Dreaming of Balthus: Hisaji Hara

At three in the morning, Hisaji Hara awakes to a darkened room, the sound of the forest and the pale light of a white moon filtering through his window. The photographer’s countryside home lies just outside Tokyo, bordering an 800-year-old bamboo forest. After his first coffee, he sets about his day. ‘I often work obsessively for six to seven hours,’ he says, adding that he sustains himself on sweets and caffeine for ‘best efficiency’.

When we speak, though, it is at a more reasonable hour and Hara is sitting peacefully at home, his cat nestled beside him. In slightly broken but careful English, he describes the ‘damp air and silver sky’ encircling his house. But life wasn’t always so serene. Until 2005, the photographer mostly spent his time in the US, shooting stills and practising art on the side. It was after his visa expired that he returned to Japan and conceived the project that would dominate the next six years of his life – and launch him on to the international art scene. This month, it arrives in Beijing as part of the Caochangdi PhotoSpring festival, with +3 Gallery at Three Shadows playing host to Hara’s work until mid-June.

It’s a story he has clearly told a thousand times before. ‘One quiet autumn night in 2005, a very vivid image of one of Balthus’s paintings suddenly came into my mind,’ he recalls. ‘It was “Thérèse Dreaming”. I tried to search for an image of the painting on the internet and found only a very small version. Despite being only a blurred 5cm square, it radiated an intense light of authenticity.’ Hara scrupulously planned 25 black-and-white photographs, based on canvases by the early 20th-century French painter Balthus (Count Balthasar Klossowski de Rola), few of which he has seen in the flesh.

‘Thérèse Dreaming’ depicts an adolescent girl, face turned away, eyes closed and skin bathed in sunlight. Her parted legs reveal white underwear as she dozes unconcerned, basking in the sun’s warmth. But it was not the sexual elements in the count’s work that enraptured Hara. Rather, it was the lines of composition and use of light; the carefully rendered angles of bent knees and elbows that form a complex image; the sense of aerial perspective achieved within that cramped space that caught his eye.

‘Light and shadow are everything to me,’ says Hara. Using the same models for every shot, he took over a 1920s art nouveau-style medical clinic. The building, in a state of preserve since the ’60s, even had old medicine bottles still on the shelves. ‘It has its own spatial quality,’ he explains. ‘When I shot the interior, I wanted to transfer that quality into light and shadow to achieve a density of image.’ Using dry-ice machines found at concerts, Hara has discovered his desired stillness.

The dispersed light seems to softly envelop his models, giving them an almost comatose air, yet the figures and the objects are still sharply defined. There is no attempt to disguise that they are posed; they are calm but frozen, acting their parts.

As we get down to discussing the light in Balthus’s paintings, I pause to ask what Hara means by ‘authenticity’. It is a word that he frequently uses to describe his goals as well as the work and artists that he most admires, such as the filmmaker Tarkovsky and the painters Poussin (1594-1665) and Giotto (1266-1337).

‘Authentic’ artwork should achieve a sense of timelessness. ‘It makes you feel that you’ll never have to compare a painting to any other in art history,’ he says. But Hara’s quest for timelessness goes beyond a still visual style. He is keen to show that photography need not be limited by its modernity. By taking multiple exposures, Hara has proved to be a man of patience and has avoided the lens’s usual sense of perspective.

The technique enables Hara to focus on different subjects in each take, squeezing more detail into the end shot – just as if he were composing a painting. ‘Because I was shifting the focus as I took the multiple exposures, the optical perspective was impaired and I got a really attractive sense of space, which I see in Balthus’s paintings,’ he adds.

In what seems a quirk of fate, history reminds us that Balthus’s surviving widow, Setsuko, is from Japan; the painter was as inspired by the island’s ancient landscape painting as he was by Western art. In turn, throughout Hara’s interpretations, the photographer features Japanese models, school uniforms and period architecture, all composed within a hazy, unidentified time. It feels as if Balthus has gone full circle. By using the medium Japan is perhaps most famous for – photography – Hara has managed to imbue his images with a timelessness of their own. Clare Pennington


Originally posted in Time Out Beijing

It Means Nothing to Me: Turner Prize-Winner Susan Philipsz's First Collaboration With her Father is Exhibited in China

Beijing is not the first place you'd think of finding Turner Prize-winner Susan Philipsz. But the artist, who usually creates works of sound sculpture from Celtic or Western pieces of music, is part of a new trend. British artists exhibiting solo in Beijing this month include sculptor Tony Cragg and British-based artist Bashir Makhoul, and there'll be plenty more coming to take advantage of the growing Chinese market. Chinese economic growth is giving rise to a new generation of collectors here with a voracious appetite for contemporary art.

The timing for Philipsz's new exhibition in China's capital is telling, but the sound sculptor, as she refers to herself, is not simply following the crowd. In fact it is a meandering journey back to her home, retracing her family roots, that has brought the Berlin-based artist to China for the first exhibition of her new work, It Means Nothing to Me.

The work is her first collaboration with her now octogenarian father; a duet of the Celtic song The Ash Grove, which the father and daughter both grew up singing. China is of special significance to Philipsz's father, as he grew up in Burma, next door to a Chinese community, stories of which the artist has heard since her childhood. 'Location has always been key in my work,' Philipsz says to me the day before the the show's opening at Caochangdi's Mizuma & One gallery.

Whether it is the underbelly of three vaulting bridges that cross her hometown, Glasgow's River Clyde or the Guggenheim's rotunda in New York, the artist always plans her work in the knowledge of its location. Step into the white-walled interior of the gallery where It Means Nothing to Me is housed, and you'll be faced by a poster-sized framed photograph. The use of photography to accompany her sound work is an interesting addition for Philipsz, whose art is usually invisible, made purely of sound.

The photograph, showing a tin foil stick, driven into a dirty grass verge, is a reconstruction of a childhood memory. "My dad told my younger sister that if she ever saw a silver stick in the ground, it meant fairies had left money there," she says. So, in 1970s Glasgow, Mr Philipsz planted an aluminium foil-covered stick in a rough, grassy patch of turf littered with rubbish along the path to Sunday Church. When Philipsz's sister set eyes on the shiny pole, it was as if she had been transported to a fairyland. "You could see it in her eyes, but really he'd planted it next to a factory, and I remember a cigarette packet being there." The scene meant nothing to the artist as the elder child, and the uncompromising photograph - showing thick rough grass and crumpled cigarette packet with the unseen buried money - supports this reality.

The exhibition is dark, with only natural light illuminating the two black speakers standing a little lower than head height, facing each other from three or four metres apart in the centre of the space. From these come the untrained but lovely voices of an old man and younger woman; Philipsz and her father. The pace of the song is slow and transforms the space from a simple white box into something more sublime, as a story of love, death and loss unfolds.

Philipsz's dad was born in Burma to an English mother and Burmese father. Having grown up, as Philipsz describes, "isolated and separated," without being allowed to go to the local school because of the British blood that runs through his veins, "he went to a refugee camp when [Burma] was occupied during the war with Japan. Then it became a Communist country, so he had to make a decision whether to remain in Burma and choose a Burmese rather than a British nationality." Philipsz's father chose to keep his British citizenship. In his 20s he moved to Glasgow, never again to see many of the family members he grew up with. Burma came under the rule of a military junta led by the Communist Party of Burma in 1962. 'He doesn't have such fond memories of that time in Burma, but he does have fond memories of the Chinese community he lived next to," says Philipsz. "Those are the people that he saw most of. They were kind to him."

For It Means Nothing to Me, father and daughter recorded their versions of The Ash Grove separately, though in gallery they are played together, and in time. This isolated recording process was necessary for the artist to recall "a sense of solitude." Her father's voice is tuneful, with softer and faltering tones that betray his age. Played against the sweet but characteristically untrained voice of his daughter, the result is startlingly moving. The song is in the voice of a man walking through the shady ash grove where he first met his "dear one." But in the second verse it is revealed that she is now buried under the green turf, separated from him forever.

Dig deeper into the song's history, Philipsz says, and you'll unearth even more sinister undercurrents. In the original Welsh version, The Ash Grove is a lament that sees a father grieving over a daughter he killed. Having intended to slay the lover he disapproved of, it is now his child who lies under the earth. The buried money that lies unseen in the photograph suddenly becomes that bit more menacing. There is a sense of separation, love, accidental loss and displaced melancholy. Here it is a reminder of the Burmese family her father was suddenly severed from and the Chinese community he remembers so fondly. It is a tale of change, of love and yet distance between the family generations, people who Philipsz herself is so far removed.

"He remembers lots of these sounds from the Chinese community,' Philipsz says of her father's life in Burma. 'He talked about the sound of funeral gongs, or rain on the corrugated iron roofs. He remembers lots of these sounds and I find this very evocative." The work also refers to these sounds, so that the relationship between this anglicised Welsh lament and Philipsz's father's childhood memories is located back to this Chinese community.  The original Welsh version of the song was meant to be accompanied by the harp, and so Philipsz has used what she considers to be the "Chinese harp" to form another element of the sound installation. After the unaccompanied voices' duet, the sound of the zither fills the room. Philipsz recorded herself plucking the strings in her studio in Berlin. Untrained in the instrument, she recorded each note individually, and these sounds resonate from four white speakers set up around the gallery walls.

Philipsz's father was one of her most important inspirations for becoming an artist, and she does talk of a happy, if sometimes difficult childhood. Her father would praise her drawings as a young girl, and it was his insistence on drawing his children that attracted her to art in the first place. With five brothers and sisters, life could be tough for her parents too, and they would sometimes escape from the stresses of life in music. "My mother, she would lock herself up in her room with the lights out and listen to Ravel and Debussy. Story-telling was also a part of growing up - it was uplifting and a wee kind for escape."

Looking at the darker themes that have invaded this work, she says, "I suppose that is something that always comes up in my work. Escapism, longing and separation are things I think have come from my parents' stories."  Philipsz's father's story has been, she thinks, subconsciously filtering into her work for a long time. Explaining why she chose now to collaborate with her father for a piece to be shown in China, she says, almost in a whisper, "He's eighty, and I don't know if he has much time left."

Originally posted in the Huffington Post.

Static Electricity: Ma Qiusha exhibition

Showing at Beijing Commune until Thursday 19 April

When a static electric charge builds up, you can feel the air around you change: your skin tingles, your hair stands on end, and then you get the hit! But Ma Qiusha’s latest exhibition isn’t about the moment of inevitable shock. In Mandarin, its title is Jingdian, referring to the static build-up – it’s all about the anticipation.

On the wall of Beijing Commune, three flat screens hang in a row, each showing differently coloured melting ice blocks. In ‘Red/White/Yellow’, the first rectangular lump is made from blood, the second from milk, and the third from urine. We glimpse the first minutes of melting, as the white-frosted texture of each block begins to darken, revealing a clear film of latex over the ice. The colours are meant to recall the coding of the audio jacks you would use to connect a TV to a sound system – a charge locked inside a protective plastic casing (in this case a condom). The artist links this to the intensely private, sexual and even insanitary fluids that make up our daily routine.

Although the link between static and these visceral elements seems a little tenuous, Ma’s works are often unsettling. ‘Token’ shows a dark road illuminated with a single, dim beam, filmed unsteadily as if from the back of a moving trolley. Across the dark tarmac, roughly cut organs are intermittently and violently thrown – a large kidney, brains, a liver – all accompanied by a feline purring, distorted like something from a horror film. Hot steam from the offal fills the screen and quickly disappears.

Ma’s works are as visceral as ever, yet here they are made up of traces, things left undefined. ‘Fog’ is a painting consisting of layers of watercolour built over a pattern of lace. The textures of the material remain on the paper, although the material itself has been removed. We are left only with the remains of bodily fluids, viscera and elements of man-made lace.

If this exhibition evokes in us anything, it’s a feeling of underlying foreboding and mortality. As the title suggests, it’s not about the shocks, but nor is it for the faint-hearted. Clare Pennington

Originally posted in Time Out Beijing

Sui Jianguo solo exhibition

Showing at Pace Beijing until Saturday 14 April

Sui Jianguo came to sculpture in the 1980s, at an age when the medium was still predominantly used for public realist monuments in China. This solo exhibition is a selective retrospective looking back at his work since 1987, the year he moved from Shandong to Beijing – and it is a career worth mapping. Sui is an artist who has long influenced trends in Chinese sculpture, and he remains a key figure as the head of the sculpture department at China’s Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA).

The selection on display here represents his artistic career fluently and beautifully without overcrowding the space. Seen together, the threads that the artist has been pulling at throughout his career become apparent. His exploration of form, and interest in expressing force by combining different materials in his sculpture, emerge to the fore.
 

In the first hall stand classical plaster figures based on traditional Greek sculptures made by Sui’s students, but very quickly we move into more abstract and tactile territory. ‘Earthly Force’ (1992-1994) is a series of stones wrapped in industrial metal cords, strewn across the floor. The dinosaur-egg-sized rocks seem to push out against the rusting nets.

Another work that has been well represented is ‘Legacy Mantle’, conceived during the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. The empty sculpture of a ‘Mao Suit’, as it is often dubbed, represents China as a shell, in which different leaders, regions and ideologies can be exchanged to fill an externally unchanging uniform. Here, the first version of this work is imposingly large, accompanied by a small maquette and deserving of the space it takes up.

The exhibition brings us right up to Sui’s changing interests as they bend towards manipulating forms. ‘For Presence’ (2006-ongoing), the artist has been adding a drip of blue paint to a metal stick every week, and will do so until his death. The result so far is an industrial, dark globule reminiscent of the lacquer-making process. Rather like a retrospective, the globule will become a strange, self-made monument to the artist’s life – a fitting symbol for this comprehensive and important exhibition. Clare Pennington

Originally posted in Time Out Beijing