Solar: A Meltdown was one of the five works featured in Singapore Focus, a program by Tang Fu Kuen at TPAM this February in Yokohama. The lecture performance employed two screens—one large and one small—showing photography and video edited by Ho Rui An while the artist spoke to the audience for an hour.

Photo: Hideto Maezawa / TPAM 2016

Lecture performances are currently very popular in the West but remain unconventional in Japan. Indeed, this was the first time where I saw the true potential of the format. On a superficial level, what the performer was doing was very simple and no different from a regular business presentation. There was nothing extraordinary about Ho’s "costume," nor did he make any special gestures that would require practice. No, what was impressive about the performance emerged from how his skillful narration, full of humor and irony, was added to the content of the photography, video, and texts. This performance was essentially a lecture about his ideas. Therefore, the audience too was required to take on the message he threw at us accurately and respond.

Photo: Hideto Maezawa / TPAM 2016

The performance began with an image of a mannequin of the Dutch anthropologist Charles Le Roux that Ho stumbled upon in Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum (Tropical Museum), and whose back was dripping with sweat, while it ended with Ho describing the moment when he saw Queen Elizabeth’s sweat on her back as she rode a boat down the River Thames in London during the Diamond Jubilee Pageant in 2012, marking 60 years since she ascended the throne. The central leitmotif of the performance was the issue of the internal versus the external. For Ho, what was important was ultimately the external, which is symbolically summarized in the image of sweat coming out of the body due to the heat of the sun. On the other hand, the internal obscures the presence of the external. As an image of this, Ho presented the wide, circular skirt of Anna Leonowens, the real-life English tutor for the children of King Mongkut of Siam at the end of the nineteenth century, played by Deborah Kerr in the 1956 film version of The King and I. From this image of a bulging skirt, Ho created a concept of the "global housekeeping space." Originating in the strong sense of making the home a place of comfort, developed by white wives in order to protect colonialists from the harsh sun in Western colonies during the second half of the 19th century, the concept also refers to the globalized world today. That is, for Ho, globalization forms the image of a maternal, spherical space. Moreover, the power moving this sphere that is internally open while closed externally is the behavior of love and exchange. Following Anna Leonowens' skirt, Ho develops this thesis next with Queen Elizabeth’s "royal wave," which is criticized thoroughly using video footage and a toy called a "Solar Queen," a solar-powered moving model of Queen Elizabeth found by Ho in a New York store.Ho concluded that what we should share is not love, with its maternal embrace, but rather the sweat from toiling under a sun that cannot be controlled.

Photo: Hideto Maezawa / TPAM 2016

Ho seems to be linking Bataille’s concept of how we waste excess energy through the act of sweating with Marxism and feminism. We might call this the idea of returning to the sweating body to consider all humanity equally. Above all, though, what we must not overlook is Ho’s implied criticism of the neocolonialism that can be sensed in work by many non-Western artists currently enjoying acclaim in the West. Their work, though initially appearing to be new forms of art created out of a cultural dialogue between West and non-West, is in fact a rehash of non-Western traditional culture embraced through a love of Western contemporary art. Under the name of this "love," the hierarchy that exists between the West and non-West has been preserved and there is no attempt to shake the autonomy of Western culture. In the end, what is commended about non-Western culture is always the traditional culture, which is no different from what happened during the age of imperialism. However, unlike the age of imperialism, today commercialism is also involved and the non-Western countries are developing by themselves and joining this movement, meaning the sickness is perhaps even more severe than before. In Ho’s performance there were no traditional elements whatsoever. Depending on the person, it might just have seemed a hasty imitation of a style currently in vogue in Europe and America. But, for example, could a Japanese person—like Ho, someone from the East—have created such a cruel satire of Queen Elizabeth? Perhaps due to Japan’s unique history of having avoided Western colonialism, on the contrary itself colonializing Asia, we have become insensitive, but there is almost no shared awareness that neocolonialism is a problem. In this sense, Ho’s skill at exposing the power structure latent in this maternal sphere was nothing short of brilliant.

Photo: Hideto Maezawa / TPAM 2016

And yet, in Ho’s description of the "sweat from toil" I could sense the residual thinking of modernity that still centers on production. The sweating body is inadequate as a body that can resist globalization today. No, we must again confront the inactive and empty body; that is, the dead body.

March 16th, 2016