The Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

but it also functions as a critical appropriation of the hideous generalisations projected by white Australia onto its Indigenous population. Similarly, curator Venus Lau has recently suggested that Ming Wong’s chameleonic presence in his work signals a double alienation — a critical distance from both ‘Western’ and ‘Asian’ cultural constructions — the gestural nature and symbolic density of which eludes dualist impositions of identity. 18 Significantly, such practices already exist in the broader social field, a point emphasised by siren eun young jung’s video documentation of the performers and performances of yeosung gukgeuk, a postwar adaptation of Korean musical theatre in which all roles, male and female, are played by women. For the artist, yeosung gukgeuk manifests an inherently critical approach to socially delineated gender roles and, crucially, the uses and abuses of affect in identity formation and interpersonal relations. Justin Shoulder and Bhenji Ra draw on the renegade creativity of Sydney’s underground clubs and their operation as ‘safe spaces’ for personal expression. Identifying sympathies between queer, migrant and intercultural identities, Shoulder and Ra’s video portraits of members of marginal communities in Australia and the Philippines are accompanied by guerrilla performances given as extravagantly costumed creatures, manifestations of desires that exceed all existing frameworks, monsters desiring the creation of new frameworks that might accommodate them. Philosopher Gerald Raunig has proposed the term ‘monster institutions’ to describe such practices in contemporary art and society. For Raunig, monsters are ‘immeasurable, unformed, formless and ungovernable’. The tradition of institutional critique in art has moved through a sequence of phases, from ‘monsters attacking the institutions from outside’, to ‘inserting the monster into the institution’. Raunig proposes a third phase: ‘monsters becoming institutions or creating monster institutions of your own’. 19 The frameworks that might accommodate Shoulder and Ra’s monsters, then, may well be monsters themselves. Toying with the potential linguistic confusion of the monstrous with monstration, or the act of showing, Jean-Luc Nancy offers the earliest known instances of figuration — Paleolithic cave paintings of bison and similar herd animals — as humanity’s representation of the strangeness of its own nature, its ‘obscure obviousness’; the proximity between ‘the society of other men’ and ‘the troubling familiarity of animals’. 20 Perhaps it is this troubling familiarity that also lends White Darkness its poetic force: Morimura asserts that his first encounter with a flayed cow in a slaughterhouse was with ‘an indescribable mass’, ‘a world of perfect abstraction’, giving rise to the suspicion that, 350 years earlier, Rembrandt decided to make an abstract painting. 21 The social analogues proposed by this formal innovation might give shape to their own frameworks, their own institutions, their own imagined communities, in which the skin no longer functions as the boundary of human relations. MINGWONG Singapore/Germany b.1971 After Chinatown (detail) 2012 Mixed media installation: single-channel black-and-white video, colour photographs, found objects, cinema billboard, posters and ephemera / Image courtesy: The artist Me In Me (still) 2013 Three-channel video installation / Commissioned by Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo / Image courtesy: The artist, Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou and carlier | gebauer, Berlin 72—73 BACK TO THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE