Art Cologne 2018 Film works from Southeast Asia - Galerie Michael ...

Art Cologne 2018

Film works from Southeast Asia

Martha Atienza PH
Kiri Dalena PH
Lani Maestro PH
Charles Lim SG
Ming Wong SG
Ho Tzu Nyen SG
Nguyễn Trinh Thi VT
Park Chan-kyong KOR
Tromarama IDN
Apichatpong Weerasethakul THA
Wu Chi-Yu TW

In recent years some of the most intriguing film and video art originated from the regions of Sou-
theast Asia. The above listed represent a selection which show the range of the artists’ research
into their own cultural and historical backgrounds. The works gain shape through allegories that
re-evaluate the social and political reforms in Post-War and Cold-War Asia. The cinematic works
combine fact and fiction and not only allude to rarely discussed subject-matters but also raise cru-
cial questions about power and authority, construction of narratives, repression of identities, and
collective trauma.

The medium of moving image allows for a representation of time and space through a narrative
that results from imagination, real history or another, parallel universe. Whether a depiction of the
fantastic and an invention of the human mind or a documentation of reality, a moving image work
presents a singular spatial and temporal narrative that can also shift and acquire new or additio-
nal meaning from the space within which it is seen. Its narrative can therefore become part of the
space as the space can become part of the artwork.

The suggested artists are concerned with the varied connections between history, politics, the indi-
vidual and the collective in contemporary society. With a practice revolving around the medium of
moving image, they search for contemporary narratives in lost memories through the reproduction
and analysing of oral history and myths, as well as contemporary media and popular culture.

Martha Atienza PH

born 1981, Manila

Born in Manila, The Philippines to a Dutch mother and Filipino father, Atienza has moved between
both countries and cultures throughout her life. Currently she resides both in the Netherlands and
the Philippines, dependent on where her projects bring her.

In 2006, Martha received her Bachelor in Fine Arts from the Academy of Visual Arts and Design
in the Netherlands. She also participated at the art programme at the Kuvataideakatemia in Hel-
sinki, Finland, in 2005. Previously she exhibited video art, often described as snapshots of reality,
as part of installations at galleries. Her works have been exhibited internationally at various art
spaces, galleries and video festivals. In 2009, she joined a residency in Green Papaya Project
space in the Philippines. She recently was awarded the Ateneo Arts Award with studio Residency
Grants in Liverpool, Melbourne, New York and Singapore.
In 2017 she won the prestigious Balois Art Price for her video installation Our Island,
11°16`58.4“ 123°45`07.0“E which shows a traditional procession from her native Philippines,
which she alienates by placing it under water. We watch the procession passing by as if in an
aquarium: Christ carrying the cross, men in women’s clothes and demonstrators carrying tableaux
with political slogans, threatened from behind by menacing, armed henchman. Through her cast
of characters and choice of setting, Atienza presents a both critical and humorous take not only on
the state of society in the Philippines but also on the threat of climate change to which the country
is increasingly exposed through the warming of the world’s oceans.

Atienza’s video installations are visions culled from her Filipino and Dutch side. The precept of
‘stranger’ emanates as crevice between the operations of understanding and imagining. Her work
is a series mostly constructed in video, of almost sociological nature that studies her direct envi-
ronment.

Atienza concocts her observations into fictions framed by gallery devices. She does not spare
herself from this presentation of anomalies. Tempting as it is to construe identity within the ope-
ration of the gaze. Atienza hardly gives us this power. She is still the employer of this gaze, even
when the view is centered on her own image. It remains a curious sensation: to stand as voyeur to
another person’s voyeurism.

Martha Atienza
Gilubong Ang Akong Pusod sa Dagat
(My navel is buried in the sea)
Three screen video installation
2011,
HD video, 31 min
English subtitles

The video captures the significance and mystery of the sea to the millions of Filipinos who derive
their living from it, particularly giving shape to a reality which is rarely seen. It reflects the Philippi-
nes’ historical and geographical relationship with the ocean and to its contemporary reality, as a
metaphor of necessity and opportunity, and of both community and isolation.
following the men from Madridejos, Bantayan island onboard container vessels, batel, Banka’s and
underwater- it is a portrait of a people. Made for and by the people of Madridejos, the Philippines.

Kiri Dalena PH

1975 born in Manila, Philippines
lives and works in Manila (Philippines)

Dalena is an acclaimed visual artist and filmmaker known internationally for her works that lay
bare the social inequalities and injustices that continue to persist, particularly in the Philippines.
Her active involvement in the mass struggle to uphold human rights amidst state persecution is the
foundation for her art practice that underscores the relevance of protest and civil disobedience in
contemporary society.

Dalena’s works are both documentation and critical commentary on historical and current state
of national political affairs. „Erased Slogans“ (2008-today) for instance, is a series of digitally-
manipulated scanned photographs documenting the numerous demonstrations during the Martial
Law era under then Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos in the 1970s. Deleting all the text that
has been previously written in the placards, the artist encapsulates the magnitude of government
suppression carried out under the military regime. „Red Saga“ (2004), originally captured in film,
recounts the intense armed hostility towards radical individuals and serves as a call for sustained
uprising. Meanwhile, „Requiem for M“ (2010) tackles one the most brutal murder of journalists in
the world – the Maguindanao Massacre – and the culture of impunity that plagues the Philippines.

Dalena‘s films have been screened in numerous international film festivals, exemplry of which is
Tungkung Langit (Lullabye for a Storm) (2012) - a three-channel video chronicle of two orphaned
children coping with the aftermath of a typhoon that devastated Mindanao (southern region of the
Philippines) in 2011. The film has been shown in Visions du Reel (SW, 2014), Naqsh Short Film
Festival (BH, 2014) and in the Sharjah Biennale 11 Film Program (AE, 2013), among others.

Kiri Dalena
Monument for a Present Future, 2013
Single-channel video and mixed media installation
(wood, clay and stone)

In an installation comprising fragments of body parts made of wood, clay, and stone scattered in
foetal positions, Kiri Dalena’s Monument for a Present Future (2013) recalls the ash-covered bo-
dies in the wake of Mt. Vesuvius’s eruption in A.D. 79, suggesting that the loss of lives will always
count as the greatest tragedy in the aftermath of catastrophes or atrocities. The foetal human
forms echo the postures of protesters beaten during the years of Martial Law, while the video do-
cuments the dirt road where 58 civilian bodies were found in the Maguindanao massacre of 2009.

Charles Lim Yi Yong SG

born 1973, Singapore
lives and works in Singapore.

A former national sailor who competed in the 1996 Olympics representing Singapore and Team
China in the 2007 America’s Cup, he co-founded the seminal net-art collective tsunamii.net which
exhibited at the prestigious dOCUMENTA11.

Charles’s work encompasses film, installation, sounds, conversations, text, drawing, and pho-
tography. Since 2005, he has been developing a body of works, titled SEA STATE, that explo-
res the political, biophysical and psychic contours of the Southeast Asian city state, Singapore,
through the visible and invisible lenses of the sea.

Made up of nine components and inspired by the World Meteorological Organization’s code for
measuring sea conditions, which measures the varying states ranging from calm, to moderate, to
the phenomenal, his SEA STATE works have been exhibited at manifesta7, the Shanghai Bien-
nale and most recently, Singapore Biennale.

Charles’s solo-exhibition In Search of Raffles’ Light (2013) at the National University of Singapo-
re Museum tracked the immaterial, mundane, anecdotal and irreconcilable traces surrounding
Singapore’s fractured relationship with the sea.

His short film, „All The Lines Flow Out“, a meditation on the drainage infrastructures of Singapore
premiered at the 68th Venice Film Festival in 2011 and won a „Special Mention Award“, making
him the first Singaporean to ever win an award at the festival.

Charles Lim Yi Yong

Surveying the Singapore perimeter in a recreational context, line in the chart (2008) is based on
an image taken by Charles Lim when he encountered a sea wall along the northeast border regi-
ons of Singapore.

The encounter, until today, remains familiar but perplexing. On the one hand, the wall in the sea,
as sudden barricade, a line in the chart that marks Singapore, is markedly highlighted by multilin-
gual signs, a quaint signifier of many post-colonial publics; but on the other hand it activates an
insight into Singapore’s relation with the sea and its steady shifts, as almost-extant presence.

Line is considered to be a formative work in the SEA STATE series. When it was first presented,
Lim staged a lottery where the winner got to sail with the artist to the edge of the sea wall. In acti-
vating and occupying the perimeter, the hope was that a discussion would be generated, about the
gravitas that usually gather at points of territorial division.

Lani Maestro PH

1957, Philippines.
Lives and works between Canada and France

Lani Maestro has used a range of media including installation, sound, video, books and text to
create work that explores the often complex dualities of human experience and the physical power
of the natural world.

Born in Manila, Philippines where she began working professionally as an artist, Maestro immig-
rated to Canada in 1982. Her expanded art practice has included exhibitions, publishing, writing,
teaching and running an itinerant gallery. In the early nineties, her collaborative engagement with
artist and critic, Stephen Horne launched Harbour Magazine of Art and Everyday Life, a journal of
writing and artworks by artists which she co-edited and designed. This editorial project expanded
to produce burning books, artists’ books which also accompanied works in exhibition at galerie
burning, an itinerant gallery space she co-directed in Montreal, Canada. Lani Maestro’s work has
been shown extensively and has gained the respect and admiration of a diverse international artis-
tic community for its poetic minimalism, its subtle but forceful engagement.

She has been participated at numerous international exhibitions including representing the Philli-
pines together with manuel Ocampo at the venice Biennal 2017; Encounter: UK/Asia, The Royal
Academy in Asia at the La Salle ICA, Singapore (2012), Sharjah Biennal, United Arab Emirates
(2009), Mixed Bathing Worlds, The Beppu Project, Beppu, Japan, (2009), Tempo ao tempo, Mu-
seu del arte contemporaneo, Vigo, Spain (2007), Busan Biennal, Korea (2004), Mind Space, Ho
Am Art Gallery, Samsung Foundation, Seoul, Korea (2003) Shanghai Biennial, China (2000),
Sydney Biennal, Australia (1998), Istanbul Biennale, Turkey (1997), and the Bienal dela Habana,
Havana, Cuba (1994/1986) where she received the Bienal Prize in 1986.

Lani Maestro
Brenda Console, 2011
Single-channel video, two monitors, two arm chairs

Brenda Console , a video that act simultaneously as sculpture, architecture and body posing
questions of voice. Who is speaking? The work raises questions of subjectivity, agency and world-
view that ultimately bring us to a coming to “difference.”

Ho Tzu Nyen SG

*1976, Singapore
Lives and works in Singapore

A plethora of historical references dramatised by musical scores and allegorical lighting make up
the pillars of Ho Tzu Nyen’s complex practice that primarily constitutes video and installation.
Features in their own right, each film unravels unspoken layers of Southeast Asian history whilst
equally pointing to our own personal unknowns. Permeating Ho’s work is a pervasive sense of
ambiguity, theatricality and unease, augmented by a series of deliberate literary, art historical and
musical references. Centrally, Ho charges the viewer emotionally and physically to deliver a multi-
sensory consideration of what we know and crucially, do not.
His current field of research is the recent historiography of Southeast Asia and especially Singa-
pore, established as an independent city-state in 1965. Through his work, he therefore acts as a
critical historian for his home region, examining hegemonies to expose their structures and faults.
In his latest project The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia at the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong,
he created a platform for ongoing research on the subject. What constitutes the unity of Southeast
Asia – a region never unified by language, religion or political power?

Ho Tzu Nyen has been widely exhibited with solo exhibitions at Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong
(2017); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2012); Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Adelaide
(2010); Artspace, Sydney (2011); Substation Gallery, Singapore (2003). Furthermore, he represen-
ted Singapore at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011). Important group exhibitions include Guggen-
heim Museum, Bilbao (2015); Guggenheim Museum, New York (2013); Autonomous Zones, Times
Museum, Guangzhou, China (2013); Surplus Authors, Witte de With, Rotterdam (2012); transme-
diale.11, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2011); No Soul for Sale, Tate Modern, London (2010);
Asia Pacific Triennial, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane (2009); Thermocline of Art: New Asian
Waves, ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe (2007); Video Killed the Painting Star, Contem-
porary Center of Art, Glasgow (2007); Singapore Biennial (2006). He has participated in numerous
international film festivals including the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah (2012); 66th
Venice International Film Festival (2009); 41st Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes International Film
Festival in France (2009). Ho has furthermore held a residency at Asia Art Archive (2017).

Ho Tzu Nyen
No Man II, 2017
Single-channel video, sound, lights, spy mirror, 6 hrs

No Man II (2017), a single-channelled multimedia installation. It is a follow-up on the six-chan-
nelled video installation No Man (2015), which was shown at the Singapore Art Museum. The film
is projected on a two-way mirror glass, drawing the spectator into the designed world. Contrary
to previous work, Ho chose to examine different types of narratives, not only historical ones. He
brings together 50 different figures, all digitally created from online sources, that have a profound
connection to popular cultural imagination.
The title refers to the famous line ‘No man is an island’ taken from a poem by John Donne (1572
– 1631). In his 17th meditation, the English poet calls out for connectivity – comparing the behavi-
our of people to the politics of countries. Ho makes the figures sing lines adapted from the poem,
evoking Southeast Asian challenges of isolationism, solitude and enclosure.
In No Man II, a ghostly choir assembles in a mirror – an unruly gathering of figures of uncertain ori-
gin. They range from animals to human-animal hybrids, cyborgs and anatomical figures; some of
which are manifestations of mythical archetypes, while others are cultural stereotypes. They may
be a small sampling of humanity’s figurative imagination across history.

Ming Wong SG

born 1971, Singapore
Lives and works in Berlin and Singapore

Ming Wong’s videos play with notions of personal and national identity through a playful re-inter-
pretation of world cinema. A master of costuming and highly earnest overacting, Wong has been
able to create a minor cinema where everything from gender to racial identity are given fluidity.
Using humour and self portrayal as a vehicle for self discovery, Wong often steps into the shoes,
wigs and dresses of diverse and unlikely characters.
He works with cinema and popular culture to consider how culture and gender are constructed,
reproduced and circulated. Through imperfect translations and reenactments, Wong uncovers the
slippages that haunt ideas of ‚authenticity‘ and ‚originality‘. Wong‘s video installations often remake
classic films, with the artist playing all of the characters, regardless of gender or ethnicity. Recent
projects have become more interdisciplinary, incorporating performance and installation to flesh
out his exploration of cultural artefacts from around the world.

Ming Wong received an MFA from Slade School of Art, University College London. His major solo
exhibitions include “Me in Me” (Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo, 2013); “Ming Wong: Making Chinatown”
(Redcat, Los Angeles, 2012). His major group exhibitions include “Fassbinder – NOW” (Martin-
Gropius-Bau, Berlin, 2015) and “Islands Off the Shores of Asia” (Spring Studio / Para Site, Hong
Kong, 2014). Ming Wong has participated in a number of international triennials and biennales,
including “The 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art” (Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane,
2015); “Social Factory: The 10th Shanghai Biennale” (Power Station of Art, 2014); “12th Biennale
de Lyon: Meanwhile… Suddenly, and Then” (2013); Liverpool Biennial (2012); Singapore Bien-
nale (2011); Gwangju Art Biennale (2012); Biennale of Sydney (2010); Performa 11 (Museum of
the Moving Image, New York, 2011). Ming Wong also has also presented “Life of Imitation” at the
Singapore Pavilion of the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009).

Ming Wong
Next Year / L’Année Prochaine
2015
3 channel video installation

In Next Year | L’Année Prochaine, Ming Wong performs the male and female roles in fragments
taken from Last Year in Marienbad (1961), written by Alain Robbe-Grillet and directed by Alain
Resnais. The film is celebrated for its innovative cinematic language – the camera reflecting the
pace of the mind through repetition, reversal, freeze frame, and white out-capturing reality, memo-
ry, and illusion while inventing a sequential order different even from the internal logic of the mon-
tage. In the original film, the memory loss of the main character inhibits her thought process and
time-”next year” compressed into now-loses all meaning.

Nguyen Trinh Thi VT

born 1973, Hanoi
Lives and works in Hanoi

Nguyen is independent filmmaker and video/media artist. Her diverse practice has consistently
investigated the role of memory in the necessary unveiling of hidden, displaced or misinterpreted
histories; and examined the position of artists in the Vietnamese society.

Nguyen studied journalism, photography, international relations and ethnographic film in the United
States. Her films and video art works have been shown at festivals and art exhibitions including
Jeu de Paume, Paris; CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; the Lyon Biennale 2015;
Asian Art Biennial 2015, Taiwan; Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial 2014; Singapore Biennale 2013;
Jakarta Biennale 2013; Oberhausen International Film Festival; Bangkok Experimental Film Fes-
tival; Artist Films International; DEN FRIE Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen; and Kuandu
Biennale, Taipei.

Nguyen is founder and director of Hanoi DOCLAB, an independent center for documentary film
and the moving image art in Hanoi since 2009.

Nguyen Trinh Thi
Eleven Men, 2016
Single-channel video, sound, 28 min.

Eleven Men is composed of scenes from a range of Vietnamese classic narrative films featuring
the same central actress, Nhu Quynh. Spanning three decades of her legendary acting career,
most of the appropriated movies — from 1966 to 2000 — were produced by the state-owned Viet-
nam Feature Film Studio.
The film’s text was adapted from “Eleven Sons”, a short story by Franz Kafka first published in
1919, which begins with a father’s declaration: “I have eleven sons”, then describes each one of
them in acute and ironic detail. Transposing the father’s voice of Kafka’s story, the film begins with
a woman stating: “I have eleven men”.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul THA

Apichatpong Weerasethakul( *1970 in Bangkok, Thailand) is recognized as one of the most
original voices in contemporary cinema. His seven feature films, as well as his short films and
installations, have won him widespread international recognition and numerous awards, including
the Cannes Palme d’Or in 2010 with Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. His Tropical
Malady won the Cannes Competition Jury Prize in 2004 and Blissfully Yours won the Cannes Un
Certain Regard Award in 2002. Syndromes and a Century (2006) was recognized as one of the
best films of the last decade in several 2010 polls.

Born in Bangkok, Apichatpong grew up in Khon Kaen in north-eastern Thailand. He began ma-
king films and video shorts in 1994 and completed his first feature in 2000. He has also mounted
exhibitions and installations in many countries since 1998 and is now recognized as a major inter-
national visual artist. His art prizes include the Sharjah Biennial Prize (2013) and the prestigious
Yanghyun Art Prize (2014) in South Korea.

Lyrical and often fascinatingly mysterious, his film works are non-linear, dealing with memory and
in subtle ways invoking personal politics and social issues. Working independently of the Thai
commercial film industry, he devotes himself to promoting experimental and independent filmma-
king through his company Kick the Machine Films, founded in 1999, which also produces all his
films. His installations have included the multi-screen project Primitive (2009), acquired for major
museum collections (including Tate Modern and Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris), a major instal-
lation for the 2012 Kassel Documenta and most recently the film installations Dilbar (2013) and
Fireworks (Archive) (2014) variously presented in one-person exhibitions in important galleries in
Oslo, London, Mexico City and Kyoto.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Fireworks (Archives), 2014
Single-Channel Video Installation
HD Digital, Colour, Aspect Ratio: 16:9, Dolby 5.1, 6:40 minutes (loop)

Fireworks (Archives) is an installation-based short-form work by internationally acclaimed Thai
filmmaker and installation artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul. This piece acts as a counterpoint
and pendant to Apichatpong’s latest feature film, Cemetery of Splendor, an official selection of
the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. In Cemetery of Splendor, a mysterious sleeping sickness besets
soldiers, who are transferred to a temporary clinic in a former school in Thailand’s long oppressed
and politically marginalized northeast. The memory-filled space becomes a revelatory world for
housewife and volunteer Jenjira, as she watches over Itt, a handsome soldier with no family vi-
sitors. Jen discovers Itt’s cryptic notebook of strange writings and blueprint sketches suggesting
there may be a connection between the soldiers’ enigmatic syndrome and the mythic ancient site
that lies beneath the clinic.

The related Fireworks (Archives) is an abstract and intensely graphic exploration of one of the key
settings for Cemetery of Splendor, the Sala Keoku sculpture park, which features religiously inspi-
red, concrete sculptures of animals and gods. In this hallucinatory setting, we see the two central
characters of Cemetery of Splendor appear, approach each other, and disappear like specters in
the night time garden amid the disorienting flash of fireworks and flares. Fireworks (Archives) acts
as a counter-point to the slow, sun-drenched melancholy at the heart of Cemetery of Splendor. For
the artist, the Sala Keoku sculpture park is a manifestation of the way that an arid land and a long
history of political oppression from the central government in Thailand have driven the inhabitants
to “dream beyond” mundane realities – in this sense, the fantastical statues of Sala Keoku are a
form of revolt. In the words of the artist, “Together they commemorate the land’s destruction and
liberation.”

Park Chan-kyong KOR

born 1965, Seoul
Lives and works in Seoul

Park Chan-kyong is a media artist, film director and writer. He graduated from Seoul National
University in 1988 with a BFA in Painting, and the California Institute of the Arts with a MFA in
Photography in 1995. Park served as the Artistic Director of the SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul
in 2014. His major works include Manshin: Ten Thousand Spirits (2013), Night Fishing (2011, co-
directed by Park Chan-wook), Sindoan (2008), Power Passage (2004) and Sets (2000). Park’s
work has been exhibited internationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions including Haus der
Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2017), Taipei Biennial (2016), Anyang Public Art Project (2016), Iniva,
London (2015), Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2013), and Atelier Hermès, Seoul (2008, 2012). Park
was awarded the Hermès Korea Art Award in 2004, and the Golden Bear for best short film at the
Berlin International Film Festival in 2011 for Night Fishing. His works are included in the collection
of major art institutions, such as the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea;
KADIST, Paris and San Francisco; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, Nantes; Leeum, Samsung
Museum of Art, Seoul; Seoul Museum of Art; Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Ansan; and Art
Sonje Center.

Park Chan-kyong
Citizen‘s Forest
2016, video (b&w), ambisonic 3D, sound

The victims of various historical and more recent tragedies in Korea appear together in the three-
channel video Citizen’s Forest (2016). The film features several figures in the straw hats that con-
demned criminals were made to wear in the late 19th century. Amongst the trees, men with skulls
for heads play trumpets: an image borrowed from Oh Yoon’s incomplete painting The Lemures
(1984), which portrays the victims of the 1980 Gwangju Massacre. Teenage girls standing next
to a boat in school uniforms seem to be the victims from the Sewol ferry disaster in 2014. A dog
barks throughout, spooked. We also hear a funeral song sung by elderly men from Jindo and the
sounds of gut performed by elderly women from Jeju Island. The ghosts find the solace needed to
rest in peace and then leave one by one, as though bidding farewell to their tragic pasts.
The video work is a tapestry of fragmented memories and references. Other pieces of this unfi-
nished puzzle can be found on the wall opposite the projection. Small Art History 1-2 (2014-17)
comprises 27 photos, including images of Korean amulets and a scan of a book on the history of
mudang (female Shamans) written in the late Choson dynasty (1392-1910) as well as reproduc-
tions of old master and contemporary artworks from both Eastern and Western traditions. The
images are annotated with handwritten captions, many of which make reference to ghosts and
spirituality, reconfiguring art history through Park’s particular thematic lens.

Tromarama IDN

Tromarama – artist collective, formed in 2006 in Bandung, Indonesia.

Febie Babyrose (1985, Jakarta), Herbert Hans Maruli A. (1984, Jakarta), Ruddy
Hatumena (1984, Bahrain).

Widely playing with stop motion animation in works such as ‘Bdg Art Now’ (2009), ‘Watt?!’ (2010),
‘Pilgrimage’ (2011) and ‘The Lost One’ (2013) it was ‘*Ting’ back in 2008 that marked the trio’s first
step in this practice. A video that follows the travelling adventures of a collection of porcelain table-
ware, it presents in rhythmic formation and ballet-esque movements, the elements’ aligned tittering
to the tones developed by Bagus Pandega. A touching animate play on human-like formations, the
work parallels our individual yet collective journeys through the playful use of everyday domestic
objects, which in turn are active players in the rituals of our everyday life.

Tromarama’s body of work extends beyond stop motion animation though, and even video art.
‘Borderless’ (2010), for example, comprises a video made of embroidery on canvas, whilst ‘Tugu
Lentera Listrik’ (2013) is composed of a single channel video and digital print on sticker. These
works still play with the commonplace though and the domestic, from a craft-like past time to the
creation of an everyday domestic interior that in one small screen portion comes to life. ‘Private Ri-
ots’ (2014) marks, however, a political leaning in its playful pop-like extractions of key images from
protest banners; time, marching, speeches are represented by centered images on boards that as
an installation tower at an imposing height, standing in tall yet approachable opposition. Alongside,
an interactive post-it board invites passers-by to mark and share their own frustrations or commen-
tary.

Selected solo exhibitions:
Tromarama (Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, UK, 2016), Tromarama (Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2015), Open House (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne,
Australia, 2015), MAM Project 012: Tromarama (Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan, 2010).
Selected group exhibitions: 11 Gwangju Biennial
(Korea, 2016), Root (Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany, 2015), Fantasy
Islands (Espace Louis Vuitton, Singapore, 2012), Jakarta International Video Festival
(2011, 2009), Contemporaneity / Contemporary Art in Indonesia (Museum of
Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China, 2010), Refresh: New Strategies in Indonesian
Contemporary Art (Valentine Willie Fine Art, Singapore, 2008).

Tromarama
Quandary, 2016
two channel video, sync
3 min 47 sec

The Charade, 2014
Single channel video, sync
3 min 54 sec

Wu Chi-Yu TW

born in 1986,Taipei
Lives and works in Taipeh, Taiwan

Wu Chi-Yu is concerned with the varied connections between history, politics, the individual, and
the collective in contemporary society. His practice revolves around the moving image, looking for
contemporary narratives in lost memory through the reproducing of oral history and myths. He is
also involved in different collaboration projects of installation, video installation, and performance,
in an attempt to bridge postmodern history and contemporary life. Wu Chi-Yu received a master’s
degree in new media art from the Taipei National University of the Arts in 2011. He participated in
several residence programs between 2014 and 2015, including at the Rijksakademie van beelden-
de kunsten in Amsterdam, Netherlands; Seoul Art Space Geumcheon, Korea; and Baan Noorg,
Ratchaburi, Thailand. He has exhibited in the Taipei Biennial, Taipei, Taiwan (2016); 2nd China
Central Academy of Fine Arts Future Exhibition, Beijing, China (2015); and Fest — New Directors/
New Films Festival, Espinho, Portugal (2015).

Wu Chi-Yu
Refraction, 2015
video installation, 09min:46sec, dimensions variable.

Refraction (2015) “incarnates” the perception of Lanyu’s elders of the inception of the island off
the southeastern coast of Taiwan. Lanyu (‘Orchid Island’) is a volcanic island that is separated
from the Philippine archipelago by the Strait of Luzon, and is home to the Tao minority, an aborigi-
nal people of Taiwan who originated from the Philippines’ Batanes islands. Lanyu appeared for the
first time on maps in the 17th century, apparently thanks to the Japanese. The title of the work re-
fers to the fracturing of light which transforms an image, in the same way as the work itself reflects
the perspectives of Lanyu’s elders and the fictional elements added by the artist.