Flash Art - Issue 338: spring 2022

Shuang Li’s work Lord of the Flies—which accompanies one of two cover stories in this spring issue—was performed in Shanghai in January 2022. Twenty performers, trained remotely by the artist, were tasked with embodying the sense of failure and implosion that defined metropolitan cities during the pandemic years. The performance is about the absence of human presence, both contingent and conceptual, as well as the metamorphosis of human relationships during a historical moment when we are creeping ever closer to a state of dematerialization. The work also resonates with the currently fraught global political situation, which will likely redefine our delicate relationships both interpersonally and internationally.

This issue encompasses a dark side that emerges from time to time; thoughts of rebirth, typical in springtime, presently seem faraway for humanity. The pages of this issue are populated by mutable creatures, a term that Isabel Parkes uses to describe Colin Self in her introduction to a wide-ranging discussion of Self’s latest project, called Tip the Ivy, and the artist’s longtime interest in shadow worlds. We also meet another singular creature, a material entity that periodically visits Hayden Dunham’s subterranean studio in LA. Between a darkness chamber and a wet studio, the entity questions Dunham about her research on the development of a new plant—a hybrid from the Rex begonia family that will function as an air purifier. The dark side surfaces again in Catalina Ouyang’s art, which, as Jane Ursula Harris points out, conjures “psychosexual and generational traumas that are not meant to be resolved but rather give rise to contingencies of being outside of logic and morality.”

Work—and the illness it causes as an endemic social condition—is one such generational trauma, as the bare minimum collective points out in their manifesto. Their solution seems to reside in collective actions and loving gestures—ways of being that may seem elusive to the inward-looking subjects of Xinyi Cheng’s painterly world. “By submitting to a wider logic of sensation, they have gained access to a world that is just theirs,” writes Ingrid-Luquet Gad in her essay. Still, even the most self-possessed mind is shaped by the highly engineered infrastructure of physical space, as Olivia Erlanger incisively deliberates with Keller Easterling.

In this issue’s second cover story, Blake Oetting reflects on how Kayode Ojo’s sculptures “choreograph a series of sly subversions by harnessing the rhetoric of display.” Also in this issue: Pascale Krief writes on the work of Julien Creuzet, which is made up of a complex poetic language woven from a set of historical, philosophical, and sociological references; Charlie Robin Jones dedicates his latest edition of Profile to the British designer Craig Green, who has produced some of the most poetic fashion statements of the last few decades; and Mandy Harris Williams, in Letter from the City, writes from her place in Mt. Washington, where “each day begins as a phantom apparition and proceeds as such, as though it could be just a specter, just a mythology, just a story that was blown across the plains…”

This entire issue reflects on the shaping of human identity: through the body, with its shifting terrain of desire and affect; in nonhuman beings; in architectural spaces; and in fictitious narratives that unfold across disparate temporalities and geopolitical contexts. This season will embody the essence of digitalized intimacy amid the existential restlessness of the world around us.