“Beauty itself doth of itself persuade the eyes of men without an orator.“
William Shakespeare.
'The Rape Of Lucrece' (1594)
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We decided to install the work by Mit Jai Inn at the center of the gallery’s huge atrium. The work is called ‘Fallen’ and it’s a large flag, that we imagine floating, while falling in slow motion from the ceiling until hitting the ground. We positioned the flag on the floor, giving it the shape of a cross. Now it lies on the ground, people can step on it, can trample it. By the days the cross loses its initial shape, it’s not clear what’s the shape it will take in a month, nobody knows, only time will tell.
Think of a society and imagine its flag, its ideology, the ideology falls. Then try to see a big cross, symbol of religion, of spirituality. But then think that the spiritual wears off, like something trampled under the feet, until it’s not a cross anymore, until it becomes something else, no matter what, it just vanishes. This is the so-called ‘post-ideological’ world we all live in today. Even though the notion of a ‘post‐ideological’ age is itself a masking device, since social media and networks have created new kinds of ideology and globalization and delocalization brought to cultural decentralization.
The very concept of South East Asian art has to be reconsidered after this reflection. South East Asian artists today, just like artists coming from any region, belong to a changing scenario, divided between modernity and tradition, parochialism and hospitality, and the center and the outskirts.
With this project: ‘Falling’, a wide-ranging exhibition, inclusive of 23 artists coming from different countries, we aim to portrait a snapshot of SEA art in its complexity. The show features a majority of established artists, emblematic names resonating internationally during the past 20 years: Mit Jai Inn, Sriwan Janehuttakarnki, Sakarin Krue-On from Thailand; Yunizar, Entang Wiharso, Eko Nugroho from Indonesia; Geraldine Javier, Andres Barrioquinto, Jigger Cruz, Rodel Tapaya from the Philippines and Dinh Q Lê from Vietnam. In dialogue with them, we present a few younger artists that better epitomize the feeling of the new generation: Pannaphan Yodmanee, Gongkan, Kitti Narod, Luis Antonio Santos, Kim Oliveros, Raffy Napay, Ayka Go, Wedhar Riayadi and a group of young artists coming from Singapore: Shen Jiaqi, Khairulddin Wahab, Faris Heizerand Marla Bendini.
Still the exhibition in its whole results in a chorus that's absolutely in sync with one another. In fact regional, cultural peculiarities give way to an international language that all of them equally use to express their art, despite the different context they come from.
South East Asia art scene is today completely parallel to other international realities. This is obviously due to the new fluidity of connections and the incredible ease of communication we experience globally since a few years. But this apparent simplification doesn’t come without a side effect: together with the flexibility and rapidity of communication, the revolution of the global system has enhanced the traits of ‘nihilism’. The very value of freedom is now relegated to the individual sphere as a principle of self-determination, beyond ideologies and morals. Our ethical choices are all relative today, we live in the illusion of freedom but we are simply immersed in a kind of ‘transitory’ reality that doesn’t propose a new system of values in place of the traditional one.
There is nothing that has withstood the corrosion of time, nothing that is worthwhile and that remains. Everything today is fleeting and provisional. We find ourselves living in an archipelago without a center, and this in both senses: the geopolitical one and the cultural one.
But just when ideologies cloud over, the natural human need to give space to the spiritual sphere nevertheless remains. Rationality and spirituality are two sides of the same coin, and they are both functional and necessary to our existence. Therefore artist in this era is called to play a crucial role, being art, perhaps, the only reserve still intact of spirituality, irrationality, ideas and ideologies. Artists today, whether or not they are aware of it, take on a social responsibility; they are the demiurge of spirituality, the modern ministers capable of evoking mental spaces of freedom. Therefore the spiritual part of us continues to live in art.
As modern rebels, artists, while making art, express freedom and independence. Art represents a human sphere capable of resisting automatism and nihilism. It represents the ancient freedom in a modern guise: substantial, elementary freedom that survives in spite of everything.
In fact, it is the immateriality of art that fascinates us. We fall in love with the void, not with the full, because beauty and magic are transcendence, and not materiality. For this reason the language of art has to do with the spiritual so much that it seems stolen from the language of the mystics. If reality in its concreteness cannot stimulate us, because it leaves no room for creation, vitality and beauty exist only where there are construction, projection, invention and ideation. We are irreducibly trapped in our solitude, and if transcendence is given, it runs through the space that exists between nature and its transfiguration. Therefore artistic creation is what fascinates us and keeps us alive, it’s not simply nature, but it’s what, starting from nature, we are able to create.
Michela Sena (curator)
29.11.2021
