Para Site’s latest exhibition “An Opera for Animals,” co-curated by Cosmin Costinas and Claire Shea, featured works by 49 artists and groups installed across two floors of Wing Wah Industrial building in Quarry Bay, Hong Kong. The exhibition started with the historical coincidence of opera’s cultural apex in the late 19th- and early 20th-century, and the height of European colonialism, drawing a connection between the “absolute hubris when Europe imagined it could dominate and reorganize the world” and the “total spectacles” presented on stage in the new opulent cultural palaces of European capitals. From there, the exhibition expanded to include artworks about European classical music and other music systems, “conflicts of staging, controlling, hiding and repressing,” “digital parallel worlds,” “self-staging of personal identities” and the “new technological turn in the field of intelligence”—bringing many artworks, ideas, and themes all together. Here are ArtAsiaPacific editors’ takes on the dense and variegated exhibition. The Editors

“A dramatic ensemble of works”

“An Opera for Animals” did not disappoint in being a dramatic ensemble of works addressing performativity and/or animalism—often movingly, as in the case of Inuit artist and hunter Tim Pitsiulak’s paintings. But the exhibition quickly skimmed across so many topics around indigeneity, postcoloniality, trans- and queer-identity, and post-humanism, that it seemed to elide distinctions between those positions and even between non-European cultures. The capaciously and/or casually articulated concept of opera was accompanied by an actual experiential cacophony—works by Samson Young and Ming Wong were drowned out by Euan Macdonald’s video about piano construction in China, 9000 Pieces (2010). I appreciated Chitra Ganesh’s animation Adventures of the White Beryl (2018), Juan Davila’s wall-textile-like paintings, and Firelei Báez’s delicate renderings of hybrid plant-animal figures. Yet there were works that seemed barely tangential—like Lee Bul’s shiny hanging assemblage Sternbau (2010), about the fragmented legacy of revolutionary modernist architecture. Adam Nankervis’s photographs showing a post-stroke David Medalla in bed, his face decorated in manners recalling a death mask, appeared troublingly exploitative—and surely Medalla’s actual physical decline should not be treated as “opera.” I’m sure that’s not what the curators intended, but in the expansive definitions of the exhibition, certain binaries—of nature/culture, West/non-West, indigenous/non-indigenous, craft/technology, science/mythology—felt strangely reified rather than richly complicated. HG Masters

“Perpetuations of the mythical ‘other’”

Red flags were already raised with the overly ambitious curatorial statement, and I expected at least enough breathing space to properly explore the multiple themes. Yet in the crammed show I found only perpetuations of the mythical “other.” I felt that the unnatural forcing together of contemporary artworks—some whose inclusions seemed merely perfunctory—and sacred animist customs and rituals was problematic. These formations were often additionally contextualized in a discombobulating way—as in a section which juxtaposed a tiger prayer rug created by persecuted Tibetan refugees with one of Candice Lin’s etchings of the mythical Sycorax, a cat-and-herb bearing witch who is racialized in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611); and Ticio Escobar’s photographs of the Paraguayan ritual of sparring between two men, one representing a bull and the other a jaguar, recalling the trauma of the Spanish invasion. While the works found common ground in a history of violence—and big cats—visitors were not privy to an emic view of the many indigenous cultures referenced.

If parsed to its core, the contrasts and discourses between the artworks seemed only to be rehashing the age-old East/West dichotomy with sprinklings of references to the Anthropocentrism thrown in—although I’ll admit I got a laugh out of Ciprian Mureșan’s macabre video Dog Luv (2009), in which a rag-tag group of dog puppets discuss the fallibility of humankind: “If we want to understand the humans, we gotta see them at their lowest.” Ysabelle Cheung 

“Refutation of any easily connected, streamlined readings”

Evading dichotomous thinking, “An Opera for Animals” took as its departure point how the intertwining of European modern rationalism and Indigenous wisdom has (in some cases unwittingly) informed operatic and Western cultural narratives of the past, as well as our projections of the future. Juan Davila’s monumental paintings, drawing from both the stories that a Mapuche woman told the artist as a child, and Richard Wagner’s opera The Ring of the Nibelung (1848–74), which was itself based on Norse mythology, exemplifies the exhibition’s layered purview.

Hybridity was also reflected in the show’s layout, recalling the self-contained space of the stage and its back wings, populated with an unruly, rhizomatic abundance of narrative strands that met unevenly between “opera” and “animal.” The presentation’s strength and weakness was this very asymmetry, and its refutation of any easily connected, streamlined readings. In some instances, this approach was befitting of the works’ commentaries on non-binary understandings of the world, such as in Firelei Báez’s paintings of plant-animal-women figures, which was based on the shape-shifting folkloric creature Ciguapa, and underscored the fluidity of identity. On the other hand, the amorphous premise meant that some of the looser threads, including Ho Tzu Nyen’s video tracing the history of the gong, R for Resonance (2019), and Haegue Yang’s wall sculpture The Intermediate – Adorned Frosty Shield (2018)—both of which might have otherwise spoken volumes—were lost among the other components. Chloe Chu

“An excessively diffuse spread of ideas”

“An Opera for Animals” featured works that dealt proficiently with “opera” (or performance, more broadly), and works that dealt proficiently with “animals” (this seemed to encompass all organisms, real and imagined). Many of the selected works were only nominally related to either subject, though thought-provoking in their own right. Simon Soon’s The Tyger and the Navigator (2019), for example, was a fascinating study on the coopting of performance for political ends. Uncovering the history of an 18th century Malay song written by Captain Thomas Forrest of Britain’s East India Company in the hopes of winning over the local population and improving trade relations, Soon’s project teased out the complexities and contradictions of colonial force and cultural diplomacy. At the other end of the thematic spectrum was Angela Su’s Wicked Wiccan Wicker Wish (2019), an anatomical drawing of a humanoid torso with a plant-like system of vessels, and antlers and arachnid appendages sprouting monstrously from the neck. Simultaneously referencing witchcraft and pre-modern biological theory, the illustration disturbingly encapsulates longstanding anxieties surrounding science, nature, and the human body. Unfortunately, insight into how the two central categories overlap was lacking, presumably because their definitions were simply much too loose, resulting in an excessively diffuse spread of ideas. Without a compelling, clear, and focused curatorial framework setting up fruitful dialogue between works, visitors are left with a deeply divided show, composed of two sections that rely on conceptual stretching of the highest order. Ophelia Lai

“An overgrown wildlife sanctuary”

Sprawled across two floors, the layout of “An Opera for Animals” was theoretically intended to echo the “foyer, stage, and backstage” of an opera house. With no wall left bare, the show instead resembled an overgrown wildlife sanctuary. As such, it was difficult to find harmony both within the show’s various dialogues, as well as between the different topics and the overarching theme of the exhibition. Surprisingly, it was an ensemble of contemporary artworks and ethnographic objects that played a part in establishing a distinguishable tune for this otherwise cacophonic opera. A section on the top floor comprised a traditional Tibetan tiger rug crafted in a refugee camp. This was included alongside Ticio Escobar’s video montage of photographs from the Arete Guasú festival in Paraguay, depicting a fight between two men dressed as a bull and a jaguar, respectively—an allegory for the Spanish colonial invasion. Nearby, Clara Cheung’s Lo Ting Toy Story (2017)—figurines with the arms and legs of human dolls, and heads and bodies of dried salted fish, referencing a Hong Kong myth—and Chitra Ganesh’s mixed media pieces that appropriate traditional folkloric symbols, similarly attested to the role of animals in political and social commentaries. Attendees were reminded of the innate “physical, emotional, and symbolic” relationship we possess with animals, eminent across diverse cultures and throughout vast spans of time. Xuan Wei Yap 

HG Masters is ArtAsiaPacific's deputy editor and deputy publisher; Ysabelle Cheung is managing editor; Chloe Chu is associate editor; Ophelia Lai is reviews editor; and Xuan Wei Yap is an editorial intern.

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