Are You A Foreign Artist? - Round One
04/29/20
By Lori Waxman
“Are You A Foreign Artist?” is series of reviews written by art critic Lori Waxman, in partnership with Li-Ming Hu during her solo exhibition DISCOmbobulation at Co-Prosperity Sphere.
The following reviews were written between 5 and 11pm on Saturday, February 1st, 2020.
Round 2, written on February 1st, and Round 3, written on February 22nd, have also been published on Quarantine Times.
Li-Ming Hu, “DISCOmbobulation” at Co-Prosperity Sphere, February 2020. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Li-Ming Hu
Love it or hate it, disco was a pleasure-seeking global music phenomenon to be reckoned with. And was it ever hated, especially locally, where on July 2, 1979, the White Sox baseball team managed to fill (and nearly ruin) their stadium by offering cheap tickets to anyone who brought with them a disco LP to blow up. New Zealand artist Li-Ming Hu fills the windows of the Co-Prosperity Sphere — debuting a promising exhibition program that more galleries with big storefront windows ought to copy — with a fabulous array of documentary images, glittery props and a six-minute video exploring the origins of “The Day Disco Died” — or didn’t. What better way to prove the significance of a form than to try to destroy it? Hu, who stars in the video, has fun swinging on mirrored balls of all sizes, pumping a limp purple plush bat, and, in her trademark gesture, wearing a simple paper mask of the people she’s investigating. Here, it’s DJ Steve Dahl, the frustrated rock radio host who came up with the Comiskey Park gimmick, and there’s nothing lo-fi about seeing his schlubby head atop Hu’s cool, petite body. It’s as uncanny as Freud on the dance floor. Shake that.
— Lori Waxman 2020-02-01 5:34 PM
Sungjae Lee, “Fake Muscles,” 2017. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Sungjae Lee
What’s a man? What’s a gay man? What’s a South Korean gay man? Plenty of people believe strongly that they know the answers to these questions; it is this sureness that compels others to work so hard at proving the fallibility of the very questions themselves. The performance practice of Sungjae Lee is exemplary in this respect, and I wish it as required viewing for anyone who thinks they know what no one can ever really know beyond pigeonholing and stereotyping. Watch Lee flex his clay six-pack until it collapses; see him transfer chest hair from a hirsute lover to his own smooth torso; watch him laboriously make and then smash dozens of “Yellow Hairy Balls.” With grossness and humor and a deep sense for tactility and affect, he willingly uses his own body to ends beyond its own.
— Lori Waxman 2020-02-01 5:59 PM
Efrat Hakimi, “Zion 1652: Stake, Surveying,” 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.
Efrat Hakimi
I have always found it strange that place names re-occur from city to city, country to country. Really? Can’t town planners show a little more originality? The coincidences do provide for all sorts of artistic exploration, however, and Efrat Hakimi’s exhibition “Zion,” curated by Avi Lubin at Hamidrasha Gallery in Tel Aviv, is no exception. Hakimi chose her subject well: there is Zion, Illinois, just north of Chicago, where Hakimi currently lives. There is Zion National Park in Utah, one of the great national parklands, set amid the state of Mormonism. And there is the first Zion, the hill on which King David built the ancient citadel of Jerusalem, origin of the term Zionism and the practice of referring to present-day Jerusalem as Zion. How this all figures into one exhibition owes much to contemporary modes of storytelling: through narrative and exploratory video footage, archival research and photography, and the culling of choice facts from often convoluted histories. The coincidences are always surprising, sometimes startlingly profound. Plus, there’s promise of more: with dozens of Zions across the globe, Hakimi could just keep on going.
— Lori Waxman 2020-02-01 6:30 PM
Haerim Lee
AT THE ARTIST'S REQUEST, A LETTER IN SUPPORT OF HER O1 VISA APPLICATION WAS WRITTEN INSTEAD OF A REVIEW. THIS WAS NECESSARY BECAUSE ONE OF HER RECOMMENDERS HAD TO PULL OUT SUDDENLY DUE TO AN INSTITUTIONAL CONFLICT.
— Lori Waxman 2020-02-01 7:04 PM
Guanyu Xu, “Space of Mutation” (from “Temporarily Censored Home”), 2018. Image courtesy of the artist.
Guanyu Xu
What’s it like to live a secret life? To need to live one’s true life in another country, far away from disapproving parental eyes? Guanyu Xu presents these overlapping realities with the help of his camera, recording through documentary and staged photographs his life as a gay man in the United States; himself and other men in intimate domestic environments; pavement or plants or architecture that caught his eye. So far, so good—Xu’s pictures fit squarely in the tradition of Wolfgang Tillmans and Nan Goldin. But then he goes home, to his parent’s apartment in Beijing, a place where nothing is out of order and everything is heteronormative. Worlds collide. In “Temporarily Censored Home,” Xu takes over the apartment while mom and dad are out and fills it to the brim with the images of his other life. They hang from the ceiling, spread out over the sofa and tables, cover the fridge and the windows, even jut out into doorways. And then, just before they come home again, he packs it all neatly away, into the literal and proverbial closet —though not, of course, before taking enormous hi-resolution photographs of his makeshift installation.
— Lori Waxman 2020-02-01 7:41 PM
Eunhye Shin, still from “Make Yourself Comfortable,” 2018. Image courtesy of the artist.
Eunhye Shin
What makes millennials comfortable? Since I haven’t got a clue, I’ve watched two experimental videos by Eunhye Shin that offer partial answers to the question. “Make Yourself Comfortable” poses its titular query to four Berlin-based artists, while “Molka (hidden camera)” sets up a secret camera in a women’s bathroom stall. Bits of narrative appear on the screen here and there: the Berliners talk about their language issues and about living away from home for the first time, the women do or don’t use the toilet. (Maybe they knew about the camera? Two of them seem to be looking for it.) The true source of millennial comfort exists elsewhere, however, in the formal devices Shin employs. The Berliners get fragmented into biomorphic shapes, disappearing into a perfect blue screen. The women get pixelated on the opposite half of a split display, dissolving into rectangles of neutral color. Being bits of people never looked so comforting.
— Lori Waxman 2020-02-01 8:49 PM
Leticia Bernaus, still from “Not Exactly Love,” 2018. Image courtesy of the artist.
Leticia Bernaus
In “Not Exactly Love,” a series of simultaneous videos, Leticia Bernaus caresses a dead fish, a big beautiful shell, brown-gray fur, a large side of meat, a bag of trash, a dead bird, and green grass. It’s not too much a stretch of the imagination to imagine a person experiencing real love for any one of these things (honestly, it’s not), but nevertheless that is not quite what Bernaus is doing. Her gesture is faultlessly gentle, seemingly endless, mesmerizingly patient—she is not being a lover here, she is being a caretaker, and she is doing it through the touch of her fingers. But caretaking what? Not an elderly relative or an ill child, but rather the things of the earth, rendered somehow inanimate. That’s where we live, folks, on a planet full of all sorts of things, extraordinary and not, being decimated one by one by one. At this point, it’s starting to seem like the best we can do might be to caress them gently after they die.
— Lori Waxman 2020-02-01 9:32 PM
Catalina Tuca, installation detail from “Límite y territorio,” 2013. Image courtesy of the artist.
Catalina Tuca
Some people just arrange things better than others. The rest can improve through lessons in ikebana and like arts. I don’t know what training Catalina Tuca did or didn’t undertake, but her work of the past decade proves her to be profoundly more accomplished in this area than all but the most skilled painters of Dutch still lifes. (Or whoever it was that set up those flowers, dead animals and edibles before the master sat down at his easel.) Tuca doesn’t just position objects in meaningful compositions, she also finds them: in Medellin, Colombia; in the Mapocho neighborhood of Santiago; in the Suginami part of Tokyo. Maybe they come from the trash, maybe from thrift stores, maybe from donation—any which way, Tuca intuits how to put them together in a newly symbolic or aesthetic configuration that tells a story about the place from which they came. If only she’d come to my neighborhood one day, I’d like to know what it has to say.
— Lori Waxman 2020-02-01 9:57 PM
Maryam Faridani, image from “#onlineactivist,” 2018-present. Image courtesy of the artist.
Maryam Faridani
The only social media that remains unfiltered in Iran is Instagram. That makes it the go-to source for expats like Maryam Faridani, who are seeking news and information from home. The difference with Faridani is that she gives as good as she gets, maybe better. Since 2018, this weirdly profound digital artist has produced dozens of — for lack of a better term —editorial cartoons that she puts up as stories on the site. They comment on the daily news, whether it’s the suspicious death of former president Rafsanjani, the smuggling of tomatoes into the country disguised as cauliflowers, or the mysterious smell that permeated Tehran for days. What do Faridani’s gifs look like? Many feature her face, more or less obscured behind cute little animals, torrential waves, diagrams, headlines, and other randomly coherent items. They’re bizarre, unkempt, clever, critical, utterly contemporary, very silly, and totally their own thing. If this is what happens when newspapers fall to censorship and bankruptcy, maybe there’s hope yet.
— Lori Waxman 2020-02-01 10:27 PM
Pegah Pasalar, still from “Phenomenology,” 2017. Image courtesy of the artist.
Pegah Pasalar
I can’t watch Pegah Pasalar’s short film, “Saturday.” I mean, I watched it, but it hurt too much. A family goes to the beach, one of their small children drowns, and since the film is finely shot, the tragedy is unbearable. I don’t think this is only because I have small children, or because I know someone whose young child died in a pool, but perhaps it is. Pasalar’s equally well-made “Phenomenology,” in which a young woman (the artist) dresses herself in a roomful of clothes, starting with a dozen panties and bras, moving on through pants and shirts, all the way to a long, black abaya, entrances with its cinematic cleverness. Because the film was actually shot in reverse, as an undressing, the clothes fly magically up to her body, as if she were not just a female done in by the strictures of conservative religious requirements, but a superhero with a secret identity: Clothing Woman! Underneath that abaya and that frown, she hides, unbeknownst to all but always there, ready to save the day. If only she could have saved that little kid.
— Lori Waxman 2020-02-01 10:49 PM
Lori Waxman reviewed artists’ work well into the evening. “Are You A Foreign Artist?”, collaboration with Li-Ming Hu at Co-Prosperity Sphere, 2020. Photo by Jesse Bond.
Lori Waxman (b. Montreal, Canada) has been the Chicago Tribune’s primary freelance art critic for the past decade. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has a Ph.D. in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts in New York. Her "60 wrd/min art critic" performance has been exhibited in dOCUMENTA (13) and a dozen cities across the U.S. She has received a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and a 2018 Rabkin Foundation award, and is the author, most recently, of Keep Walking Intently(Sternberg Press), a history of walking as an art form.
