11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Cultivating the waves (still) 2024 / Single-channel video projection: colour, sound, 15 minutes (approx.) Not Ocean (still) 2024 / Single-channel video projection: black and white, sound, 15 minutes (approx.) Courtesy: The artist and ANOMALY, Tokyo Ishu Han’s work is sometimes framed in terms of the artist’s hybrid national identity. Born in Shanghai, Han has lived in Japan since the age of nine, when his family moved to Aomori Prefecture at the northern tip of Honshu island. He is part of a generation of practitioners currently coming to prominence in Japan who advance diverse social and cultural perspectives within the framework of contemporary art. While the experience of migration from China to Japan — and, significantly, from an urban context to a relatively remote one — has certainly played a role in shaping his practice, Han is more directly concerned with the complexities of the relationship between individuals and society. Among the range of media he works with, including playful installations, Han is best known for his compelling performance videos. These works typically position the artist in absurd and dreamlike scenarios within larger natural forces, such as shifting tides or fields of snow. Through the videos, he has developed a metaphorical poetic language characterised by its humour, which operates as a form of challenge, and visual restraint, evoking the solitary negotiation of immense social systems and popular norms. The inspiration for his work is contextual, drawing on personal experience — as in A dream about stopping the waves 2017, where Han struggles against the ocean dressed in the uniform of his day job as a security guard — or careful observation of small details, such as cotton dust accumulating on the roof beams above an obi workshop filmed for his contribution to the 2022 Aichi Triennale. For the Asia Pacific Triennial, Han presents two single-channel video works as part of an integrated installation: one drawing on arguably his most iconic series; the other a kind of riposte to it. Han’s Ocean works have been a fixture of his practice since 2010. Like A dream about stopping the waves , they feature him performing futile and incongruous actions at the edge of the sea, such as attempting to harvest waves, clean them with a bamboo broom or engage them in a game of tug of war. Not Ocean , on the other hand, inverts this process. Prior to this Triennial, it has been performed only once, in 2017, on a flat patch of earth, far from the sea, which the artist filmed himself breaststroking awkwardly across. One new iteration of each work has been created in south-east Queensland, drawing on the experiences of Chinese–Australian communities of Greater Brisbane, with particular reference to histories of mining and farming, as a reflection of Han’s own status in Japan. Presenting his Ocean and Not Ocean works together invokes a play of dualities, of not being one thing or another, that is reinforced by his use of black-and-white video. This can certainly be interpreted as evoking a hybrid experience of migration. Yet it is also open to broader readings of binary systems as they apply to identity beyond the merely national or linguistic, or to systems of knowledge, reason or logic. The absurdity of Han’s gestures — especially with regard to their framing, which draws so overtly on the tropes of romantic painting, of the individual posed against sublime wilderness — adds a dimension that is at once existential and comical. They suggest an expressly human conviction in the face of utter fallibility. REUBENKEEHAN BORN 1987, SHANGHAI, CHINA LIVES+WORKS INTOKYO, JAPAN ISHUHAN ARTISTS+PROJECTS ASIAPACIFICTRIENNIAL 94 — 95