Ishu Han: Memory of Each Other

Memory of Each Other, 2010. Video, 6:35 min.

Ishu Han: Memory of Each Other

July 8 - October 2, 2015

International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP)

Foreword

ISCP has played a strong role in fostering the development of Ishu Han’s work, commissioning photographs and a video that continue his explora-tion of national identities. Han’s exploitation of iconic patriotic and cul-tural symbols have deep roots in his own background, complicated by his research of “America.” In this exhibition, organized by Kari Conte, Direc-tor of Programs and Exhibitions, with Shinnie Kim, Program Manager, the spoils of Han’s recent travels to the Grand Canyon play out in new work, building upon his related videos and prints from the past several years.

It bears mention that Han’s exhibition coincides with another solo show of the work of Saskia Janssen at ISCP, and that the two artists collabo-rated to create a joint work—they made a sort of homage to Joseph Beuys’ I Like America and America Likes Me. The artists donned coyote costumes and had themselves photographed at the storefront site of the old René Block Gallery in Soho, where Beuys performed as a kind of shaman for three days in 1974, sharing the space with a live coyote. In the context of Han’s work, the adoption of yet another animal costume reso-nates with his recent commissioned video work, as well as transcultural artistic negotiations.

Ishu Han’s residency is made possible by the dedicated support of the Asian Cultural Council. The exhibition is further supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Greenwich Collection, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, which has allowed these new commissions as well as the exhibition production and this accompanying publication. ISCP’s commitment to introducing unfamiliar and innovative contemporary art on an ongoing basis is part and parcel of the depth and strength of its international program.

Susan HapgoodExecutive Director

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Sky Seen from Stars, 2005. Digital print, 26 x 39 in.

A photograph of a Chinese flag fluttering in the wind devoid of its five yellow stars was made by the artist Ishu Han ten years ago, re-markably while he was still in high school. Roughly cutting out the flag’s five yellow stars, and turning the gaping holes into windows onto the sky, Sky Seen from Stars questioned universal ideas of na-tionhood. Indirectly, this gesture commented on Han’s own double identity; his homeland is China even though he has lived most of his life in Japan.

Sky Seen from Stars is an ideal entry point to Han’s solo exhibition Memory of Each Other, his first in the United States. Issues of mi-gration and identity recur throughout his practice. These could be unexpected interests for an artist living in Japan, as it is a country often perceived to have a homogeneous population. Memory of Each Other is comprised of four works that depart from real life places and common objects that are all iconic national symbols. Han re-imagines them by tweaking their most well-known characteristics. He employs humor alongside stark seriousness to conflate culture with fiction, permeated by both Japanese and Chinese characteris-tics. There isn’t a lot of political work being made by artists living in Japan, perhaps owing to the fact that the country has been relatively stable since the Second World War. Even so, Han shares affinities with the few contemporary Japanese artists who make softly po-litical work with a droll edge such as Yukinori Yanagi—whose 1990 work The World Flag Ant Farm comments on political boundaries in dozens of plexiglass boxes filled with colored sand in the pattern of 170 United Nations member countries. These flags are dissected by colonies of ants that run through them, crossing international “bor-ders” and cracking the tightly packed sand. Also worth mentioning is Tsuyoshi Ozawa who for the past decade has created “weapons” out of local vegetables that are eaten after they are documented in the arms of women.

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Memory of Each Other Kari Conte

This exhibition takes its title from Han’s 2010 video work which shows one of the five uninhabited Senkaku Islands slowly fading into the sea, ending up level with the horizon line over a period of six minutes. This work addresses a highly charged territory in the East China Sea where the ownership of the islands has long been disputed between China and Japan. In a more metaphorical sense, Han’s life stretches between China and Japan, and when looking at the Senkaku Islands from Japan, he is surely reminded of his own selfhood, which is constructed between the same two lands. The video has no sound, and its slow movement and grayish hues bring about a poetic, yet melancholy reading of this prolonged political situation. Tourists are seen on the water’s edge, oblivious to the island sinking into the sea. This scene is a montage of footage the artist took of a seascape, transposed with the island’s rendering on Google Earth’s 3D map. There’s a kind of Zen passage of time in the video, even though lurking beneath the surface is a whole tangle of territorial conflicts; Han also sees the influence of US power on Japan in the situation, as the US administered the islands for nearly three decades. Reclining Statues, a ten-minute video made earlier this year, shows the artist in costume and utterly transformed into five mon-uments: Statue of Liberty in New York, Columbus Monument in Barcelona, St. Francis Xavier in Malacca, Adam Smith in Edinburgh and Rodin’s The Thinker in Tokyo. In the video, Han appears on

Reclining Statues,2015. Video, 9:55 min.

screen as each of these statues, at first replicating their original poses for about a minute. He then gradually lies down to his right, assuming a reclining Buddha pose that he holds for another minute. Seeing the artist convincingly dressed as a statue, only to reinter-pret its form as Buddha is comical to say the least. Furthering this sentiment, the statues seem to hover in the sky, in direct reference to the way the Buddha is often depicted. The video’s soundtrack is a slightly warped religious mantra, chanted by Han with the beat orchestrated by banging on a cardboard box. Sounding more con-temporary than conventional, the artist distorted both the tone and reverberation.

All of the statues are based on Western figures with widespread cultural relevance, and were selected by the artist on the basis of their perception in Japan and the East. Of course, the work also fol-lows a long lineage of the representation of the Buddha in art. The Buddha can even be seen in the shape of Marcel Duchamp’s leg-endary urinal, which some argue is the artist’s expression of Zen. Amongst many Japanese contemporary artists known for depicting the Buddha are Nam June Paik and Hiroshi Sugimoto.

As mentioned above, Han carefully chose the five statues; he sees them in totality as personifying the balance of world power. The vid-eo begins with Han performing as the Statue of Liberty—an icon of freedom par excellence in the US—embodied by the broken chain at her feet. The towering robed female figure holds a tablet, torch and crown suggesting that she enlightens; Han puts these down as he reclines. Next, Han becomes the Columbus Monument, which commemorates Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas, and again for Han, the influence of US power on the world, and Japan. The green outfit Han wears imitates the patina on the almost 200-foot tall statue erected in 1888.

Made ethereal and otherworldly by Han’s animation, the alabaster St. Francis Xavier memorializes the first Christian missionary in

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Reclining Animals,2015. Video, 5:47 min.

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Japan. Xavier wrote in a letter that the Japanese were “the best people yet discovered.” Following this, Han emulates a statue of Adam Smith, the eighteenth-century philosopher and economist often considered to be the father of capitalism, best known for his book, The Wealth of Nations. Smith interested Han for his lesser known book, Theory of Moral Sentiment, which is about moral judg-ment, and relates to Buddhist ideas of Dharma, the religious law of individual conduct. Han’s depiction of Smith ends humorously as he lies down, pulling his cloak over his body as a blanket. In the fifth part of the video, the artist imitates The Thinker, which is a popular work for Japanese art students. A version of this sculpture exists nearby Japan’s leading art school, in the National Museum of West-ern Art’s collection. As in the original work by Rodin, The Thinker leans forward in meditation. As The Thinker transitions to repose in the video, a nude Han steps off his pedestal, seemingly lost in thought as he moves to the supine position.

A sequel to Reclining Statues, the newly commissioned work Re-clining Animal Statues provides a novel reading of iconic patriotic symbols. This video once again shows the costumed artist, who over five minutes transforms into an eagle, lion and beaver—symbols of the US, UK, and Canada—gracefully assuming the reclining Bud-dha pose. The same soundtrack is played here as in the first video, only now it is augmented with animal shrieks and cries, vocalized by Han himself. The animal sounds lend an absurd aspect to the video; made all the more whimsical by the artist moving into the Buddha poses mimicking the same gesticulations that he imagines the animals themselves would use. Han, as a burnt orange bald eagle, spreads his wings outside Grand Central Station in New York City, the largest commuter railroad station in the world. The bald eagle, an animal that represents freedom, was chosen as an emblem for the US due to its long life and considerable strength. The 4,000-pound eagle statues that now perch on the entrance to Grand Central, are made light in Reclining Animal Statues.

In London, lions encircle the Royal Coat of Arms on the entrance gates to Buckingham Palace, accenting the traits of leadership, strength and courage. Han poses as one of the lions embedded in the crest, as he struggles to hold the lion’s one-legged pose, he por-trays the “pride” of England. Han next reenacts a beaver at the apex of the Parliament Building in Canada. With brownish fur made of string, and two cardboard buckteeth, Han squirms and chirps much like a beaver would if made to assume a Buddha pose, with his hand delicately placed on his right cheek. Beaver pelts used for hats were lucrative for Canadian trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-turies; and so the beaver became the national animal emblem.

In a second commissioned work made this year, Han traversed the US to see the Grand Canyon for the first time. This trip resulted in a

Grand Canyon, 2015. Digital ink jet print, 82 x 121 in.

Detail of Grand Canyon

twelve-by-seven-foot digitally produced photograph of this natural wonder, made up of identical one-cent coins, problematizing US politics and society through its currency. Each individual “pixel” in the photograph is a one-to-one scale penny, and the image of the canyon only appears when the viewer stands back from the photo-graph. Interrogating the interdependence of landscape, ecology and economics, this photograph is the latest work in Han’s series Life Scan, which are all images of places composed out of hundreds of scans of the lowest currency coin from the country in which they exist such as Australia, China, Taiwan and the US. Grand Canyon pits a natural wonder against economic gain and questions the ex-ploitation of natural resources throughout the world for monetary profit, often at the hands of governments.

There’s a real sense of play in both of the reclining statues videos, and in all of Han’s work. Japanese popular culture teems with a playful dissociation from reality into an escapist fantasy world. Yet, Han’s playfulness diverges from escapism and is firmly situated in the real, ontologically forming the basis of his art. He constructs historical narratives from disparate cultural sources in order to complicate identity in our present era of globalization. Memory of Each Other evinces these dualities, from monumental sculpture that transforms into the Buddha to the integration of currency and landscape.

Ishu Han (born 1987, Shanghai, China) currently lives and works in Tokyo, Japan. Han’s works have been featured in a number of solo exhibitions including Life Scan, Tokyo Frontline, Japan, 2014; Study Country, VCA Gallery, Australia, 2013; Form of Sea, Kyoto Art Center North Gallery, Japan, 2012; as well as groups shows such as In the Wake, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2015, and Whose Game is it?, Royal College of Art, UK.

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Published on the occasion of the exhibition,Ishu Han: Memory of Each Otherat the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), July 8 - October 2, 2015

The exhibition is organized by Kari Conte, Director of Programs and Exhibitions with Shinnie Kim, Programs Manager. Published by the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP)Printed by Ideal Graphics, New York

International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP)1040 Metropolitan Avenue Brooklyn, New York 11211USAT: +1 718 387 2900 F: +1 718 387 2966www.iscp-nyc.org

ISCP is a 501(c)(3), not-for-profit organization.

ISBN 978-0-9862167-2-5© 2015 International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP)

This exhibition has been made possible with support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Greenwich Collection and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

Ishu Han’s residency is sponsored by the Asian Cultural Council.

ISCP would like to thank FUF Studio, Tokyo and Alexandra Friedman, ISCP Program Intern.