In a sketchbook that dates to her early student years at Framingham State College (now Framingham State University) in the mid-1970s, the artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, 1940–2025) wrote, “[I] have a brainstorm . . . to do a series of paper dolls.”¹This annotation shares the page with two drawings: a paper figure with a folded base and the tabbed outfit with which it could be paired. The clothing ensemble includes a crisply starched dress layered underneath an apron embellished with a heart-shaped appliqué spelling “Mom.” Alongside the two drawings, Smith penciled a block of ruled lines as if from a composition book and neatly printed “American Public School Education Series.”

Smith recognized dolls to be powerful pedagogical tools that could shape aspirations, perpetuate stereotypes, and ascribe or reinforce societal roles.²Below the apron-strung mother in her sketch, Smith dotted the edge of the page with words including “doctor,” “detective,” and “lawyer.” These read like a laundry list of professions that most young girls of her generation were discouraged from pursuing. Born in 1940, Smith was herself a parent while completing her postsecondary training in fine art. Well-meaning and condescending instructors alike implored her to consider becoming an art teacher, reasoning it was a more suitable and rewarding line of work for a Native American woman.³

Smith didn’t create the first of the paper dolls until the early nineties, but she never abandoned the idea in those intervening years. Some of her earliest doll works were in fact sculptures, from raggedy cloth moppets to wire figurines. In Tribal Ties (1985), two lovingly hand-stitched and pillowy dolls with button eyes embrace one another.⁴ Later, Smith made use of store-bought toys. The Red Dirt Box (1989) is wooden and pocket-size with a plastic Statue of Liberty affixed to the lid. “Give me your tired, your poor” is handwritten on one side.

The “Mother of Exiles” had come to stand for a compassionate center of power, distinct from the conquering empires of yore. In Smith’s sculpture, she is set askew, revealing the contents of the box beneath her: action figures of Plains warriors, who lay flat on their backs, half-buried in the soil. The configuration of the work suggests that righting her would bury them. The scattered plastic bodies of the warriors are solid blue and white. There are no red men, leaving the would-be trio of patriotic colors incomplete. The expression of “red” as a shorthand slur for Native Americans is reappropriated by Smith to present an image of the United States as partial and unfinished without Indigenous peoples. The Red Dirt Box upends the superficial national story of a land for one and all; colonialism is not so easily disguised. 

Smith’s artistic games are serious. Her work alludes to childhood pastimes but not for fun (although play and humor are important)—or because her professors thought it would be better for her to work with children than in the field of contemporary art—but rather because early development is when the norms of social and cultural life are established.⁵In an unpublished document from the artist’s archive, Smith imagines a conversation between a katsina figure and a Cabbage Patch doll taking place in her studio in Corrales, New Mexico, over the course of two days in 1985. The transcript, titled “Fad or Fetish,” records the speakers politely bickering over their origins and responsibilities: Who is a more American product? Who has been more commercialized? Eventually, they come to realize their similarities, including a shared disdain for the bourgeois aspirations of Barbie and Ken. They also agree that each has a role to “help make order in our worlds” and to “teach children about love, hate and nurturing.” Whether used in ceremonial and religious rites or for secular purposes, “dolls reassured the human place in the universe by acting out what the human could not do . . . but they also involve fantasizing and dreaming which made their world a better place.”⁶Dolls are instruments that can reproduce social codes, but they are also agents of change.

In 1991, Smith created Paper Dolls for a Post-Columbian World with Ensembles Contributed by the US Government, a suite of 13 xeroxed drawings tinted with watercolor and pencil.

Paper Dolls depicts an imagined family of Barbie, Ken, and young Bruce Plenty Horses, as well as the black-robed Jesuit priest Father Le de Ville––a homonym of “devil.” On the Flathead Reservation, where Smith grew up, the Jesuits operated a Federal Indian Boarding School from 1864 to 1972. This was one of more than 400 schools jointly run by missionaries and the colonial government in the United States. Like those that existed in Canada, these institutions aimed to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children into a Christian Euro-American worldview. This was done by separating them from their families, language, culture, and religion. These bitterly hostile places were rampant with abuse, and many children never made it home. Those who did survive were impacted in existential ways that Smith’s artwork carefully records.

Paper Dolls illustrates how boarding schools, land grabs, biological warfare, criminalizing ceremonial practice, and the theft of cultural belongings are interlinking strategies of genocide. As Smith once said, “People think that genocide is just about standing people in front of an open pit and shooting them. . . . They think it’s about murdering people. It’s way bigger than that.”⁷The sheet depicting the outfit for Bruce, the child, is especially demonstrative of this reality. Whereas the hospital gown or the capote or the maid’s uniform are garments alone, the “Flathead child’s boarding school outfit,” as Smith labeled it, comes complete with a figure.

The teacherly style of Smith’s handwritten notations is a direct response to the historical fallacies printed in textbooks and otherwise circulating widely at the time. These were the frenzied years leading up to the Columbian Quincentenary in 1992. Major cultural organizations received grants to develop blockbuster projects and exhibitions, many of which perpetuated a narrative of “encounter and exchange” between Indigenous peoples and European invaders––a perspective that offered a benign and teachable framework of multicultural harmony. To some, this even felt like a progressive step, an update of the older “discover and conquer” model. Students of history would learn that things were bad but that now they’re good, while absolving settler society of wrongdoing. “That’s what 1992 was about,” Smith recalled. “This whole big propaganda machine in America was overwhelming the whole story. Making up a new story. I couldn’t stand it.”⁸Smith’s infuriation catalyzed a few strategic shifts that she began to make at the time.

Paper Dolls is unusual as a drawing in that there are multiple sets.⁹It pushes against the categorical line that separates a drawing from a print. Smith was an expert printmaker, having worked with the renowned Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico, since 1979.¹⁰She could have easily created Paper Dolls as an editioned lithograph, for example, but instead produced the work more like the handbills and fliers that plaster streets and circulate on the ground during times of political activity. Indeed, a reproduction of Smith’s Paper Dolls landed on the cover of How to ’92: Model Actions for a Post-Columbian World.¹¹This interventionist booklet offers a guide for do-it-yourself actions to counter the misinformation of the quincentenary: how to mount a demonstration, how to initiate media campaigns, and how to petition for curricular revisions. By opting to draw Paper Dolls, Smith may have intentionally created some distance from the master matrix that printmaking relies upon. This artwork underscores the violence of enforcing a singular worldview, and drawing allowed Smith to forego identical impressions for a process more intimately connected to uniqueness and individuality. One drawing was maybe not enough to reach the audience she needed, given what was at stake, but perhaps several versions would be.

In 2021, Smith returned to the idea of paper dolls.

Even though her practice had always been invested in contemporary politics, this was an exceptional moment of prescience. The revisitation of this work coincided with the announcement of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. The final volume of the investigative report was released in 2024. “For the first time in the history of the United States,” Deb Haaland, Secretary of the Interior, declared, “the federal government is accounting for its role in operating historical Indian boarding schools that forcibly confined and attempted to assimilate Indigenous children.”¹²This comprehensive federal effort outlined recommendations to recognize the legacy of these policies with the goal of addressing intergenerational trauma and providing a path toward healing.

Paper Dolls from 2021 shares its name with the earlier series, but Smith transformed the scale and the material. The installation involves nearly life-size aluminum cutouts of the painted figures and their outfits. Smith designed them so that they come away from the wall, creating a dimension of depth and shadow. The imagery is identical to the earlier work, but the written descriptions are absent. Whereas the paper versions were carriers of explanations and historical facts, the sculptural dolls—which connect to Smith’s earliest approach to doll-making—are physically embodied. It is as if the core of Smith’s lesson to audiences today is one of relationality. The history is important, but so is our position toward it in the present. “My messages are about things that have happened in the past that impact what’s happening today,”¹³she maintained.

Smith was awarded four honorary doctorates over the course of her lifetime and an honorary baccalaureate from Salish Kootenai College, an accredited tribal college founded in 1978 that offers essential services to those in her home community. Smith was a longtime supporter of Salish Kootenai’s library and arts programs. In her speech for the school’s 2015 commencement ceremony she began, “This honorary degree from Salish Kootenai means more to me than all four honorary doctorates from mainstream universities.”¹⁴Encouraging the students seated before her, she continued, “My story is about how a child develops resiliency and coping mechanisms in a difficult and disenfranchised world.”¹⁵Smith’s relationship to the classroom was one she navigated with criticality and determination. Her role as a teacher was neither vocational nor a consolation to her. She was deliberate in how, when, and where she taught, and her artwork became one of most powerful platforms from which she advocated for education. Smith used dolls throughout her practice in service of that wider strategy, as an unassuming yet powerful motif to redress political and cultural injustices.

In Memory of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940-2025).

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith Paper Dolls for a Post-Columbian World 1991 is currently on view in Gallery 208 at MoMA.

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A tapestry of such and similar interplays between mythology and technology is on display in Ming Wong’s Windows on the World (Part 2), a 24-channel soundtracked video installation from 2014 composed of flat-screen monitors arranged on three levels of long tabletops stacked like freestanding shelves. This work’s corpus of moving images and accompanying on-screen notes are gleaned from the sprawling archives of Cantonese opera film, East Asian science fiction, and TV news about the role of the People’s Republic of China in what has become of the Space Race.

The collection partially explores the turbulent history of Chinese and East Asian narratives and characters with science-fictional elements, whether found in annals, reports, films, or literature from the late nineteenth century onward. As David Wang has argued, “By the act of imagining and writing out the incredible and the impractical, late Qing writers set forth the terms of China’s modernization project, both as a new political agenda and as a new national myth.”¹ The staunch realism of the May Fourth literati, however, meant an aversion to such works of fiction and led to their relatively belated canonization.

Of course, the genre’s position vis-à-vis the Western canon has not been much less ambivalent. In 1941, Wilson “Bob” Tucker coined the term “space opera” to define the popular subgenre that had helped to establish science fiction as a literary staple in the previous two decades. He meant it pejoratively, calling it the “hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn space-ship yarn, or world-saving for that matter,” which follows similar designations like “horse opera,” as in a cheap Western, and “soap opera,” as in the radio tearjerkers once sponsored by soap manufacturers.²

Wong, however, takes the label at face value, treating it with irreverence. Instead of rejecting “hacky” and “outworn” clichés, the Berlin-based Singaporean artist uses them as cultural vehicles with high mobility. Divesting from essentialist truth claims, he pursues unprecedented affinities and adjacencies across space and time, reclaiming the hollowness of types, tropes, and clichés as a shape-shifting mold for recasting the history of an unrecognized presence. He turns “opera” into an opportunity to bring together science fiction and Chinese mythology in an arguably queer outer space, working toward the emergence of further hybrid constructs and media offshoots—particularly a Cantonese space opera film.

Wong’s personal history also weaves into his multiyear quest for an exquisite amalgamation of film, media, and performance. He is related to acclaimed opera singer Joanna Wong Quee Heng, who first encountered Cantonese opera in Penang, her birthplace, and later pursued it academically and professionally in Singapore. Wong also wrote an award-winning play as a student in the early 1990s, which led to a theatrical production with elements from Indonesian Wayang and Cantonese opera.

His research into the “opera film” as a transnational genre traces the history of complex and multilayered interactions between Hollywood films, dialect or non-Mandarin Sinophone films, and Cantonese opera performances. The international appeal of talkies in the 1930s transformed performing arts in China, leading to stage versions of popular movies, both foreign and domestic, as well as film adaptations of Cantonese operas.³ By the mid-twentieth century, this hybridity had been further facilitated through connections developed by opera troupes that sailed from Hong Kong to perform for the Southern Chinese immigrant communities on the North American West Coast. Considering how hybridization both compounds and confronts the differences and divisions from which hybridity emerges in the first place, Wong studies the form of Cantonese opera film not only as a response to the invasive hegemony of Hollywood but also as it was shaped by diasporic and nomadic conditions.

Like a media archaeologist, Wong explores how old narratives of the heavens are retold by new means, and he gathers videographic visions of the world’s expanding future into outer space as imagined and reimagined at different points in the past and from multiple standpoints in and around China. Nonetheless, thematic through lines form the armature that supports the work’s treatment of different media—as much juxtapositional as it is anachronistic. Wong’s approach to locality follows the forms and narratives of dislocation, considering historical discontinuities of a place alongside incredible overlaps between what is no longer there and what is not yet there. The work’s own curated database, much like an index, can serve as a research dossier or study station for identifying various associations between the fictions and realities of future imaginaries, between the unrealized and exhausted narratives of modernization.

In light of the political agendas and national myths that were set in motion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Wong collects visual testaments to situated experiments in alternate modernities, whether Chinese, socialist, or both. In this sense, his methodology is tantamount to what could be called “comparative futurism,” charting the conflicts and commonalities between different kinds of “the incredible and the impractical” envisaged through artistic, discursive, and political practices of posterity in different geographical and historical contexts.⁴ Comparatism in this sense is fundamentally archaeological; every comparative futurist is required to always historicize the future in its multiple guises. This entails studying how the different progress- and return-oriented approaches to futurity have grown closer and/or more distant from each other over time, or how the technologies of imagination developed by one approach are appropriated and repurposed by the other. The archaeological model of sedimentation reveals to the comparatist that even a newly minted future-oriented thought often carries forward traces of hopes, fears, and ideologies that render it comparable to the accumulated strata of past imaginings.

Given its ethnic, racial, national, and linguistic baseline, Windows on the World (Part 2) particularly situates its comparative lens in relation to what has been referred to under the rubric of Sinofuturism since the 1990s. It is an ambiguous moniker that often stands for a heterogenous constellation of competing ideas. However, by drawing on science-fictional correlations between myth and statecraft, Wong suggests that the presence of Sinofuturist orientations predates the emergence of the terminology and its most emblematic associations today, namely with artificial intelligence or smart cities. For some, Sinofuturism is a techno-orientalist imaginary in which fears and fascinations of a rapidly changing world are projected onto all things Chinese as reductive metonyms for East Asia at large. Its counterpart is another tyrannical sense of the term: a technocratic ideology that drives state policies envisioning China’s future as an ethnonationalist and neocolonial force with a monolithic grip on global capital. Yet for others, Sinofuturism may represent a set of tactics for reappropriating techno-orientalism into an ever-emergent vision with transregional affiliations, navigating a path of futurity between and beyond hegemonic tendencies.⁵

Either way, the Sinofuturist bottom line is that if the future is not so radically new as to erase old constructs of otherness, and if inherited identities remain fictions—because they have never been anything but—then why not fabulate further? Windows on the World (Part 2) frames the future as a dialectic of progress and return, while positing futurisms as the tactics of making do with and without history. It wonders how speculative fabulation might go beyond cashing in on the past or compensating for it, even if history is rife with such maneuvers.

The socialist futurisms in the mix range from Maoist propaganda posters featuring “space babies” to Zheng Wenguang’s pioneering short story “From Earth to Mars” (1954), the first of its kind to gain the Communist Party’s official endorsement. Also included are scenes from Kurt Maetzig’s The Silent Star (1960), a screen production of The Astronauts (1951) by Stanisław Lem, who later distanced himself from his popular novel’s “simplistic moral universe,” seeing it as a result of the period’s constraints.⁶ The first of several Eastern Bloc sci-fi films, The Silent Star is distinct in its techno-positive pacifism and interplanetary color blindness by way of a multicultural community of crew—perhaps an unsung precursor to Star Trek.⁷ This history also revisits the brief years between bans on the genre, when archaeologist Tong Enzheng’s short story “Death Ray on Coral Island” (1978) was adapted by actress and director Hongmei Zhang into the PRC’s first sci-fi film (1980). Finally, Wong’s assortment circles back to the present, marked by the genre’s growing popularity in China since the 1990s and the international rise of Chinese science fiction, particularly those stories set in an extraterrestrial context, since the 2000s.

A key reference among the more recent productions excerpted in Windows on the World (Part 2) is Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 (2004), which is part of a lineage of Hong Kong films emerging in the 1980s and flourishing through the 2000s that are often considered an alternative within rather than to the Hollywood mainstream.⁸ The title alludes to the final year of the fifty-year interregnum during which China and its former British colony are to be governed as “one country, two systems” (although this period feels prematurely cut short following the 2020 national security law). The year 2046 is in the future but also represents a place trapped within the memory walls of unfulfilled desires and unmet promises.

Considering this filmic citation, Wong’s space patchwork seems immersed in a mood of anticipatory nostalgia fused with cognitive latency: in the age of planned obsolescence, extraterrestrial imageries might still momentarily tingle with futuristic flair before turning sourly dated. This is what Ackbar Abbas terms “déjà disparu,” or “the feeling that what is new and unique about the situation is always already gone, and we are left holding a handful of clichés, or a cluster of memories of what has never been.”⁹ Media archaeology can address this cultural politics of disappearance not only by studying the past but also through a historiography of the vanishing present. Media archaeology remediates the experience of becoming aware of something only when it begins to disappear—or of realizing, retrospectively, that it may as well have never existed. Confronted with such prophecies of disappearance, a media archaeologist of the future may be poised to both invoke and intervene in the conditions under which clichés, or memories of what has never been, become self-fulfilling precedents.

Technically an inexhaustible cliché, the lunar soil has long served as fertile ground for stories of colonization, exile, alienation, and physical or psychological transformation, among others. Windows on the World (Part 2) sifts through a large corpus of East Asian cultural productions that reference mythopoetic and technoscientific engagements with the Moon. Among them is Battle in Outer Space (1959) by the kaijū auteur Ishirō Honda, an early non-Western apocalyptic scenario wherein major cities, including those in the West, come under attack by Moon-occupying, mind-controlling aliens. Another is a 2003 recording of the renowned Bai dancer and choreographer Yang Liping’s solo dance Moonlight, in which she fluidly shifts her full-length silhouette between human, animal, and vegetal forms against the backdrop of a large gleaming circle.

Another example of shape-shifting as a motif is Satoshi Kon’s cult anime Millennium Actress (2001), a fictional account of a documentary being made about a reclusive former movie star, which implodes into a dizzying metanarrative conflating biographical facts with her on-screen roles. This fourth-wall-free tour de force follows the actress’s memories of embodying characters in a wild array of films, from period dramas to sci-fi thrillers. In Wong’s selected excerpt, she appears in a spacesuit, boarding a rocket on an ominous solo mission into the unknown—a scene that resonates with other images of predominantly female taikonauts. Among them are Major Liu Yang, the first Chinese woman to leave Earth in 2012—who is shown in a postmission TV interview—and Captain Wang Yaping, the second to do so in 2013—who is shown gracefully practicing Tai Chi and teaching physics via a live video broadcast while defying gravity aboard the Tiangong space station.¹⁰

Such thematic focal points—including matters of alienation and longing, adaptation and reinvention, and female or femme representation in historical and mythological narratives as well as in aerospace and entertainment industries—reveal the queer tendencies woven into Wong’s practice. Since the mid-2000s, his oeuvre has involved reenacting iconic scenes from the Golden Age and New Wave canons of film history, with the artist often casting himself in every role. While offering a nod to the long history of female (and male) impersonation in Chinese opera, this approach also suggests a queering of the mutual reinforcement of diversity and uniformity, of segregation and integration, as two sides of the same coin in late liberal globalization.

The artist not only asserts roles that he, as a queer Asian in the diaspora, has been historically excluded from but also challenges assumptions about the historicity and locality of what renders him identifiable. The aim here is to gesture toward global lineages of movement across the assumed borders of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, and language. In his own words, Wong is an “unwilling performer,” challenging “mainstream” expectations for explaining oneself or performing one’s own authentic self: “Double-drags and triple agents; what you see is not always what you get.”¹¹

Via a clip from the video component of his multimedia installation Windows on the World (Part 1) (2014), the artist inserts himself into the grid of (Part 2), where he is walking through a foil-covered, tube-shaped corridor, its oval windows casting an eerie glow. He is wearing a metallic spacesuit with orange details, a high bun with short bangs peeking from beneath a round, oversize helmet, and a stoic expression—somewhat evoking French-Japanese vedette Yoko Tani’s look in The Silent Star. The mise-en-scène echoes that of the Soviet sci-fi classic Solaris (1972), adapted by Andrei Tarkovsky from a 1961 novel by Lem.

Wong soundtracked both (Part 1) and (Part 2) by mixing Eduard Artemyev’s electronic score for Solaris, which was based on a Bach composition, with a 1950s recording of a sorrowful aria from the opera Zhaojun Crosses the Border performed by legendary actress and Cantonese opera virtuoso Hung Sin-nui. This opera narrates the story of Princess Wang Zhaojun’s marriage, arranged as a form of foreign peace treaty during the Han dynasty, and her symbolic role as a “mediator in ethnic and gender conflicts.”¹² When placed within Wong’s repertoire, her journey of no return reflects how national bodies, always already gendered, remain haunted by a longing born of “estranged futures,” which can offer “passports into queer worlds” through reimagining their aborted beginnings in the past.¹³

Wong’s recombinant approach to customs of crossing or tales of transgression, on the one hand, and futures repeatedly exhumed and exhausted or imagined and abandoned in the past, on the other, is aimed at queering the present—that is, the present as the locus of historical reorientations where our ways of relating to both the past and the future can be reshaped. “Old futures,” according to Alexis Lothian, “are the traces that remain to show that the official narrative is never the whole story.”¹⁴ In this sense, Wong’s ambivalence toward the mainstream brings together a twofold set of vestigial fragments: some represent one of the many narratives of the same story or one of the many renditions of the same narrative, while others suggest shapes of an implied future that never came but still might in one configuration or another.

The grid of identical flat screens—complete with the typewriter effect that animates the artist’s explanatory briefs—evokes not only a control room but also TV sets in a store window, as well as the associated history of forming public spaces in the broadcast image of space travel, among other news. Here, the familiar view of 24-hour news cycle playing in sync across multiple screens has been replaced with an archival display. Deep into the postnetwork era, the contemporary public that Wong calls on too is familiar with the reformatting of diverse source images, daily doomscrolling through so much of it. His audience also knows that while data footprints might be hard to rub off, the digital age has its own culture of disappearance formed around not only encoding losses but also the human inability to retain attention amid mounting information overloads.

For Abbas, writing at the turn of the millennium, disappearance in this sense entails “a radical desynchronization: the generation of more and more images to the point of visual saturation going together with a general regression of viewing.”¹⁵ The present vanishes into images generated at speeds and volumes beyond perception. Every image becomes a record of an instant relic and then a distant memory of what may never have existed. The past thickens, weighing down on the present, pressing it thin. In other words, globalization has accelerated history to the point that it blurs in places.

A little over a decade into the new century, Wong’s ensemble relocates the matter of ubiquitous disappearance within the increasingly globalizing conditions of the screen age. What characterizes the screen age today is not only the desynchronization of sequential images but also the simultaneity of parallel streams of viewing. More channels, more gaps or divisions—where the specter of disappearance hovers.

What remains in the drift of disappearance is perhaps the impulse to connect—to form longer, layered trails of association across space and time. Simultaneous yet out of sync, a kind of disjointed affinity. This is queer persistence in media mode, seeping from one screen or format into another. The queerness of wayward associations is embedded into Windows on the World (Part 2), which the artist has called an attempt “to open windows into the metaphysical contradictions and cultural clashes of [his] own lived, queer existence.”¹⁶ Whether on a screen or in a spaceship, these are also windows through which to navigate the history of the future, its repetitions and discontinuities, in today’s split, multichannel media culture. “Splits function as porous contact zones rather than inviolable borders,” David Joselit writes about early experiments with video, adding that “The split is a navigable space of interchange rather than a void or vacuum into which dialogue disappears.”¹⁷ With this archival installation, the artist plants another seed of queer porosity within the split narratives of the past and future. Amplifying the resonance between situated facts and fictions, Wong traces the splintered backstory of a hybrid, imaginative tradition yet to come.

The post A Queer Media Archaeology of the Future: Ming Wong’s Quest for a Cantonese Space Opera Film appeared first on post.

Missing and Lost People’s Day also points toward the complex and empathetic politics of an artist who has reflected on his homeland for four decades. The painting shows seven protestors—three men, three women, and a child—each dressed in monochrome Sudanese attire. They appear emblematic, though Elmur’s subjects always look half realistic and half like characters in a story. Six of them hold white pieces of paper, each of which contains the image of a missing person. Several cover their own faces with the depicted face, as if it were their own. The effect is evidentiary and stirring, as if each protestor were two people at once—the living and the dead.

It is also a remarkably self-reflexive painting, because photography is at the very heart of Elmur’s practice and, specifically, the inspiration for the works he has been making since his mid-30s, of which Missing and Lost People’s Day is exemplary. Its profound political commitment also reflects the inextricability of art and politics, for better and for worse, in the Sudanese context. Sudan’s modern art history typically begins with the Khartoum School¹, which in the postcolonial excitement of the 1960s sought to find and represent a specifically Sudanese identity. When Elmur, who was born in 1966, studied at the College of Fine Art and Applied Art in Khartoum, the lead tutor was Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq, cofounder of the Crystalist movement that challenged the foundations of the Khartoum School.(Elmur, under pressure from his family to earn a living, studied graphic design, but he painted in his free time and sought advice from Ishaq and other lecturers.) The Crystalists aimed to break free from art’s ties to nationalism and class and move toward Conceptualist underpinnings, particularly as elaborated through a study of the intrinsic properties of materials. However, as the country’s political situation worsened in the 1980s, many artists fled to Europe or neighboring countries. When Omar al-Bashir seized power in 1989, his repressive regime began instrumentalizing art, pushing artists to produce pastiches of Islamic designs or Sudanese identity. Elmur was targeted by the conservative government. Soon after the coup, the authorities deemed one of his cartoons inflammatory—an image he had drawn for the newspaper and magazine where he worked after university—and he was fired from his job and then arrested. Afterward, he fled to Nairobi, where many Sudanese artists were already living.

When he returned to Khartoum, he painted furiously, developing the style that he is now best known for, with photography at its center. As he often tells the story, after Sudan achieved independence in 1956, the state mandated that each citizen carry an identity card.² Suddenly, all of Sudan needed to have their picture taken, and so Elmur’s enterprising father opened a photography studio—the Studio Kamal, which was adjacent to his own father’s barbershop—to meet this demand. As a child, Elmur was fascinated by the rejected photos that were kept in a tin box: double exposures or photographs in which a subject turned a head or arm, leaving a scar of a blur across the picture. These images, as well as others from his archival collection, became the basis for his new paintings. The technological misfires account for some of the glimpses of oddness in his portraiture: the wonky cheeks of one subject’s face, or the second chin that unexpectedly protrudes from another’s. Sometimes the double exposures are easier to spot because a subject appears to have two or three faces, with the extras hiding behind the original like discarded personalities—or, as in Missing and Lost People’s Day, take the form of an image of a face that is held in front of an actual face. These glitches are commensurate with the overall strangeness of Elmur’s work. His figures’ blocklike bodies seem at once too bulbous in their shape and too linear. Subjects are often shown in head-on formality—like they are posing for a studio photographer—or holding animals or plants as if to record their own role as caretakers, occupying the frame with impenetrable or perhaps simply worried facial expressions.

Elmur’s decision to put photography at the core of his work is a loaded one. The photograph played an important role in colonialism, where it reinforced the racist views of the European administrators. Popular images of the time showed “newly discovered” people in tribal dress, submitting them to the taxonomies and hierarchies laid out by colonial authorities. Others showed crowds arrayed as passive subjects around a central European administrator, clearly visible by his white skin and, more often than not, his obstinately white linen attire. (Elmur has also collected examples of these colonial images.) This legacy persists in Elmur’s work, though he also brings out other, less theoretical and arguably more powerful uses of photography: its dual role as a mechanism of state and economic state control (as, for example, in ID cards) and, on the flip side, as a means of accountability or way to contest state control by evidentiary testimony.

His Innocent Prisoners series (2019) refers to those who were disappeared under Omar al-Bashir’s regime. His subjects mostly appear in white, each holding or identified by a number, recalling another genre of photography: the mug shot, examples of which also appear in Elmur’s collection. He has acquired numerous archival photographs of apparent criminals from the United States, with their name, age, alleged crime, and other particulars handwritten underneath profile and frontal views. He also collects mug shots from 19th-century Egypt as well as Egyptian and Sudanese identity cards—much like those produced by the Studio Kamal.³ Other elements of his collection are less typical, such as water and electricity invoices and notices informing recipients that their service will be cut off after 24 hours if the bill is not paid immediately. These latter administrative papers were the inspiration for the Central Electricity and Water Administration series (2022), which shows the artist’s trademark characters standing next to water tanks and towers whose contents they have been denied. Water supply in Sudan is a serious issue, with most in the arid country hugging the contours of the three major rivers. For Elmur, who was raised on the banks of the Blue Nile, the idea of legislating access to water through extortive corporations is no mere infraction but a major example of the injustices of Sudanese corruption.

These notices, much like the images held by the figures in Missing and Lost People’s Day, point to the outsized importance of paperwork (passports, contracts, leases, birth certificates, images) among the migratory and dispossessed. If a house or a life is destroyed, these documents can be key to establishing lines of credit, gaining permission to travel or remain, or securing government benefits, new legal standing, and other fundamental rights. (Or to alerting you that you will have no water or that you must leave the country.) Elmur’s artwork not only acknowledges the power of these papers—the proof of life that the relatives of the June 3 massacre brandish in front of them—but also recognizes the absurdity of this power, couching this proof within a world of surreal and made-up figuration. These documents are both more and less than mere pieces of paper, depending on the authority behind them. But such testimony is sometimes all that people have: fragile leaves of paper that Elmur elevates on his stretched and confrontational canvases.

All personal accounts from Salah Elmur, unless indicated otherwise, were gathered by the author during discussions with the artist in the spring and summer of 2024.

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In a series of email conversations with art historian Moira Roth, Dinh Q. Lê (1968–2024) recalled a form of ritual he would perform on each of his trips back to Vietnam. As an act of healing to help his home country recover from the wounds of war, Lê would carry with him some amount of American soil that he would then mix into the water of the Mekong River. In his own words, this action of soil transfusion was a way to “help the wandering souls of all American MIAs lost in the jungle of Vietnam to have some sense of home.”¹ Conjuring both the artist’s trajectory from Southeast Asia to the United States and back again and a process of anamnesis across historical and political events, this anecdote is suggestive of the matrix guiding much of Lê’s work, in which histories of war and violence and the individual lives they often overshadow constitute threads—narrative as well as material—that are open to recombination.

Indeed, the act of bringing an element (soil) from a distant place and mixing it with a local element (water), ultimately—all things considered—results in the transformation of both, a process that can be seen as a translation of the method Lê used to create the series for which he is best known, namely his “photo-weavings.”² Untitled (Soldiers at Rest) (2003) belongs to this body of work, which resulted from Lê’s long-term archaeological investigation of the visual culture of the American War (known as the Vietnam War in the United States), via a traditional Vietnamese weaving technique. Lê learned the latter from his aunt who, when he was a child in Vietnam, wove grass mats, and he later adapted this traditional craft for his own purposes. As Christopher Miles, an artist, curator, and friend of Lê has noted, the function of weaving was, for Lê, both “an effective method and a powerful metaphor” in addressing the layering of personal, historical, and cultural registers operating in his practice.³ In an attempt both to interrogate the construction of representations of Vietnam and the way his own subjectivity related to them and to explore how “to take back control of those images,” Lê cut chromogenic prints of archival and found imagery into strips that he interlaces into composite pictures.⁴

Untitled (Soldiers at Rest) shows a group of five men who, as the title suggests, are taking a break from their military duties. This moment of pause from the temporality of war is signaled through their bare chests and laid-back demeanors. They smile at the camera; one man in the foreground can be seen holding a cigarette. Elements of warfare are identifiable, mainly in the form of a vehicle that, at the center of the image, one of the soldiers is seated upon. This scene is interlaced with two other characters whose presence produces an impression of spectrality and wards off any attempt to capture the image as a whole—that is, to find an all-encompassing meaning within it. The most easily discernible of them is Cynthia Wood in her iconic role as a Playboy Playmate in Apocalypse Now (1979). Wearing a pale sky-blue cowgirl outfit and white hat, she appears in a number of Lê’s other woven photographs, including in Paramount (2003), Untitled 9 (2004), and From Vietnam to Hollywood (paratroopers) (2005), as part of his endeavor to examine the connection between sexualized imagery and imagery of war and political violence. Wood’s inclusion in Untitled (Soldiers at Rest) seems to aim to problematize certain binaries within the image. Often, black-and-white images are archival or photojournalistic and so Wood is rendered in bright colors—in contrast to the soldiers. Furthermore, the men’s faces are identifiable, while hers is partially blurred through the effects of crosshatching—the mark of Lê’s “own style of weaving.” As the artist has declared, “There are parts where I skip weaving to make a certain part of the image clearer or to hide an area.”⁵ In Apocalypse Now, the arrival of Playmates in the Vietnamese jungle to perform for the soldiers results in the latter’s display of violent virility—led by their drive toward a fantasized full satisfaction that, in fact, exposes the military’s impotence. However, in Lê’s image, this scene is not reduced to the mere spectacle of the female body offered to the male gaze—or even to its critique. The quasi-kinetic dimension of Lê’s photo-weavings, when encountered in real space, invites the viewer to a wander of body and gaze, and to a back-and-forth examination of “hidden” elements and of the work in total. And so, on closer inspection, Untitled (Soldiers at Rest) reveals the silhouette of a man who, emerging from the right-hand edge of the picture, stands face-to-face with Wood, his arm stretched toward her and blending in the picture as he reaches out to her. Within this triangular scenario, it is unclear (at least to the author of the present speculation) which gazing subject is the object of Wood’s lascivious pose. As already mentioned, the soldiers seem to stare at the camera—or the viewer—and the way Lê has crosshatched Wood’s right eye directs her gaze in the same direction. As for the character on the right, Lê has woven a strip of the soldiers in the other image into the area of his eye socket.

Having experienced war and refugeehood, Lê’s questioning of what forms the memories of Vietnam led him to undo their established representations and to “start to insert other narratives,”⁶ a process that, as major commentators of Lê’s work have noted, “can be seen as acts of repair or as a kind of memorial.”⁷ Here, questions arise: do Lê’s gestures of interlacing, interweaving, or suturing constitute a form of critique, and what do these other narratives entail? In this regard, Lê stated in a 2023 interview: “Everything’s kind of merging, so I was trying to break the whole thing apart into pieces or to deconstruct it, to start to talk about how everything is merging between facts, between fiction, between personal memories into this landscape of surreal memories, neither facts nor fiction.”⁸ As this statement on merging levels of realities and the constructed scenario of Untitled (Soldiers at Rest) suggests, the insertion of other narratives produces indeterminacy and undecidability relative to the legibility and visibility of the images he produces. My contention is that this phenomenon relates as much to the material condition of weaving as to its conceptual and psychic dimensions. Although rarely discussed by his commentators, the visual likeness between Lê’s woven photos and the texture of early electronic videos is striking, and it is something the artist himself commented on: “I always think of the weaving in terms of pixels, because weaving is the first binary structure. Maybe not exactly from the start, but certainly over the years I have been working on the project, and particularly after the first body of work in the late 1980s, I was aware of that relationship.”⁹ Thus, it can be inferred that the site that interlaces the personal with the political is precisely the minimal unit of a woven image—the stitch, the point of suture, or the pixel. A suture closes a wound but in so doing, makes it visible; and to borrow from philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato’s writings on the videographic image, similarly, Lê’s “weaving, dissolving, and re-weaving flows . . . is radical constructivism in politics as well as in the . . . image.”¹⁰

In memory of Dinh Q. Lê and to our missed encounters. Thank you to post editors Beya Othmani, Carlos Quijon, Jr., and Elena Pérez-Ardá López for making this encounter of another kind possible.

Untitled (Soldiers at Rest) (2003) is currently on view as part of the presentation titled “War Remembers Me” in Gallery 214.

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Jean-Michel Atlan (1913–1960)—who signed simply as Atlan in his works—¹is most often considered a representative of lyrical abstraction, an art movement that took root in Paris after World War II. Born in the Casbah of Constantine to a Jewish Berber family (a fact he often emphasized),² his Algerian childhood lent specific forms and colors to his uniquely creative imagination. Atlan’s parents combined tradition and modernity, enrolling their children in both a Talmudic school and a French secular school. Steeped in the mystic readings of sacred texts, his father transmitted knowledge of the Kabbalah to his son, a legacy that would remain important to the artist throughout his life.

In 1930, Atlan left home to study philosophy at the Sorbonne. He became involved in political circles as soon as he arrived in Paris, publishing in Trotskyist journals like La Vérité (The Truth) and attending anti-colonial protests. Concurrently, he began writing poetry, drawing closer to the literary circle surrounding Georges Bataille (1897–1962) and the revolutionary Surrealist movement. He started teaching philosophy but was dismissed when the Vichy regime began to collaborate with Nazi Germany and implemented anti-Jewish laws. Within this extremist context, in 1940, Atlan started to make visual art. Imprisoned under the pretext of “Communist activities,”³ then committed to the Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital from January 1943 to August 1944, he executed his first paintings on boards and makeshift canvases provided by friends and hospital staff.⁴

Once Paris was liberated, Atlan dedicated himself entirely to painting, declaring: “I’ve made the leap from poetry to painting, like a dancer who has discovered that dance is better than verbal incantations for his self-expression.”⁵ He made his breakthrough in the art scene in December 1944, right after the war, at a time when artists had to reinvent themselves to rebuild their relationship with the public.⁶ Nonetheless, his career and distinctive work have posed a challenge to critics. Atlan was perceived both within the School of Paris and on its fringes, engaging in every pictorial trend—from “Art Informel” to lyrical abstraction—so as to better disassociate himself from all of them.⁷ 

After the war, Atlan was hailed as an innovator by new gallery owners such as Denise René and Aimé Maeght as well as by art critics and historians, including Jean Cassou, Charles Estienne, and Michel Ragon (who would become one of the artist’s closest friends). Like French writers Jean Paulhan, Jean Duvignaud, and Clara Malraux, American writer Gertrude Stein was among his first supporters, purchasing several of his works. As a philosopher, Atlan was comfortable taking stances on issues rocking the art world and in 1945, published a manifesto in the second issue of the French journal Continuity.⁸ In this text, he questioned the concept of reality, and, further, the conception of realism—which, according to him, resulted in paintings that were too literal.⁹ Atlan felt a profound sense of freedom and broke his contract with Galerie Maeght in 1947. After making that decision, which was praised by the French artist Pierre Soulages (1919–2022),¹⁰ Atlan experienced a slower period in his career. However, he continued to paint and exhibit. In 1957, his career gained momentum again with a mature body of work that received international recognition in Europe, Japan, and the United States. He would not attend the April 1960 opening of his solo exhibition at The Contemporaries Gallery in New York, because he died in Paris on February 12 in his studio on rue de la Grande Chaumière. By tracing the trajectory of his unconventional career, from his homeland to his premature passing, one can gain a deeper understanding of this self-taught artist’s distinctive impact on art, transcending predefined categories and movements.

A Gestural Painting Focused on the Sign

The works by Atlan in The Museum of Modern Art’s collection represent both periods of the artist’s activity (which were separated by a reclusive time of low visibility for Atlan from 1947 to 1957, although he was still working): lithographs and line blocks created by Atlan in 1945 for Description of a Struggle (Description d’un combat) by Franz Kafka, an illustrated book published in 1946, and Realm (Royaume), a pastel on colored paper made by the artist in 1957. Despite being created ten years apart, the sign is present in both works.¹¹ While the 1945 prints foreground the plastic potential of the sign, his later pastel establishes its use as a means for the artist to relate to the world around him. 

Atlan progressively developed images incorporating biomorphic forms and strange signs. What were his sources of inspiration? Perhaps Arabic calligraphy, which he had encountered in many forms, including in the epigraphic decors of mosques and Islamic monuments in Constantine, such as in the famous madrassa on rue Nationale by his parent’s house? Maybe Hebrew calligraphy, with its graphic and esoteric dimensions? Or Berber motifs used in the decorative arts and symbols to ward off evil? Indeed, Atlan recalled seeing “Berbers tracing geometric signs, making little triangles or zigzags on pottery.”¹² Or ideograms from Japanese culture, with which Atlan felt a close affinity? In Atlan’s visual world, everything is sign and can truly be grasped only through understanding a mysterious language all his own. Atlan constructed his work over a fifteen-year period under the reign of the sign, using lines that are sometimes sharp but more often supple and cursive—signs that, like language, have endless variations. Everything feels connected, both surprisingly open and yet equally mysterious: black forms emerge as abstract signs, or as stylized silhouettes of humans, birds, and trees, or a combination of all these morphing together in metamorphosis—a process central to the artist’s magical universe. Some of his works evoke the Maghreb,¹³ but the majority make no reference to it, leaving the viewer unconstrained in their visual experience and the enigma preserved.

Movement and gesture are embedded in his work. From his earliest ink drawings to his collection of pastels, Les Miroirs du Roi Salomon (King Solomon’s Mirrors), which was published posthumously, calligraphy proved to be consistently significant for the artist. In his illustrations for Kafka’s Description of a Struggle, Atlan transmuted this calligraphy into his own writing. As part of his first contract with Galerie Maeght, at the suggestion of Georges Le Breton and Clara Malraux (who translated Kafka’s text into French), Atlan created a series of lithographs to illustrate the edition for its September 1946 publication.¹⁴ Working with lithographer Fernand Mourlot proved vital to his work: “My contract with Maeght led me to Mourlot’s lithograph studio, where I worked with stones for a year. This time was incredibly enriching for my painting—the black and white taught me about color. In black-and-white work, I discovered light and matter.”¹⁵

He persistently pursued material investigation, driven by a desire to find the best way to bring his forms to life.¹⁶ He explained his choice of materials as follows: “I needed a medium like fresco or oil paint, which led to my absorbent preparations using sackcloth canvas and to mixing powders, oils, and pastels.”¹⁷ Just as a line cuts across to create a symbol, the direct application of pastels—which cannot be covered or redone—contributes to the expressivity of his gestural painting. Atlan’s large oil canvases from this period owe their sumptuous nature in part to the work he was doing on paper at the same time, including in distemper and pastels. His research on color, such as silver, white and ivory black, as well as the absorbent abilities of his mediums, led to his becoming “a modest yet incredible craftsman,” as Michel Ragon put it.¹⁸ He dedicated himself to pastels when the technique was considered outdated and had become largely obsolete in contemporary art. But Atlan was not swayed by fashion, and he worked in that medium (among others) because of its mineral aspects, which evoked earth colors and the ocher of rock. This was undoubtedly inspired by memories, such as of the magnificent, towering plateau upon which Constantine is built.

Conjuring a mental image of his home city, by then far away, he said of the sketches he made in his notebook, “I have Judeo-Berber origins, like almost everyone there in the old city . . . which was built with stone, gullies, eyries, and cactus.”¹⁹ With his propensity for these techniques, his soot-black lines, his symbols from another age, and his ocher colors, Atlan offered the viewer glimpses of the cultural substrate that inspired him and created a staunchly modern work that nonetheless maintained a firm grip on its cultural references. His friend, the artist and poet André Verdet (1913–2004), used these audacious words when speaking of Atlan: “This undercurrent of Afro-Mediterranean civilizations . . . Jean Atlan bathes in the very humus of eras archaic, beyond neolithic.”²⁰ Therewith related, it is noteworthy that from November 1957 to January 1958, the Musée des arts décoratifs in Paris was showing explorer Henri Lhote’s exhibition on cave paintings discovered in Tassili n’Ajjer, Algeria—an exhibition that resonated with several modern artists. In the case of Atlan, the artist told Pierre Alechinsky (born 1927) that the cave metaphor ran through his work. He admitted that, according to him, art and beauty are to be found deep within it.²¹

While not discounting the primordial role of migration in sparking and intensifying memory, everything points to the fact that for Atlan, these recollections and legacies were more than fixed and inert backdrops; instead, he saw them as pliable material for an inventive imagination, freed by gesture to enter the work, reactivated endlessly in creations in which signs and colors combine to give profound coherence and constant renewal.

Atlan seemed to play with materials and mediums to construct his pictorial space: juxtapositions and superpositions reveal the intense vibrations of his colors. He used the expressive potential of vivid hues to their greatest effect, contrasting them with the black forms that structure and invigorate the space. Indeed, Clara Malraux remarked on how the colors and signs were in tension, bringing a rhythm to the heart of his works.²² In the same period, Atlan himself discussed rhythms in dance and painting as a symbol of life, such as in “Letter to Japanese Friends,” which he wrote shortly before his death.²³ In this text, he calls painting an “adventure that confronts man with the formidable forces within and outside of him: destiny and nature.” The rhythm, tension, and violent expressivity in his works add a tragic dimension that reflects his internal suffering and the impact of the conflicting worlds he had lived through. 

Realm (1957) is among the works he produced in his later period of intense creative activity and public exposure. As with other paintings and pastels from this time, the space has been refined, and the composition focuses on fewer, more majestic signs. The artist stages polysemantic forms that appear to be contemporary and personal interpretations of arabesque decoration. Likewise, the presence of rhythm is felt: The forms dance within the painted field, and the viewer can picture them continuing beyond the frame despite the black line that borders it. These shapes seem backlit in a mysterious procession, connected through an entanglement that evokes the idea of metamorphosis. Ocher, red, chalk white, and a few blue highlights lend a strange and uncertain luminosity contrasting with the foreground’s dark scrim. This tension between light and dark, line and color, is accentuated by the texture and shade of the paper, deliberately left exposed akin to the strokes of a pen.

Characterizing Atlan’s Works: Decentering the Gaze, Moving beyond Categories

The two works by Atlan in MoMA’s collection, along with others that are emblematic of his style, such as the large paintings he created from the mid-1950s until his death, reinforce the idea that his art cannot be confined within the artistic categories of Europe at that time. Although mainstream formal logic opposes figuration and abstraction, this binary thinking does not apply to Atlan’s paintings. Today, this fluidity would easily be accepted, but it was a source of debate in the postwar period.

The terms “lyrical abstraction” and “abstract expressionism,” more suited to postwar tastes, likewise did not satisfy the painter, as he did not embrace either one. Michel Ragon put forth the notion of “other figuration” to describe Atlan’s work after his early Art Informel period. In a discussion, Atlan told him that he preferred the term “other art,” suggesting that he didn’t want to be confined to a trend or to be boxed in stylistically.²⁴ For Ragon, this so-called otherness stemmed largely from the artist’s embeddedness in North African culture and history.

Ragon and other critics then began to use the term “barbarism”—often associated with the idea of rhythm—to characterize his art. This word, as well as “primitivism,” were used to describe Atlan’s output, but each has its own level of ambiguity: the former oversimplified his approach, while the latter decontextualized his original anchoring, placing it within a different cultural arena. Beginning in the 20th century, many European artists attempted to tackle the non-Western universe of signs, seeking to emphasize the notion of primitivism. This idea, embraced by artists such as those associated with CoBrA, including Asger Jorn (1914–1973) and Corneille (Guillaume van Beverloo; 1922–2010)—with whom Atlan exhibited in 1951—does not align with his intentions.²⁵ Similarly, among the practitioners of lyrical abstraction, his approach bore no similarities to that of Georges Mathieu (1921–2012), for example, who was becoming famous in Paris around the same time for extolling a type of gestural painting inspired by the calligraphic arts of the Far East. Without a doubt, the postwar context was a suitable one in which to challenge the supremacy of European art. Still, unlike European artists, who were decentralizing their views to understand the world better, Atlan’s evolution was in colonized Algeria, where he had constructed his visual universe; furthermore, he could speak from within the subjugated societies resisting that domination in their own ways. He was not coming from the outside; he was no stranger to the universe of forms other artists would appropriate and use. He claimed to belong within it, first through his political engagement during his youth and then solely through his aesthetic after the war.

In this decentring of the gaze, the question arises whether Atlan’s works relate in form to the Algerian painters who were also in Paris during the 1950s. Those from the generation born in the 1930s took an interest in Atlan’s work upon arriving in Paris. Among the Maghreb painters in the modern era, there is formal proximity with the so-called painters of the sign (“les peintres du signe”), such as Moroccan artist Ahmed Cherkaoui (1934–1967) and Algerian artists Mohammed Khadda (1930–1991), Choukri Mesli (1931–2017), and Abdallah Benanteur (1931–2017), for whom Atlan was a predecessor. The concept of sign painting, coined by Algerian poet Jean Sénac (1926–1973), was an important aesthetic trend amid Algeria’s decolonization and post-independence period. It was historically aligned with a desire for cultural reappropriation through the spotlighting of Arabic and Berber writing, as well as ancestral geometric signs like those used for basket-weaving, pottery, rug-making, and tattoos.²⁶ In his essay “Elements for New Art,” Khadda stated: “Atlan, the prematurely deceased Constantinian, is a pioneer of modern Algerian painting.”²⁷ We should not interpret this statement as assigning a label or identity but rather as expressing both interest in a new aesthetic and gratitude for Atlan’s work—Atlan paved the way for those artists in that moment in history and helped to legitimize their artistic research. 

The Postcolonial Context: Atlan (and Us)

Once idolized, then overshadowed, Atlan is particularly interesting in the postcolonial context: it is necessary to rediscover the vivid work of this precursor, one who used the power of the sign to claim his place in the world at the beginning of decolonization and who underscored the presence of plural modernities within modern art. Critics in his time spoke of the syncretism of his work. By instead referring to the work of Édouard Glissant on creolization, we can go beyond this syncretic vision and reconnect Atlan’s work to other aesthetic experiences that are the result of the creolization of art in the 20th century, a significant source of renewal and a shared universe, recognizing the contributions of each of these actors without having to resort to the idea of hierarchy or centralization.

Translated from the French by Allison M. Charette and Beya Othmani. Click here to read the French version.

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Jean-Michel Atlan (1913-1960) – qui signait simplement Atlan –¹ est le plus souvent considéré comme l’un des représentants de l’abstraction lyrique, mouvement qui marqua la scène parisienne dans l’après-guerre. Né dans la casbah de Constantine, au sein d’une famille juive berbère, comme il aimait à le rappeler,² son enfance algérienne a contribué à donner formes et couleurs à son imaginaire singulier de peintre. Les parents d’Atlan concilient tradition et modernité, inscrivent leurs enfants à l’école talmudique mais également à l’école laïque française. Imprégné de la lecture mystique des textes sacrés, son père lui transmet aussi la connaissance de la kabbale, sujet qui accompagnera l’artiste tout au long de sa vie. 

En 1930, Atlan part étudier la philosophie à la Sorbonne. Dès son arrivée à Paris, il marque son engagement politique en publiant dans des revues trotskistes comme La Vérité et en participant à des manifestations anticolonialistes. En parallèle, il poursuit une activité de poète qui le rapproche du cercle littéraire formé autour de Georges Bataille ainsi que du mouvement surréaliste révolutionnaire. Il enseigne la philosophie, mais il est révoqué suite aux lois antijuives instaurées par le régime de Vichy qui collabore avec l’Allemagne nazie. C’est dans ce contexte extrême qu’Atlan commence le dessin dès 1940. Emprisonné sous prétexte de « menées communistes »,³  puis interné à l’hôpital psychiatrique Sainte-Anne de janvier 1943 à août 1944, il réalise ses premières peintures sur des matériaux de fortune grâce à la complicité de ses proches et du personnel soignant.⁴ 

Au moment de la libération de Paris, Atlan décide de se consacrer pleinement à la peinture et déclare : « Je suis passé de la poésie à la peinture comme un danseur qui découvrirait que la danse le révèle mieux que les incantations verbales ».⁵ Il émerge sur la scène artistique dès décembre 1944 dans un immédiat après-guerre qui pousse les artistes à chercher un nouveau langage pour renouer avec le public.⁶ Le parcours et les travaux de cet artiste singulier interrogent les critiques. Atlan se situe à la fois dans et en marge de l’école de Paris dont il traverse les tendances picturales, de « l’informel » à l’abstraction lyrique, pour mieux s’en extraire.⁷

Après-guerre, de nouveaux galeristes comme Denise René, Aimé Maeght, de même que certains critiques et historiens de l’art comme Jean Cassou, Charles Estienne ou encore Michel Ragon, qui sera un ami proche, voient en Atlan un novateur. À l’instar des écrivains comme Jean Paulhan, Jean Duvignaud, Clara Malraux, l’Américaine Gertrude Stein installée à Paris compte parmi ses premiers soutiens en lui achetant plusieurs œuvres. Théoricien, Atlan prend position avec aisance sur les questions qui agitent le monde de l’art et publie un manifeste dans le numéro 2 de la revue Continuity en 1945 par lequel il remet en cause le concept de réalité et par là même la conception du réalisme qui produit, selon lui, une peinture par trop littérale.⁸Profondément libre, Atlan rompt son contrat avec la galerie Maeght dès 1947. Survivant tant bien que mal à une période difficile à la suite de cette prise de position saluée à l’époque par Pierre Soulages,⁹ Atlan continue de peindre et d’exposer, puis revient en 1957 avec un travail confirmé qui trouve alors un écho international en Europe, au Japon et aux États-Unis. Il ne verra pas l’ouverture de l’exposition que lui consacre The Contemporaries Gallery à New-York en avril 1960, car il décède prématurément des suites d’une longue maladie, le 12 février, dans son atelier, rue de la Grande Chaumière à Paris. Suivre son parcours atypique et complexe, du pays natal jusqu’à son décès précoce, est une manière de rendre à cet artiste autodidacte, et à son art, toute leur singularité, et de sortir des catégories englobantes.

Une peinture gestuelle qui privilégie le signe 

Ainsi, les deux œuvres présentes dans le fonds du MoMA sont-elles représentatives de chacune de ces deux périodes, séparées par une éclipse au cours de laquelle Atlan est peu visible même s’il continue à travailler : lithographies de ses débuts, créées en 1945 pour illustrer la publication Description d’un combat de Franz Kafka, et Royaume, un pastel de 1957, réalisé après le tournant du milieu des années 1950. Dans les deux œuvres, distantes pourtant de plus de 10 ans, le signe est là, avec l’intuition précoce de son potentiel plastique dès 1945, puis avec une place affirmée comme marque d’une présence au monde. 

En effet, Atlan développe progressivement des peintures dont les formes sont chargées de biomorphisme et de signes étranges. Quelles sont ses sources d’inspiration ? La calligraphie arabe, qui lui fut familière, entre autres, sous sa forme épigraphique, ornant les monuments musulmans de Constantine, les mosquées ou la célèbre médersa proche de la maison de ses parents rue Nationale ? La calligraphie hébraïque, avec ses dimensions graphiques et ésotériques ? Les motifs berbères, à la fois décor ancestral et symboles prophylactiques ? Atlan évoquait lui-même qu’il avait vu des « Berbères tracer des signes géométriques, faire de petits triangles, des zigzags sur des poteries».¹⁰ Les idéogrammes de la langue japonaise, culture avec laquelle Atlan avait des affinités intimes ? Dans le monde peint d’Atlan, tout est signe et ne se laisse saisir qu’au travers d’une langue mystérieuse qui est, somme toute, sa propre empreinte sur le réel. Sur une quinzaine d’années, Atlan construit son œuvre en affirmant, par des lignes parfois acérées, mais le plus souvent souples et cursives, le règne du signe, porteur, comme un langage, d’infinies variations. Tout semble lié, étonnamment ouvert et mystérieux à la fois ; les formes noires apparaissent comme des signes relevant de l’abstraction, mais pourraient tout aussi bien être la stylisation de silhouettes humaines, d’oiseaux, d’arbres ou de tous ces éléments confondus dans une métamorphose qui semble l’une des clés de l’univers magique de l’artiste. De nombreux titres de ses réalisations évoquent le Maghreb,¹¹ mais la majorité n’y fait pas référence, laissant le récepteur libre et l’énigme préservée.

La question du mouvement et du geste va donc être centrale dans son œuvre. Depuis ses premiers dessins à l’encre de Chine jusqu’au recueil illustré de ses pastels, Les Miroirs du Roi Salomon, qui paraît à titre posthume, la calligraphie se révèle une écriture particulièrement importante pour l’artiste tout au long de sa carrière. Les illustrations de l’ouvrage Description d’un combat de Franz Kafka conservées par le MoMA constituent un exemple de la transmutation de cette calligraphie vers la propre écriture de l’artiste. Dans le cadre de son premier contrat avec la galerie Maeght, et sur une suggestion de Georges Le Breton et de Clara Malraux qui traduit le texte de Kafka,¹² Atlan va concevoir une série de lithographies pour illustrer cette édition d’art qui sera publiée en septembre 1946. Il va trouver chez le lithographe Fernand Mourlot un enseignement capital pour son œuvre : « Mon contrat chez Maeght m’a conduit vers les ateliers du lithographe Mourlot, où j’ai travaillé pendant un an sur les pierres. Ce séjour m’a terriblement enrichi sur le plan de la peinture elle-même ; le noir et le blanc m’ont appris la couleur. Dans le travail du noir et du blanc, j’ai fait la découverte de la lumière et de la matière ».¹³ 

Il poursuit obstinément ses recherches matiéristes, motivé par l’impératif du type de rendu qui pourra le mieux faire vivre ses formes.¹⁴ Il expliquait ainsi le choix des matériaux utilisés dans ses œuvres : « […] j’ai besoin d’une matière proche de la fresque et de l’huile à la fois, d’où mes préparations absorbantes, l’utilisation de grosse toile de sac, le mélange de poudres, d’huiles, de pastels. »¹⁵ De même que le trait incisif créant le signe, l’application directe du pastel sur lequel on ne peut revenir contribue à l’expressivité de sa peinture gestuelle. Les huiles sur toile de grand format qui datent de ce moment doivent pour une part leur somptuosité au travail sur papier que mène en parallèle Atlan au moyen d’autres techniques qu’il affectionne, telles que la détrempe et le pastel. Ses recherches sur les couleurs, comme le blanc d’argent ou le noir d’ivoire, ainsi que sur le pouvoir absorbant des supports, concourent à faire de lui un simple mais fabuleux artisan, selon Michel Ragon.¹⁶ Il s’adonne ainsi au pastel à une époque où la technique, considérée comme datée, est largement tombée en désuétude dans l’art contemporain. Mais Atlan n’est pas sensible aux phénomènes de mode et travaille ce médium, entre autres, pour son aspect minéral qui évoque les couleurs de la terre et les ocres des rochers. Ceci fait sans doute écho à ses souvenirs, comme le fantastique rocher surplombant des à-pics vertigineux sur lequel est bâtie Constantine : « […] mes origines sont judéo-berbères, comme un peu tout le monde là-bas dans cette vieille ville […] qui est construite avec des rochers, des ravins, des nids d’aigle et des cactus »,¹⁷ dit-il pour évoquer la présence mentale de sa ville natale, désormais lointaine, dont il dessine le profil dans ses carnets.

Par le goût pour ces techniques, par ses traits charbonneux, ses signes hérités d’un autre âge et ses teintes ocre, Atlan laisse entrevoir quel substrat culturel l’inspire pour créer une œuvre résolument moderne, mais en prise avec ses référents culturels. Son ami l’artiste et poète André Verdet parle d’Atlan en ces termes audacieux : « Ce souterrain des civilisations afro-méditerranéennes […]  Jean Atlan baigne à même l’humus des âges archaïques, par-delà le néolithique. »¹⁸ Rappelons qu’eut lieu à Paris au musée des Arts décoratifs, de novembre 1957 à janvier 1958 l’exposition d’Henri Lhote sur les découvertes de l’art rupestre en Algérie, dans le Tassili N’Ajjer, exposition qui interpella nombre d’artistes modernes. Évoquons également ici la métaphore de la grotte – qu’Atlan livre un jour à Pierre Alechinsky –,¹⁹ au fond de laquelle se trouvent, selon le peintre, l’art et la beauté. 

Sans oublier le rôle primordial de la migration qui potentialise et magnifie les souvenirs, tout concourt à penser que ces souvenirs et héritages ne sont pas pour Atlan de simples arrière-plans fixes et inertes, mais que ces perceptions passées sont les matériaux ductiles d’une imagination inventive que le geste libère pour les faire advenir dans le présent de l’œuvre, sans cesse réactivées dans des créations où signes et couleurs se combinent et donnent à l’œuvre peinte d’Atlan sa profonde cohérence et son constant renouvellement.

Atlan semble jouer avec les matières, le support, pour construire son espace pictural ; juxtapositions, superpositions révèlent les intenses vibrations de ses couleurs. Il exploite au mieux le potentiel expressif de teintes fortes contrastant avec ses formes noires qui structurent l’espace et le dynamisent. Clara Malraux remarquait dans l’un de ses textes que couleurs et signes étaient en tension, mettant la notion de rythme au cœur des œuvres.²⁰ Atlan lui-même, à la même période, parle du rythme dans la danse ou la peinture comme symbole de la vie, comme il le réaffirme peu avant sa mort dans sa « Lettre aux amis japonais ».²¹ Dans cette lettre, comme dans d’autres textes, il parle de la peinture comme d’une « aventure qui met l’homme aux prises avec les forces redoutables qui sont en lui et hors de lui, le destin, la nature ». Rythme, tension, violente expressivité donnent à ses œuvres – qui apparaissent comme des champs de forces antagoniques – une dimension tragique, échos de ses tourments intérieurs et des mondes que le peintre a traversés et qui l’ont profondément marqué par leur conflictualité même.

Le pastel conservé par le MoMA, Royaume (1957), fait partie des œuvres réalisées dans cette période d’intense activité de création et d’expositions en France et à l’international. Comme dans les autres toiles et pastels de cette dernière période, l’espace s’est épuré, la composition se concentre sur quelques signes à la présence majestueuse, qui emplissent le champ peint de manière expressive. Des formes polysémiques se déploient telles des déclinaisons modernes et très personnelles de l’antique arabesque. L’idée de rythme opère, les formes sont dansantes, et on les imagine se poursuivant aussi hors champ, malgré le trait noir qui délimite la scène. Ces formes paraissent vues comme à contre-jour dans une mystérieuse procession, reliées les unes aux autres dans un entremêlement qui évoque l’idée de métamorphose. Les ocres, les rouges, le blanc crayeux, quelques éclaircies de bleu apportent une luminosité étrange et incertaine qui contraste avec les formes au premier plan. Cette tension entre le clair et l’obscur, la ligne et la couleur est servie par le grain et la teinte du papier que le peintre laisse apparaître comme s’il participait à son écriture. 

Caractériser son œuvre ? Décentrer le regard, s’extraire des catégories

Ces deux œuvres et d’autres devenues emblématiques de son style, comme les grands formats qu’il réalise du milieu des années 1950 jusqu’à sa mort, confirment le sentiment que les catégories de l’art européen ne conviennent pas : si la logique formelle et l’usage opposent la figuration à l’abstraction, pour la peinture d’Atlan, ce schéma de pensée binaire ne s’applique pas. Cela est aujourd’hui accepté, mais était, après-guerre, l’objet de débats esthétiques et polémiques. 

Les vocables d’abstraction lyrique, d’expressionnisme abstrait, plus conformes à l’évolution des sensibilités d’après-guerre, ne semblent pas non plus satisfaire le peintre qui ne s’y reconnaît pas entièrement. Michel Ragon avait avancé la notion d’une « autre figuration », pour les œuvres d’après la première période informelle. Dans un dialogue, Atlan lui répond qu’il préfère le terme « art autre », pour montrer qu’il ne veut être enfermé dans aucun courant.²² Pour Ragon, cette altérité tient beaucoup au rôle matriciel joué par son histoire et sa culture nord-africaine. 

Michel Ragon ainsi que d’autres critiques utilisent alors l’adjectif « barbare », souvent associé à l’idée de rythme, pour caractériser son art. Ce terme et celui de « primitivisme », qui fut aussi mobilisé pour parler d’Atlan, ont leur part d’ambiguïté : le premier, pour essentialiser sa démarche, le second, pour décontextualiser son ancrage originel dans une aire culturelle autre. En effet, depuis le début du xx^e siècle, nombre d’artistes européens ont cherché à se confronter aux univers des formes non occidentales, ce que cherche à mettre en évidence la notion de primitivisme. Cette notion, utilisée par exemple pour les artistes du groupe CoBrA, tels Asger Jorn ou Corneille, avec qui Atlan a exposé en 1951 sans faire partie du groupe, ne semble pas convenir à son propos.²³ De même, parmi les tenants de l’abstraction lyrique, sa démarche n’est pas similaire à celle d’un Georges Mathieu qui devint célèbre à Paris au même moment en prônant une peinture gestuelle qui s’inspirait des arts calligraphiques d’Extrême-Orient. Certes, le contexte qui suit la Seconde Guerre mondiale est propice à remettre en cause la suprématie de l’art européen, mais contrairement aux artistes européens qui ont décentré leur regard pour mieux saisir le monde, Atlan a évolué dans l’Algérie colonisée, il y a construit son imaginaire et il parle de l’intérieur de ces sociétés assujetties qui résistent à leur manière à cette domination. Il ne vient pas de l’extérieur, il n’est pas étranger à l’univers des formes que d’autres vont utiliser et s’approprier. Il y affirme son inscription, d’abord, par son engagement politique durant ses années de jeunesse, et après-guerre, uniquement par son esthétique.

En décentrant le regard, se pose la question de savoir si les œuvres d’Atlan ont une proximité formelle avec celles des peintres algériens présents à Paris dans ces années 1950. Les peintres avec qui le rapprochement prend tout son sens sont issus de la génération née dans les années 1930. Et l’intérêt qu’ils ont porté dès leur arrivée à Paris au travail d’Atlan est déjà un indice. Parmi les peintres maghrébins de l’époque moderne, la proximité formelle se situe avec la mouvance des peintres du signe, comme le Marocain Ahmed Cherkaoui, les Algériens Mohammed Khadda, Choukri Mesli, Abdallah Benanteur, pour qui Atlan est un précurseur. Selon la notion forgée au début de l’indépendance par le poète algérien Jean Sénac, cet important courant esthétique, en mettant en avant l’écriture arabe et berbère ainsi que les signes géométriques ancestraux comme ceux utilisés pour la vannerie, la poterie, les tapis, le tatouage,²⁴ s’est inscrit historiquement dans une volonté de réappropriation au moment de la décolonisation et après les indépendances. Le peintre Khadda affirme dans son essai Éléments pour un art nouveau : « Atlan, le Constantinois prématurément disparu, est un pionnier de la peinture algérienne moderne. »²⁵ Il ne faut pas voir là l’assignation à une identité, mais plutôt l’intérêt pour une nouvelle esthétique et la reconnaissance du travail d’Atlan, qui, à ce moment de l’histoire, leur a ouvert voie et a contribué à légitimer leurs propres recherches.

Atlan et nous dans le contexte postcolonial 

Adulé puis éclipsé, Atlan revêt un intérêt tout particulier dans contexte postcolonial : nécessité de redécouvrir l’œuvre intense d’un précurseur qui affirme par le règne du signe, au début de la décolonisation, une présence au monde qui peut être saisie, en termes de modernités plurielles, comme l’un des rameaux de l’art moderne. Les critiques ont parlé en leur temps du syncrétisme de son œuvre. En se référant aux travaux d’Édouard Glissant, on peut aller au-delà de cette vision syncrétique et rapprocher cette œuvre d’autres expériences esthétiques qui sont le fruit d’une créolisation de l’art du xx^e siècle, source majeure de renouvellement et d’un universel partagé, en reconnaissant l’apport de tous ses acteurs sans recourir à l’idée de hiérarchie ou de centralité.

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Invocation of Montien Boonma (1953–2000) almost always arrives in the form of an elegy. Best known for meditative sculptural installations that incorporate herbal medicines and earthy fragrances, he was a rising star of the international biennial circuit before an untimely death from cancer at the age of forty-seven. For many curators and critics who came to prominence in the 1990s, Montien’s work carried the promise of profundity for “contemporary Asian art,” back when the field still had to prove its capacity for aesthetic and philosophical complexity in comparison to so-called traditional art.¹ His contemplative brand of Buddhism—unbeholden to national essentialisms but also ostensibly undiluted by “sloppy New Age enthusiasms”—exemplified a particularly credible cross-cultural currency.² In his native Thailand, Montien was likewise heralded as a pathfinder who pioneered an approach to local materials and religious subject matter without nostalgia.³ His legacy has been consolidated in fetes of hagiographic commemoration otherwise reserved for modernist masters of an older generation.⁴ Death has, in short, made a heroic figure out of Montien.

If these narratives deserve revisiting, it is not only for the sobriety of historical distance, but also in light of the rich archive that Montien left behind. Located in his old studio space in Bangkok, Montien Atelier houses a collection of drawings, letters, faxes, and emails that chart the artist’s trajectory across Chiang Mai, Paris, New York, Tokyo, Brisbane, and other nodes of an emergent contemporary art world. More than an index of geographic mobility, the selection of documents catalogued thus far reveals his expansive intellectual appetite, ranging from an engagement with European philosophy (notes on Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Edmund Husserl, Immanuel Kant, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean-Paul Sartre abound) to an interest in the vibrant world of religious commerce during the boom years of the Thai economy (think magical amulets and spirit shrines).⁵ A less dreamy picture of an artist emerges here, one perhaps as doubting and skeptical as he is faithful, and certainly without the mystique of ascetic withdrawal. The archive offers the possibility of refiguring Montien’s relationship to the sign of Buddhism that hangs over his oeuvre.

Consider House of Hope (1996–97), a work that marks a departure from his usual reference to Buddhist iconography for the generic shape of a gabled house. An installation shot taken at Deitch Projects in New York presents the work as a dramatic stage set against an otherworldly backdrop (fig. 2). We can imagine wandering up the red steps into the porous but forebodingly dense forest of medicinal prayer beads. There is an urge to enter and be absorbed into this shadow architecture, the hanging weight of which centers the gravity of the room. Painted directly onto the walls with aromatic herbal pigments, a band of smoky clouds wafts in an atmosphere that intimates ethereal ascent. “House of Hope is abstract,” Montien noted in 1997. “It concerns the existence of something large, but which we cannot grasp. Like how we think God exists, but we have never truly known. He has never shown himself. It has been a story of hope all along.”⁶ All too aware of being pigeonholed as a “Buddhist artist,” Montien gestures here toward a more expansive thematization of faith.

Critic Holland Cotter would later call House of Hope “the most moving New York gallery installation I had seen in years.”⁷ Others praised it for offering an emotional experience that transcended specific religious reference, reaching a “doctrine-free spiritualization of art.”⁸ However, with no other work of his did Montien express such profound skepticism. In various published and unpublished conversations, he revealed his unhappiness with its first iteration in Japan, ambivalence about the New York version, and uncertainty if it would restage well in Athens.⁹ Production and staging issues abounded in what was his grandest project to date, especially if measured by its unprecedented scale of production (over 300,000 beads and 440 stools). Yet Montien’s frustration, I think, concerned more than the challenge of achieving largeness or immersion. His choice of a culturally unspecific shape, staged within the archetypal space of the white cube, was an ambitious experiment with the neutral. In an art world that was quick to collapse aesthetic experience into essentialisms (Thai, Buddhist) and universalisms (spiritual, transcendent), what did it mean to chart a middle path?

But first, a detour through the question of shape. After all, Montien’s oeuvre sees the preponderance of immediately recognizable silhouettes, whether the Buddha’s head and torso, the round vessel of the monk’s alms bowl, or the conical towerlike construction of the stupa (Buddhist reliquary). Exemplary of his earliest work, Paintings and Candles (1990) de-monumentalizes the form of a stupa into a precarious pyramid of wax panels leaning against the wall (fig. 3). Coated with a thick layer of candle wax, the surface is then charred to produce a smoky triangular shadow across the panels. The fleshy skin is molten and gouged with wounding incisions that turn the architectural reference into a carnal one or, according to Montien, “give it a real physical presence in the room at the same level as the viewer.”¹⁰ Where critics were quick to take any reference to the stupa as evidence of his Buddhist faith, they missed altogether the unorthodoxy of his gesture. Paintings and Candles carries a sensuous organicity in a manner that recalls, almost contemporaneously, Janine Antoni’s lard cubes and Wolfgang Laib’s beeswax panels.¹¹ As much as Montien may have been interested in evoking the stupa’s historical ritual and symbolic associations, he rooted the encounter firmly in the present tense of a corporeal encounter. Shape became the basis for a psychosomatic relationship between geometric figure and lived body.¹²

No mere formalist concern, shape cut to the heart of identity politics in the 1990s, when the evocation of objects native to an artist’s background routinely served as a cipher for cultural difference, and often exoticism. Shape, however, also afforded escape from the tyranny of origins. A contemporaneous comparison for House of Hope might be found in Do Ho Suh’s geometrized life-size replicas of his childhood home, whose ethereal apparition in silk gauze suggests the fluid physical mobility of the itinerant artist.¹³ For both Suh and Montien, architecture need not be durable or monumental—or preoccupied with cultural memory—to have staying power. But where Suh insisted in the haunting domestic detail of his house’s specific furnishings and finishings, Montien reached for a house in a more elemental sense with his earthy materials and woody scents. Seemingly rootless form, if rendered through evocative materiality, can hold a phantasmatic quality. By playing on this tension between architectural abstraction and an appeal to the deeply visceral, House of Hope holds out a promise of remapping the terms of the specificity and malleability of cultural associations.

Montien’s approach in the work might then be described as less tethered to symbolic meaning and more concerned about the dynamics that intertwine building and body, shape and subjectivity. The house that from afar looks durable and even solid, when up close becomes diffuse, no longer a discrete geometric form that we confront, but rather a blurred field. Its earthy, fragrant materiality conditions the entire interior weather of a space, playing off the currents of swirling clouds that evoke the gentle heat of incense. Montien was known to invite viewers to lay down on the red wooden platform, to be showered in what he called a “torrent of black rain.”¹⁴ The cool touch of the clay beads cuts against the temperature of the vermilion sky. Minimalism gives way to meteorology, as we oscillate between seeming tactility to synesthetic immateriality and back.¹⁵ His analogy to religious space provides insight: “When you enter a temple, it makes you warm. I use the word ‘warm’ because there’s the feeling that we will be given help—like having a father and mother to protect us. These shrines used to be centers of healing and faith, where people would go and propitiate the gods and at the same time do chants and take medicine, so it was also a kind of psychotherapy.”¹⁶ Architecture as constructed form or iconographic order may provide an entry point, but it is the way that space inscribes social relations and shared mood that is of interest. In other words, if shape was Montien’s compositional tool, his true medium was atmospheric. At turns warming and cooling, House of Hope changes the weather in the white cube to one that is less aridly didactic or cerebral, priming mind and body for more supple states of becoming.

If, so far, we have meandered—between shape and subjectivity, structure and environment, directed attention and diffuse affect—it is for reasons that relate back to the question of Buddhism that hangs over this discussion. Most accounts cite Montien’s debt to both the forest monk Ajarn Chah (1918–1992) and the reformist monk Buddhadasa Bhikkhu (1906–1993), for whom meditation was a central practice. These references provided a dependable source of Montien’s moral and intellectual legitimacy, especially for a Euro-American audience—or even an upper-middle class Thai audience—that favored a soteriology of withdrawn ascetism. And yet, his investment in practices of oscillation points to a structure of experience that barely accords with the focused concentration that is essential to meditation. Even as his works may offer opportunities for detached repose, they also invite interaction and even touch, driving bodily performances that go beyond the purely meditative. The minimalism of Montien’s shapes is a red herring that misleads us down a genealogy of quiet contemplative Buddhism, when his works may in fact have more to do with crowded and colorful everyday scenes of ritual propitiation that appeal directly to the senses.

After all, Montien was more attuned to the consumerist trappings of religion than most. Following his wife’s cancer diagnosis in 1994, he went in search of hope and healing from the many cults that sprung up in the bubble years of the Thai economy. In a 1995 interview, he recalls: “I went and made propitiations at shrines everywhere. I would chant continuously the Jinapanjara (an ancient mantra, popularised by the late Buddhist saint, Somdej Toh of Wat Rakhang) and whatever I found in Lok Thip magazine (literally ‘Heavenly World,’ a journal focused on the Buddhist supernatural). I took an oath to Mother Kuan Im (Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion) to stop eating beef. I went to pray to the Buddha relics of Doi Suthep and Khruba Sriwichai.”¹⁷ Instead of casting Montien as a pensive thinker, it might then be more accurate to also picture him, at times, as a restless pilgrim in search of talismanic promises. The grammar of his Buddhism entailed breathing meditation, but also propitiation rituals, esoteric prayers, and offerings to charismatic images of Hindu, Chinese, and animist bent.¹⁸ In these scenarios, atmosphere again matters. “If you go look in Khmer temples [prasat khom], you will see black marks on the walls, traces of incense and candle smoke. It is a reminder of prayer, stained with memories of begging.”¹⁹ For all that religion may offer by way of doctrines and promises of ultimate truth, Montien turned to the primal importance of acknowledging what we do not know. The house of hope is a place of not knowing.

It is under this sign of ambivalence and openness that a less idealistic account of House of Hope’s realizationcomes into view. For the initial idea of the work lacked any of the immersive atmospheric play that we now see as its defining quality. The sketch for House of Hope—originally submitted as a conceptual proposal to the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) in 1996—shows with schematic clarity the house in its totality, as well as its constituent units (fig. 5).²⁰ The structure’s porosity is overshadowed by an impression of impenetrability, as the shape emerges as a dense overlay of precisely drawn lines. This laborious graphic presentation calls attention to the sheer number of beads and stools required to achieve density, perhaps in implicit justification of a financial advance to cover production and shipping costs. The inclusion of a human figure to provide scale is expected, but here, the surrounding elements also function to highlight the installation’s obduracy. A ghostly human silhouette is juxtaposed against, on one side, the house’s solid curtain wall and, on the other side, medicinal beads drawn to real size to solicit the viewer’s literal grasp.²¹

This schematic clarity, intended to make the work believable for the commissioner, belies the fact that its construction remained untested. For the work’s first staging at MOT in April 1997, Montien relied on the museum’s production team to devise a suspended metal frame from which the beads would hang.²² It was only upon arriving in Tokyo that Montien realized that the fabricated frame, overly chunky and in a distractingly bright white, undercut the levitative quality he wanted; worse yet, the work was assigned to a large gallery, leaving plenty of empty space, which negated the intimacy he sought.²³ As he later recalled, “In Japan, the scent emanates from the work. But for New York, it is as if we have entered a sauna. The work gives an impression of warmth. As soon as you enter the room, herbal aromas surround you. I like the work in New York better. The Japanese version felt too sparse. Ineffective.”²⁴ Despite Montien’s criticism, the Japanese crew could hardly be blamed. After all, the drawing he had submitted prioritized a sense of physical integrity. The team accordingly ensured that the structure, which had to hold the weight of 1,648 strands of hanging beads, was also sturdy enough to be safely entered by visitors, though at the cost of its outsized ponderability.

In the same way that no concept of religion can be relayed without material translation, House of Hope’s making points to the way that there is no such thing as a predetermined shape of experience that can be transported frictionlessly. The invitation to present the work again at Deitch Projects later in 1997 offered Montien the opportunity to propose the wraparound mural, whose spatial illusionism was a deviation from his usual painterly style. In this manner, the freestanding sculptural object dwarfed by the room gave way to a transformation of the room into an immersive enclosure. While this version was successful by comparison to Tokyo, Montien nonetheless equivocated, “I did not let the beads touch the ground in New York. I did not feel good about the cement floor at Deitch Projects.”²⁵ The coldness of the floor mitigated the warmth that he wished to conjure, a testament to the emphasis Montien placed on calibrating the right interior weather. Indeed, temperature was a recurrent challenge with which the artist contended in his travels; Apisit recalls a project in Scandinavia where Montien asked for his work to be stored in the HVAC room for the heat and humidity to activate the organic pigment—to return the suppleness and chromatic saturation it had in the tropics.²⁶ The seeming interchangeability of white cubes belies differentiation across cultural and climatic zones.

This transnational story of House of Hope’s realization is, in many respects, one of an artist at the height of his powers and peak of circulation. Here was Montien ascendant, producing a project of unprecedented scale that fully leveraged the infrastructure of transnational financing, distributed fabrication, and multilingual mediation that constituted the art world. But he was also made keenly aware of the limits of this infrastructure. In an interview given in the fall of 1997—as the Asian financial crisis was in full swing—Montien criticized the installation shots from Deitch Projects with uncharacteristic harshness: “I don’t like them at all. They’re too perspectival. Because the gallery is so small, they had to take the frontal photo from the entryway. It’s a difficult work to photograph.”²⁷ With the crash of the Thai baht, and with the desertion of the hotels and skyscrapers that once housed Bangkok’s commercial galleries, photographic mediation was the only means that remained for the work’s movement. For all the lubricants and cultural currencies of the art world, the prospects of its showing in Thailand became impossible in the face of real economic illiquidity. Ostensibly a mobile architecture of faith, House of Hope could not travel to where its solace may have been most needed.

If there is a lesson to be learned from the narrative rehearsed here, it concerns the insufficiency of branding Montien’s art as “Buddhist.” The term has been mobilized for interpretations with relish for authenticity and Orientalist stereotype, a far cry from the complex relationship to faith evinced in his approach. This is not simply a retrospective observation, for the postmodern critique was already immanent, with Montien himself a passionate student of continental philosophy. Given his time at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1986 to 1988, it was the legacy of Jean-François Lyotard’s mega-exhibition Les immateriaux (1985) at the Centre Pompidou that plausibly loomed large over his intellectual formation. The show was significant in thematizing global postmodernity as a question concerning communicative technologies that shape a mediated imagination of distant and fragmented cultural “spaces” or “zones.”²⁸ That Montien had metabolized such semiotic lessons is made clear on a page of undated handwritten notes titled “Postmodern.” He wrote: “Meaning is not communication (information) or signification (symbolism) BUT it is the house where experience lives [sing mi yu asai khong prasopkan], which holds the constant play of difference. The incommensurability of the message is one pathway towards emptiness.”²⁹

To revisit Montien’s legacy with the question of how discursive structures enable—or stifle—play allows us to see that the biennials, exhibitions, and even the discourse of “contemporary Asian art” in which he figured so prominently were frameworks for the management of cultural difference that made room for the religious but also often accelerated its reification. But these spaces, ungoverned by the norms of orthodox religious architecture, were also critical opportunities for articulating a malleability of faith that need not be beholden to traditional markers of identity. With its resolution for the most nondescript of shapes, House of Hope may be—to take on Montien’s phrasing—a house where difference lives.

House of Hope is currently on view in Gallery 211 at MoMA.

With gratitude for Wong Binghao and Roger Nelson, thoughtful interlocutors; Jumpong Bank Boonma, Apisit Nongbua, and Apinan Poshyananda, generous keepers of memory; Petch Osathanugrah and Poolsri Praepipatmongkol, in memoriam.

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In Campesinos Testifying, Palace of Justice, Cuzco (c. 1929) by Peruvian photographer Martín Chambi (1891–1973), six Andean peasants huddle together at the Cuzco courthouse—four on a wooden bench and two standing behind them. Behind this group, two men are seated along a wall and, to their right, two functionaries sit at a table, one bent over his paperwork. Receding into the background of the room, these four men in suits underscore the peasants’ incongruous presence in a government office. The stripes of their rough ponchos contrast with the faded floral carpet beneath their bare feet. Bearing expressions that flicker from impassive to imploring, obdurate to contrite, the peasants meet the camera’s lens with serious gazes. Scant information about this arresting—and possibly arrested—group exists beyond the title of the photograph. Who are these people and what brought them to court? The image alone provides no answer.

Active between 1908 and 1954, Chambi photographed widely in the southern Andes of Peru, achieving significant renown in his own day. Born to an Indigenous family in a small highland town in the province of Puno, Chambi was a native speaker of Quechua, the most common Indigenous language spoken in the Andes. His skill behind the camera afforded him social mobility in a region riven by racial and economic inequality. Having first laid eyes on the apparatus as a teenager outside the gold mine where his late father had labored, Chambi apprenticed with the photographer Max T. Vargas (1874–1959) in Arequipa before opening his own photography studio in Cuzco. There, in the former Inca capital, Chambi made portraits of the middle and upper classes; shot scenes of urban and rural life in the city and its surroundings; and documented architectural and archaeological sites. At the time of his death in 1973, Chambi’s archive contained some thirty thousand negatives; in 1978, his son Víctor Chambi, collaborated with U.S. photographer Edward Ranney (born 1942) on a restoration project. The following year, in 1979, they selected a group of negatives to reprint for an exhibition that traveled to The Museum of Modern Art and subsequently entered MoMA’s collection.¹

Campesinos Testifying is presently on view at the Museum in a collection gallery related to Indigenism, a movement of considerable cultural and political influence across Latin America in the early twentieth century that sought to redress the oppression of Indigenous peoples. The Peruvian Marxist critic José Carlos Mariátegui offered one of the first literary theories of Indigenism, describing it as an emergent yet transitional genre, as a prerequisite for a future literature written by and for Indigenous people. “Indigenist literature cannot give us a rigorously veristic version of the indio,” he wrote, in the parlance of the time. “It must idealize and stylize the indio. Nor can it give us its proper spirit, for it is still a literature of mestizos.”² In these few lines Mariátegui makes two foundational observations about Indigenist art: first, that Indigenism is the prerogative of non-Indigenous or mixed-race intellectuals; second, that it aspires to representation but not realism. As an artist of Indigenous heritage and a photographer, Chambi challenged these precepts, even collaborating with Indigenist intellectuals who often chose or commissioned his work to illustrate their writings.³ A photograph like Campesinos Testifying, which has lost the original context of its production, demonstrates how Chambi’s work might speak for itself.

Campesinos Testifying pictures a trial, but researchers have yet to find written records that, corresponding to the event, confirm whether the peasants were defendants or plaintiffs. Literary historian Jorge Coronado located a descendant of one lawyer pictured in the photograph,who alleged that the peasants were on trial for attempting to assassinate a powerful landowner.⁴ Uprisings plagued plantations and farms in Peru’s rural provinces throughout the 1920s, and the press sensationalized particularly violent episodes, stoking elites’ fears of revolution.⁵ But Andean peasants also employed nonviolent methods as they resisted the exploitation of their labor and dispossession of their lands under the feudal structure of the agricultural economy. They petitioned local and federal authorities, for example, attempting to claim rights granted by the 1920 constitution, in which the state first legally recognized Indigenous communities—even as the justice system proved inadequate in the face of the political influence of wealthy landowners.⁶

In Chambi’s time, photography was perceived as a privileged mode of objective representation. During the nineteenth century, photographs gained the status of evidence through their role in the development of criminology, forensics, and surveillance.⁷ Campesinos Testifying shirks this social function. Even before the loss of context rendered the image ambiguous, it had failed to serve as a testimonial, revealing the camera to be an unreliable witness. According to historian Alfredo Flores Galindo, when called to court to testify against their interests, Andean peasants occasionally refused to speak. ⁸ As a mute record, perhaps Chambi’s photograph mirrors this strategy, its silence intentional rather than circumstantial.

The author wishes to thank Beverly Adams for facilitating this publication, as well as Horacio Ramos, Hannah Rose Blakeley and Fedor Karmanov for thinking through it with her.

Campesinos Testifying was on view at the Museum in a collection gallery related to Indigenism, a movement of considerable cultural and political influence across Latin America in the early twentieth century that sought to redress the oppression of Indigenous peoples.

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The work of Nigerian woman artist Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu (1928–2003) offers a window into cultural representations of African men and women in postcolonial Nigeria. In what was a male-dominated art scene in the 1960s, Ugbodaga-Ngu stood out not only because of her visual production, but also because of her intellectual involvement as a faculty member at the Nigerian College of Art, Sciences and Technology (renamed Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria in 1962). Despite her contribution to the history of modernist art, little has been published on her role in the advancement of art during this period or on her far-reaching influence as an art educator. This post feature foregrounds Ugbodaga-Ngu’s role in the structural development of art in Nigeria, the themes that were of particular interest to her, and how she represented cultural identity, practice, and experience in her painting.

Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu was born in Kano, Nigeria, in 1928. Although most biographies state that she was born in 1921 and died in 1996, The Nigerian Artist of the Millennium: Historian, Builder, Aesthetician and Visioner (2004) notes that she was born in 1928 and died in 2003. ¹ This source is likely to be more accurate, not just because it was documented by a professor of art history in the university where she first worked as a faculty member, but because it is aimed at filling a research gap on the biographies of Nigerian artists. Ugbodaga-Ngu taught art in mission schools from 1945 to 1950, when she received a scholarship from the colonial administration to study art at the Chelsea School of Art in London. Four years later, in 1954, she received a National Diploma in Design, with a distinction in painting. A year after that, in 1955, she was awarded an Art Teacher’s Diploma from the Institute of Education, University of London. She was a contemporary of Ben Enwonwu (Odinigwe Benedict Chukwukadibia Enwonwu, 1917–1994), though their work is equally good, hers did not receive the same critical attention because it had been produced by a woman. This is, however, not to deny that some narratives accompany her rarely seen work in galleries, but they are mostly dispersed. 

As an art educator, artist, and arts administrator, Ugbodaga-Ngu contributed to advancing modernism in Nigerian art in the mid-twentieth century and its elaboration in the decades that followed. ² She was the first Nigerian artist-intellectual and woman appointed to teach the first and second generations of art students at the site of the former Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, now Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria (ABU), where she was a faculty member from 1955 to 1964. At the beginning of her career at ABU, she was not popular with her white colleagues, “who felt, she was not supposed to be there.” ³ However, she remained committed to her work during this period, as she taught Life Drawing, Imaginative Composition, and Painting. Ikpakronyi, ⁴ In 1959, she was awarded a Ford Foundation Fellowship that enabled her to accept a lecturership at the Institute of Education at the University of Ibadan. ⁵ Later, she served as a temporary part-time research fellow at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ife where, in 1964, she wrote a paper on Yoruba ibeji carvings. ⁶

After her departure from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria for some years, Ugbodaga-Ngu resumed teaching at ABU again after 1966, having raised her four children—three boys and a girl. ⁷ She continued to lecture at ABU in the 1970s, before Solomon Wangboje (1930–1998) was head of the Department of Fine Arts at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria (1972–75). ⁸ This is significant because it draws attention to a period when she probably left ABU again. Apart from teaching, in 1975, she served as a state advisor to the Second Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC 1977), a pioneering Nigerian festival held in Lagos in 1977 to celebrate Black artists from across Africa and its diaspora. This event was significant in the advancement of art beyond academia in Nigeria and on the African continent at large. She returned to lecturing at the University of Benin in 1980 during Professor D. W. A. Baikie’s tenure as vice-chancellor (1979–85). ⁹

In 1959, as part of the effort to expand and nationalize the curricular offerings in the ABU art department, Ugbodaga-Ngu invited Ben Enwonwu to deliver a lecture on contemporary Nigerian art and Timothy Adebanjo Fasuyi (born 1935), her former student, to speak on traditional Nigerian art. ¹⁰These presentations set the decolonizing stage—along with efforts by other African intellectuals and artists such as Iba N’diaye (1928–2008) and Papa Ibra Tall (1935–2015), both of Ecole National des Beaux-Arts in Senegal, and Francis Nnaggenda (born 1936) of Makerere Art School in Uganda. ¹¹

This was a period when attempts were being made to create national identities and public cultures that would reflect a distinctively African art. In Nigeria, as a result, artistic practice increasingly focused on aspects of Nigerian cultural and artistic heritage, albeit infused with European technique. Ugbodaga-Ngu’s first generation of students, which included Timothy Adebanjo Fasuyi, Solomon Wangboje, Uche Okeke (1933–2016), Yusuf Grillo (1934–2021), Demas Nwoko (born 1935), Simon Okeke (1937–1969), Bruce Onobrakpeya (born 1932), and William Olaosebikan, among other pioneers, went on to form the Zaria Art Society. Not all of them opposed the imported curriculum and colonial imprint of the Royal College of Art. What they universally rejected, however, was their British lecturers’ abhorrence of the incorporation of African art references in their work. ¹² In response, they drew upon diverse African cultural and aesthetic traditions in decolonizing visual practice they defined as “natural synthesis.”

Ugbodaga-Ngu’s educational qualifications and status as an intellectual were far-reaching in their influence. Many of her students obtained certificates in art education, or the so-called Art Teacher’s Diploma, upon completing their training in art. ¹³ Recollecting the impact of his teachers on his artistic development, Kolade Oshinowo (born 1948), who studied painting at ABU from 1968 to 1972, observed that he was fortunate to have “serious and dedicated lecturers like Professor Charles Argent, Mrs. Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu, [and] Messrs. Mike Tailor and Clary Nelson-Cole.” Oshinowo further expressed, “These are people who helped me a great deal in laying the foundation upon which my practice is built today.” ¹⁴ His reference to Ugbodaga-Ngu, in particular, stresses how much she contributed to shaping the direction of his creative process. 

An image of a Fulani milkmaid titled Agwoi (1960) by Uche Okeke, one of Ugbodaga-Ngu’s students, references the vernacular term used to describe people of Fulani descent in Nigeria. The invocation of a milkmaid in Fulani culture reflects the concept of “natural synthesis” in its referencing of not just the maid’s braided hair which highlights a mode of body beautification and adornment, but the intricately decorated calabashes used for collecting and storing cow milk for the day’s business.

Apart from the contributions discussed above, Ugbodaga-Ngu played other significant roles in the development of modernist art in Nigeria. She featured as a regular television guest artist in Ibadan in the 1960s, and participated in several group exhibitions in Europe and the United States. She had solo exhibitions in London 1958, in Lagos and Ibadan in 1959, in Boston in 1963, and again in Ibadan in 1964. ¹⁵

During this time, she developed her own idiosyncratic language; one influenced not only by European art tradition, but also by African motifs and forms drawn from different cultures in northern and southern Nigeria. Some of her works of this period combine the vitality of the northern Nigerian aristocrat with the vivacious and sensuous festival dancers of southern Nigeria, producing in some cases, tension, and in others, repose and calm. ¹⁶ The dominant aesthetic formation of the postcolonial era in Nigeria, as elsewhere on the African continent, took African culture as its paradigm. Some of the major ideologies that shaped this aesthetic were Pan-Africanism, Négritude, and Natural Synthesis. These movements were integral to decolonization and, ultimately, to independence. Although Ugbodaga-Ngu’s paintings are not easily accessible, the few that can be traced indicate her alignment with this paradigm.

Close inspection of her work reveals that she also drew inspiration from Hausa cultural traditions and the lived experience of diverse people in northern Nigeria. This is evident in the range of thematic preoccupations expressed in her paintings, in works such as Abstract (1960), Market Women (1961), and Beggars (1963). Other works, including Palm Wine Seller (1963) and Dancers (1965),reference cultural practices and festival scenes from southern Nigeria. 

Abstract, a highly textural painting, boldly explores color and shapes adopted by European artists in their exploration of African shapes and forms. One Western artist whose style possibly inspired Ugbodaga-Ngu was Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), largely because “Picasso [was] an all-encompassing symbol in the minds of many African artists.” ¹⁷ Despite this stance, Ugbodaga-Ngu did not emulate his style, but rather drew inspiration from the Andalusian to define her own form of abstraction. Her peculiar individual style is evident in this painting, in which she applied the lessons of cubism to her own composition. The picture plane reveals the arrangement of diverse geometric shapes and forms, suggestive of a bull in its rich, earthy color palette but equally evocative of traditional African art in its sculptural forms. The bull’s two “horns” are rendered as thick curved lines, and the animal appears to be in a restive position. This subject matter might have been inspired by Picasso’s bull series and also scenic views of bulls in the northern Nigerian landscape. The sight of cattle is an everyday experience for people who live in the north, and Fulani herders grazing cattle or bulls owned by Hausa households are likewise common.

Market Women (1961) signals the construction of gendered social identity, drawing attention to the socioeconomic activity of the market. Ugbodaga-Ngu used expressionistic brushwork to depict four women: two seated and two standing. Adorned in veils, blouses, and dark wrappers of different colors, they are arranged in the foreground, set against the brown wall of a shop or stall. Chiaroscuro models and defines their bold forms. Ugbogada-Ngu successfully depicted the drapery of their veils and wrappers, the folds and textures of which are highlighted. Their activity, in turn, is suggested by their bowls—calabashes used for the storage of the milk and millet meal sold by Hausa/Fulani milkmaids in northern Nigerian markets. The depiction of these women engaged in work is offset by a group of three men in the distance who, presumably customers are walking toward them and the market. The contrasting portrayals of the men and women highlight the differing gender roles.

The sartorial details also date the activity. Given that the women use veils, as opposed to hijabs to cover themselves. Research reveals that the hijab was adopted in the late 1970s and 1980s as a result of cultural encounters and exchange with Arabs. ¹⁸ Thus, Ugbodaga-Ngu did not merely reflect on the economic activity of these women but their cultural attires in a likely scene from the 1960s.

 Beggars (1963) introduces a nuance in the construction of sociocultural identity among a group of people in northern Nigeria. This particular scene is dominated by a blue background, and three figures arranged in the center of the composition. They are dramatically highlighted with sharply contrasting light and shade. The figure on the left sports a cap while the center and right-hand figures are wearing hats. Their clothing is characteristic of that of mendicants in Hausa/Fulani culture. The men’s hats hint at cultural elements adopted to provide shade as their wearers move from street to street under the hot sun.

In her painting, Ugbogaga-Ngu draws attention to the history of mendacity among men, women, and children forced into vagrancy as a means of livelihood. Indeed, in an attempt to engage elements from indigenous African art, she depicts the three beggars engaged in the act of singing, a cultural practice of Muslim minstrels, who perform satiric operas as they go about begging. Given the fact that Ugbodaga-Ngu was a faculty member at the ABU, Zaria, she must have been witness to and influenced by these groups, as she reflected on modernity in Hausa society. Although the subject is mendicants, the painting does not depict begging as such, but rather the musical performance of oral beggar poets or almajirai. ¹⁹ These Hausa minstrels do not use musical instruments to accompany their street poetry.

A colorful or polychromatic portrayal of a woman adorned in a blue gele and buba, the cultural dress of the Yoruba, Palm Wine Seller (1963) features calabash motifs in the foreground, and as shadows in tones of green and yellow in the background. In front of the vendor, there are five intricately designed calabashes filled with palm wine. Ugbodaga-Ngu has portrayed the woman holding two of the vessels, attempting to present them to customers in front of her as is suggested by her upward gaze. Although the thematic thrust of this painting constructs the identity of an individual selling palm wine, its content draws attention to one of the economic activities of women in Yoruba culture: she is likely the wife of a tapper or a vendor whose trade is selling the beverage. Palm wine is a natural alcoholic drink produced from the fermented sap of various palm trees. Common throughout West Africa, it has social and cultural value in many rural and urban areas in southern Nigeria. Together with Market Women, this painting  highlights Ugbodaga-Ngu’s interest in depicting the various economic activities and roles of women in Nigeria in the 1960s—that is, their noble and industrious engagement in supporting their households.

Clara Ugbodaga-Ngu played numerous roles in advancing postcolonial modern art in Nigeria, becoming an inspiration not only to her students, but also to other Nigerian art teachers and artists. Even though she depicted figures in her work, in many instances, she moved away from a realistic figurative style, blending Western and Nigerian traditions, forms, techniques, and ideas to create fresh modernist work. Not only did she develop and excel at a representational style adopted by early modernist artists, she also contributed to portraying the lived experiences of men and women, drawing attention to aspects of modernity in Nigeria in the 1960s. Her compositions manifest the cultural dress associated with African identity and the cultural differences among people in northern and southern Nigeria. Her work communicates different thematic concerns that convey her thoughts on individual and Nigerian cultural identities, and social and cultural values among people in northern and southern Nigerian cultures.  

In reproducing the images contained in this text, the Museum obtained the permission of the rights holders, whenever possible. If the Museum could not locate the rights holders, notwithstanding good-faith efforts, it requests that any contact information concerning such rights holders be forwarded so that they may be contacted for future editions.

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In Take My Breath Away, the Guggenheim Museum’s 2018 survey of work by artist Danh Vo (born 1975), Death Sentence (2009) was displayed in a custom shelf wrapping the inner edge of the museum’s iconic spiral ramp. Visitors encountered a sequence of sixty white sheets of standard A4-size paper adorned in blue ink calligraphy (supplied by the artist’s father, Phung Vo) in a script that is at once precise, orderly, and quickly assimilated, as it is florid, flowing, and idiosyncratic. First produced in 2009, the piece is a collaboration between the artist, his father, and his close friend and fellow artist Julie Ault (born 1957). Across the sixty pages of paper, Phung copied a sequence of five texts selected by Ault, each of which meditates, in its own quirky way, on themes of death, mourning, and representation.¹

At the Guggenheim, the pages were placed face up on the horizontal shelf and exposed to the warm natural light flooding the atrium through the building’s oculus. Despite protective glass, the installation risked the work’s integrity since the sun pouring in through the skylight would slowly bleach the ink over the course of the exhibition’s three-month run. The willingness to court the potential destruction of an art object, appropriately titled Death Sentence, through its (re)presentation is a gesture that runs through much of Vo’s practice as he commonly curates, presents, alters, and rearranges objects that are sedimented with historical, cultural, and personal significance. Rather than treating the objects assimilated into his practice as rarefied objects of value to be preserved and protected for posterity, he approaches them as things to be worked with and used in the present.²

My approach employs a soft Marxian analytic regarding notions of use and value.³ For Marx, capitalist value is largely centered on the production of commodities, or things that can be bought and sold in the marketplace. The commodification of art within the art market reflects this position, as the fetishistic assignment of value to a given work is often organized around the work’s physical presence as an enduring art object: something that is to be preserved, rather than used. In Vo’s practice, there is consistent refusal to preserve the commodity/art object as he purchases objects on the market before converting them back into “use values” that he consumes within his own practice. This move doesn’t necessarily subvert or resist the logic of the market, but it does invert and queer these logics as, for example, he cannibalizes these works into his broader practice, before returning them to the market to sell at a dearer rate. But in making use of them, he may alter or even, depending on one’s perspective, destroy, if not kill, them.

To make the wall-mounted installation Lot 20. Two Kennedy Administration Cabinet Room Chairs (2013), for example, Vo purchased at auction two chairs that Jackie Kennedy had given to Robert McNamara. McNamara was one of the chief architects of the Vietnam War. Kennedy gave the chairs to McNamara following the assassination of her husband John F. Kennedy, the president who oversaw the war’s commencement. A refugee of the war, Vo disassembled the chairs and displayed their leather upholstery, padding, and desiccated wooden skeletons as a deconstructed sculptural arrangement. Refusing to freeze these historically overdetermined objects in time, Vo makes use of the chairs in a fashion that rescues them from becoming nostalgic, nationalist relics, while transforming them into a still-life spectacle of vengeful, anti-imperial critique, annihilating and exposing their previous form. By acquiring these historically and ideologically charged objects only to dismantle them, the artist coolly and violently confronts the equally destructive legacy of “Camelot,” before breathing new life into these objects for and in his critical present.

As Vo makes (new) use of and (re)presents objects that are tethered to converging sites of death and mourning (the abstract scale of the death and destruction of Vietnamese life during the war alongside the intimate grieving practices of the people who designed and executed the war), he confronts the spectator with the compresence of life and death and, similarly, a mutually implicated relationship between creation and destruction. These pairs do not form oppositional binaries, but instead are resolved into a state of constant, co-constitutive relation. Life with death, creation with destruction.

Exposing Death Sentence to the sun might have destroyed the work, but it was not the Guggenheim’s to destroy. The piece was on loan from The Museum of Modern Art, which, in 2010, acquired Death Sentence along with two of Vo’s other works. For that acquisition, Vo’s gallery supplied MoMA with an invoice doubling as the artist’s certificate of authenticity, a copy of Phung’s text, an appendix with a bibliography of the five texts comprising the work, and instructions for manufacturing the custom wood, glass, and metal cabinet to be used for its display.⁴

Through the certificate of authenticity, Vo cites the conceptual practice of one of his major influences, Félix González-Torres (1957–1996), who often supplied collectors with certificates of authenticity and instructions for assembling his work, thus forgoing the delivery of an enduring art object. The work’s life, in such pieces, need not exist as ossified commodity. It may exist instead, when it is staged or performed in a given time and place and in relation to a specific public.⁵ As a conceptual work, however, Death Sentence is distinguished by the presence of an enduring object as its central component: Phung’s text. Unwilling to risk the destruction of MoMA’s property via the artist’s ongoing use of the work at the Guggenheim, it was decided that for this particular installation, Phung would produce a new copy of the text, which would be subject to slow death by ultraviolet bath. MoMA would retain its “original.”⁶ By having his father produce another copy, one fated for destruction by way of the Guggenheim’s oculus, the artist quietly questioned where the work lives or even what MoMA has purchased. Does the museum own the concept for the piece, it’s schematics, Phung’s first sixty-page copy of the manuscript, the right to materialize the work, or some combination of these and other elements? Further, the solution worked out for the Guggenheim exhibition raised the question of whether the work could ever truly be possessed or destroyed. I am less interested in resolving these questions than I am in the way Vo’s practice consistently raises them. As he does so, he places pressure on a conception of “value” that is grounded in the preservation of the art object as commodity, and suggests instead a notion of art as a ceaselessly unfolding process/practice of mutually implied creation and destruction. One that appropriates objects and artworks to use and consume them in the making of new work. The impulse is not merely, or not always, destructive.⁷ Rather, it may be instructive insofar as it teaches a powerful set of lessons about living with destruction, if not the universal death sentence that accompanies all forms of living.

It is significant that Phung produced Death Sentence with the same ink and calligraphic style that he used for another ongoing collaboration with his son, 2.2.1861 (2009).⁸ For this latter work, which is also on paper, Phung reproduced a letter sent from French missionary Jean-Théophane Vénard to his father on the event of his beheading, having been condemned to death by the Vietnamese crown for illegal proselytization. In it, Vénard writes that “all [involved] regret that the law of the kingdom condemns me to the death sentence.”⁹ It is dated January 20, 1861. The artwork’s title refers to the fact that the letter was received by the father some days later, after his son’s death, on February 2, 1861. The piece is editioned, but the edition will only be defined by the conclusion of Phung’s own life. As Vo writes, “My father will write this letter repeatedly until he dies,” suggesting that the work itself is a kind of “death sentence.”¹⁰ The number of editions will be determined by the number of times the piece is purchased until Phung dies. MoMA acquired Death Sentence for its collection together with an edition of 2.2.1861. When displayed in relation to Death Sentence, as it did in the Guggenheim’s rotunda in Take My Breath Away, the two works offer a profound meditation on the compresence of a multitude of unfolding presents with the finitude of death: that is, not life versus death, but the mutual implication of life and death (as well as creation and destruction) with each other.

The origins of Death Sentence are based in Vo’s friendship with Ault, one born from the grounds of queer of color loss. González-Torres died in 1996 at age thirty-eight amid the first waves of the AIDS crisis. He has been a major influence on Vo’s practice, and the two share a set of formal and autobiographical similarities. Both are artists who deploy sculptural, conceptual, and performance dynamics in their practices, just as both are queer men and refugees of the Cold War (Cuba and Vietnam, respectively) who incorporate autobiographical matter into their work. But by the time Vo encountered the work of this queer ancestor, or Cold War cousin, González-Torres was already dead.

Ault was one of González-Torres’s dearest friends and collaborators. They worked closely together and, in 1987, Ault helped recruit him to join the conceptual art collective Group Material. In the early 2000s, Ault was briefly in residence in Denmark, where Vo’s family settled after escaping Vietnam by boat when he was a child. He sought her out with questions about González-Torres’s practice and process. According to Vo , she was interested in what the “next generation” of artists would do with González-Torres’s legacy. She was immersed in editing her 2006 compendium Felix González-Torres¹¹ and the two began a dialogue regarding González-Torres. This dialogue led to a deep and ongoing friendship.¹²

As he was preparing for his landmark 2009 exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, Where the Lions Are, Vo invited Ault to write a text for the exhibition catalogue. She was unsure at first, but they agreed to meet at a film festival in Argentina where they continued the exchange. Of the trip he remembers only the consuming nature of their conversations at the hotel and the films. Ault would later reflect that “the period was exuberant and exhausting; we thrived on and suffered from utter mental saturation.”¹³ From the exchange, Ault curated the five texts to be reproduced at the catalogue’s conclusion in lieu of the traditional catalogue essay, titling her contribution “Death Sentence.” Doing so, she sought to avoid the exegetical form that is the norm for the catalogue essay: “It didn’t ring true for me to interpret or explain Danh’s work. It didn’t make sense to have something like a unified narrative.”¹⁴ Rather, and in Vo’s own words, he “wanted a text that I could use for the future . . . something to learn from. That you can carry with you. I think that’s also what I mean when I think of artwork. No? It just sits there and you keep thinking about it.”¹⁵ Sharing the desire for a text that could be worked with and used over time, rather than explaining and fixing Vo’s work in time, Ault chose texts that “bore a kind of analogic . . . significance to Danh’s way of thinking and working . . . because of the way that they would, together, as a whole, configure, not diagram, but begin to configure, or suggest, a kind of unfolding of the cosmology of Danh’s practice.”¹⁶ Her hope that Vo would continue to work with the texts bore immediate fruits as he absorbed them into a new piece, also titled Death Sentence, which was first displayed at Art Basel in Miami Beach in 2009 before being purchased by MoMA in 2010.

Reading the five texts in sequence, one finds a wide range of resonances with Vo’s practice. In a lushly poetic fragment from a California land survey, for example, one catches descriptive language that seems presciently relevant to Vo’s conceptual approach. The author, John McPhee, lyrically narrates the earth’s story through the analogy of furniture housed in an attic, all in different styles and from different eras. Resonating with Vo’s practice of curating and (re)presenting objects amid shifting contexts and points of reference, McPhee writes that one tells such objects’ stories by moving “backward through shifting space to differing points in time,” before consoling the reader by telling them that “you can’t see the story whole. You cannot tell when each of these items has come, any more than its maker could have known where it would go.”¹⁷ This emphasis on subjective experience and contextual meaning making not only points to Vo’s methods, but also resonates with tactics deployed by Ault and Gonzalez-Torres (as evidenced in Group Material’s seminal AIDS Timeline of 1989).¹⁸

A fragment from an essay by Pier Paolo Pasolini, in turn, dissects the cinematic footage of Kennedy’s assassination. Reading the footage, Pasolini describes the way a sequence of cinematic shots form a multitude of unfolding, subjective presents. Through the effects of montage, he writes, “We obtain a multiplication of ‘presents,’ as if an action, instead of unfolding only once before our eyes, unfolded more times.”¹⁹ The act of cinematic editing (of editing the multiplication of presents into a single, streamlined sequence) will, in turn “render the present past”just as death provides a completed form for a life that is, until that point, unfixable and multitudinous potentiality.²⁰ The Pasolini fragment closes with the insistence that, “It is therefore absolutely necessary to die, because, so long as we live, we have no meaning, and the language of our lives . . . is untranslatable; a chaos of possibilities, a search for relations and meanings without resolution. . . Death effects an instantaneous montage of our lives.”²¹ As curator Katherine Brinson has noted, Vo’s studied interest in questions of death, and his deconstruction of the binary that divides life from death, appear resonant with Pasolini’s conclusion. In her reading of Death Sentence, Brinson remarks, “In an oeuvre predicated on a belief in the incommensurable vagaries of lived experience and the flickering instability of the self, death finally arrests this ceaseless flux and is a perpetual, countering presence in the work.”²² Death functions in two competing ways here. Death is that which arrests the arc of a particular life, but it is also a kind of continuance: what Brinson describes as this “perpetual, countering presence” of death in the mix with the living.²³

By refusing to provide a “unified narrative” of Vo’s practice by way of an exegetical text for Where the Lions Are, Ault sought to avoid the trap of fixing or killing the work. Instead, she provided Vo with a text (or a sequence of five texts) that could continue to live and work for him: “My hope is that ‘Death Sentence’ is something that Danh continues to read and delve into” as the text’s meanings transform and take on new life across different spaces, times, contexts, and utilizations.²⁴ So doing, it is inevitable that old meanings might be destroyed or killed off, making way for new points of connection and entry to emerge. This is a process of living, where death and destruction are not anathemas to life, but “a perpetual, countering presence” within it. ²⁵ This might suggest that when Vo exposed Death Sentence to the destructive rays of the sun, his aim was not to slay the work. In some ways, by becoming a rarefied art object acquired by MoMA and held in its collection, the piece had already been killed. By exposing it to the sun, giving it a new purpose, and giving it away to a new public, Vo sought to give it a new use, to find new life, as his work often does, in a seemingly dead and inert thing.

Vo once remarked to me, “The art world thinks I destroy things.”²⁶ He didn’t finish the thought, but I inferred that he understood this particular “unified narrative” of his practice as incomplete, if not inaccurate. Death and destruction are not, within his work, finite or conclusory. They are not the period delimiting the end of a (death) sentence. They are, instead, a part of the ceaselessly unfolding project of living. Rather, and in keeping with something Sigmund Freud once argued, death here does not run counter to life, so much as it is the realization of life’s aim.²⁷ That is, living is, always and at the same time, a process of dying, and all living matter ultimately comes from, and returns to, the pregnant nothingness that we sometimes call “death.” To put a work of art to use in the present, and presence of the living, as Vo often does, is to risk altering it and wearing it out, if not rendering it vulnerable to death and destruction. But Vo’s work is often an invitation to experience a shift in perspective. Seen otherwise, what appears to be destruction might be an invitation to come to terms with the fact that destruction and death are perpetual companions to creation, life, and the art of living on. As we are all sentenced to die, a death sentence need not necessarily be the opposite of living. As Death Sentence reminds us, it is the art of living with death that gives the act of living on meaning, substance, and stakes. A death sentence, in other words, is a precondition for More Life. It is the negotiation of this contradiction that gives life, and perhaps art, its force of power in the world.

(Boundless thanks to Danh Vo, Julie Ault, Marta Lusena, Binghao Wong, Susan Homer, and Daisy Matias (for excellent research support).

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