Bashir Makhoul: boxing clever

Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost by Bashir Makhoul shows at Yang Gallery until Sunday 15 April.

Ghosts are notoriously difficult to exorcise. Like tragedies, they leave their mark, whether in real life or literature. In Hamlet, the protagonist’s dead father repeatedly urges him to avenge his murder; by the end, after most of the cast has perished, best friend Horatio promises to retell Hamlet’s story throughout ‘the unknowing world’. As long as the tale is retold, the ghost will continue to haunt us all.

It is from Shakespeare’s stage directions for the Ghost that Israeli-born artist Bashir Makhoul found the title of his latest exhibition, Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost. But how does an artist from the Middle East bring Shakespeare to China? Born in 1963 to an Arab or – depending how you look at it – Palestinian, Catholic family in Galilee, Makhoul takes his complex identity with him wherever he travels. Twenty-one years ago, he relocated from Israel to the UK, where he has built a career as a professor, writer and artist. Now he’s in Beijing to launch his seventh major solo exhibition in 798’s Yang Gallery.

‘There will be 100 metres of cardboard walls covered with 40 panels taking up this space,’ Makhoul says, waving at one half of the gallery. As we sit, surrounded by piles of flattened cardboard and wooden boxes, he takes me on a virtual laptop journey through his artwork of the same name. 

We move through a maze constructed from tall cardboard walls, each covered with lenticular micro-lens photos. These hologram-like images contain two photographs on one surface; as the viewer moves, the image changes. Makhoul takes out some prints from the boxes, and the kaleidoscopic effect is unsettling. You have to walk to see the images  shift, but it is impossible to predict how and when you will see pictures of real cities or cardboard ones – sometimes they even overlap.

One of these images is of a fake town Makhoul made from cardboard boxes. The simple, haphazard structures mimic those of poorer Arabic communities. But if you keep moving, other photographs, taken in East Jerusalem, Hebron and refugee camps such as Shu’fat, also emerge. Like the news images that perpetually haunt us, some are repeated at different points in the maze, dislocating and disorientating the viewer further.

The installation is meant to remind us that the images we are fed of Israel and the Gaza region by the media cannot be the whole truth. These places, despite the nationalist, Biblical and news-fed myths associated with them, are real, ever-changing and, like ghosts, cannot be defined by a picture. ‘It’s something that we invented ourselves, but we can’t even describe. If we do, we describe it in so many different ways. It’s something intangible,’ says the atheist Makhoul, observing that only a child might think they really know what God looks like.

Makhoul himself grew up with nine siblings in devastating poverty. His father was crushed under a tractor when the artist was just five and, by his own admission, his childhood was ‘miserable’. The family depended on their mother, a ‘real hero’ who kept her children fed and encouraged them to be successful. Makhoul later trained as a carpenter, making violins and other fine pieces, earning enough to make his way to university overseas. But he never forgot his past and carried with him his humanist and political ideals, a belief in justice and a concern for the place of his birth where much of his family remain today.

It is only after the presentation that Makhoul, perched on the corner of a small sofa and fuelled by a triple espresso, finally recounts the artwork’s history. The tale begins out in the Israeli Negev Desert, where lies one of the country’s few ‘ghost towns’, as he calls them.

Dubbed ‘Chicago’ by Israeli and US forces when it was built in the 1980s, he tells of a makeshift town created as a training location for ‘Military Operations on Urban Terrain’. Never built for habitation, the concrete city is a shell of a typical ‘Arab’ town. Complete with a peaked mosque, it has been used by the Israeli Defence Force to prepare for invasions into Beirut, the last Gaza evacuation and, more recently, by the US military.

‘They built a whole city out of concrete, similar to my cardboard boxes, for training,’ explains Makhoul, his relaxed demeanour cracking slightly to betray deeper emotions. ‘Be it for operations in Gaza, Hebron or Hanin, they built a city of concrete to practise on. They are merging training and playing with killing; that’s what makes the whole thing so absurd for me, and that’s why I think it’s worth us talking about it.’ In his hands, ghosts come alive and the maze of buildings becomes more about the fragility of human life in urban war zones.

Like Hamlet’s Ghost, Makhoul’s spectre emerges in the artist’s personal search for justice for those lives devastated by the Palestinian conflict. Just as the Ghost haunts Hamlet because he seeks justice for his murder, ‘You shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that this piece [‘Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost’] is about death,’ says Makhoul. And for all its playfulness, it is a message that will not die.  Clare Pennington

Originally posted on Time Out Beijing

Inside a Book a House of Gold

The 212 intimately scaled works housed under the UCCA’s vast, slanting ceilings are the sum (thus far) of collaborations between Swiss art journal Parkett and 192 artists from around the world. Over the course of 28 years, for each printed edition, a piece was specially commissioned. These incorporate print, installation, painting, photography and all variety of media, with the journals themselves piled into a single reading room, separate from the rest of the gallery.

Words for different areas of a typical, bourgeois household – ‘playroom’, ‘studio’ and so on – appear on the brightly coloured walls, with a ‘city’ area bringing this conceptual house into an urban context. The result is an ordered cacophony that continues to unfurl in your mind long after you leave.

Though many works were intended to be handled, from Jeff Koons’s inflatable flower to an orange trussed-up doll of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner by Jon Kessler, take note that, for visitors, there are glass cases to keep our hands off. The decision to divide the works from their corresponding journals is less understandable, though. Yes, they are allowed the freedom to stand on their own merits, but it would be interesting to see them displayed in the context of each Parkett, to give a bigger picture of the world it came from.

Nevertheless, this is a wonderland of sometimes-fantastical treasures. These include the last work by Andy Warhol, whose career began with magazine illustrations and, fittingly, reached its endpoint in another publication, with memento mori black-and-white photographs of skeletal figures.

A plaster cast, ‘Switch’, by Rachel Whiteread, was designed for hanging on a wall. At first glance, it’s just another light switch. But the indentation made by the lever and two small screws are just shadows of the original’s function, transformed into pure form.

This exhibition can be a lot to take in – the works are broad and cover a multitude of eras and ideas. But the scope and quality of what is on display, not to mention the artists involved (from Ai Weiwei to Damien Hirst and Sophie Calle), make this show one of the strongest so far this year. Clare Pennington

Originally posted in Time Out Beijing

Tony Cragg comes to CAFA, China

Tony Cragg's exhibition opened today at the China Central Academy of Fine Art (CAFA) in Beijing with a talk about his life and practice. The Liverpudlian sculptor quit his studies in Chemistry and his work at a "smelly" laboratory (he worked at the Natural Rubber Producers Research Association) to begin his studies at the Gloucester College of Art in 1970.  When the drawings he was making in his spare time became more important to him than his work in the lab, he decided it was time to go decamp from his chosen career.

Speaking on the subjects of the sciences, human developments and other man-made products, Cragg dwelt on our need as a species to create cheap, low standard houses, objects,  materials and so on for mass-consumption. "Every city is the same,"  he said, as he described the grey streets, grey lamp posts and grey buildings of our cityscapes. Art, on the other hand, is for Cragg "free from utilitarian motives...something useless and exciting."  He might have added that Beijing is a particular case. On this day, the smog in Beijing has been so terrible that I would rather be inhaling second-hand smoke, but he was obviously too polite to do so.

 Going on to speak about the relationship between science and art (and he says that he cannot understand why people do not find out more about the way man made things around them function - in comparison to something like a tree, these things are "simple"), the artist said, "we should never forget that it is artists who went to the moon first... who went to the bottom of the ocean first." Making art, as an imperative for the development of science is a great "responsibility" to Cragg.

Cragg also spoke of the use of a broader range of materials in sculpture following the innovations of Marcel Duchamp at the beginning of the twentieth century. Now in his sixties, he came into the art scene at a time when conceptual art was coming into vogue with force. Yet, materials are everything to Cragg, and as such he would never describe himself as a conceptualist; someone he would say just sits on the sofa and thinks of one or two related ideas for a work that can be put together just so.  Creating pieces of sculpture is for Cragg akin to writing: "[it] means you discover new words or new thoughts" as you are working.  Material is in this sculptor's mind, ultimately complicated and sublime, with even our emotions being a kind of material in his mind. "This turns me into a radical materialist, if you like." Clare Pennington

Lee Kit: Not an Easy Thing

At Arrow Factory until March 25

Wander down Jianchang Hutong and you might pass this tiny exhibition – and the ’80s pop emanating from its display window – without ever knowing it was there. But it’s worth knowing about. Behind dusty, sliding French doors stands Lee Kit’s installation, a cheap grey chair and beaten-up cabinet table with a cassette player on top, the speakers spilling onto the floor. Behind is a dark black-blue curtain, shutting off what could be a living space. A smiling picture of Cai Qin, the Taiwanese singer whose ’80s success lived longest in both Hong Kong and mainland China, is stuck inconspicuously on the wall. It is her music that wafts out into the street and the lyrics to her song, ‘Just Like Your Tenderness’, which give the exhibition its title.

 

Kit is no stranger to incorporating second-hand objects, having used his studio in Hong Kong as an installation space for years. But he is better known for the pattern-painted, and often colourful, swathes of material used for household objects such as table cloths; ‘Not an Easy Thing’, by contrast, is sparse, recalling the artist’s first visit to Beijing – a cold environment characterised by a simple lifestyle.

 

The song goes, ‘I cannot stop remembering; remembering you and remembering the past’. A few bandages are eerily scattered on the cabinet and chair, a single red bottle on the floor; suggestions of a darker history here. It might be the front of a shop, although it speaks to us more of an ordinary living situation. In the ’80s, private spaces were often curtained off from view within communal rooms. Both shop owners and the average family might have shared miniscule front-room space where they could socialise and greet others in the community. Yet you cannot enter this space from the street. It remains strangely unreachable and empty of people, as if such memories have been pushed into the background. We cannot go in and open the drawers or touch the unused bandages, emblems of a wounded society. A poignant exhibition – if you can find it. Clare Pennington

Originally posted in Time Out Beijing

Chen Qingqing

Remove the mask of the present, and underneath lies the deep, personal well of our memories. Chen Qingqing keeps hers in boxes. ‘It’s like on a computer, where you have different folders for different things,’ she explains in her tidy Songzhuang home studio, surrounded by decades of work. ‘I put my memories in different containers. Sometimes I even take them out and later shift them around.’ Chen has a deep – and sometimes dark – well from which to draw.

 

Chen is best known for her silhouette-like recreations of Qing and Ming Dynasty clothing, which are woven out of dried flowers and grasses, then mounted on to flat surfaces. Her upcoming retrospective at the Today Art Museum, however, will focus on the installations she has worked on for the past 20 years.

 

Born in 1953, Chen didn’t begin to practise art until the ’90s. ‘The Story of Women’ (1998), a small, wooden four-part cabinet containing red ‘lotus feet’ slippers, pages from an ancient medical manual and dried leaves, twigs and stones, encapsulated how intertwined her art and experiences have always been. Recollecting her training as a barefoot doctor after the Cultural Revolution, she recalls an old lady with bound feet: ‘She was in so much pain that she had us cut all her toes off. They were cutting into the bottom of her shortened feet. I’ll never forget that operation.’

 

If there is one thing she misses about her childhood, it’s the role that women played. In her experience, they really were, in the famous words of Mao Zedong, ‘Holding up half the sky’; she remembers her mother working every day except Sundays. A self-taught artist, who made her way without the training and connections of art school, Chen has forged her own path – something she feels not enough modern women do. ‘Chinese society has regressed,’ Chen opines. ‘Women today will go to university, but their dream is to marry a man with a fat wallet and never work again after that.’

 

That unique path led her from a white collar job in Vienna to 798, back in the days when it was just a factory district and far from the commercial art hub it is today. She remembers the abandoned buildings, empty but for a few artists and the truck drivers who took advantage of a space ‘not even the government wanted’. It was only later that the crowds began to appear.

 

‘People thought that modern art was just for fun,’ she recalls. ‘You could use whatever you had to hand to make it, bits of rubbish and so on.’ Despite her desire for it to be more prominent in Chinese society, the simplistic and commercial way in which contemporary art was approached by much of its new audience stirred strong disagreement in Chen. Consequently, she began to make more elaborate and bizarre works coloured by a vicious sense of humour: in one piece, dolls’ heads were attached to the bodies of lizards, then lined up against the inside of a glass tank; in another, the skeletal forms of dinosaurs are depicted having sex with animals and humans. ‘People can be Jurassic,’ she explains.

 

But these earlier efforts, in which the bodies of plastic babies and girls are broken up into disturbing scenarios (in one, a tree breaks through the flailing form of a girl, both penetrating her and pinning her to the ground), also refer to her wider experiences. ‘I’ve gained things, lost things and gained things again so many times… gone through so many extremely different experiences, that it is as if my life is like that – broken up into parts.’

And it's not just misunderstandings of our histories and cultures that abound. In ‘Dialogue – My Coffin’ (2000), two busts face each other across opposite ends of a translucent coffin, made from grass and flowers over a branch frame. It is intended as an expression of hope, a wish that people can better learn to communicate with each other – and yet the coffin itself admits that ‘the possibility of this ever happening, even in our deepest relationships, has its limits’.

 

There are many things, she thinks, that her parents did not communicate to each other before they died. Imagining herself as a restless ghost, perhaps finding another male ghost seeking companionship, Chen has done battle with her own – and others people’s – interpretation of history, searching for the kind of freedom she has yet to find, either here, in Europe or anywhere else she has travelled in the world. Clare Pennington

Originally posted in Time Out Beijing