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MAINLAND đại lục แผน่ ดนิ ใหญ่ 大陆 CREDITS COLLECTION COORDINATOR Anita Archer ESSAY Dr Roger Nelson CATALOGUE DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Leonard Joel PUBLISHED BY Mainland Art Collection, May 2018 ISBN 978-0-646-98840-5 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording or any other information storage or retrieval system, without prior consent in writing from Mainland Art Collection. Images remain the copyright of the artists. Mainland Art Collection thanks Leonard Joel Auction House for its generosity in supporting the design and printing of this catalogue. Mainland Art Collection also extends its sincere gratitude to Lowensteins for nancial advice and accountancy services throughout the life of this Collection. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION Mainland Art Collection C/- Pegasos5 PO Box 8838 Armadale VIC 3143 Australia +61 402 067 070 [email protected] www.pegasos5.com MAINLAND ART COLLECTION THE ART OF HUMANITY: A CULTURAL MARCH THROUGH COMPLEX LANDSCAPES. Five Threads (Among Many Others) in the Mainland Collection BY ROGER NELSON1 A collection is, to paraphrase Han Suyin, a many-splendoured thing. The late Suyin—an acclaimed novelist, biographer, memoirist, and a physician—was referring 2 So too it is with the other kinds of love and desire which are vital ingredients for the making of almost any collection—and certainly of this, the Mainland Art Mainland collection was assembled under a thematic banner: The art of humanity: a cultural march through complex landscapes. The collectors have acquired here as elsewhere, and of artists’ engagements with it. As Mainland’s guiding phrase suggests, the collection is informed by a deep empathy, and a strong sense of curiosity—a wish to know and understand (and a necessary acceptance of unknowing, and not understanding). These too are, we might say, also forms of love and desire. Like many truly special gatherings, the collection is much more than the sum of its parts. Through their juxtaposition within the collection, the artworks reveal us to approach the collected artworks, and to consider what we gain by seeing them in relation to each other, in the context of this collection. In proposing to when we consider them in relation to each other, through this collection. Along with love and desire, knowledge and understanding are the other essential ingredients in this collection. It is possible to conceive of the activity of collecting as being a kind of knowledge, a quest for understanding. In Luang Prabang—a remote town located in a valley in mountainous northern Laos—there is a vast collection of photographs, sculptures, and other historic objects, amassed under the leadership of a senior Buddhist monk, the late Most Venerable Pha Khamchan Virachitta Maha Thera (1920–2007). Throughout his life, Pha Khamchan had been a collector, and he viewed this activity as being entirely in keeping with his devout spiritual practice. He used his collection for teaching, discussing, and learning. Today, it is housed in one of Luang Prabang’s most beautiful temples. Without it, much of the unique cultural heritage of this town and this nation would have been lost during decades of war and upheaval.3 ON CONNECTIONS AND ENTANGLEMENTS and its internal heterogeneity, this region—this conglomeration of regions—resists stable categorization. Several of the works in the collection take the multiple and layered entanglements within and beyond this region as their point of departure. Emphasising connections across national and other borders, between various locations as well as between different cultures and aesthetic systems, these works bring into view the importance of peripatetic and transnational practices, plural-centred research methodologies, and diasporic identities. They point to the multi-directional Consider, for example, Jakkai Siributr’s embroidery piece, Come to Me (2011). It draws on the form of the yantra: a design combining image and text which has a magical and protective function. Yantra are popular in Thailand, yet most feature text written in the Cambodian language; Jakkai, in turn, stitches his letters in roman script. Their quirky shapes match the wordplay in the embroidered words, Maha Jakkai. In Thai, Khmer, and many other Indic languages, this can mean “The Supreme Jakkai;” in Thai, it also means “Come to Jakkai,” hinting at playfully profane desires. The work speaks of the movement of words and magic across national borders, and also at shifts in the possibilities for appropriation of cultural and aesthetic forms which have shifted very far from their imagined origins and original functions. The migration of aesthetic forms and visual vocabularies are seen in several other works in the collection. Both The Propeller Group and Reko Rennie explore The desire to selectively adapt, reinterpret and appropriate aesthetic approaches from a range of different locations and cultures is seen also in Alex Seton’s and Shane Cotton’s works. Not only aesthetics and styles move, but also people, cultures, economies and belief systems. This is seen in Anida Yoeu Ali’s work, in which elements of the saffron orange coloured robes worn by Theravada Buddhist monks and the headscarves worn by Muslim women are fantastically melded. Yuken Teruya, by contrast, is less concerned with the diffusion of cultures and more with the spread of economic hegemony. Her sculptures of trees are made with mass-produced paper bags, usually produced far from the streets where the artist has found them. The connections and entanglements that these and other works in the collection articulate are not one-way, and rarely concern only two points. Rather, they are multi-directional. Nor are they only exchanges with the former centres of colonial and other power, in the North and the West. These are there, and they are referred to as “South-South.” The point is not to identify all of the nodes of interconnection, or to name all of the borders being skirted and crossed here; to try to untangle the knotty interrelationships here would be impossible, and unnecessary. These artists, and others in the collection, are unafraid of the complexity connections pose. ON COMPLEXITIES The artworks in this collection reveal that it is not only links between places, ideas and people that are many-directional and complex, and not only the borders (real and imagined) being crossed that are multiple and mysterious. Many of these works centre on thinking around these as well as many other forms of irreducible complexity. In the past, many artists, like others, believed that to understand was to simplify. Many of those engaging with such artists—through writing or curating thinking. Many in the arts, as in other discourses, are now embracing complexity, and seeking to grapple with it without attempting to reduce or minimize it. installations which are monumental in scale and dramatic effect, yet also feel intimate, hushed, and poetic. State of Being (Guitar) (2011) is a vertical rectangle, framed by solid black metal bars; the piece has a solidity and mass which is entirely belied by the lightness and delicacy of the threads that traverse the six surfaces of this sculptural object. A guitar, suspended at its centre, is suggestive not only of music but also of the body, the human hand needed to play it. An aesthetic of deliberate and evocative convolution is shared also by Mit Jai Inn—whose thickly painted scrolls are at once paintings, sculptures, installations, and playthings—and Sally Smart, whose collaged paintings confound our perception of foreground and background, surface and shadow, human and vessel. The dense composition of Rodel Tapaya’s paintings combine the real with the fantastical, pushing from the surreal to the supernatural through his references to folklore narratives. Mark Whalen’s painting on panels appropriates stylistic approaches from street art, Japanese geisha, and globalized Los Angeles popular culture. In Thailand’s painted scrolls, Smart’s invoking of Australia’s colonial ships, Tapaya’s reference to Philippine legends, and Whalen’s interest in LA celebrity culture—yet Complexity appears also in conceptual approach, with several of the collected artists drawn to the contradictory drives of horror and fascination. Larissa Sansour and Shen Shaomin both present nightmarish visions of a dystopian future that is also eerily beautiful and seductive. Sansour imagines a Palestinian nation-state exquisite. A similar paradox drives Ken and Julia Yonetani’s practice. Their Crystal Palace series (2012) is enormous, luminescent, grandiose, and gorgeous in its colours and delicate forms—yet it is also hideous, its glow caused by deadly radiation, its title a reference to the folly of colonial exhibitions, and failed attempts to regulate nuclear proliferation. These works, and several others in the collection, are at once beautiful and barbaric, and the complexity of this contradiction is key to their splendour. ON HISTORIES Another key concern for many contemporary artists, and many in this collection, is engaging with histories. As with artists’ approaches to complexities, these take both aesthetic and conceptual forms. Jompet Kuswidananto, and Yee I-Lann’s works are among several in the collection which take the narratives and legacies of colonialism as a central concern. Tiffany where they work, and their personal biographies. Yang Yongliang and Vandy Rattana, in turning their attention to rapidly transforming urban

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