| art.description.project | I first experienced Kawara’s Title (1965) in the exhibition Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965-1975, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 15 Mar – 18 Aug 2019. My first reaction was awe, with a slight rage, one easily circumvented by calm reasoning thanks to the training provided by the society I grew up in, where I had to repress emotions and thoughts on the topic of 1965 for a long time. Most Americans might remember 1965 as the year the US combat troops were first deployed into Vietnam. I remember 1965 as the year my grandfather was forcibly disappeared in the “paradise island” of Bali, Indonesia, as part of the US-backed mass killings led by General Suharto.
Coming from a migrant family that has been crossing borders for more than seven generations, I began researching the border in 2007. Indonesia’s 1965-66 mass killings were one of my first impetus to this, as they demonstrate the subtleties of borders: the border can seem automatically synonymous with power, but Indonesia’s 1965 shows that a dramatic shift of power can happen without the slightest shift of a nation-state’s borders as inscribed on the map. In the case of Indonesia, (extra-)territorial government coercions manifested in a covert action, one in which “the world's leading democracies collaborate to secretly […] helped in the consolidation of […] military dictatorship in Indonesia” (Kim, 2002, p. 82). If borderlessness does exist, it must also be seen in the light of this destructive kind of global power collaborations. Subtext – after Kawara’s Title, 1965 is my deeper peer into this borderless – and timeless – universe of global conflicts.
Subtext was initially conceived as a triptych, a literal revisit to Kawara’s Title, parts of which were initially intended to be made as close as possible to the original. I initially thought of the canvas bearing “1965” serving as a pivot point to the conceptual composition of the conceived triptych. The residency was to be held in a gallery as an open studio, so I regarded the whole process as performance. During pre-residency discussions, working with the floor plan and some photographs of the gallery, I settled with a single wall in the gallery to hang the tryptich. When I came to the gallery, however, and experienced the space of the gallery in context, I realised I could convey process and distance by working spatially. As 1965 was never just one thing, I decided to keep "1965" as a pivot point, and exploded "ONE THING" to multiple shades of quinacridone magenta canvases that travel across the walls, ceilings and floor of the gallery.
I learned from Henning Weidemann’s 1991 photograph series on Kawara’s process of Today series that he would layer the monochromatic background several times before starting to work on the letterings (Chiong, 1999). As I see the process as a performance, I decided early on I would have to experience and experiment with layering as well. Working with the colour, Quinacridone Magenta, the layering from "shocking pink" (as Kawara referred to it) into deep, blood red is reflective of the history of the colour's pigment, which as a dye was invented in 1859 and named after a battle - the Battle of Magenta. It is also appropriate with respect to the stories of 1965 Indonesia's imageries of the killings: of rivers that reeked of blood, and were clogged with bodies.
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