science. In addition to these waxen figures, His bowtie unbuttoned and seeming a bit forlorn, this mannequin holds
De Bruyckere has made works cast from the bodies of horses and a packet of confetti strips and a rifle, out of which it appears he has
covered in horsehide, cobbled into strange forms that seem mutilated just shot a bundle of paper streamers and plastic decorations. Our
or shot through with pain. Her child-sized sculpture Pascale (2003- host suggests that the party is just now over, his actions frozen in
2004) is wax rendering of a hunched, blue-veined female figure mute relief. BT
engulfed in the tangle of her own hair. This delicate, reticent figure
recalls a diminutive Eve, bereft of any means of comfort. CW

Pascale, 2003-2004 Peinture Tragique, 1991

Wax, horse hair, epoxy, and wood, Oil on canvas, life-size
140 × 50 × 45 cm mannequin, mixed media

106 107
 JONATHAN BOROFSKY PAUL MCCARTHY

(b. 1942 Boston, U.S.A.) Jonathan

Borofsky’s human-scaled I Dreamed I Could Through a vast multiplicity of forms, Paul
(b. 1945 Salt Lake City, U.S.A.)
Fly (1984-2006) and Chattering Man (1982) are set in relationship McCarthy explores the sublimated grotesque of American culture
to each other in the Biennale. In I Dreamed I Could Fly, a flying man and mythology. His diverse materials include ketchup, mustard,
dressed in blue jeans and a T-shirt is suspended from the ceiling, arms chocolate, dolls, and sex toys, and are often employed in conjunction
outstretched in free-fall and chest mysteriously emblazoned with the with photographs, drawings, sculptures, or installations. McCarthy’s
number 2887539. Below him is Chattering Man, a simplified, slate- works excavate taboos that undergird vast swaths of popular culture,
grey robot automaton who gazes up in awe while its motorized jaw which he delightedly harvests and shapes into gleeful and obscene
chatters audibly, left foot etched with the number 2890538. These installations. He initially began making puppets and using dolls as
numeric codes relate to Borofsky’s personal counting system, which he props for performance works, where they would double for the artist
began in the late 1960s while forging his space within the percolating himself—a gesture of personal displacement that has persisted
conceptual art movement. The works’ numbers correspond to where, throughout his practice. His work Garden Dead Men (1992-1994), a
sequentially, Borofsky was when he produced the idea for the work. two-part installation made of latex and foam rubber, shows two men (one
Throughout the past few decades, Borofsky’s massive sculptures of of which is a portrait of the artist) lying prostrate on clinical dissection
human figures in the midst of labor or activity have been installed in tables, face up and pants down, their genitalia and legs bloodied from
numerous public spaces, signaling a perpetual sculptural reminder their obsessive compulsion to have intercourse with trees. Another of
of our collective social self-image. Walking to the Sky (2008), a McCarthy’s works, Children’s Anatomical Educational Figure (ca. 1990),
permanent installation at the Kiturami building in Seoul, South Korea, is a ready-made children’s toy—a stuffed human model complete with
consists of a vast, tilted pole, pointing upwards, on which a number removable internal organs—so in line with his thinking that McCarthy
of life-sized figures in casual, everyday dress appear to be walking, has appropriated it as his own. One of McCarthy’s core gestures, which
single-file, into the oblivion of heaven. BT emerged in his more recent works, is to enlarge everyday objects to
spectacular, architectural scale: he has produced outdoor, inflatable
sculptures, in the manner of children’s toys, of copulating animals,
Santa Claus holding sexual aids, condiment bottles, piles of excrement,
and the collapsed head of George W. Bush. McCarthy sets images in
Chattering Man, 1982
motion through a chain of psychological and cultural filters: political
Painted wood, aluminum, electric motor, audio system, 213 × 61 × 91 cm and cultural reality generates an impossible psychic image, which is
then rendered as the cartoonishly haunted real. BT

Children’s Anatomical Educational Figure, ca. 1990

Fabric, wool, found object, 173 × 130 × 117 cm

108 109
 NAYLAND BLAKE ART ORIENTÉ OBJET

(b. 1960 New York, U.S.A.) Nayland

Blake’s practice encompasses sculpture, Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoît Mangin have been
(Established 1991)

photography, and video work, and revolves around psychically charged collaborating as Art Orienté Objet since 1991. Through images,
themes such as biracial identity, homosexuality, and the physicality sculptures, text, and installations, they reconfigure and reassess the
of the flesh and body. Using widely varied materials—sticks, leather, societal overlap between biology, behavior, science, and aesthetics.
furniture, fabric, and sometimes toy bunnies—Blake has produced a Their work foregrounds concerns with the environment, animal rights,
unique body of work that shrewdly upends prejudicial social codes and and social justice, and imports into the museum system a set of social
customs, while maintaining a taut, austere sculptural aesthetic. Feeder and political critiques. They have produced a miniaturized dollhouse
2 (1998) was a human-scaled house made of gingerbread on a steel cataloging the horrors of animal experimentation, and explored the
framework, which was slowly eaten by visitors over the course of the experiences of visiting prisoners as a complex gallery installation.
exhibition. Gorge (1998), a video that accompanied Feeder 2, showed For their project Wire-mesh Surrogate Monkey Mother (1991), they
the artist being steadily fed by another man for an hour. For the recreated a landmark behavioral psychology experiment conducted on
assemblage sculpture Magic (1990-1991), Blake purchased a puppet rhesus monkeys in the late 1950s by Dr. Harry Harlow, who replaced
at auction from the estate of Wayland Flowers—a flamboyant television a mother monkey with an ersatz simulacrum monkey puppet made of
entertainer, puppeteer, and icon of gay American culture—and set it cloth and wire-mesh to measure the emotional effects. The results were
inside an open box, from which it emerges at the top of a collapsing devastating to the social and mental health of the baby monkeys. Here
mass of dried flowers. Activating the encoded sensation of animate life this scientific faux-mother is recreated, exorcising the taint of the
that resides within a puppet to gesture toward the life of its author, experiment and rehabilitating the image-sign of the mother. The work
Magic is equal parts homage and memorial. BT is displayed along with photographic documentation of the original
experiment, charging the distinction between its past life as science
and its current life as sculpture. BT

Magic, 1990-1991
Mixed media, puppet, 91 × 17 × 23 cm

Wire-mesh Surrogate Monkey Mother, 1990

Mixed media, 48 × 38 × 30 cm

110 111
 TETSUMI KUDO  PAUL THEK

(b. 1935 Osaka, Japan; d. 1990 Tokyo, Japan) Coming

of age in a Japan that was (b. 1933; d. 1988, New York, U.S.A.) The
American artist Paul Thek died in
recovering from nuclear attack, and adjusting to a nuclear future, 1988, at the age of 55, leaving behind a complex body of sculpture,
Tetsumi Kudo produced a wide variety of artworks that probed and installation, painting and drawing that has proved inspirational for
puzzled over human life and social constructions. Though Kudo initially subsequent generations of artists. Reacting to the prevailing climate
produced installations and performances, his move to Paris in 1963 of austere minimalism, Thek sought to insert emotion and flesh back
spurred a figurative trend in his work, where the body is contorted, into the sculptural discourse. In an untitled 1966 piece, Thek encased
dismembered, and mutated into dense installations that tackle a painted wax model of an ancient warrior’s bloodied leg—clad in
fundamental ideas like the cultural collision of nature and technology, a shin-guard and sliced gruesomely above the calf—inside a clear
while also producing a complex web of psychological associations plexiglas vitrine. In another untitled work, from the series Technological
surrounding control, victimhood, material culture, sexual drive, and Reliquaries (1965), Thek placed a wax sculpture of decomposing human
societal forms of repression. In Kudo’s sculptures, genitals sprout from flesh and bone inside a bright yellow plexiglas casing of futuristic,
a bucket of dirt; a disconnected face feeds itself (with disconnected minimalist design. Much as religious reliquaries safeguard the remains
hands) inside a brightly colored birdcage; a skull is decorated with or talismans of saints, Thek’s sculptures—though dealing in imaginary
pastel colored yarn and thread. These works derive from Kudo’s lives—cast images within our minds through those same gestures of
political concerns about postwar Japan: its devastation, exhaustion, collection, preservation, and display. Thek’s other major works include
and efforts at rebuilding, and its entwined military relationship to the a suite of bronze sculptures depicting sections of an outdoor fairytale
United States. But he also grew to articulate a philosophy of a potential scene, and an installation of a full-scale, realistically pink-clothed
future humanism, one where ecology could accommodate pollution, cast of the artist’s own body, entombed within a large, pink ziggurat.
and give rise to new forms of animal life and social habits. For L’Amour Presaging a revived discourse after Minimalism that would be infused
(1964), two chairs support two giant, gelatinous, disembodied heads with concerns for the pictorial, the human, and the animate, Thek re-
whose faces and tongues are locked in a luscious, if slightly awkward, engaged the possibility for sculpture to propose an image, and used
kiss. BT those images to trigger fundamental questions about human life. BT

L’Amour, 1964
Chairs, cotton, plastic, polyester, electrical diagrams, vinyl tubing, Untitled from the series Technological Reliquaries, 1965
hair, painted wood box, audiotape, 99 × 119 × 58 cm Metal, formica, wax, 99 × 27 × 65 cm

112 113
 EDWARD KIENHOLZ AND NANCY REDDIN KIENHOLZ JOHN DE ANDREA

(b. 1927 Fairfield, U.S.A.; d. 1994 Hope, U.S.A./ b. 1943 Los Angeles, U.S.A.) Raised
on a (b. 1941 Denver, U.S.A.) John
De Andrea grew up in Boulder, Colorado and
dairy farm in Fairfield, Washington, Ed Kienholz emerged as a West studied painting at the University of New Mexico. Inspired by a boat-
Coast artist in the 1960s with a brusque, muscular style of assemblage, builder’s casting techniques, he began cultivating his signature version
sculpture, and installations. His works were grounded in a hyper- of hyper-realist, polychrome sculpture. His remarkable technical skill
masculine sensibility and in Kienholz’s broad range of mechanical gives his statuesque sculptures of nude models an extraordinary
skills. His sculptures (from the 1970s onward made in collaboration semblance to reality. Cast from molds of human body parts, cellulite,
with his wife, Nancy) combined found materials with cast and painted bumps, and wrinkles are all faithfully reproduced. Though De Andrea’s
objects into unruly installations, which traded on multiple aspects of early works were made of resin and finished with auto-body paint,
American culture cut loose from their contexts and in tense collision in recent years he has perfected a subtle, layered application of
with each other. Untrained in fine arts or art history, Kienholz’s forms polychrome paints onto bronze casts, producing a hauntingly lifelike
derived from his own lexicon of personal citations: farm trucks, military rendering of skin and the sinewy flesh beneath. His works carry the
architecture, Los Angeles car culture, Las Vegas kitsch. In some of his psychic charge of someone who is alive (just holding their positions in
earlier works, like John Doe (1959) or The Illegal Operation (1962), a perpetual tableau-vivant), until very close inspection reveals its true
human figures had holes ripped open in their bodies and were strapped nature. But in edging closer and closer to the appearance of the real,
to baby carriages; and installations of rotting, domestic interiors De Andrea tests the strangeness of that sensation, highlighting the
suggested that flesh would stick to the furniture. Later projects slippage between being and seeming. BT
focused on more immersive installations that suggested bleak, discrete
narratives of suburban life. The works were often grotesque: pop
objects were melted, mutilated, or repurposed, and sculptural human
forms were posed in compromised social or sexual positions. Kienholz
intuited and stripped bare the ghastly underside of American life. BT

Hoverman, 1993 Katy, 1991

Mixed media, 81 × 30 × 25 cm Vinyl, 132 cm high

114 115
 JOHN MILLER OH YOON

(b. 1954 Cleveland, U.S.A.) John

Miller’s provocative body of sculpture (b. 1946, d. 1986 Busan, South Korea) Oh
Yoon was the leading artist in the
engages the question of artistic value, often suggesting a fundamental Minjung cultural movement (Minjung means “the people”), an activist
transference between the cheap and the expensive, the low and the artistic movement that was intimately involved with the broader
high. Miller has made suites of sculptures made of plastic, everyday democratization movement in South Korea, which formed in response
objects first glued into freestanding agglomerations and then precisely to the 1980 Gwangju Massacre. Oh, who specialized in sculpture and
gold-leafed by hand. An earlier series of paintings and installations, printmaking, founded Reality and Utterance, an artist group that
The Price is Right, postulated on the sublime infinities embedded in the contributed to establishing the theoretical and formal foundation for
visual codes of the television game show (and consumer indoctrination Minjung art. His work is renowned for its simple, graphic depiction of
strategy program). For the piece Mannequin Lover (2002), Miller set a the prototypical subjects of Minjung culture such as laborers, mothers,
generic mannequin in the window of the gallery for the run of the show dokkebi, farmers, which he rendered in thick, hard-edged lines that he
and had its clothes changed daily by gallery staff, either purchasing created with a print knife.
new items for it to wear, or soliciting donations. Mannequin Lover
questioned the role of the artist and the autonomy of the sculptural On exhibition in the Biennale is the death mask of Oh’s father Oh
object and confused viewers who were unsure whether to look at the Youngsoo, which the artist made himself soon after his father’s death.
clothes or at the object itself. Side-stepping the array of associations Like his son, Oh’s father shared an abiding affection for the plight
usually made with mannequins—their haunted, quasi life-like, often of the common people, and, like his son, expressed this affection
uncanny qualities—Miller locates his usage within a materialist through art, writing novels such as his well-known work The Seashore
cultural critique: this mannequin acts more like his corporate brethren, Village, which earned him a place among Korea’s most eminent modern
showcasing the (perhaps) expensively unattainable, and reminding us novelists. HS
of the constant presence of economic transaction. BT

Mannequin Lover, 2002 Death mask of Oh Youngsoo, 1979,

Mannequin, wig, shoes, 190 × 51 × 35 cm Plaster, life size

116 117
 HANS BELLMER KARL SCHENKER

(b. 1902 Kattowitz, Germany; d. 1975, Paris, France) Born

in Kattowitz, in the far (b. Germany; d. 1951 or 1952, UK) Karl
Schenker became a well-known and
reaches of the German empire (now Katowice, Poland), Hans Bellmer successful photographer during the Weimar Republic, working chiefly
began producing his eerie, disturbing doll works in the early 1930s. for the popular Berlin women’s magazines Uhu and Die Dame. He
Weaving together his own obsession with a young girl cousin, nostalgia specialized in portraits, images of actors, and fashion photography.
for childhood toys, and a visit to the opera to see Tales of Hoffmann (in From 1913-1923, Schenker kept a studio on the fashionable street
which the protagonist falls in love with an automaton), Bellmer began Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, and remained in the city until 1938, when he
producing interchangeable, ball-jointed doll sculptures and arranging immigrated to London. In these images, taken in 1925, Schenker has
them in photographic tableaux. By 1934, Bellmer had found a keen meticulously painted and dressed wax mannequins in preparation for
audience in the circle of Parisian Surrealists, and his collection of use in a fashion spread. Fashion was at the forefront of Weimar culture
photographs of disembodied doll parts awkwardly propped in a number (in cinema, theater, and media) and—along with the popular idea of the
of disturbing domestic situations was published by André Breton in New Woman—was a mechanism for women’s engagement with the public
the Surrealist journal Minotaure. Grotesque and highly sexualized, sphere. Clothing displays were so common that the word “mannequin”
these doll works were a manifest rejoinder to the Nazi obsessions was interchangeably applied to both these inanimate dummies and to
with physical perfection and Aryan purity, and they resonated with the real women who modeled outfits for individual clients or fashion
the Surrealists’ interests in automata and the fear and repulsion shows. A modern Pygmalion, Schenker here recreates the classic image
engendered at the sight of the plastic, nearly human, body. After his of the artist at work with his model, playing on the object’s haunting,
wife’s death in 1938, Bellmer settled in Paris, where he spent the rest human-like presence. Convincingly life-like, Schenker’s mannequins
of his life making sexually charged drawings, paintings, prints, and also offer a window onto an earlier moment in image making, when
photographs of young girls. BT photographic technologies fell short of today’s high-resolution clarity,
and so could mask (or produce) confusion between the living and the
inanimate. BT

La Poupée, 1934
Gelatin silver print, 9 × 6 cm Karl Schenker Working on a Wax Shop Window Mannequin, 1925/2004
Ubu Gallery, New York & Galerie Berinson, Berlin Gelatin silver print, 28 × 36 cm

118 119
 HERBERT LIST CYPRIEN GAILLARD

(b. 1903 Hamburg, Germany; d. 1975 Munich, Germany) German

photographer Herbert (b. 1980 Paris, France) Connecting
threads of land art, monumental sculpture,
List has had a profound impact on the postwar visual codes of fashion minimalism, and trespassing, Cyprien Gaillard’s work questions the
photography and gay masculinity. His iconic, 1930s black and white trajectories of Modernist architecture and the structuring of public
images of young men, often taken outdoors, combined an avant-garde space. Through videos, paintings, photography, and sculpture, Gaillard
visual idiom (starkly modernist compositions, double exposures, and connects the iconography of modernity with Romanticism, provocatively
props such as masks and fabric) with an erotically charged imagination. reviving ideas of ruin, collapse, and loss. In the video Desniansky
List found work in the late 1930s photographing assignments for Raion (2007), a public light show heralds the implosion of a public
Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and Life, but was forced to return to Germany housing block in Meaux, while in the painting series Swiss Ruins (2005),
and serve—despite being gay and half-Jewish—in the German modernist architecture in Switzerland is transplanted into a new, post-
campaign in Norway, as a military cartographer. He returned to diluvian landscape, in the style of the seventeenth century ruinist
commercial work after the war, under contract with Magnum, though he painters. For the project Dunepark (2009), Gaillard excavated an
focused more on his personal work and took relatively few assignments. intact WWII bunker from a hill overlooking the beach in Scheveningen,
His images of wax models undergoing operations—performed with Germany. Once part of the German Atlantic coastal defense system,
brutal surgical tools by other wax figures—were produced at the the structure was unearthed, opened to the public, and then reburied,
end of the war, in 1944. They are disturbing images: a woman seems simultaneously connecting the town to its history and its current
to undergo some kind of sanctioned torture as her skull is drilled situation of gentrification and real-estate speculation.
(Trepanation); tear ducts are poked with sharp instruments (Surgery
for Squint). Contextualized by their author’s experience during the war His new video deals with the relocation of the Nubian Monuments from
and the haunted spirit of their times, these images provoke a visceral Abu Simel to Philae in Egypt in the 1960s, to prevent their destruction
response for their seeming abstention from moral and humane behavior, by the flooding of Lake Nasser, a vast reservoir produced by the
while also conflicting with our core sense of photography’s depiction Aswan Dam. The ancient rock temples, carved under Ramesses II in the
of the real. BT thirteenth century BCE, were disassembled and moved in their entirety
to a high hilltop. Reconfiguring archival footage and pushing at the
conventions of anthropological films, Gaillard’s work continues his
interests in destruction and iconoclasm as symbols of our location in
history. BT

Cenotaph to 12 Riverford Road, Pollokshaw,

Glasgow 2008, 2008
Gorilla Kidnaps a Girl, 1944 Recycled concrete and building detritus from
Gelatin silver print, 22 × 25 cm demolished housing estate, 400 × 200 × 200 cm

120 121
 TINO SEHGAL MAURIZIO CATTELAN

(b. 1976 London, UK) Tino

Sehgal’s practice is inspired by his training Maurizo Cattelan is known as an art world court
(b. 1960 Padova, Italy)

in dance and political economy. Executed by rigorously trained jester, who pokes fun at the foibles of the market and lampoons the
interpreters, who Sehgal instructs especially for each exhibition, the traditionally expected roles of the artist. In the 1993 Venice Biennale,
works take the form of moving tableaux and interactive “constructed Cattelan rented out his allotted space to a perfume company, who
situations,” as Sehgal calls them, during which viewers are asked put up a large billboard in place of, or perhaps as, his art. His 1996
to enter into structured discussions with his interpreters on a wide exhibition in the de Appel Gallery in Amsterdam consisted of the
range of political and philosophical topics. His works share a common stolen contents of a nearby gallery, repackaged and entitled Another
critical tactic of radical dematerialization, which can be seen as both Fucking Readymade. Underlying the playful exterior of Cattelan’s
a political and philosophical gesture in its own right. Rejecting both work are darker concerns with death, failure, and despair. Cattelan
photographic and written documentation—the traditional methods is also notably concerned with religious imagery, inherited from his
used to preserve performance practice—Sehgal’s works continue for Catholic upbringing in Italy. Early on, these concerns were manifested
the entire duration of the exhibition. But they exist only in the time and in his controversial work La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour) (1999), a
space of the exhibition, thereafter circulating in the cultural sphere hyper-realistic sculpture of Pope John Paul II being struck down by
only via word of mouth, or secondary written accounts. Thus, Sehgal’s a meteorite. A later work, Untitled (2007) consists of a large wooden
works are unified by a principled refusal to add objects or images to a crate, into which the figure of a woman, apparently crucified to the
world already supersaturated with both. Sehgal’s Instead of allowing interior, has been secured as though ready for transit as an artwork.
some things to rise up to your face, dancing bruce and dan and other Unlike the traditional icon of the crucified Christ, who faces out
things (2000) consists of a single dancer, who writhes around on the towards the faithful as a reminder of his sacrifice, Cattelan’s figure
gallery floor in a slow, stylized manner, seeming to mime the effects of is packed with her back to the viewer, as if hiding or in shame. The
physical or psychic trauma. However, the dancer is in fact reenacting protective packaging that girds the figure’s waist and encircles her
dance-like gestures from early videos by Bruce Nauman and Dan hands and ankles suggests a tension between her status as spiritual
Graham, who are alluded to in the work’s title. As a result, the artwork relic and art object—carefully and lovingly stored, whether in a church
can be seen as both an homage to these towering artistic figures, vault or circulating from exhibition to exhibition. CW
and as a kind of exorcism, a ritual that Sehgal has created in order to
divest himself of the encumbrances of the past and the great burdens
of influence. CW

Untitled, 2008,
Silicone resin, clothes, wood,
140 × 140 × 70 cm

122 123
 EMMA KUNZ PORTRAITS OF YE JINGLU, COLLECTED BY TONG BINGXUE

(b. 1892; d. 1963, Brittnau, Switzerland) Emma

Kunz’s elaborately detailed (Ye Jinglu b. 1880, d. 1968 Fuzhou, China; Tong Bingxue b. 1969 Hebei Province, China) Ye
Jinglu
geometric drawings were not designed to be art. Rather, she created sat for his first photographic portrait in a London studio in 1901, and
them to be used as guides in healing rituals, where she would place for his second studio portrait in 1907. Thus began an annual ritual
the drawings between herself and her patient and use them to divine that continued until his death in 1968 and resulted in an impressive,
energy disruptions. Aware of her artistic and mediumistic abilities from sixty-two year archive. Looking over a cumulative picture of a life, it is
young age, when she began making drawings in her school notebooks, compelling to pick out the little details that hint at the texture of Ye’s
Kunz developed an interest in radiesthesia, a divining process that existence: the playfulness in his warm but otherwise serious-seeming
relies on energy fields. Kunz used a pendulum to guide the creation of persona that comes out in a picture of him reading a newspaper (1949)
her drawings’ geometries, completing each piece in a single session, or pretending to talk on a telephone (1959); the Western suit that
which occasionally lasted over twenty-four hours. Kunz believed that speaks of his time abroad (1909); the haggard look that marks a period
her drawings were a product of “the most profound interiorization of illness (1961). In one anomalous image from 1952, Ye even chose
of the outward and the purest exteriorization of the inward,” which to forego a portrait all together, replacing his image with a cutout
allowed her to discern negative energy and transform it into healing silhouette.
energy. As such, Kunz’s drawings are part of a much larger history of
healing images, whose presence or touch are enough to salve wounds In addition to personal changes and Ye’s passion for portraiture,
and cure illness, both psychic and physical. What is interesting about the pictures reflect changes in photographic styles. While the early
Kunz’s works, however, is that while the history of healing images is portraits typify the conventions of portrait studio photography of the
largely entwined with overarching structures of religion and cultural nineteenth century, around 1941 they begin to take on a more modern
belief, her images are wholly personal and idiosyncratic, a manifestation cast with his first close cropped, head-and-shoulders portrait. The
of what she called “a specific system of law, which I feel within me and clear stylistic evolution of photographic portrait conventions adds
which never allows me to rest.” CW another layer of interest to Ye’s archive, making it not only a life
history in images, but also a kind of life history of images themselves.
Discovered by the collector Tong Bingxue, exhibitions of these portraits
raise complex questions about authorship: the photographs can be
seen as a kind of displaced collaboration between the subject, the
anonymous photographers, and the album’s current guardian, whose
efforts have helped to bring this remarkable life chronicle to public
view. CW

Drawing No. 086, n.d. From the Album of Ye Jinglu, discovered and
Pencil and crayon on white scale paper, collected by Tong Bingxue, 1901-1968
92 × 92 cm 62 photographs, dimensions variable

124 125
 TAEKYU PARK

(b. 1965 Hampyeong, South Korea) For

years, Taekyu Park has acted as the only
remaining movie poster painter in Gwangju. Once the predominant
method for advertizing coming cinematic attractions, the vocation of
poster painting has largely fallen victim to the strict standardization of
multi-national cinematic advertizing. However, Park’s enormous, hand-
painted interpretations of promotional material for cinematic releases
ZHOU XIAOHU both new and old still occupy a small, yet significant outpost in the
visual culture of his native city. For the Biennale, Park will exhibit a
series of freestanding lobby placards that tell the history of Korean
cinema, through a selection of what he considers its seminal films. CW

TAEKYU PARK

Memory, 2002
Painting on panel, 180 × 90 × 40 cm

BIENNALE HALL
126 . GALLERY 5 127
 ZHOU XIAOHU

(b. 1960 Changzhou, China) Zhou

Xiaohu’s videos, animations, and paintings
engage with the structures of the mass media, politics, and the culture
ALICE KOK MING WONG
of consumerism. Many of his works employ painstaking stop-motion
animation techniques, breathing life into drawings, clay figures, and
everyday objects. Through these techniques, Zhou is able to construct
complex allegorical works that mix some of the levity of children’s
ANDRO WEKUA
animation with serious socio-political concerns.

JUNG LEE HENRIK OLESEN

In addition to his work in animation, Zhou also produces live action
videos, which nevertheless exhibit the same playful criticality as KWANGHO CHOI
his animated works. His video Concentration Training Camp (2008)
shows a corporate training meeting for the American company Amway
during which something appears to have gone wrong. What aberrance
has occurred is not immediately clear, but all the participants have
KEREN
strained faces, oddly draped clothing, and their hair has a tendency to CYTTER
HYEJEONG CHO
stand on end. Soon, the problem becomes apparent: these corporate
trainees, who are emphatically repeating platitudes about their future
wealth and success, completing trust and team building exercises,
and unburdening themselves about their past hardships, are, in fact,
all suspended from the ceiling of an upside down conference room.
This ridiculous situation comically pairs the absurd money-worship
of corporate Capitalism with its bizarrely topsy-turvy acolytes. This
double absurdity slowly works to reinforce Zhou’s purpose: as the GWANGJU FOLK MUSEUM
video’s vignettes unfold, they form a portrait of a world whose values
have been turned upside down. CW

Concentration Training Camp, 2007-2008

Video, 3:40

JEAN-LUC
GODARD

128 FOLKLORE EDUCATION

129 CENTER
 HENRIK OLESEN HYEJEONG CHO

(b.1967 Esbjerg, Denmark) Henrik

Olesen’s work attempts to expand traditional (b. 1973 Seoul, South Korea) Hyejeong
Cho’s films blur the boundary between
historical narratives to include discussion of the presence and influence the private and the public to create highly personal documents that
of gays and lesbians, as well as to expose methods of oppression and speak to both her subjective experience and the experiences of society
exclusion that have been enacted against them. Olesen has created at large. In her film What They Remember from the Lost (2009) Cho
projects that attempt to undermine (often playfully) the staunchly interweaves impressionistic vignettes pertaining to the memory of one
masculine, heterosexual legacies of Minimalism and conceptual art. of her recently deceased friends (footage taken from a trip they took
Some Faggy Gestures (2008), Olesen’s most ambitious project to date, together, scenes of family and friends in mourning, and, in a gesture
is an incomplete history of homosexual and homo-social imagery in towards possible rebirth, images of a mother languidly breastfeeding
the history of art. For this project, which has been reconfigured and her child) with images of public memorials commemorating the passing
expanded for the Biennale, Olesen has assembled a huge number of of former President of the Republic of Korea, Roh Moo-Hyun, to create
historically disparate images ranging back as far as the twelfth century, a complex picture of both personal and societal grief. However, as the
images that are homo-erotically charged, made by gay artists, or contain title implies, What They Remember from the Lost is not only designed
homosexual subtext. Arranged into loose categories (“The Effeminate as a marker of loss, but also a receptacle for memory. In a globalized
Son,” “Dominance,” “The Appearance of Sodomites in Visual Culture”) world beset with frantic and frequently frivolous dispatches from
or focused around the lives of specific artists (Thomas Eakins, John all corners of the media environment, it is easy to acquire a mindset
Singer Sargent, Anne Seymour Damer, Rosa Bonheur), this project in which all information—from the trivial to the tragic—becomes
is reminiscent of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas. However, while equivalent. Against this deluge of information, Cho’s dream-like and
Warburg’s work—named after the Greek goddess of memory—formed an meditative work attempts to create a bastion of remembrance so that
idiosyncratic illustration of the influence of classical antiquity on the in our headlong rush towards the ever-quickening future we might not
imagery of the Renaissance, Olesen’s archive asks us to remember a lose hold of the past. CW
more contentious vein of cultural influence, which many would still wish
us ignore. CW

Some gay-lesbian artists and/or artists relevant to homo-social culture I – VII, 2007
7 collages, wood, 2 padded chickens, 1 padded rooster,
dimensions variable

Grand(m)others, 2007
Video, color, sound, 20:00

130 131
 ANDRO WEKUA KWANGHO CHOI

(b. 1977 Sochumi, Georgia) Andro

Wekua creates psychologically charged (b. 1957 Kangreung, South Korea) Kwangho
Choi’s startlingly intimate photographs
sculptures, drawings, and films that he arranges into meticulously from his series My Family tackle grand themes—life, death, intimacy, joy,
considered environments, simultaneously evoking the surreal and and pain. But despite the broad emotional scope of his photographs,
sometimes frightening world of dreams, and the layered histories of they are never melodramatic, cloying, or clichéd. Rather they are
the visual. Wekua is best known for his work with mannequin-like wax possessed by a modest yet penetrating rawness and realism that makes
figures, cast from live models. These mute, enigmatic figures haunt the photographs seem as though they had been torn from the pages of a
his oeuvre like ghosts attempting to convey a message that may never private diary—mementos of an ordinary life lived by a passionate, astute
be deciphered. Like much of Wekua’s work they are both giving and observer. Some pictures are vignettes of the everyday: a grandmother
withholding, seemingly clear but ultimately obscure. holding her crying grandchild; a seashell repurposed as an ashtray,
filled with extinguished cigarette butts; a family dinner; a girl knitting.
Wekua’s recent series of miniature buildings—Hotel Abchasia Others preserve life’s more traditional landmarks: weddings, childbirth,
(Building 1), Pier (Building 2), High-rise building (Buidling 7), and family gatherings.
Steamboat Administration Buidling (Building 4), and Hotel Ritsa
(Building 5)—are models of his childhood hometown of Sochumi, But Choi’s most poignant and disquieting works are those that deal
Georgia, recreated entirely from memory. Wekua’s models are unflinchingly with the end of life: the process of dying and the rites and
constructed from the unreliable building blocks of memory itself— rituals that attend its aftermath. In three particularly affecting series,
incarnations of recollection rather than its storehouse. Embodying Choi has painstakingly documented the final moments of the lives of
a traumatic series of events that compelled him to leave Georgia, some of his elderly relatives. In these sequences, the evacuation of vital
Wekua’s subjective memories have produced a model of a personal energy from the bodies of Choi’s subjects is almost palpable, and their
landscape rather than an accurate representation of his former terror utterly present. We see their mouths twist in pain, their ravaged
hometown. Though subject to revisions, distortions, and omissions, bodies tense, and their faces finally slacken and sag under the weight
this model, for Wekua, is perhaps more real than the place itself. CW of death. They are frightening, disturbing images, both because of what
they depict and the intimacy and frankness with which they depict it.
But, if Choi is to show life in all of its fullness, as he endeavors, they
are images that could hardly have been left out. CW

Steamboat Administration Buidling (Building 4), 2010

Wax, metal scaffolding, wood, 39 × 91 × 28 cm

My Family, 1975-2009
Gelatin silver print,
dimensions variable

132 133
 JUNG LEE KEREN CYTTER

(b. 1972 Seoul, South Korea) Jung

Lee’s photographic series Clubgenki was (b. 1977 Tel Aviv, Israel) Keren
Cytter produces work as a filmmaker, novelist,
made in a London pub that claimed to offer a place to share the and, most recently, as a choreographer for her dance troupe D.I.E. Now
cultures of East and West; a place for Western men to meet with Asian (Dance International Europe Now). Cytter has produced approximately
women. Born and educated in Korea, when Lee moved to the UK to study sixty films in the past ten years, all of which are relatively low budget
photography she found herself confronting, for the first time, issues of productions with casts made up of her friends and acquaintances.
identity, outsiderness, and cultural stereotyping. For several months, These films, like most of Cytter’s endeavors, are marked by disjointed,
Lee was a member of this club (genki means “well-being” in Japanese), unstable narratives that shift erratically between various genres
but she soon found herself uncomfortable with the dialogues and and emotional registers and feature characters whose identities are
meetings between the Asian girls, who spoke broken English, and the unstable, which has lead to comparisons with the strategies of the
Western men, who cast themselves in dominant positions. Her pictures films of the French New Wave cinema. Like these films, Cytter’s works
show the pub patrons engaged in convivial conversation, but the are also known for their self-referentiality and use of distancing
peculiarities of its demographics creates an uncomfortable sensation techniques, such as intentionally bad acting and the inappropriate use
for the viewer. The men are not here just to meet women—one of the of music, which serve to remind the audience of the constructed nature
goals of male bar patrons the world over—but to meet women who of the work.
conform to a specific ethnic type. The impression is that the individual
woman is less important than whether or not she conforms to certain For the Biennale, Cytter has created a new film in which a single
behavioral and physical expectations. Lee’s photographs are ultimately narrative evolves simultaneously in four cities: Johannesburg,
concerned with the act of looking—the Clubgenki series communicates Inhambane (Mozambique), Tel Aviv, and Berlin. Hot Days (2010) is
the tension and suspense of these interactions with strong cinematic a mocumentary that follows the French colonialist anthropologist
lighting and emphasis on the gaze itself. In psychoanalytical theory Anne Marie Baptist as she moves from South Africa to Israel in the
and cinema studies, we are often reminded that the gaze is inextricably nineteenth century. She follows the great legend of South East African
bound up with notions of desire, objectification, and otherness. Lee’s tribes, focusing mainly on the Koi and the San tribes that migrated from
pictures make these theoretical notions manifest, exposing them to Mozambique to Matsulu and White River (today north of South Africa),
scrutiny and criticism. CW until she finally arrives in Israel. CW

Four Seasons, 2009

Video, 8:00

Clubgenki, 2002
C-print, 90 × 120 cm

134 135
 ALICE KOK MING WONG

(b. 1978 Macau, China) Alice

Kok’s photographs and videos address cross- (b. 1971 Singapore) Ming
Wong works primarily in video, a medium that he
cultural communication in the post-colonial, globalized epoch. The uses to explore the performative aspects of identity and language,
video installation Family Script (2007) addresses these concerns often through restaging and reconfiguring scenes from commercial
quite literally—through the facilitation of international communication motion pictures, with Wong acting each part. Past works have found
between members of Tibetan families living apart from one another in him engaging with films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Douglas Sirk,
India and Tibet. Traveling between the two countries, Kok would record Wong Kar-Wai, and Luchino Visconti, among others, each of which
and deliver video messages sent between the long-separated families Wong uses as a starting point for his investigations, which play with
with often touching results. The families sing songs to one another, received expectations of racial, cultural and gender roles, and explore
send news of new additions to the family, and, on the Indian side, ask the possibilities and impossibilities of communication.
to be sent back images of the small corners of their homeland that
they hold fondly in their memories. Of course, there are inevitably also In Filem-Filem-Filem (2008-2010), Wong expands his exploration of film
tidings of sadness, hardship, and death, but even these are borne with to encompass the architecture of cinema—the theaters themselves.
a resoluteness and dignity that exudes tenderness for the feelings The work is composed of what appears to be a series of Polaroid
of the recipients, who are constantly reminded not to worry. Mostly, photographs of small cinemas (but are, in fact, digital composites of a
there is joy: one woman even exclaims, with an expression that she is number of images of different views of each building) that were built
barely able to contain, that seeing her daughter again (through the in colonial Malaysia and Wong’s native Singapore in the 1940s and
video message) has been the happiest day of her long life. Ultimately, 50s. The images form a typological study of these eccentric structures,
whether they deliver good news or bad, these video missives—shuttled which were constructed using a grab bag of architectural styles,
across vast distances by one intrepid artist—constantly remind us of ranging from Bauhaus to Art Deco, and customized by local architects
the power of images to potently make the absent present, to bring our to reflect the tropical climate to create vernacular architectural folies.
loved ones near, no matter how far away they may be. CW However, like the ersatz Polaroids with which the cinemas are depicted,
these former “dream palaces” are now merely leftover husks of an
obsolete form, put out of business by the bland architecture of the
multiplex, abandoned or repurposed as enterprises not in the business
of selling dreams. CW

Family Script, 2008

3 channel video, 18:05 Filem-Filem-Filem, 2008-2010
Instant color photograph, 9 × 10 cm

136 137
 JEAN-LUC GODARD
THOM PUCKEY
SEUNGTAEK LEE

(b. 1930 Paris, France) Jean-Luc

Godard was a seminal figure of French New
ROBERTO
Wave cinema of the 1960s and is considered one of the most influential CUOGHI
filmmakers of the twentieth century. Godard’s critical writings first TEHCHING CINDY PAUL RYAN
HSIEH SHERMAN MCCARTHY TRECARTIN RONI
appeared in André Bazin’s influential Cahiers du Cinéma and in his own HORN
MORTON MARIA
journal Gazette du Cinéma, which he founded in 1950 along with fellow BARTLETT LASSNIG
filmmakers Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette. In 1960, Godard released
his first feature film, Breathless, which was marked by a unique visual
style that resulted from his pioneering use of discontinuous jump cuts,
as well as by its plentitude of extra-narrative references to earlier NAMJIN LIM

films. Along with Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) and
Francois Tuffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), Breathless was instrumental ANDY WARHOL
in bringing international attention to the French New Wave. Godard’s
interest in revolutionary politics is evident in the boundary-breaking DIETER ROTH
feature films he continued to produce for the remainder of 1960s. After
the student uprisings in May 1968, he began to more fervently identify
with Maoism, distancing himself from his previous cinematic output and
creating films that more explicitly addressed the political and social
issues of the day.
PHILIP-LORCA DICORCIA

In 1980, he resumed a more narrative style with the release of Sauve

qui peut (la vie). Since this time, he has completed a number of
projects, but none have been more ambitious or storied than his epic,
four-and-a-half hour masterpiece, Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1988-1998).
Almost entirely composed of a dizzying array of appropriated footage
and dialogue, with occasional asides in the form of narration and
overlaid text, Histoire(s) du Cinéma is Godard’s frenetic, personalized
account of cinema’s historical entanglement with society, politics, love,
sex, and death, which he ultimately fashions into a critique of twentieth
century history as a whole. CW

Histoire(s) du Cinema, 1998, Video, 4:25:00

138 GWANGJU MUSEUM

139 OF ART
 THOM PUCKEY SEUNGTAEK LEE (see p88)

(b. 1948 Kent, UK) Thom

Puckey’s focused sculptural language produces
images that, while crystallized in sculptural form, persist and flicker
in the mind in the manner of cinema and literature. For the installation
True Light (1989), two mannequins fully dressed in Victorian garb (a
man and woman) stand on a ten-meter long, cruciform shaped platform,
each holding a disc of green or red glass, a physical duality that
directly references Jan van Eyck’s famed Arnolfini Portrait (1434).
Between them, miniature wood marionettes, all dressed in identical
uniforms, mill about with tiny props, while a magnifying glass focuses Artist to Be Out of Breath, 1991
Mixed media, 400 × 200 cm
a small disc of light on the rear panel of the platform. The work
suggests an oblique but imagistic narrative, and even includes a
sculptural rendering of the technology of image production itself—
again, a nod to the complex optical illusions within van Eyck’s portrait.
MARIA LASSNIG (see p23)
Puckey’s more recent marble sculptures are made from live models and
produced in a laborious, classical method of casting and finishing. They
depict disturbing scenes: realistically rendered nude women, posed in
the manner of nineteenth century history paintings, aim and fire brutal-
looking contemporary military technology into an imagined horizon of
space, if not at each other. Collapsing classical studio techniques with
art-historical legacies and contemporary political implications, Puckey
continues to coax from his frozen material a kind of trans-historical
living image. BT

Self-portrait, 1971
Video, 4:30
True Light, 1987
Mannequins and mixed media, 260 × 193 × 1073 cm

PAUL MCCARTHY (see p109)

Garden Dead Men, 1992-1994

Latex rubber, foam rubber, wig, clothing,
and tables, 2 parts: 243 × 76 × 98 cm

140 141
 RONI HORN RYAN TRECARTIN

(b. 1955 New York City, U.S.A.) Roni

Horn’s works often employ minimalist forms (b. 1981 Webster, U.S.A.) Ryan
Trecartin’s videos conjure alternate realities
that refer to the natural world. Her sculptures, photographs, drawings, and warped futures populated by a motley cast of unstable, ambiguously
and installations tend to be structured according to twinned concepts, gendered characters, many of which are played by Trecartin himself.
addressing the relationships between the human and the natural, the These characters rush across the screen with screaming, lysergic
fixed landscape and changing weather, the self and the other, internal, abandon through a cacophony of digital effects, hyperactive editing,
psychological life and exterior, natural forms. Making use of doubling and candy-colored face paint, as if the product of an Internet fever
and repetition, Horn pays close attention to the dialog created dream. Fittingly, Trecartin’s works initially appeared on the video-
between the work, the space it inhabits, and the other works with sharing website YouTube, where their visual supersaturation and semi-
which it is situated. For Horn, this engagement with duality is related incomprehensible teenage techno-babble are not totally out of place.
metaphorically to her own identity, particularly to her androgynous Instead, Trecartin’s videos can be seen as a kind of sounding board,
appearance. In a.k.a. (2008-2009), Horn literalizes this examination amplifying the manic energy of the digital free-for-all until it echoes
through a series of paired self-portraits, taken by various friends and back on itself.
family members. Each pair of images presents Horn at two different
stages of her life, tracking the changes in her appearance as she ages Trecartin’s videos are populated with characters with multiple identities,
as well as her personal decision to render her gender ambiguous. The clones, or digital avatars, and which, like the videos’ supersaturated
work becomes a photographic autobiography, presenting identity as aesthetic, also reflect the (virtual) realities of the digitized world.
never stable, but rather in constant flow and flux. CW Online, we can create new images of ourselves, fashion new identities,
and even maintain multiple personalities, just as Trecartin’s characters
are able to do in his videos. As such, just as his madcap aesthetic is
merely an amplification of the frenzied realm of the digital, Trecartin’s
characters, strange though they are, can be seen as warped reflections
of ourselves, as we appear in the digital hall of mirrors. CW

a.k.a., 2008-2009
30 Inkjet prints on rag paper, 38 × 33 cm each

P.opular S.ky (section ish), 2009

Video, 40:00

142 143
 ROBERTO CUOGHI MORTON BARTLETT

(b. 1973 Modena, Italy) Beginning

in 1998, Roberto Cuoghi became his father. (b. 1909 Chicago, U.S.A.; d. 1992 Boston, U.S.A.) In
1993, an antiques dealer named
He adopted his father’s style of dress, and carefully imitated his daily Marion Harris made a curious discovery at an antique fair in New York:
habits. He ballooned to over 150 kilograms, grew a beard, and bleached a collection of anatomically correct, handcrafted dolls packed carefully
his hair white. People began to treat him as if he was his father’s in thirty-year-old newspapers, accompanied by stacks of black and
age—they gave up their seats, opened doors, offered to help him with white photographs of the dolls (both with and without clothes), in a
his bags. It was a radical transformation, and, unsurprisingly, one that variety of intricately staged tableaux. The items were from the estate
was hard to reverse. For over five years he inhabited his father’s life, of the recently deceased Morton Bartlett, who had spent his life
and the process of returning to some semblance of his original self working as a commercial photographer and graphic designer in Boston.
was a grueling one, which required multiple surgeries and left him with Though few knew of Bartlett’s strange obsession with his collection
lingering health problems. of dolls, he was a far cry from naïve outsiders like Henry Darger, with
whom he is often compared. Raised by a wealthy adoptive family,
In successfully fast-forwarding his life, Cuoghi voluntarily submitted Bartlett studied at the prestigious Philips Exeter Academy and briefly
to the fear that we will one day all grow up to be our parents. For at Harvard University, and was known to attend art exhibitions with his
the Biennale, Cuoghi has created a series of paintings that play on a social circle of well-heeled Bostonians. Bartlett’s relationship with his
related psychological roadblock: the idealized image of our future lives creations remained largely secret—brought to life through a private
that forms in the minds of our parents, sometimes before we are born. labor of love, the dolls can be seen as embodied projections of his
The paintings are self-portraits of the artist, not as he is, but how his desire. CW
mother imagined, or hoped, that he might be. As such, they can be seen
as totems erected in honor of a life not lived, icons of defiance, and,
perhaps, as a kind of apology. CW

Untitled, 2003
Mixed media on tracing paper, Untitled, Standing Girl, c. 1950-1960
acetate and glass, 73 × 53 cm Plaster with polychrome and fiber hair, 81 cm high

144 145
 CINDY SHERMAN TEHCHING HSIEH

(b. 1954 Glen Ridge, U.S.A.) Cindy

Sherman first rose to prominence with her (b. 1950 Nanzhou, Taiwan) Tehching
Hsieh is best known for a series of year-
Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980), a series of sixty-nine photographs long performances he completed between 1979 and 1986. In each of
that appear to have been taken from an array of B-grade movies in a these works, Hsieh followed a simple set of rules, which over the course
variety of recognizable genres, in which Sherman always appears in of an entire year, become feats of endurance. These performances
the starring role. To make each image, Sherman transformed herself were recorded in photographs and statements of intent, which now
with wigs, makeup, and costumes in order to inhabit a series of comprise the documentation of the work. Hsieh spent a year in a cage-
stereotypical female roles—innocent schoolgirl, femme fatale, pining like enclosure in the corner of his studio during which time he was not
housewife—which, in turn, can be imagined to inhabit an equal number allowed to read, watch television, listen to the radio, or speak (1978-
of hackneyed narrative tropes. At once typology and critique, the 1979); a year entirely outdoors (1981-1982); a year tied to fellow artist
works went beyond an unpacking of filmic representations of women to Linda Montano with an eight-foot rope, during which time they were
address how predetermined roles and types contribute to the formation not allowed to touch (1983-1984), and a year in which he ceased to
of individual identity. make, view, or speak about art (1985-1986). In One Year Performance
(1980-1981) Hsieh spent a year punching a time-clock every hour of
These early works laid the foundation on which the rest of Sherman’s every day, taking a photograph of himself as part of his record keeping
practice has been built. In her photographic work to date, Sherman account. As spare and restrained as the work itself, the individual
continues to use herself as her subject. Her costumes and backdrops images register the passage of time only through the progressive
have become increasingly elaborate, and her themes have become growth of Hsieh’s hair, which he had shaved at the beginning of the
darker, tingeing her photographs with traces of sexual violence, performance. These separate portraits mark the passage of time like
desperation, decay, and death. However, despite the inevitable changes the monotonous beats of a metronome, but, taken together, form a kind
in her work, Sherman is still concerned primarily with the costume play of timeline that is essentially a single, larger portrait of a year. CW
of identity—the ways we attempt to mold ourselves into images of an
idealized other, along with the ways we inevitably fail. CW

Untitled, 2010
Pigment print on PhotoTex adhesive fabric, dimensions variable

One Year Performance April 11, 1980-April 11, 1981,

(Punching the Time Clock) 1980-1981
C-print, 32 × 22 cm

146 147
 NAMJIN LIM DIETER ROTH

(b. 1970 Gwangju, South Korea) Namjin

Lim creates elaborate, painstaking ink (b. 1930 Hannover, Germany; d. 1998 Basel, Switzerland) Born
in 1930, Dieter Roth
drawings using the same, traditional techniques with which ancient spent his childhood years in Zurich during the war, before moving with
Buddhist religious icons were produced. However, in Lim’s works, the his parents to Bern in 1947. Throughout the 1960s, he developed
ancient world of gods and demons is intermingled with scenes from a diverse and prolific practice of writing, printmaking, sculpture,
contemporary life, often to pointed effect. Her work, For the Souls of and book making, often collaborating with colleagues in the Fluxus
the Departed (2000), depicts the atrocities perpetrated by Chun Doo- movement. He became known for his use of decaying, natural
hwan’s military forces during the Gwangju Democratization Movement. materials such as cheese, chocolate, birdseed, and feces, and for his
Amid scenes of unrest, many of which are bracingly forthright in their uncompromising personality.
address of the uprising’s brutal realities, two gnarled demons hold
court, gleefully reveling in the destruction. On a mountainside above Solo Scenes (1997-1998) was Roth’s last project. The 128-monitor
the fray, a collection of placid Buddha figures look down upon the installation shows him ambling around his house and studio,
proceedings with a calm that bespeaks an equal measure of God-like convalescing in isolation from his most recent bout with alcoholism.
patience and chilly aloofness. This strange, occasionally incongruous Saddled with a large amount of free time while recuperating, and yet
mixture of religious imagery with the triumphs and tragedies of frustrated by television’s manipulative fictions and endless culture-
everyday life fashion Lim’s works into modern-day icons, which, industry products, Roth made a series of daily videos about his routine
though they may not reflect humanity in an altogether rosy light, can domestic trials. A mix of diaristic revelation, television overload, and
nonetheless be seen as astute interpretations. CW epic narcissism, Roth’s project takes the promise of television’s
reality and calls its bluff: our protagonist, broken with age and
drink, gives a vivid account of his own, real life. Much of the footage
in Solo Scenes shows Roth as a ghost-like figure (in night footage
mode on the camera), echoing his frail health and foreshadowing his
death shortly after the project began. The installation echoes with
voyeuristic, surveillance tape aesthetics, and the overwhelming amount
Living Like a Drunkard Like a Dreamer, 2009 of visual information adds up to a dizzying account of the authentically
Painting, 152 × 205 cm
mundane. BT

Solo Scenes, 1997-1998

128 monitors with VCRs,
3 wooden shelves, 128 VHS-tapes

148 149
 ANDY WARHOL PHILIP-LORCA DICORCIA

(b. 1928 Pittsburg, U.S.A.; d. 1987 New York, U.S.A.) Andy

Warhol’s name has become (b. 1951 Hartford, U.S.A.) Since
the 1980s, Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s photographs
synonymous with both Pop Art and the practice of art as a business. have blurred the lines between the spontaneous and the staged, the
Known as much for his unorthodox, industrial-style production intimate and the theatrical. Even his earliest works contain features of
methods and his meticulously constructed public persona as he was both autobiographical reportage and the cinematic, arranging family
for his iconic, brightly colored images lifted directly from the popular members and friends in subtlety staged domestic tableaux. In later
culture of his day, Warhol carved out a niche for himself in the popular works, diCorcia took to the streets: for his series Hustlers (1990-1992)
imagination and irrevocably altered artistic practice. he photographed male prostitutes in a similarly filmic style, paying
each their hourly asking price—noted matter-of-factly in the titles—in
Despite Warhol’s fame, there was one aspect of his practice that exchange for their pictures. He further expanded his attempts to merge
remained unknown to all but a handful of friends and assistants the real and the cinematic in Street Work (1994-1998) and Heads
until after his death: a collection of over six-hundred equally sized (2001-2003), rigging remote-controlled lighting setups on city streets
cardboard boxes filled with all manner of keepsakes and ephemera. to create paradoxically theatrical, impromptu photographs.
Warhol began collecting materials for these Time Capsules in 1974,
assiduously filling them with material that might some day be of Thousand (2009) is a collection of one thousand Polaroids culled
interest: a receipt from Max’s Kansas City, newspaper clippings, a pair from diCorcia’s vast photographic output over the past twenty-five
of Clark Gable’s shoes. Warhol toyed with the idea of selling the Time years of his career. They reveal the diversity of his practice, including
Capsules, each for the same price, without divulging their contents, family snapshots, portraits of friends and lovers, still lives, test shots
but this plan never came to fruition. Instead, the boxes kept piling up and sketches from past projects, fashion shots, and landscapes.
in storage until his untimely death in 1987, leaving a vast archive of his Exhibited in an unbroken row that snakes around the gallery walls,
life, or what amounts to a sprawling self-portrait in objects. Only one Thousand forms not only a compact timeline of a life’s work, but also
of the Time Capsules had something resembling a coherent structure: an autobiography in images. CW
Time Capsule -27 was devoted to Warhol’s mother, Julia Warhola,
who lived with the artist in New York from 1952 until 1971. They had
an extremely close relationship, and Warhol often integrated her
distinctive handwriting into his works. Nestled in his vast archive, Time
Capsule -27 is a portrait within a portrait, a box filled with tokens of
their relationship, marking the place Warhol kept for her in his heart. Thousand, 2009 (installation view)
CW 1000 Polaroids mounted on aluminum, total length of photo rail: 104 m

Time Capsule -27, n.d. (installation view)

Mixed media, dimensions variable

150 151
 JANGSAMISA—PORTRAIT OF GWANGJU

The Yangdong traditional market has been a vibrant marketplace for The market is more than a place where goods are traded, it is a place
over 100 years and is considered the largest market in the Honam where people exchange ideas and stories. Map of the Marketplace
region of Korea. Jangsamisa—a satellite project of the Gwangju collects such gestures of rapport: customers will be asked to select
Biennale, programmed by Kyungwoon Jeong—will present an images of their favorite stores to complete the map with a thousand
accumulation of images, objects, and observations from merchants emoticons. Open-Wall is a site where visitors to the market are invited
and visitors to the market, which will add up to a rich experience of to write their impressions on the wall, creating a public view of their
individual and collective impressions. diverse expressions and experiences. These three projects present
records of time, tracing the past, present, and future of Yangdong
Several sub-programs bring together various aspects of the market’s market. We can find traces of the lives of our ancestors in Yangdong
history. Gwangju painter Taekyu Park will realize a special commission Market Diary, see how small gestures can add up to a vibrant display of
for Jangsamisa, a large scale outdoor painting depicting the many contemporary life in Map of Marketplace, and share ideas about what
stories and characters of the market. Yangdong Market Diary is a is still to come in Open-Wall.
collection of objects, images, and oral histories of the market vendors
to reconstruct the history of this community. Though they may appear
small, rough, or old, these are treasures of Yangdong Market in their
own right.

YANGDONG MARKET DIARY

YANGDONG CULTURE CENTER

152 153
SPONSORS LENDERS TO THE EXHIBITION Gladstone Gallery, New York Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York
Estate of Hermann Glöckner Galerie Praz-Delavallade, Paris
A Palazzo Gallery, Brescia
Marian Goodman Gallery, New York Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich
Official Sponsors Joshua Adler
The Granger Collection, New York Regina Gallery, Moscow/London
American Folk Art Museum, New
Greene Naftali Gallery, New York Estate of Peter Roehr, Berlin
York, Blanchard-Hill Collection
Galerie Haas & Fuchs, Berlin Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg-Paris
Anthology Film Archives New York
Hauser & Wirth Dieter Roth Estate
Arario Gallery, Seoul
Hauser & Wirth Collection, Scheinbaum & Russek LTD,
Art:Concept, Paris Santa Fe
Switzerland
Aschenbach & Hofland Galleries, M. Scheler, Hamburg
Ursula Hauser Collection,
Amsterdam
Switzerland Esther Schipper, Berlin
Balice Hertling Gallery, Paris
Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, Karsten Schubert, London
Helke Bayrle Toronto
Laurence and Patrick Seguin
Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla Hotel, London
ShanghArt Gallery, Beijing
Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi J. Crist, Boise
Estate of Paul Sharits
Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New Steven Kasher Gallery, New York
Official Supplies Official Licensee
York Sichuan Fine Arts Institute
Sean Kelly Gallery, New York
BSI Art Collection Sperone Westwater, New York
Anton Kern Gallery, New York
James Castle Collection, Boise Sprüth Magers, Berlin/London
Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich
Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus
Galerie Daniel Buchholz,
Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo und Kunstbau, Munich
Cologne/Berlin
Knoedler & Company, New York Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Galerie Bugada & Cargnel, Paris
Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo/Kyoto
Capitain Petzel, Berlin
Kukje Gallery, Seoul Take Ninagawa, Tokyo
Co-Marketing Sponsors Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne
Kunstmuseum Basel Tate Collection, London
Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris
Emma Kunz Foundation, Würenlos Courtesy Galleria Tega, Milan
Galleria Continua San Gimignano/
Beijing/Le Moulin Kurashiki Museum, Japan Timothy Taylor Gallery, London
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York L.A. Louver, Venice, CA Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo
Pilar Corrias Ltd., London Rachel and Jean-Pierre Lehmann Estate of Stan VanDerBeek
Thomas Dane Gallery, London Herbert List Estate Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Danziger Projects, New York Long March Space, Beijing The Andy Warhol Museum,
Pittsburgh
Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan Marvelli Gallery, New York
Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin
Elizabeth Dee, New York Matthew Marks, New York
Michael Werner Gallery, New York/
Deitch Projects, New York Stephen Mazoh and Co., Inc.
Berlin
Deste Foundation, Athens Louis K. Meisel Gallery, New York
Helene Winer
Eric Diefenbach and James Keith Metro Pictures Gallery, New York
ZERO…, Milan
Brown, New York Yossi Milo Gallery, New York
David Zwirner, New York
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), Motive Gallery, Amsterdam
303 Gallery, New York
New York
Musée National d’Art Moderne,
Eleven Rivington, New York Centre Pompidou, Paris
Support
Ellipse Foundation – Contemporary The Museum of Photography,
Art Collection, Portugal Hamni
DAVID TEIGER Emotion Pictures Museum fur Moderne Kunst,
Henrique Faria Fine Art, New York Frankfurt am Main

Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw Myunggi Museum, Damyang

Fondazione Sandretto Re Greene Naftali Gallery
Rebaudengo, Torino Akimitsu Naruyama, Tokyo
Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan National Film Center, The National
Foundation of Arts & Culture, Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo
Seoul Neugerriemschneider, Berlin
FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Rheims Doug Niven
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco Ock Rang Kim
Gagosian Gallery, New York One and J. Gallery, Seoul
Galerie Fortlaan 17, Gent OneWest Publishing
Geiger Archive, Munich PKM Gallery, Seoul

154 155
VENUES GENERAL INFORMATION EXHIBITION TOURS TRAVEL INFO (BIENNALE)

EXHIBITION PERIOD 1. DOCENT PROGRAM HOW TO FIND US

2010.9.3-11.7 Docent led-tours are available The venues of the 8th Gwangju
in Korean and English and Biennale include Gwangju Biennale
are offered 8 times a day Hall, Gwangju Museum of Art,
VISITING HOURS
(Please refer to the timetable). Gwangju Folk Museum, Gwangju
9:00 am-6:00pm Reservations are essential for Folklore Education Center. There
groups. will be special projects held in the
Docent Program Operating Yangdong Market, Gwangju’s well-
VENUES
Period: 2010.9 3-11.7 known traditional marketplace.

Timetable: every hour from

GWANGJU BIENNALE HALL 10:00 to 16:00 BUS

211 Biennale 2 gil Buk-Gu Tours last 60-90 min Bus #83, 64
Gwangju, Korea (500-070) / Maximum participants: 20 people to Biennale Exhibition Hall
T.062-608-4114 Meeting point: Information Desk, Bus #58, 95
Gwangju Biennale Hall, Gallery 1 to Gyeongsin Girls High School,
then take a taxi to Biennale
GWANGJU MUSEUM OF ART Reservations: www.gb.or.kr Exhibition Hall
52 Haseo-ro Buk-Gu Gwangju, Inquiry : [email protected] Bus #19, 38, 56
Korea / T.062-613-7100 to Jeonnam University Side
Entrance, then take a taxi to
2. SMARTPHONE APPLICATION
Biennale Exhibition Hall
GWANGJU FOLK MUSEUM (FOR IPHONE)
Bus #57
213 Biennale 2 gil Buk-gu, A Gwangju Biennale 2010 to Yuchang Apartment, then take a
Gwangju, Korea / application will be available for taxi to Biennale Exhibition Hall
iPhone users. This application
T.062-521-9041
will be available in Korean and
English as a free download at TAXI
GWANGJU FOLKLORE app stores starting in August
2010. from Gwangju Station:
EDUCATION CENTER
3000 won/10 min
213 Biennale 2 gil Buk-gu, Contents: Gwangju Biennale
2010 Overview, participating from Gwangcheon Bus Terminal:
Gwangju, Korea 3000 won/10 min
artists, artwork information,
T.062-521-9041 latest news from Gwangju Airport:
Inquiry: [email protected] 8000 won/30 min
YANGDONG TRADITIONAL MARKET from Chungjang-ro Gwangju:
6000 won/20 min
441 Yangdong Seo-gu, Gwangju, 3. EDUCATION FOR YOUNG STUDENTS
Korea (502-729) / (CLASS EDUCATION)
T.062-362-2042 Gwangju Biennale 2010 provides
BY CAR

Young Students Class Education Honam Expressway → Seo Gwangju

sessions to further enhance IC → Right Turn → Right Turn →
understanding of visual art and Gwangju Biennale Parking Lot
COST OF ADMISSION to encourage young students’
early experiences with art.
Reservations are required. TRAVEL INFO
SINGLE DAY TICKETS (YANGDONG TRADITIONAL MARKET)
Program Operating Period:
Adults (19-64): 14,000 2010.9.7 - 11.7 (Except
Youth (13-18): 5,000 Sundays and Mondays, 5 times BUS
a day)
Child (4-12): 3,000 160, 760 / 19, 30 ,36,37, 39, 48,
Timetable: 09:00, 10:00, 11:00, 99 / 52, 59, 61, 65, 69, 71, 72, 79,
Seniors (+65): 4,000
12:00, 13:00 82, 177
Families
Program lasts 40 min (approx.)
(Parents + 2 children): 26,000
Venues: Gwangju Museum of Art SUBWAY
* Special group discounts are
(Lecture Hall) & Gwangju Folk
available Get off at Yangdong Traditional
Museum (Media Room)
Market Station (Exit # 1)
Maximum participants: 100
EXHIBITION PASS people
TAXI
Adult: 30,000 Reservations: www.gb.or.kr
Youth: 20,000 Inquiry : [email protected] From Gwangju Station:
7 min/2600 won;
Child: 10,000
from Gwangcheon Terminal:
Ticket Prices (in Korean Won) 12 min/3500 won;
from Gwangju Airport:
30 min/ 8000 won

156 157
IMAGE CREDITS & PERMISSIONS 28 © Sherrie Levine/© Walker 49 © Jacob Kassay, Courtesy 75 © Sergey Zarva, Courtesy 104 © Jeff Koons, Courtesy Deste 135 © Jung Lee, Courtesy One and
Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Eleven Rivington, New York, Photo: Regina Gallery, Moscow & London Foundation, Athens J Gallery, Seoul
Museum of Art, New York, Courtesy Rons Amstutz
8 © Sanggil Kim, Courtesy PKM 76 © Magnum Photos, Courtesy 105 © Laurie Simmons, Courtesy 134 © Keren Cytter, Courtesy Pilar
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Gallery, Seoul 50, 86 © Kan Xuan, Courtesy of Danziger Projects, New York Sperone Westwater, New York Corrias Gallery, London
29 © Sturtevant, Courtesy Museum Galleria Continua San Gimignano/
9, 86 © 2010 Bruce Nauman/ 77 © Freddy Alborta, 1967, 106© Berlinde De Bruyckere, 136 © Alice Kok
für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Beijing/Le Moulin
Artists Rights Society (ARS), Courtesy Leandro Katz and Courtesy Hauser and Wirth, Zurich,
Main, Photo: Axel Schneider
New York, Courtesy Walker Art 51 © Glenn Brown, Courtesy Henrique Faría Fine Art, New York Photo: Mirjam Devriendt. 137 © Ming Wong
Center, Minneapolis/T. B. Walker 30 © Aurélien Froment, Photo: Gagosian Gallery, London
Acquisition Fund, 1994 Aurélien Mole, Courtesy Motive 78 © Carl Andre/VAGA. Courtesy 107 © Jacques Charlier, Courtesy 138 © Jean-Luc Godard, Courtesy
Gallery, Amsterdam. 52 © Harold & Esther Edgerton Paula Cooper Gallery, New York Gallerie Fortlaan 17, Ghent Emotion Pictures
10 © Sanja Iveković, Courtesy Foundation, 2010, Courtesy Palm and Stephen Mazoh and Co., Inc.
May18 Democratic Associations 31 © Wu Wenguang Press, Inc. 108 © Jonathan Borofsky, 140 © Thom Puckey, Courtesy
for Honorable Persons and Victim’s 79 © Gu Dexin, Courtesy Galleria Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, Aschenbach & Hofland Galleries,
Family 32, 66 © Mark Leckey, Courtesy 53 © 1990 Amon Carter Museum, Continua San Gimignano/Beijing/ New York Amsterdam
Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New Fort Worth, Texas, Bequest of the Le Moulin
11 Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery, York artist, P1990.52.95 109, 141 © Paul McCarthy, 142 © Roni Horn, Courtesy Hauser
New York 80 © Doug Niven/© Tuol Sleng Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, Photo: and Wirth
33 © Lee Friedlander, Courtesy 54 © Artur Żmijewski, Museum of Genocide, Cambodia. Stefan Altenburger Photography
12 © Anne Collier, Courtesy Anton Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco CourtesyFoksal Gallery Foundation, Courtesy Doug Niven Zürich 143 © Ryan Trecartin, Courtesy
Kern Gallery, New York Warsaw Elizabeth Dee, New York and
34 © Heungsoon Im 81 © 2010 Gustav Metzger, 110 © Nayland Blake, Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New
13 © Arnoud Holleman, Courtesy 55 © João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Courtesy Generali Foundation Matthew Marks Gallery, New York York
The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam 36 Courtesy Estate of Stan Paiva, Courtesy Galeria ZERO…, Collection, Vienna, Photo: Sylvain
VanDerBeek. Originally re-staged Milan, Photo: Raimund Zakowski Deleu 111 © Art Orienté Objet 144 © Roberto Cuoghi, Courtesy
14 Courtesy OneWest Publishing at Guild & Greyshkul, New York Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan
and Joseph Bellows Gallery (2008) 56, 86 © Harun Farocki, 2010, 82 © Liu Wei 112 © 2010 Artists Rights Society
Courtesy Greene Naftali, New York (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. 145 Courtesy Ricco/Maresca
15 Courtesy The Museum of 37 © Bridget Riley, Courtesy 83 © Eye Glass Shop Courtesy Kurashiki Museum, Tokyo Gallery, New York
Photography, Seoul, Hanmi Timothy Taylor Gallery and Karsten 57 © Shinro Ohtake, Courtesy Take
Foundation of Arts & Culture Schubert, London Ninagawa, Tokyo 87 Jean-Frédéric Schnyder, 113 Collection Fondazione 146 © Cindy Sherman, Courtesy
Courtesy Kunstmuseum Basel Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino Metro Pictures, New York
16 © Pawel Althamer, Courtesy 38 © Ataru Sato, Courtesy Gallery 58 © Hanyong Kim
Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw Naruyama, Tokyo 88, 141 © Seungtaek Lee 114 © Kienholz, Courtesy L.A. 147 © 1981 Tehching Hsieh,
and Neugerrimschneider, Berlin. 59 © Duncan Campbell, Courtesy Louver, Venice, California Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, Images
Collection Fondazione Sandretto 39 © 2010 Artists Rights Society Hotel, London 89 © 2010 Artists Rights Society from Out of Now: The Lifeworks of
Re Rebaudengo, Turin (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; 115 © John De Andrea, Courtesy Tehching Hsieh
Bonn, Courtesy Galerie Barbara 60 © Danh Vo, Courtesy Galerie Courtesy Musée National d’Art Louis K. Meisel Gallery, New York
17 © Mike Kelley, Courtesy Weiss, Berlin and Cardi Black Box, Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 148 © Namjin Lim
Gagosian Gallery Milan, Photo: Axel Schneiderf Photo by André Morin 116 © John Miller, Courtesy Paula
61 © Hans-Peter Feldmann, Cooper Gallery, New York and 149 © Dieter Roth Estate,
18 Photography by E. J. Bellocq, © 40 © Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York 90 Courtesy Ydessa Hendeles Galerie Praz-Delavallade, Paris Courtesy Hauser & Wirth
Lee Friedlander, Courtesy Fraenkel Courtesy Take Ishii Gallery & the Ydessa Hendeles Art (installation view, 48 Biennale di
Gallery, San Francisco 62 © Irina Botea Foundation, Toronto, Photo: Robert 117 Courtesy Estate of Oh Yoon Venezia, 1999)
41 © Haegue Yang, Courtesy Keziere
19 © Franz Gertsch, Courtesy Kukje Gallery, Seoul. Photo: Bob 63 © Seth Price, Courtesy Capitain 119 Courtesy Ullstein Bild/The 150 © 2010 The Andy Warhol
Galerie Haas & Fuchs, Berlin Matheson and the Art Gallery of Petzel, Berlin and Friedrich Petzel 91 © Tom Holert Granger Collection, New York Foundation for the Visual Arts,
Greater Victoria Gallery, New York Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS),
20 © Christopher Williams, 92 © YangAh Ham 120 © Herbert List Estate, M. New York
Courtesy David Zwirner, New York 42 © Tokuma Shoten Publishing 66 © Overplus Project Scheler, Hamburg Germany
Co., Ltd. 93 Courtesy The James Castle 151 © Philip-Lorca diCorcia,
21 © 2010 Artists Rights Society 67 Exhibition view, Schirn Collection, Boise, Idaho/Courtesy 121 © Cyprien Gaillard, Courtesy Courtesy David Zwirner, New York
(ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, 43 Courtesy Anthology Film Kunsthalle Frankfurt 2009, © Knoedler & Company, New York Galerie Bugada & Cargnel, Paris
Bonn, Courtesy David Zwirner, New Archives New York City; Greene Norbert Miguletz
York Naftali Gallery, New York City; 94 Courtesy Michael Werner, Berlin 123 © Maurizio Cattelan, Photo:
68 © Byungsoo Choi Zeno Zotti
Estate of Paul Sharits
22 © Franco Vaccari 95 © 2010 Artists Rights Society
69 © Rabih Mroué (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, 124 © Anton C. Meier, Emma Kunz
44 © Tauba Auerbach, Courtesy
23, 141 © Maria Lassnig, Courtesy Bonn Foundation, CH-5436 Würenlos,
Deitch Projects, New York 70 © 2010 Artists Rights Society
Hauser and Wirth Switzerland
(ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris, 96 © Liu Zheng, Courtesy Yossi
45 © Kerstin Brätsch, Courtesy
24 © Jakub Ziółkowski, Courtesy Courtesy Galleria Tega, Milan Milo Gallery, New York 125 © Tong Bingxue
Balice Hertling Gallery, Paris
Foksal Gallery, Warsaw
71 © 2010 Artists Rights Society 97 © Anna Artaker 127 © Taekyu Park
46 © 2010 Artists Rights Society
25 © Peter Fischli David Weiss, (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris,
(ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, 128 © Zhou Xiaohu, Courtesy Long
Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, Courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel, 98 © Kang Bongkyu
Bonn, Courtesy The Geiger Archive, March Space, Beijing
New York Paris, Photo: Romain Lopez
Munich 99 © Yasmine Kabir
26 © 2010 Artists Rights Society 72 © Useful Photography (Hans 130 © Henrik Olesen, Courtesy
47 Courtesy Long March Space, 100 Collection of Ock Rang Kim Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Köln/Berli
(ARS), New York/VG Bild Kunst, Aarsman, Claudie de Cleen, Julian
Beijing
Bonn/Archiv Paul Maenz, Berlin, Germain, Erik Kessels, Hans van
Courtesy Estate Peter Roehr der Meer), Photographs by Ad van 101 © Zhang Enli, Courtesy 131 © Hyejeong Cho
48 © 2010 Artists Rights Society ShanghART Gallery, Beijing, and
(ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Denderen
27 © Walker Evans Archive, The Hauser and Wirth 132 © Andro Wekua, Courtesy
Bonn, Courtesy Esther Schipper, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New 73 © Hito Steyerl
Berlin, Photo: Attilio Maranzano 102 Courtesy Arario Gallery, Seoul
York; Courtesy The Library of
74 © 2010 Artists Rights Society 133 © Kwangho Choi
Congress, Washington, D.C.
(ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, 103 © Matt Mullican, Courtesy
Bonn Tracy Williams, Ltd.

158 159
GWANGJU BIENNALE DIRECTOR OF POLICY & RESEARCH PR & BUSINESS DEPARTMENT EXHIBITION CREDITS ADMINISTRATION/MANAGEMENT DOCENTS
FOUNDATION DEPARTMENT Kyoungmin Lew Woosung Lee Sohyun Kang, Yoonhee Kwan,
Eunyoung Kim Jinkyoung Jeong ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Myung Kim, Danhwa Kim, Dongseon
Goeun Lee Massimiliano Gioni EXHIBITION COORDINATOR Kim, Moonsung Kim, Mihee Kim,
PRESIDENT
DIRECTOR OF ADMINISTRATIVE Jiyoung Ahn Namgyeong Hong Minha Kim, Sunhee Kim, Seonghee
Untae Kang DEPARTMENT Tae Cheon EXHIBITION COORDINATOR/ Hyunjoo Lee Kim, Sujin Kim, Joohee Kim, Hanui
Yongseong Kim ASSISTANT CURATOR Jungmin Lee Kim, Eunhee Na, Youngji Ryu,
Dongpyo Jeong
EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT
Jeesun Kim Jenny Moore Jeongeun Shim Eunyoung Moon, Miso Park,
Yongwoo Lee DIRECTOR OF EXHIBITION & SPECIAL Eunjae Park, Hana Park, Hanbyul
PROJECT DESIGN BIENNALE EXHIBITION TEAM EXHIBITION COORDINATOR/ INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Park, Jungeun Bang, Hwayoung
VICE PRESIDENT PUBLICATION MANAGER/ Aurélie Wacquant Mazura Sung, Gyeongri Shin, Eunhee
Inho Cho Keunjong Lim, Chief
Gwigeun Song ASSISTANT CURATOR Yoon, Choah Yun, Kyounghee Lee,
Mansub Roh
Judy Ditner ASSISTANT TO EXHIBITION Bora Lee, Yeujin Lee, Hyein Lee,
DIRECTOR OF PR & BUSINESS DEPARTMENT Youseon Gang
BOARD MEMBERS Donggeul Choi Jeongsun Yang Woojung Lim, Chaewon Lim, Suyeon
Jiyoung Hong RESEARCH ASSOCIATE/
Kwangmyung Kim Hyunjun Lee Jang, Dahye Jeong, Jimi Jeoung,
ASSISTANT CURATOR Mingyeong Kim
Youngho Kim Policy & Research Department BIENNALE EXHIBITION TEAM Jihye Jeong, Minyoung Cho, Rahee
Jitaek Park Mihee Ahn, Chief Chris Wiley Eonjin Chin
Sooeyun Lee Cha, Jimi Choi, Sunhwa Hwang
Sooknam Song Johnson Han
Sookang Park CURATORIAL ASSISTANT SECURITY
Jaegil Woo Woosung Lee YANDONG TRADITIONAL MARKET
Jaehwan Roh
Kwangho Youn Yoonhee Chun Tamsen Greene Guard-Top Guard Association SPECIAL PROJECT
Yeonjeong Go
Cheongyong Rhee Taeyoung Cho EXHIBITION DESIGN COORDINATOR INSURANCE Kyungwoon Jeong, Taekyu Park,
Sunsuk Lim Aurélie Wacquant Mazura
ADMINISTRATIVE DEPARTMENT Kiju Jeong, Gibeom Kim, Yumi Seo,
Chaehyong Lim Ian Sullivan Dongbu Insurance Co., Ltd
Myunghee Soun Namgyeong Hong Miyoung Kim, Shinhee Park, Sol
Soonyi Jung
Myeonghwan Shin Seungyong Ryu EXHIBITION IDENTITY & GRAPHIC DESIGN TRANSPORTATION Kim, Hyunnam Lee, Jaemyeong Lee,
Seungju Chung
Jiman Park Jaeyeop Jeong Yuri Kim
Gyucheol Choi TEXT Sunjinart, Seoul
Soyeon Lee Hyunjoo Lee
Younghoon Choe Dongbu Art INTERPRETERS FOR
Jinhwan Kim Jungmin Lee INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS
Misun Pyo
Jungho Bin Jeongeun Shim A/V Tino Sehgal, Instead of allowing
Rayoung Hong Andy Cushman
Byeonghwan Na Jeongsun Yang some thing to rise up to your face
Sangryul Kang Flavio Del Monte Hyunjin Cinema
Hyunjeong Kim Hyunjun Lee dancing bruce and dan and other
Woonwook Kim Kwangju Total Rental
Bokrae Lee Mingyeong Kim INTERNS things, 2000
Rental Leader
Eonjin Chin
GENERAL MANAGER OF ADMINISTRATION Joanne Bonhee Koo
SPECIAL PROJECT DEPARTMENT CONSTRUCTION Gyeong Lee, Younghee Kim, Minki
Kwangjo Shin Atalanti Martinou
Kang, Gyeorye Han, Hana Kim,
Eunha Lee Róisín Morris ARTEC Co., Ltd
Ahhyun Kim,
Youngmi Song CL Co., Ltd
I’M NOT THERE PUBLICATION Yuri Kim, Giljune Oh, Jaeyeon Song,
Sera Park
ADVISORS AND RESEARCH CONSULTANTS INSTALLATION Gongji Kang
Youjin Lee
Defne Ayas (ArtHub Asia) Jinsung Kim, Hyeonbeom Kim, PARTICIPANTS FOR
Davide Quadrio (ArtHub Asia/Far Jiung Park, Hanbit Park, Jihun
Sanja Iveković, On the Barricades,
East Far West Ltd.) Yang, Junho O, Geunwoo Lee,
SPONSORS OFFICIAL LICENSEE SUPPORT 2010
Adeline Ooi Duhwan Lee,
Insnine Co., Ltd. Deste Foundation For Eun-a Nana Seo Changbeom Lee, Useock Jang,
Contemporary Art, Athens Soyeon Kim, Gyeongnam Moon,
OFFICIAL PATRONS Daehyeon Jo, Hyeonuk Bae,
BIENNALE EXHIBITION TEAM Geunyeong Cheon, Sangdong Cho, Sook Kim, Younghee Jung,
Ministry of Foreign Affairs and CO-MARKETING SPONSORS Fundación/Collection Jumex,
Jubin Im, Jinwoo Jeon, Soyoung Park, Nagun Lee, Soomin
Trade Mexico City
KBCard CHIEF Jonggyu Kim, Changseong Lee, Kim, EunHye Lee, Nanim Jung,
Ministry of Education, Science and David Teiger, New York Misook Park, Gaenam Seo, Maeja
BCcard Co., Ltd. Mihee Ahn Jaemyeong Lee, Uju Sin
Technology Austrian Embassy, Vienna Kim, Gyeonghyun Choi,
Kwangju Bank Visa Card
Ministry of Culture, Sports and Centre Culturel Français SHIPPING IN CHARGE ADDITIONAL EXHIBITION PARTNERS Sunhee Park, Younghee Yu, Yewon
Samsung Card Co., Ltd. Johnson Han Gwangju Museum of Art Kim, Junghwa Lee, Jungah Seo,
Tourism CULTURESFRANCE
Hyundaicard Gwangju Folk Museum Hyunjoo Jung, Moonyee Kim, Bokja
Ministry of Public Administration The Danish Arts Council, PUBLICATION / EDUCATION Yangdong Traditional Market Kuk, Hyunjung Lee, Byungnam Kim,
and Security GS Caltex Co., Ltd
Committee for Visual Arts Yoonhee Chun Hyesook Park
Korea Customs Service Tourrail Network Co., Ltd
Dedem, Rome
Gwangju Metropolitan Office of KUMHO BUSLINES CONSTRUCTION IN CHARGE
DigiCube, Seoul
Education U·square Taeyoung Cho
Embassy of Italy in Seoul
Kumho Resort Byeongjae Kim
Embassy of France in Korea
OFFICIAL SPONSORS Kumho Familyland
Ifa (Institut für INSTALLATION IN CHARGE
Kwangju Bank Hampyeong Dynasty Club Auslandsbeziehungen e.V.), Seungyong Ryu
Gwangju Shinsegae Department Damyang Dynasty Country Club Germany Jaeyeop Jeong
Store Co., Ltd Gretech Italian Cultural Institute, Seoul
Asiana Airlines Naju Image Theme Park The Japan Foundation, Seoul
Korean Airlines Hampyeong Count Mondriaan Foundation, The
Bohae Bank KIA Tigers Netherlands
Lottecinema Gwangju The Henry Moore Foundation
OFFICIAL SUPPLIES ProHelvetia, Swiss Arts Council
Korea International Art Fair
Hampyeong Cheonji Bokbunja The Park, Busan
Agricultural Guild Co.
Bo Hae Brewery Co., Ltd.

160 161
SHORT GUIDE CREDITS PUBLISHER Published on the occasion of the
Gwangju Biennale Foundation exhibition 10,000 Lives, the 8th
EDITORS 211 Biennale 2 Gil, Buk-Gu Gwangju Biennale, September
3-November 7, 2010.
Massimiliano Gioni Gwangju 500-070, Korea
Judy Ditner T. +82 (0)62 608 4114
F. +82 (0)62 608 4409
© Gwangju Biennale Foundation.
EDITORIAL THINK TANK www.gb.or.kr All rights reserved. Except for the
Mihee Ahn legitimate excerpts customary in
Jenny Moore DESIGN
reviews of scholarly publications, no
Chris Wiley TEXT part of this book may be reproduced
49 Gahoe-dong, Jongno-gu  by any means without express
MANAGING EDITOR Seoul, 110-210, Korea written permission of the publisher.
Yoonhee Chun T. +82 10 3338 0862
F +82 2 742 3441 The editor and publisher gratefully
ARTISTS’ ENTRIES www.therewhere.com acknowledge the permission granted
to reproduce the copyright material
Chris Wiley
DISTRIBUTOR in this book. Every effort has been
Benjamin Tiven made to trace copyright holders and
Hyunjin Shin Hyunsil Cultural Studies to obtain their permission for the
2F, 12-8, Kyobuk-dong, use of copyright material.
TRANSLATION Jongno-gu, Seoul, 110-090, Korea The publisher apologizes for any
Eunhae Kim T. +82 2 393 1125 errors or omissions in the above list
Jeonghye Kim F. +82 2 393 1128 and would be grateful if notified
Sanghyun Park [email protected] of any corrections that should be
Hyunjin Shin incorporated in future reprints or
Wonhwa Yoon PRINTERS & BINDER editions of this book.
Juyoun Jo EAP
ISBN: 978-89-87719-15-3 93600
Jieun Ha

COPY EDITING
Hyunsil Cultural Studies

PROOF READING
Suki Kim, Chief
Hanko Kyu Seon
Yeoim Dong
Jungwha Chae
Woojung Lim

4,000 KRW / $4.00

162
EMMA KUNZ ELIOT PORTER DANH VO
MARIA LASSNIG SETH PRICE ANDY WARHOL
MARK LECKEY THOM PUCKEY ANDRO WEKUA
JUNG LEE BRIDGET RILEY CHRISTOPHER
SEUNGTAEK LEE PETER ROEHR WILLIAMS
SHERRIE LEVINE DIETER ROTH MING WONG
NAMJIN LIM ATARU SATO WU WENGUANG
HERBERT LIST KARL SCHENKER KATSUHIRO
YAMAGUCHI
LIU WEI JEAN-FRÉDÉRIC
SCHNYDER HAEGUE YANG
LIU ZHENG
TINO SEHGAL YE JINGLU, PHOTO
PAUL MCCARTHY ALBUM DISCOVERED
GUSTAV METZGER PAUL SHARITS BY TONG BINGXUE
JOHN MILLER CINDY SHERMAN SERGEY ZARVA
RABIH MROUÉ LAURIE SIMMONS ZHANG ENLI
MATT MULLICAN HITO STEYERL ZHAO SHUTONG,
STURTEVANT WANG GUANYI & THE
NAMHAN PHOTO
RENT COLLECTION
STUDIO PAUL THEK
COURTYARD
BRUCE NAUMAN RYAN TRECARTIN COLLECTIVE
OH YOON TUOL SLENG PRISON ZHOU XIAOHU
SHINRO OHTAKE PHOTOGRAPHS
JAKUB ZIÓŁKOWSKI
HENRIK OLESEN USEFUL
ARTUR ŻMIJEWSKI
PHOTOGRAPHY
OVERPLUS PROJECT
FRANCO VACCARI
TAEKYU PARK
STAN VANDERBEEK