HO Rui An
Student Bodies (2019)
HD video
Duration: 26 minutes 30 seconds

Student Bodies is a work of pedagogical horror that approaches the fraught history of capitalist modernity and radical culture in East and Southeast Asia through the figure of the student body. Beginning with the students of Satsuma and Choshu from Bakumatsu-era Japan, who were the first students from the country to study in the West, the work considers the student body as both collective and singular, metaphor and flesh, standing in for the body politic of the region across the successive periods of “miraculous” development, crises and recoveries through to the present day.

Ho Rui An is an artist and writer working in the intersections of contemporary art, cinema, performance and theory. Working primarily across the mediums of lecture, essay and film, he probes into the shifting relations between image and power, focusing on the ways by which images are produced, circulate and disappear within the contexts of globalism and governance. He lives and works in Singapore and Berlin.

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Orawan ARUNRAK
War Journey, Okinawa (2014)
Single-channel video, colour, sound
Duration: 24 minutes 23 seconds

Not long after her godfather had passed away, Orawan Arunrak visited her godmother in Prachinburi Province. He had served in the military, and was posted near the Thai-Cambodian border. The artist asked for her godfather’s military jacket from her godmother, and she carried the jacket with her during a six-month journey which included visits to Ho Chi Minh City and Okinawa. Her godmother had joked with the artist about the tales of gold at the border, which her godfather had somehow failed to obtain. War Journey, Okinawa documents the artist’s walks around Okinawa, where Orawan would stop at various places, sit and stitch golden thread along the border lines of the camouflage patterns on his jacket.

Orawan Arunrak works and lives in Bangkok. Her multimedia practice explores the relationships that objects and peoples have with their various and diverse physical, sociopolitical and cultural contexts. Her works often reflect a dialogue between the artist, local communities in Thailand, and other places that she has encountered on her travels through Southeast Asia and Europe. The artist explores concepts of nationhood and nationality, combining visual and sound elements drawn from conversations spoken in Thai, German, English and Vietnamese.

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KIM
Skin Time (2015)
Single-channel video, no sound
Duration: 8 hours

The artist printed different times on his skin and recorded these traces of time. The duration of Skin Time resembles a gallery’s opening hours—typically, 11am to 7pm. The work is an 8-hour stop-motion video, constructed from 480 still images that change every 60 seconds. The video is synchronised with actual time, allowing the work to also function like a clock (clocks are rarely seen inside galleries). The video references the viewing experience inside a cinema, where audiences can concentrate on a time-based aesthetic experience by blocking actual time and space. The artist explores the conversation between physical time and biologic time by using minimalist and solemn images.

Kim is an Asian American who resides in New York. Because of issues concerning his identity, he is currently a stateless person. Till today, the artist’s country of origin remains unknown. His name has often been mistaken as Korean or as Chinese from China, Hong Kong or Taiwan, or even Filipino and Vietnamese. His works, mostly in video art, explore the conversation between the body and time.

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TAN Zi Hao
Negaraku. Bukan. My Country. Is Not. 我的祖国。不是。எனது நாடு. அல்ல. ਮੇਰਾ ਦੇਸ਼. ਨਾ. Menuaku. Ukai. Pogunku. Au. نڬاراکو.
(2014)
Single-channel video
Duration: 1 minute 29 seconds

Can a national anthem be sung in another language? Can a national anthem be sung in multiple languages? Can a nation have more than one national language? How many more could we include? But how many others have we excluded in the name of nationalism, patriotism, or even multiculturalism? If a hegemonic power can only seek to induct the foreign subject into its sphere of influence by way of a foreign medium of instruction—that is, a language beyond the national language, a local dialect, or an idiom—perhaps to instil nationalism requires not only the national language, but also the language of the foreign other. The resulting negative excess in such a process of translation and transcription is always alluring. At the moment a country announces its generosity towards others, it renounces some others in return. The politics of recognition, ever so pursued by ideologues, appears ridiculous at times, but remains nonetheless an inevitable ambition. Polyglottic subtitles; a smokescreen, at once, attracts and distracts. Nation and language are incompatible.

Tan Zi Hao is a multidisciplinary conceptual artist. His ideas have taken shape across a diverse range of works involving soil ecology, language politics, interpretive etymology, mythical chimeras, and organic assemblages from carrier shells (Xenophora pallidula) to household casebearers (Phereoeca uterella). His practice is mostly informed by the political contestation of identity vis-à-vis the nation-state. Tan recently completed his PhD in Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore, undertaking fieldwork research on animal imagery in the Islamic art of Cirebon, West Java. His recent exhibitions include Back to Art, A+ Works of Art, Kuala Lumpur, 2020; The Horizon is Just an Illusion: New Thoughts on Landscape, OUR ArtProjects, Kuala Lumpur, 2018; ILHAM Contemporary Forum (Malaysia 2009–2017), Kuala Lumpur, 2017; and Singapore Biennale: An Atlas of Mirrors, Singapore Art Museum, 2016–2017.

TRƯƠNG Quế Chi
Cuộc sống ở đây / Life is here* (2017)
HD video
Duration: 7 minutes 25 seconds
Credits: acting and editing by Đỗ Văn Hoàng, and sound by Hoàng Thu Thủy 

A man’s presence through his silhouette. Corporeality as a form of existence. A substance. In and out of the frame. Life is a form of maintenance, endurance, and tolerance, inside and outside the body. Events or incidents, like blows of any intensity, make rhythms. A man whose face can’t be seen. And his face is the only thing that he can’t refuse and can’t hide.

Life is elsewhere. And life is here.**

—translated by Hiếu

* The work is part of the video series “A Reply to ALL MY LIFE” 22/08-05/09
** Life is Elsewhere is a novel by Milan Kundera

Trương Quế Chi lives in Hanoi and works in visual art and cinema, as an artist, curator and lecturer. She is one of the four curators of the inaugural A+ Online Festival of Video Art.

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Ray LANGENBACH
singapore sub liminal (1994–2017)
Single-chanel documentary video, 4:3 format, colour and sound in stereo
Duration 11 minutes 13 seconds
Credits: camera by Ray Langenbach and Sharaad Kuttan, and editing by Ray Langenbach

Singapore: at the end of 1993, the Fifth Passage artist collective hosted a week-long art festival, the Artists’ General Assembly (AGA), at their gallery space. Earlier in 1993, the theatre group, The Necessary Stage, had organised productions of forum theatre.

In early 1994, the artist Josef Ng, who had performed at the AGA, and Fifth Passage gallery manager Iris Tan were both charged with offences concerning a performance by Ng. Furthermore, the practices of both performance art and forum theatre became proscribed by the Singapore state.

These two arts groups, along with several cultural workers, found themselves scripted into a Singapore government nightmare scenario. The most riveting performances of 1994 seem to take place in the offices of the bureaucracy, police stations or the courts. Vital civil society forms became the object of renewed state surveillance and scrutiny. The art scene became the mise-en-scène of a film-noir script, and the term “performance art” took on the aura of a criminal enterprise or a forbidden ideology. The telephones of artists, cultural workers and academics were reported to be tapped, and we began to look over our shoulders during conversations, or we would lapse into silence when a stranger sat at a neighbouring table in a coffee shop. Documentations of sensitive performances were secreted away in fear that they would be absconded by the police. Some former colleagues were labeled government spies, others as too contentious. Evidence and tactics were mulled over daily.

Public universities and art schools shunned artists associated with the AGA. Students blamed their lecturers for having taught them what they called the “illegal” art form of performance art. Some artists attacked their colleagues, arguing that a few had set back the freedoms for all. Some intellectuals buttressed government positions. Performance artists removed the term from their résumés and grant applications and changed the descriptions of their works to “dance”, “theatre”, “movement”, or “action”. An entire art form slipped into the shadows. Noticing that even our sleep had taken on the pallor of state paranoia, I began to ask colleagues to relate their dreams to my camera.

Ray Langenbach is Professor of Creative Arts, Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman, and is one of the four curators of the inaugural A+ Online Festival of Video Art.

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AU Sow Yee
Pak Tai Foto (2015)
HD video
Duration: 19 minutes 14 seconds

Pak Tai Foto is a photo studio located in the heart of Kuala Lumpur. Established in the 1950s during the age of British colonisation, the photo studio is older than “Malaysia” itself. Pak Tai Foto is located near Merdeka Square, or Independence Square, a place where the Malayan flag was hoisted for the first time on 00:00 31st August 1957, when Malaya declared its independence. It’s a roughly ten-minute walk from the photo studio to the Square. Currently, many foreign labours pass by the location. For the video, Pak Tai Foto, the artist interviewed foreign labourers from Bangladesh, Myanmar and China. In these interviews, they shared their respective reasons and experiences of leaving their home country to work in other parts of the world. In addition, they also spoke of an ideal place, be it real or imaginary, and they share their favourite song from when they were children or teenagers. Originally part of a two-channel video installation, Pak Tai Foto attempts to reveal the fragile borders between absence and presence, the visible and the invisible, the audible and inaudible. 

Au Sow Yee, a Malaysian who now works and lives in Taipei, is one of the four curators of the inaugural A+ Online Festival of Video Art.

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