Arpedia

The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger begins with the sound of women’s voices describing histories of violence, of things repressed and silenced. Gradually, their voices accumulate into a cacophony of pure sonic intensity against an extreme slow-motioned image of a woman survivor of Japan’s military sexual slavery who, in the absence of words to accurately account for her suffering, gets up and walks into the center of a war crimes tribunal court room and gestures wildly before she faints. This work by Jane Jin Kasen and Guston Sondin-Kung explores ways in which trauma is passed on from previous generations to the present through a sense of being haunted.

© » KADIST

A woman you thought you knew

Sin Wai Kin

A woman you thought you knew by Sin Wai Kin originates from a performance series titled A View from Elsewhere . Wearing exquisite hair and makeup and a pair of silicone breasts under shimmering diamanté lingerie, Sin Wai Kin’s former persona, Victoria Sin, assumes an alluring, inviting, and intimidating pose. Through subtle and slow movements, this atemporal courtesan appears as a living deity, whose presence embodies codes of representation found in brothels from the turn of the century, burlesque, and Beaux Arts female nude painting.

© » KADIST

Tell me everything you saw, and what you think it means

Sin Wai Kin

The video Tell me everything you saw, and what you think it means by Sin Wai Kin is from a performance series titled A View from Elsewhere. Wearing exquisite hair and makeup and a pair of silicone breasts under shimmering diamanté lingerie, Sin Wai Kin’s former persona, Victoria Sin, assumes an alluring, inviting, and intimidating pose. Through subtle and slow movements, this atemporal courtesan appears as a living deity, whose presence embodies codes of representation found in brothels from the turn of the century, burlesque, and Beaux Arts female nude painting.

© » KADIST

The Third Seal-They Are Already Old, They Don't Need to Exist Anymore

Tsang Kin-Wah

The Third Seal—They Are Already Old. They Don’t Need To Exist Anymore is part of The Seven Seals , Tsang’s ongoing series of digital videos that are projected as installations onto the walls and ceilings of dark rooms. Using texts and computer technology, the series draws its reference from various sources—the Bible, Judeo-Christian eschatology, existentialism, metaphysics, politics, among others—to articulate the world’s complexity and the dilemmas that people face while approaching “the end of the world.” The Third Seal is a nineteen-by-twenty-seven-foot projection on a single wall that, together with sound, creates an immersive and dynamic environment.

© » KADIST

Deferral Archive #1

siren eun young jung

Deferral Archive is one of the archival extensions of siren eun young jung’s Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008-), a decade-long ethnographic research project into the diminishing genre of Korean traditional theater known as Yeoseong Gukgeuk . The genre, which was popular in the 1950s-60s, has since been forgotten, without ever being established as either a traditional or modern form of Korean theater. The most distinctive formal trait of Yeoseong Gukgeuk is that the theater performers are exclusively women.

Taking the same name as their most recent solo show at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf, siren eun young jung’s video work Deferral Theatre intertwines various threads from the last decade of the artist’s research into the Yeoseong Gukgeuk theatrical form, in which all of the roles are played by women, as well as performance-based modes of queer resistance in South Korea. The radical and temporally border-crossing qualities of gender fluidity, and lineages of queer subversion within performative spaces, animate Deferral Theatre through a critical deconstruction of Korean history, tradition and gender norms. One particularly powerful scene depicts a young drag king performer tearing at their suit and tie as they lip-sync passionately to a song in English, while the frame lilts with an ecstatic languor, as if the operator of the camera were staggering feverishly.

© » KADIST

I am not going to sing

siren eun young jung

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Sketches from train ride Chicago to San Francisco

Lam Tung Pang

Lam Tung Pang created Sketches from train ride Chicago to San Francisco during his travels through the United States researching American curatorial strategies for representing traditional Chinese painting in museums and cultural institutions. The drawings incorporate both traditional and contemporary Chinese landscape techniques to reflect on the memory, history, and aesthetic practices of the Chinese laborers who played a prominent role in the American westward expansion. By representing the Western landscape according to Chinese aesthetics, Lam calls attention to the distortions and cultural specificity of American representations of the Western landscape and non-Western cultures.

© » KADIST

Lyrics 1, 2, 3

siren eun young jung

Lyrics 1, 2, 3 is part of siren eun young jung Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008–). The work closely follows first and second generations of Yeoseong Gukgeuk actresses, who later became an important source of inspiration for the artist. Formally, this genre of theater draws from Westernized aspects of traditional Korean music performance, as well as from adaptations of pansori , a Korean genre of musical storytelling, to create a staged version of traditional Korean opera.

© » KADIST

Journey of a Piece of Soil

Truong Cong Tung

Truong Cong Tung’s Journey of a Piece of Soil (2013) and its accompanying object-based installation of the same name (2014) consider the function of ritual in larger modes of collective engagement and cultural production. In examining how spirituality inflects social engagement, Truong’s contemplates the juncture at which the rational beings encounter the unexplained while also suggesting how embodied practices offer vital conduits for experiencing new modes of consciousness. The video features a man dressed in camouflage fatigues with a blue cap tilling a patch of red-clay soil amidst a green-stalk covered patch of land.

© » KADIST

Deferral Archive #2

siren eun young jung

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I can’t believe we are still protesting

Wong Wai Yin

Drawn from the widely circulated images of protests around the world in support of women rights and racial equality, the phrase I can’t believe we are still protesting is both the title of Wong Wai Yin’s photographic series and a reference to similar messages seen on protest signages. The artist used found images from the internet, including a viral photo of an elderly woman who took part in the 2016 “Black Monday” strike against a proposed anti-abortion law in Poland, and another image taken the same year of a group of protestors in the United Kingdom, rallying for the Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing parallels with Hank Willis Thomas’s I Am a Man (2013) painting in the KADIST Collection, Wong employs the visual language and terminology of mass media, specifically borrowing images from protests on civil rights issues.

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Tribute to Inside Looking Out - For the male artists along my way

Wong Wai Yin

In this work the artist stages a humorously violent “intervention” against male-dominated cultures of art production in present-day China. For this video, Wong accompanied six male friends from art school to a group show of their work titled “Inside Looking Out” at Osage Gallery in Beijing. Throughout her visit, she was rarely acknowledged for her own creative accomplishments and was more frequently introduced as an artist’s girlfriend, and often without name.

© » KADIST

I can’t believe we are still protesting

Wong Wai Yin

© » KADIST

I can’t believe we are still protesting

Wong Wai Yin

© » KADIST

I can’t believe we are still protesting

Wong Wai Yin

© » KADIST

Classified Digits

Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader

Indexes that either allow or inhibit the establishment of communication exist in both signed as well as spoken languages. Some differ radically depending on a variety of social, economic and geographical factors, while others are universally understood. Seemingly small and fleeting gestures can determine a sense of affiliation or a feeling of rejection.

© » KADIST

Mythological Time

Sun Xun

Sun Xun’s lushly illustrated, dynamic short film Mythological Time is a dreamy chronicle of rapacious industrial development, the mythical qualities of state propaganda, and the constancy of change, as experienced by an unnamed coal mining town. While it is not named in the film itself, the town at the center of Mythological Time is a re-imagined incarnation of Sun’s hometown of Fuxin, in the northern Chinese province of Liaoning. Sandwiched between North Korea and Inner Mongolia, Fuxin is a poor coal-mining region that used to contain one of China’s largest open-pit mines and has historically been the site of significant conflict, thanks to its rich mineral resources.

© » KADIST

21 Ke (21 Grams)

Sun Xun

Sun’s animated film 21 Ke (21 Grams) is based on the 1907 research by the American physician Dr. Duncan MacDougall who claimed the measured weight of the human soul to be twenty-one grams. Sun used this episode—which was not fully recognized by the scientific community—as a point of departure for his depiction of a dystopian world in which the narration of history and notion of time are interrupted. Because each frame was drawn by hand with crayon, it took Sun and his animation studio team a few years to complete this thirty-minute film of a surreal journey through mysterious cities, plagues of mosquitoes, broken statues, cawing ravens, waving flags, and flooded graveyards.

© » KADIST

They burn our village

Aung Ko

Painting (Painting)

They burn our village by Aung Ko is part of the artist’s daily visual diary as an attempt to process and note what has been happening in Myanmar while he is being exiled, following the military takeover of the government in February 2021. Almost two years ago, Myanmar’s military ousted the democratically elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi and seized power in a coup. Since then, the country has descended into turmoil.

© » KADIST

Unfollow

Yung Jake

Unfollow is a music video by Yung Jake featuring a man haunted by the shadows of a former relationship. With the omnipresence of social media in our daily lives, breaking up in the physical world no longer suffices: posts by his ex-lover still appear in his newsfeed, reminding him of her presence and thus making it harder from him to let go of his relationship. As the ‘unfollow’ button on social media appears to be the only way to break up completely, Unfollow underlines the barrier between our online and offline identities and the difficulty to separate them.

© » KADIST

Moving Target Shadow Detection

Sung Tieu

Modelled and rendered in 3D, Moving Target Shadow Detection by Sung Tieu reconstructs the entire interior of the Hotel Nacional de Cuba in Havana, the site of the first-known instance of a supposed sonic attack, which collectively became known as ‘Havana Syndrome’. First reported by CIA staff in the Cuban capital in 2016, the syndrome includes a range of unexplained disorders ranging from nausea, fatigue and memory loss to brain injuries resembling concussions. In Tieu’s film, CCTV camera footage and images taken by a nano drone lead from the hotel’s lobby to an occupied hotel room, where the viewer is confronted with classified documents and news reportages of the recent Havana Syndrome attacks around the world.

© » KADIST

I don’t remember

Yung Jake

I don’t remember is a video by Yung Jake that combines his passion for both music and the visual arts. As per several of his works the video borrows from the vernacular of rap and relies on the aesthetic and stylistic qualities of music videos. A humorous interpretation of the rap and hip hop genres, the video combines scenes from urban settings and snapshots of a party as the artist raps in a drowsy monotone about having forgotten the wild night.

© » KADIST

Datamosh

Yung Jake

As the video Datamosh begins to play, Yung Jake emerges out of a colorful, smoke-like background and breaks into rap. Malfunctioning green screens and pixelated digital mash-ups bleed into each other in a parody of the music video trope and specifically of the trend of ‘datamoshing’—a digital technique commonly used across this genre. The song’s lyrics distinctly borrow from the lexicon of rap, combining mentions of clubs, money and fame, with self-referential and humorous lines that literally describe the way in which the artist subverts the medium.

© » KADIST

Back images

Sarah Lai Cheuk Wah

Back images is a series of six photographs by Sarah Lei Cheuk Wah that explore the semiotics of power and their intersection with representations of masculinity. The photographs feature what seem to be stock images of several policemen—their rugged uniforms, vehicles and weapons drenching the photographs with signs of masculinity and power as the policemen carry on with their usual tasks. The series was part of a larger exhibition entitled In Stasis where Lei transformed the booth of an art fair into what appeared to be a security area inside an airport.

© » KADIST

APA JIKA, The Mis-Placed Comma

Erika Tan

APA JIKA, The Mis-Placed Comma is one of three works Erika Tan filmed within exhibition spaces during the final stages of their transition from colonial period law courts to the National Gallery Singapore. Part of an on-going body of work, this video focuses on the figure of a forgotten weaver, Halimah Binti Abdullah, who participated in the 1924 British Empire Exhibition in the United Kingdom. A minor figure in the exhibition histories of what was formerly known as Malaya (today, Singapore and Malaysia), Halimah exists as a series of footnotes, gaining historical attention only for the act of a premature death from pneumonia, in London and away from home.

© » KADIST

Wailing Requiem

Wang Tuo

Wailing Requiem is the fourth and final chapter of The Northeast Tetralogy , a film project that Wang Tuo began in 2017. The project is a unique regional research of Northeastern China that addresses the region’s geopolitical contentions. Drawing on significant moments from China’s modern history, Wang’s visual storytelling sets up and displaces a series of socio-historical situations through multiple narrative structures.

© » KADIST

Shanghai Biennale Awaiting Your Arrival

Xu Tan