WALES, U.K.- Michael Glover from the Financial Times reports that last year Wales and Scotland had their own pavilions at the Venice Biennale for the first time. Now Wales has its own international visual arts prize , worth £40,000. It is truly international, with 10 shortlisted artists from Korea, Japan, South Africa, China, the US, the Bahamas, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Israel and, oh yes, Wales. The two selectors were the Irish curator Declan McGonagle and Fumio Nanjo from Japan. The judges include the clothes designer Issey Miyake and Okwui Enwezor, editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. Art and its curating inhabit a global village as never before. Four of the artists are resident or part-resident in New York. And nationality issues are even more complicated than places of residence. Fiona Tan, was born in Indonesia and now lives in the Netherlands. Video artist Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba was born in Japan and lives in Vietnam. Unsurprisingly much of the subject matter has to do with shifting identities, displacement, questions of belonging.
Tessa Jackson, director of the exhibition at the National Museum of Wales, talks about the artists as "emerging" talents, but this is not quite true. Many - Michal Rovner, for example - are well known. Rovner was Israel’s representative at last year’s Venice Biennale. "Ah, but we chose her first!" says Jackson. Other artists have been seen at art biennials (and triennials) throughout the world. This show has a theme, says Jackson: the artists work with ideas of the human form or produce work which increases our understanding of the human condition. The second part of this formulation sounds too general to be meaningful, but theoretical issues aside, this is a good show with impressive work by many of the women - seven on the short-list - and one man. Best are the rooms by Michal Rovner, Berni Searle, Janine Antoni and, the man, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba. Rovner’s first room has walls of video screens occupied by images of lines of human beings, one on top of another, all waving or signaling. Rovner’s second gallery displays the best piece in the show. On a grey table-top surface there are disks - no, more like perspex boxes - which appear to contain writhing forms: microbes, insects or some such. When we peer more closely, we see they are, again, video projections of tiny weaving and turning human forms, under ocular scrutiny forever. Berni Searle from South Africa, also working with DVD projection, is showing a film of her own feet, huge and yellow, negotiating a treacherous path across a slippery surface. Bahamas-born Janine Antoni displays two portrait busts of herself, one in chocolate, the other soap, that she felt obliged to lick or knead into shape, washing or eating herself away. Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, a Japanese video artist who raises questions about Vietnamese identity by filming underwater, achieves astonishing effects with heightened color tones.
