Historically, the various kingdoms of Asia had no higher authority than the religions that not only gave them a system of faith, morality and social structure but also served as persuasive and proficient transmitters of art, culture, and commerce. To this day, religion remains a powerful force in many Asian nations, whether it be Hinduism or Sikhism in India, Buddhism and Shintoism in Japan, or even Christianity and shamanism in Korea. The countries of Asia are often melting pots of religious sects, with several faiths existing side by side, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in deadly conflict. In the 21st-century, however, religion in Asia faces the same challenges that Judeo-Christian belief systems face in the West: how to recruit new converts into the faith; how to carry on traditional practices in empirical, science-based, market-driven, secular societies; and perhaps most importantly, how to find modern interpretations for ancient beliefs, expressed in language that contemporary practitioners will accept. Nonetheless, religion is deeply rooted in Asian cultures and artists from the region, as well as from elsewhere, have returned time and again to its teachings as a source of inspiration and solace. Others are dismissive, disowning that part of their heritage. In turn, Western religions have long vied with their Asian counterparts for believers, resulting in complex, sometimes hostile relationships with their host nations. In this section of Simulasian, the artists selected examine the role of religion in today’s Asia from multiple perspectives, including that of the social and the personal from which it is not always easily detached.

Spring, oil on canvas, 84 x 78 inches, 2005. Courtesy of the artist.

Emily Cheng is considered Chinese-American although that small hyphen is too neat for the diversity of histories it represents. Cheng was born and raised in the United States and has lived in New York for years but her family, originally from mainland China, arrived via the Philippines, a westward migration in stages that is not uncommon. Also not uncommon today is the return to Asia, both culturally and geographically and Cheng travels east often where she exhibits regularly. She has studied the history of European and Asian art and both have influenced her practice which includes painting, drawing, photography and installation, inspired by medieval manuscripts, European tapestries, Renaissance paintings, Buddhist art and more, a headily extravagant, gorgeously confected compendium of styles. Buddhism, Taoism and other Eastern philosophies, however, are increasingly her foundation. For Simulasian, her global appropriations are emblematic of today’s nonchalant cultural fusions, where everything is available. Spring, one of her Four Season paintings, is a gossamer green and violet pastel whirl touched by rose that spins together budding flora and fauna and what might be a tree of life. The concentric circles create a vortex into the infinite and recall a dharma wheel, mandala--or modernist target. Cheng has often presented her work as interactive, as guides for meditation in a contemporary world in what might be designated a program of sustainable art.

Low Tide, Mother of Pearl - 36 two piece units - concave/convex, dimensions variable, 1995. Courtesy of the artist.

Left: Answer to Colin, acrylic polymer, silica / canvas, gesso, red clay, water gilded silver leaf, lacquer / wood panel, 20 x 12” each, 1992. Courtesy of the artist.
Right: Buddha, acrylic polymer, silica / canvas, gesso, red clay, water gilded silver leaf, lacquer / wood panel, 20 x 12” each, 1992. Courtesy of the artist.

New York-based artist Max Gimblett is perhaps just as inspired by the aesthetic and religious histories of Asia as he is of the West and his native New Zealand. Deeply philosophical and good-willed in nature, his paintings and sculptures seem to transcend the here and now and take us to an interior place populated by personal beliefs and spirits from the world beyond. Often painting in black ink on lavish gilt ground, Gimblett’s lifelong study of Buddhist theology and Japanese ink painting technique is readily apparent, yet his works are purely contemporary in their subtle nods to technology in the form of occasional grids and networks that hint at computer systems, or perhaps the human psyche. For Simulasian, Gimblett includes two diptychs that allude to the duality of religion in his life, one from a Judeo-Christian background and the other from the religions of Asia. One painting in each diptych bears the backwards name of each of those tradition’s perhaps most important entities—Jesus and Buddha—while its companion canvas is simply gilt in silver. Hanging across from these conceptual mirrors, the paintings with the writing-in-reverse become legible, the names of the gods readable. Set below them on the floor, 36 skulls in opalescent mother-of-pearl fan out, reminding us all of the ephemerality of life, and the role that religion plays in helping some of us come to terms with it.

Light of Garden, plastic balls, pins and silicon on acrylic board with interactive video, dimensions vary, 2007. Courtesy of the artist and 2 x 13 Gallery, Seoul & New York

Korean-born artist Ran Hwang now works in New York but remains Korean, albeit a cosmopolitan Korean who travels often between her two worlds as well as others. She has retained many of the customs of her native land, including her belief in Buddhism which is the basis for much of her art. Hwang is also a contemporary artist and involved in fashion, using commonplace objects, a popular strategy, to miraculous effect, transforming buttons, plastic balls, pins, thread—all dressmaker items--into immense images that are both sacred and profane in a practice that is labour-intensive but also performative, meditative, ritualistic and soothing, like “monks practicing Zen in front of a wall,” Hwang said. Light in Garden, 2007, is not one of her signature push-pin and thread Buddhas but instead a chandelier that conjures up a luminous tree of life, both of which can be an emblematic of Buddhism and a reference to the multiple but organic branchings of Buddhist thought. Hwang has added an interactive video component for this work and expects viewers to walk around the installation, to be bathed by a light which itself is both real and symbolic and which she hopes will function to center and enlighten. She offers the spiritual through practical, ordinary materials and utilitarian activity. Her Light of Garden shimmers with points of brilliance that suggests the contingent, unsubstantial nature of matter and being, the illusions that comprise this world and the triumph of emptiness, linking an intricate dialectic of East and West into an ephemeral, fragile unity.

Left: Who am I, powder pigments on paper, 29 ½ x 21 ½ inches, 2005-2006. Courtesy of private collection and Ethan Cohen Fine Arts, New York.
Center: Untitled, powder pigments and blind printing on paper, 22 x 30 inches, 2005-2006. Courtesy of the Artist and Ethan Cohen Fine Arts, New York.
Right: Untitled (back view of head), powder pigments on wasli paper, 21 x 14 ½ inches, 2005-2006. Courtesy of private collection and Ethan Cohen Fine Arts, New York.
Right: Untitled (forehead), powder pigments on wasli paper, 21 x 14 ½ inches, 2005-2006. Courtesy of private collection and Ethan Cohen Fine Arts, New York.

Young Pakistani painter Ali Kazim examines the role of male beauty in Muslim culture. Educated in the art of miniature painting, Kazim carries the attention to detail that he learned as a student over to his current mode of production that often relies on powders and printing processes to realize the finished work. His color palette is haunting in its use of blacks and dark blues for backgrounds and rich shades of brown and blacks for his figures; at times the subject and the ground seem to become one, embedding Kazim’s idealized and beautiful models into a dark void here, or in other works, setting a figure against bright white ground so that his naked body seems to hover in mid-air there. A perceived homoerotic undertone can be found in the artist’s work thanks to his constant gaze on and attention to the male form, even though such thoughts would be deemed inappropriate within the strict traditions of the Muslim faith. Regardless of the artist’s own orientation, the beautiful bodies and faces that he depicts remind us that beauty is without borders, and more importantly, fully reliant on the viewer’s own cultural heritage to be read. What might be viewed as erotic in the West is in fact viewed as idealized form in Pakistan, where the artist’s work is highly revered thanks to its technical merit.

Left: Peres Huitzilopochti (eternal), Mixed media sculpture; 2 ropes, gold paint and 24kt gold leaf, Dimensions variable, 2007. Private Collection, New York.
Right: Two Marys, burnt wax figures in Plexi case, 25 x 11 x 19.5”, 2007. Private Collection, New York.

Art world darling Terence Koh has risen to the upper echelons of the art market thanks in large part to his intellectually-balanced, yet fully outrageous performances and installations. Koh seems to be able to tap directly into the angst of our contemporary times, pulling out the unmentionables of life and throwing them into the middle of his spectacles and follies. His work is often fraught with the dark depths of his inner psyche, a place seemingly populated by dripping black wax, social insecurity and fears of death and disaster. However, on the bright side, Koh balances these phobic horrors with works made of blinding neon lights, glimmering gold leaf and gorgeous young men veiled in white sheaths. Koh expertly balances the realm of beauty/vanitas with that of death and decay, creating a body of works that dangerously teeters between the two worlds, yet never decisively steps into one or the other. Two works displayed here reflect the artist’s mastery over the binarism of life and death particularly. In Peres Huitzilopochti (eternal) and Two Marys (both 2007), Koh utilizes meaning-laden icons of Western society—two nooses in the former, and two statues of the Virgin Mary in the latter—and then coats them with materials that stand in direct opposition to the objects’ original uses. By gilding the nooses, a device used to execute, with gold leaf, Koh nullifies the murderous implications of the knotted ropes (evident also in the work’s campy title referencing both his gallerist Javier Peres and the Aztec God of War, Huitzilopochti) and turns them into exalted objects of beauty. Conversely, by taking the pious figure of the blessed virgin and casting her in black wax, he hides the pure with the putrid. In this vein, Koh poignantly reverses the iconography of culture and religion, and leaves us wanting more.

KASODO 2007 Single-channel DVD (edition of 6) Copyright Susan Norrie/David Mackenzie, Courtesy of the artists

Artists Susan Norrie and David Mackenzie are both from Sydney, Australia. Australian journalist Justin Hale, who also worked with them on this project, is based in Indonesia. All three recently collaborated on Havoc, which was filmed in predominantly Muslim Indonesia on the island of Java. Havoc is an evocative, multi-layered project investigating a man-made environmental disaster and was shown at the 2007 Venice Biennale. The artists returned to East Java for their latest video work, KASODO. The work is named after a Tenggerese  festival dating from the 15th century, drawn from Hinduism, Buddhism, animism and Islam. The festival lasts about a month and takes place in the cindered, smoking crater that encloses the active volcano at the top of Gunung Bromo (Mount Bromo). The artists first learnt of the Kasodo festival whilst working on Havoc. It was believed that due to the unstoppable mud-flow, this years festival would be the largest in living memory. Stories of mass animal sacrifice were common amongst the surrounding villages, goats, pigs chickens and even buffalo, would have their bodies dismembered and thrown into the volcano in an attempt to appease the gods. The reality, as always, was quite different, more complicated, less accessible and rife with myth and misapprehension, as this collision between art and documentary attests. A hybrid of the simulated, the real and the dream-like­, the work veers between spectacle, the violent, the surreal, the beautiful and the existential. In KASODO, the artists confront an awareness and understanding of their problematic gaze as they follow a sacred pilgrimage in its modern incarnation, through ritual performances of trance and animal possession, to symbolic sacrifice and playful enactments of ritual commerce and exchange. The Kasodo festival may no longer contain the exotic legends of its mythical past but it retains its basis in faith and renewal– in this allegory of destruction, accommodation and endurance.

10 Commandments and Islamic Exegesis, 2 channel HD video, 5 minutes 34 seconds, 2007. Courtesy of the artist and Virgil de Voldere Gallery, New York.

Hung-chiih Peng is a Taiwanese artist who lives in both Taipei and New York and a recent arrival to the United States. Peng has worked with an unnamed white dog for the past several years as his main subject. In his attempt to dismantle cultural barriers, destabilize historical and conventional content and forge more heterodox contexts, his latest video projects have cast his star in a new role as the Canine Monk. Unlike William Wegman’s precocious weimaraners, Peng’s populist dog of mixed breed aspires only to be a dog—or, if reversed, god. In a series of irreverent videos, the Canine Monk licks a wall as single-mindedly and industriously as any medieval monk illuminating a manuscript and with each lick, a word or character appears, until a complete statement is revealed. Once the sentence is completed, the dog retreats from the screen in rewind only to return to “write” another sentence. The Canine Monk series began with Buddhist, Taoist and Hindu scriptures but when Peng came to New York, he began to research Western religions and was struck by the many similarities between Islamic and Judeo-Christian writings. One result of that study is the Ten Commandments and Islamic Exegesis, (2007) a dual-screen projection in which the dog reveals the Ten Commandments in Hebrew on the left screen while almost identical quotes excerpted from the Qur’an are projected on the right in English, a juxtaposition that ironically makes the latter seem more familiar.