Museums 7


The Woman Who Clicks the Shutter (2018) by Pixy Liao, C-print, 200 x 150 cm. Courtesy the artist © Pixy Liao


Aching sentimentality is also very


much on display in Rinko Kawauchi series Cui Cui (2005), where somehow inconsequential fragments of the world – misty shots of flowers – the remnants of half-eaten water melon, etc, along with actual portrait of relatives that chillingly construct the pathos of relationships and of how memories fade and reinvent themselves over the passage of time. Rinko has been photographing her family for 13 years – family gatherings for New Year’s Holidays, an older brother’s wedding, grandfather’s death, the birth of a new life, and so on. Te camera elevates their ordinariness into a collective family identity which really amounts to a disturbing memento mori. Identity is something that


American-Chinese photographer Pixy Liao dwells on in her self- portraits known as Experimental Relationships, which are now entering their second decade and, to date, have been seen in several countries. Even though Chinese she could be considered an honorary living


Japanese, between New York and


Shanghai, with Moro her Japanese boyfriend. She met Moro at art school in the


US and simply asked him if she could photograph him. He said yes, and it appears that he has hardly left her side since then. Te two of them role-play in heavily contrived tableau- vivant performance pieces that subvert the male-female power dynamic. But there can be no doubting who wears the trousers in this relationship – and it is not Moro


– even though he is often seen pressing the camera shutter. Te portraits are often risqué while being asexual. So critical is Moro as Liao’s muse one can only hope that everything in their relationship is rock solid. ‘I hope so,’ Liao quietly said on the


phone from Shanghai recently. If one needs confirmation of


Walker’s confidence in the relevance that social media plays in the lives of today’s young, one needs to look no further than Chinese photographer Lin Zhipeng (aka No 223), a leading figure of new Chinese photography, whose popularity has grown exponentially through social media. Blogger, writer, and content creator, his work focuses on the relaxed approach the young Chinese generation has to intimate nudity, a staple feature in his work. Zhipeng’s photographs are shot in lush saturated colour and occupy a space somewhere between the mannered elegance of Chinese movie auteur Yang Fudong’s still photographs from the 1990s and the sad superficiality of the late Chinese photographer Han Ren’s richly coloured


eroticism. Zhipeng’s


subjects however possess an emotional ambiguity that seems to say, take them or leave them, this is life. Part of Walker’s challenge at AGWA will be


in guiding the


gallery’s future across a state that is ten times the size of the UK with a population that – according to the 2021 Australian census – is 2.7 million people, 80 per cent of whom live in the southwest corner, where Perth is located. Even so, Walker remains adamant that the gallery’s future is one of looking north and into Asia even though the first Asian landfall from Perth is somewhere in the region of 2,617 kilometres away. Which is a mere snip when you consider Sydney is 3,290 kilometres, or thereabout, in the opposite direction.


• I Have Not Loved Enough, from 18 November to 23 April 2023,


Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, artgallery.wa.gov.au


ASIAN ART | NOVEMBER 2022


PHANIGIRI INTERPRETING AN ANCIENT BUDDHIST SITE IN TELANGANA


edited by Naman P. Ahuja


The first comprehensive volume on this Indian monastic complex in collaboration with the Department of Heritage Telangana


Order your print/digital copy at www.marg-art.org


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