Ho Rui An The Economy Enters the People
Bangkok Citycity, Bangkok 6 January – 20 February
In 1995 a Chinese delegation was dispatched to survey Singapore’s media apparatus. During the weeklong study trip – one of many such bilateral exchanges since the late 1970s – a team led by the Communist Party’s then head of propaganda, Deng Liqun, was shepherded from public broadcasters to news centres, cinemas to bookstores. The mission? Gleaning lessons from the politically stable city-state about regulating a nascent internet and better controlling society.
Singapore-based artist Ho Rui An’s latest installation offers us a seat at a table just like the one these technocrats sat at on this trip. Bangkok Citycity’s large gallery is now a clinical conference room, replete with a book trolley lined with Chinese books on Singaporean economics and two semicircles of grey modular desks. Bisecting them is a huge LED screen displaying archival images and footage, while a recording of Ho’s recent live lecture-performance plays on six desktop monitors.
The implication of this mock high-level meeting is that we are somehow active stakeholders in the story being told. But watching Ho ruminate, in impeccably enunciated tones, for 83 minutes, our seat at the table feels increasingly like an ironic gesture: technocrats – not we, the people – call the shots in his discursive account of Singapore’s role in China’s turn towards authoritarian capitalism.
Central to the narrative are official photographs of this trip, particularly one in which the attendees sit at a “large, mostly empty table that stands at the centre of the room”. For him, this scene evokes “an overwhelming sense of lack” – absent are the people they represent. During the post-tiananmen period, he explains, the Communist Party was striving to reshape an unruly public “into the rational, self-possessed individuals required by the market economy. And to do so, the people must first be moved from the scene, leaving us with an emptiness, a void.” Boasting the ingratiatingly smooth tone and slick production values of a motivational TED talk, Ho’s lecture traverses themes he has explored elsewhere, including neoliberal capitalism’s fixation on speed and spectacle, and the organisational paradoxes of China’s “socialist market economy”.
But iconographic storytelling, economic and journalistic analyses, archival footage and digital animations are here used – alongside Ho’s deadpan rhetorical style and witty turns of phrase – to unpack the geopolitical dialectic that exists between Singapore and China, or whimsically illustrate the political concepts and progress buttressing them.
At one point he deconstructs a photo from 1959 showing Singapore’s first cabinet seated in front of City Hall, all clean white smiles, shirts and slacks. Ho speculates (with irony?) that their gleaming, ghostly presence embodies the city-state’s vaunted anticorruption drive, and then he segues into a discussion of the spate of corruption-themed mid-1990s Chinese films with the word ‘black’ in the title. At another point he draws our attention to a picture of President Trump sitting awkwardly, legs akimbo, at a storied table used at the recent North Korea–united States summit in Singapore.
“Was he somehow being rejected by the table symbolising the rule of law?” he quips.
Later he pinpoints four types of Chinese film centred on the factory: from films of “workers leaving” or “never leaving” factory gates, to “workers never arriving at” or “protesting outside” the factory. Displayed in split-screen diptychs and drawn from sources as disparate as the Lumière Brothers, Chinese propaganda films and surveillance cameras, these movingimage montages power a circuitous account of late capitalism that ends with ‘the worker’ being displaced by ‘the people’ in recent capitalist critiques. Movements like Occupy Wall Street have, by calling themselves the 99%, “acquired a visibility that the Chinese worker would never attain”. In Singapore, meanwhile, such protests “made up exactly 0% of the population”.
In terms of his own politics, Ho tends to keep his cards close to his chest. He avoids value judgements, dispassionately presents historical facts and confidently triangulates opposing perspectives and ideologies. Yet both this exhibition’s seating arrangements (sit at the top half of the table and you see everything; sit at the lower half and you are essentially persona non grata, only archive photos arranged on the otherwise bare desk visible) and its speculative visual metaphors speak volumes.
The most striking example of the latter takes place at Singapore’s National Gallery in the present day. The place is empty, the people “too busy working”. Equally striking to Ho, however, is the glut of paintings of the revolutionary masses of the last century: workers, peasants, students, intellectuals, artists, shopkeepers, industrialists. For him, this interplay of absence and presence shows in no uncertain terms that “the time for dreaming is past” – the Singaporean economy, in having pacified as well as entered the people, has won. Max Crosbie-jones