Translating Afro-Asian Poetics: An Exploration of Complex Histories and Diasporas
The exhibition Translations: Afro-Asian Poetics, currently on view at 6 venues across Gillman Barracks examines varied and complex histories, stories, and speculations in diverse media drawn from African and Asian diasporic cultural experiences. This discussion between exhibition curator Dr Zoé Whitley and artists Pio Abad, Mischeck Masamvu, and Tuan Andrew Nguyen, moderated by art historian and curator Dr Karin Oen, examines the themes of translation and transcription; historicity and memory; exactitude and imprecision in a few of the works featured in the show.
Speakers
Pio Abad – Artist, Manila
Misheck Masamvu – Artist, Zimbabwe
Tuan Andrew Nguyen – Artist, Ho Chi Minh City
Dr Zoé Whitley – Director of Chisenhale Gallery, London
Moderated by:
Dr Karin Oen-Lee – Senior Lecturer and Head of Department, Art History at Nanyang Technological University Singapore
Pio Abad – Artist, Manila
Pio Abad’s artistic practice is concerned with the personal and political entanglements of objects. His wide-ranging body of work, encompassing drawing, painting, textiles, installation and text, mines alternative or repressed historical events and offers counternarratives that draw out threads of complicity between incidents, ideologies and people. Deeply informed by unfolding events in the Philippines, where Abad was born and raised, his art emanates from a family narrative woven into the nation’s story. Abad’s parents were at the forefront of the anti-dictatorship struggle in the Philippines during the 1970’s and 80’s and it is the need to remember this history that has shaped the foundations of his work.
Abad’s solo exhibitions include Fear of Freedom Makes Us See Ghosts, Ateneo Art Gallery, Manila (2022); Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite, Kadist, San Francisco (2019); Splendour, Oakville Galleries, Ontario (2019); Notes on Decomposition, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow (2016); 1975 – 2015, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney and Some Are Smarter Than Others, Gasworks, London (2014). Recent group exhibition include In Our Veins Flow Ink and Fire, 5th Kochi-Muziris Biennial, Kerala (2022); Is it morning for you yet?, The 58th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2022); Things Entangling, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2020); Phantom Limb, Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai (2019); To Make Wrong/Right/Now, 2nd Honolulu Biennial, Hawaii (2019); Imagined Nations/ Modern Utopias, 12th Gwangju Biennial, Korea (2018). Forthcoming exhibitions include: Small World, 13th Taipei Biennial (2023) and a solo exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford in February 2024.
Abad’s artworks are part of a number of important collections including Tate, UK; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Hawai’i State Art Museum, Honolulu; Singapore Art Museum; Kadist, Paris/San Francisco and Art Jameel, Dubai.
He is also the curator of the estate of his aunt, the Filipino American artist Pacita Abad. He has recently co-curated monographic exhibitions on Pacita Abad at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design Manila; Spike Island, Bristol and Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai. He also co-edited the publication Pacita Abad: A Million Things to Say in 2021.
Misheck Masamvu – Artist, Zimbabwe
Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, Misheck Masamvu’s works allow him to address the past while searching for a way of being in the world. His layered painted surfaces and brushstrokes, which are almost visceral, exist as remnants of the physical act of painting and give the sense that multiple temporalities have been included in one picture plane. Considered to be one of the most significant and pioneering contemporary artists from Zimbabwe, Masamvu’s work offers renewed understandings on visual culture in Africa and the decolonial project more broadly – inciting a fresh critical perspective that bears witness to the political realities, social textures and divergent voices present on the continent.
Central to his practice is abstraction, which the artist employs to explore “the language and politics of space”. While abstraction forms an integral part of Masamvu’s practice he does not let go of figuration completely. Rather, his figures appear within the abstracted space he creates, attesting to his continued belief in the narrative potential of painting. For the artist, his paintings are understood as marks of existence, pointing not only to the realities of his lived experience but also to mental and psychological space, where each layer of paint, or brushstroke on the canvas proposes a search to resolve conflicted experiences or decisions. “I use both figuration and abstraction in my work because I am looking for a new alternative space – one that is against the forced ideology of government and the breakdown of the pursuit of humanity. For this, the symbolism of the landscape and the figure in constant states of entangled metamorphosis are important. I am aware of the communion of the body, the soil and spirit and am interested in how transfiguration and memoirs of body and soul can evoke a real sense of vulnerability”, says Masamvu.
With a technique that is immediate and direct, Masamvu’s works consist of layered painted surfaces, abstracted forms and brushstrokes which are almost visceral and exist as remnants of the physical action of painting. In establishing a distinct abstract visual language, one gets the sense that multiple temporalities have been included in one picture plane and that beneath the surface of one painted image, an infinity of others exist. The outcome of which is a porous pictorial space, one that moves between representational clarity and rich, abstract abundance.
Tuan Andrew Nguyen – Artist, Ho Chi Minh City
Tuan Andrew Nguyen was born in Saigon in 1976 and lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City. In 1979, he and his family emigrated to the United States as refugees. Nguyen received his BA from the University of California, Irvine, and his MFA from The California Institute of the Arts. Nguyen is a founding member of The Propeller Group, an entity that positions itself between a fake advertising company and an art collective. Accolades for the group include the main prize at the 2015 Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur and a Creative Capital award. Radiant Remembrance, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the US, is on view at the New Museum, New York, from June 29 through September 17, 2023. Nguyen has also been the subject of recent solo presentations at the Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow, UK, and Marabouparken Konsthall, Stockholm (both 2023). Nguyen is the winner of the 2023 Joan Miró Prize.
His videos and films have been included in major international festivals, biennials, and exhibitions including the 12th Berlin Biennale, Berlin, Germany; Manifesta 14, Prishtina, Kosovo; Aichi Triennale, Aichi Prefecture, Japan; Biennale de Dakar, Dakar, Senegal (all 2022); Asian Art Biennial, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Tapei, Taiwan (2021); Manifesta 13, Marseille, France (2020); Sharjah Architecture Triennial, Sharjah, UAE; SOFT POWER, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; 2019 Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah, UAE (all 2019); 2017 Whitney Biennial, New York, NY (2017); the 55th International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen, Germany (2009); 8th NHK Asian Film Festival, Tokyo, Japan (2007); 18th Singapore International Film Festival (2005) and 4th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, Bangkok, Thailand (2005).
Nguyen’s work is included in the permanent collections of institutions including Carré d’Art, Nîmes, France; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; SFMoMA, San Francisco, CA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.
Dr Zoé Whitley – Director of Chisenhale Gallery, London
Dr Zoé Whitley is Director of Chisenhale Gallery, a leading non-profit space founded by artists in London’s East End. She writes widely on contemporary artists and 20th century designers, including children’s books, and has served on the 2020-22 Arts Council Collection committee in England. In 2020, Zoé curated Frieze London’s special themed section,
Possessions, exploring spirituality and contemporary art, and co-curated Elijah Pierce’s America at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, USA. Previous exhibitions to her credit include curating the British Pavilion presentation of Cathy Wilkes at the Venice Biennale (2019) and co-curating the award-winning international touring exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (2017-2020).
Zoé also serves on the boards of Creative Access, the only organisation in the UK dedicated to recruiting under- represented talent in the creative industries, and Decolonising Arts Institute, University of the Arts London. She’s formed part of international arts juries for the Wolfgang Hahn Prize(2022), Turner Prize (2021), Preis der Nationalgalerie Berlin (2021) and Future Generation Art Prize selection committee, among numerous others. Her previous professional roles include Senior Curator (Hayward Gallery); Curator, International Art (Tate Modern); and Curator of Contemporary Programmes (V&A).
Dr Karin Oen-Lee – Senior Lecturer and Head of Department, Art History at Nanyang Technological University Singapore
Dr Karin Oen-Lee is Senior Lecturer and Head of Art History in the School of Humanities.
A global modernist, she is most interested in transdisciplinary and transnational art practices that resist easy classification, and in examining modes of writing about, displaying, and collecting art in diverse cultural contexts. From early career research on avant-garde art practices in early Reform Era China to serving as a museum curator for historical, modern, and contemporary collections of Asian art, to recent investigations of paracuratorial and paracurricular practices, her work has been characterised by attention to historiographies and genealogies, institutional power structures, and a broader project of balancing the global, the local, and making space for non-canonical art histories.
Significant exhibitions include solo projects with teamLab, Haroon Mirza, Koki Tanaka, Afruz Amighi, Jean Shin, Fyerool Darma and Ala Ebtekar. Her group and thematic exhibitions have explored contemporary Japanese ceramics, modern and contemporary Japanese fashion, courtly arts from around South, Southeast, and East Asia, and the complex relationship between the physical and metaphysical in the concept of divinity.
Recently, Oen-Lee was Principal Research Fellow at the Centre for Asian Art and Design in the School of Art, Design, and Media, Nanyang Technological University. From 2019-2021 she served as Deputy Director, Curatorial Programmes for NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. Prior to that, Dr Oen was associate curator of contemporary art at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. As the Asian Art Museum’s first full-time curator of contemporary art, Dr Oen was a pivotal figure in the growth of the museum’s contemporary collection and exhibition programme — especially in new media and works by Asian diaspora artists. Earlier in her career, she was Curator at the Crow Museum of Asian Art, a Museum Educator for Asian Art at the Peabody Essex Museum, and Curator and Director of the Artists-in-Residence program at ArtWorks, a multi-disciplinary contemporary art organization in New Bedford, MA.
Dr Oen holds a PhD in History, Theory and Criticism of Art and Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an MA in Modern Art History, Connoisseurship and Art-Market History from Christie’s Education and a BA with honours from Stanford University.