Koji Ryui is known for metamorphosing humble materials into texturally delicate and materially wondrous sculptures and installations. Commissioned for ‘The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT10), Citadel 2021 converts a 17 metre wide and 7 metre high gallery wall into a vertical landscape of assemblages made from household items and wood-shop detritus. The installation rewards close viewing; bringing into focus formal juxtapositions and changes in texture, light and matter.
Although Ryui incorporates a plethora of found objects in this installation, it is dominated by sand, wood, metal and glass. By covering wood and repurposed articles in sand, the artist generates the appearance of discrete forms emerging from a larger mass, like a sandcastle along the beach. Some of the materials are chosen to draw attention to the transformation of matter: sand grains fused by heat to create glass; a clear surface turned cloudy by sandblasting. Rather than ‘making’ an artwork, Ryui describes his role as teasing out the material possibilities inherent in the objects that he accumulates.
Due to the installation’s restrained palette, its texture takes on a heightened role. The distilled materials in Citadel temper the complexity of its overall configuration while providing a visceral viewing experience.
Watch | Installation time-lapse
Toggle Caption
Koji Ryui, Japan/Australia b.1976 / Citadel (installation detail) 2021 / Mixed media / Commissioned for ‘The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT10) / Courtesy: The artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body, and Artspace, Sydney / © Koji Ryui / Photograph: N. Harth © QAGOMA / View full image
Toggle Caption
Koji Ryui, Japan/Australia b.1976 / Citadel (installation detail) 2021 / Mixed media / Commissioned for ‘The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT10) / Courtesy: The artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body, and Artspace, Sydney / © Koji Ryui / Photograph: N. Harth © QAGOMA / View full image
Toggle Caption
Koji Ryui, Japan/Australia b.1976 / Citadel (installation detail) 2021 / Mixed media / Commissioned for ‘The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT10) / Courtesy: The artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body, and Artspace, Sydney / © Koji Ryui / Photograph: N. Harth © QAGOMA / View full image
Clusters of objects in Citadel are balanced precariously and littered across the wall’s expanse. While abstract compositions are predominant, recognisable forms arise, including ceramic figurines, wire lampshades, scalloped dessert bowls, disposable coffee cups and champagne flutes. Ryui animates these nostalgic found objects, ensuring that this poetically opaque installation is also familiar and delightful.
Ryui questions the pretensions of rarefied museum objects by creating art from everyday items and incorporating a sense of play. Groupings of objects are shaped in his studio and then interchanged, adapted and transformed during their installation in the gallery.
Citadel sits at the threshold between multiple rooms, with visitors approaching and passing the work from various sides as they move through the gallery. This awareness of liminal space is echoed within the installation: while there are numerous sculptures of various sizes, the voids between them are as much a part of the installation as the objects themselves.
More than just evoking the idea of in-between spaces, Ryui creates a sense of nebulous time. He does this by summoning the moments at dusk and dawn when the illumination of streetlights melds with natural light. This can be seen in Citadel when light emanating from globes in the artwork intermingles with the gallery lighting and daylight streaming in from the adjacent space. The indiscernibility between the artificial and the natural could also be seen as a visual metaphor for the moment when dreams and memories become hard to distinguish from reality. In Citadel , Ryui revels in these points of indeterminacy as moments of potentiality.
Ellie Buttrose is Curator, Contemporary Australian Art, QAGOMAThe 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art
On display in ‘The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art ’ at the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane from 4 December 2021 to 25 April 2022
Featured image: Koji Ryui in Brisbane installing Citadel 2021 / Photograph: N. Callistemon © QAGOMA
Stories highlights delivered to your inbox
Related Stories
QAGOMA’s landmark exhibition series, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT), celebrates its tenth iteration in 2021. APT10 brings together more than 150 artists, collectives and filmmakers to reflect on complex histories, current urgencies and cultural encounters as they imagine a multiplicity of futures.
RELATED (Part 1): APT10: Navigating new futures
Ways of navigating and expressing our place in the world — and the influence of past encounters that hold meaning today — are embedded in objects, language, teaching and song throughout projects in APT10. For instance, the Air Canoe project focuses on the histories and cultures of the reefs, islands and waters that inform local art-making throughout the islands and atolls of northern Oceania, where understanding history relies on landscape and seascape literacy, and where navigational knowledge is an important aspect of cultural practice. Similarly, encounters over waterways become embedded in forms of art over time, such as knowledge of the winds, clouds and waters that underpinned exchange between voyagers from Macassar in Sulawesi to the beaches of north-east Arnhem Land. Sails, swords, paintings, pottery, performance and Larrakitj (memorial poles) have been gathered together from Indonesia, Arnhem Land and collections in Australia to illustrate these stories through the objects and materials influential in this pre-colonial history.
Among some of the stories of journeys and migrations that have inspired works in APT10, artists investigate experiences in between cultures and places. Conceived to inhabit a fluid space between two lands, a reimagined bilibili (water vessel) by Salote Tawale (illustrated) holds a central position in GOMA’s long gallery. It takes the form of a 12-metre-long raft made from pliable lengths of bamboo lashed together with recycled bedsheets and rope. Similarly, a series of images created by Aotearoa New Zealand–based artist Edith Amituanai (illustrated) tell stories of unrequited aspirations of trans-Tasman travel, taking on new connotations during a time of unprecedented restriction. Elsewhere in the exhibition, artists challenge extant forms of mapping and impositions of colonial and military borders as lines of control. Pala Pothupitiye’s series (illustrated) of manipulated and crafted maps of Sri Lanka, along with Chong Kim Chiew’s installation of textured tarpaulin maps, seek to reclaim lands and cultures by interrogating the structures and histories that established boundaries of ownership, alluding to what Air Canoe co-curator Greg Dvorak describes as the ‘mythmaking of mapping’. The ownership of land, the vulnerability of environments and the displacement of peoples are ideas that underpin contemporary art in the Asia Pacific region and are a palpable part of APT10.
Everyday lived spaces have become the source of narratives about social conditions and the imagination, in particular with experiences of domesticity assuming new meanings during the COVID-19 pandemic. APT10 constructs and gathers stories from these spaces, as architectures and homes instilled with memories and histories become both the subject and the form of projects in APT10. These include an installation of delicate threaded architecture by Indian artist Sumakshi Singh (illustrated), and a series of intimate and witty miniature paintings in which Iranian artists Maryam Ayeen and Abbas Shahsavar (illustrated)navigate the politics that preside over private and shared spaces through the confines of their domestic space in Tehran.
The varied materials, rituals and textures of the art-making of different locales is also fundamental to this exhibition, which seeks to engage with diverse contexts of cultural sharing and production. Working with the Uramat in Papua New Guinea, custodianship and the authority to view ceremonial objects outside their customary context has been called into question, while the community has been engaged to harness new ways for audiences to experience the objects in a dramatic multimedia installation. Conversely, Australian-based artists such as Koji Ryui (illustrated)and Brian Fuata explore relationships within the spaces of QAGOMA, reinterpreting and experimenting with the Gallery’s architecture, history, materiality and the presence of what cannot be seen. Invitations to step into cultural spaces are revealed and rationalised through other artworks in APT10: a Tongan fale (house made of local materials) by Seleka International Arts Society Initiative; the Balinese ritualised space of I Made Djirna’s installation; a deity-inhabited shrine by Vipoo Srivilasa; and immersive rainbow light representing safety for LGBTQI+ communities in Auckland‑based Shannon Novak’s gallery installation. Each space holds coded cultural connotations of the communities the work emerges from or engages with.
Collaborative, community-led ways of working are fundamental to the nature of many art-making contexts in the Asia Pacific region and hold a major presence in APT10 through a variety of rich and multi-faceted projects. Large groups working together in APT10 include artist collectives and communities as wideranging as the Bajau Sama Dilaut people in Sabah, Borneo; Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts in north-western Bangladesh; Seleka International Arts Society Initiative in Tonga; and the Kā Paroro o Haumumu: Coastal Flows / Coastal Incursions team from Aotearoa New Zealand. Other artists lead projects that rely on the participation of communities as producers of ambitious works, questioning the nature of representation and inclusivity while fostering agency for art-making communities for the future.
The artists and collaborators in APT10 draw on deep histories, current urgencies and cultural encounters — amicable and otherwise — that have shaped art and life across the Asia Pacific and which take on heightened relevance as we try to imagine a new future together.
Tarun Nagesh is Curatorial Manager, Asian and Pacific Art, QAGOMA;
Reuben Keehan is Curator, Contemporary Asian Art, QAGOMA; and
Ruth McDougall is Curator, Pacific Art, QAGOMA.
Part 2: This is an edited extract from the QAGOMA publication The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art
RELATED (Part 1): APT10: Navigating new futures
The fibrous souls 2018–21 currently in the Queensland Art Gallery Watermall is constructed with 70 giant shikas — embroidered, reticulated bags typically made of jute strings that are tied to a beam in the ceiling of houses and used to hold pots and food containers — Shikas are found in almost every house in rural Bangladesh and are traditionally made at home by families. Their designs, knotting and decoration varies between regions.
Kamruzzaman Shadhin and Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts expansive installation focuses on a part of Bengal’s complex and pervasive colonial history through personal stories of movement and displacement, the artwork articulates how a small part of the community came to settle in the surrounding villages.
Watch | Installation time-lapse
Kamruzzaman Shadhin, Bangladesh b.1974 / Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts, Bangladesh, est. 2001; Collaborating artists: Johura Begum, Monowara Begum, Majeda Begum, Fatema Begum (1), Shabnur Begum, Chayna Begum, Fatema Begum (2), Samiron Begum, Shirina Begum, Rekha, Nasima Begum, Shushila Rani, Protima Rani, Akalu Barman / The fibrous souls 2018–21 / Jute, cotton, thread, clay, brass / 70 pots: 40–100cm each (diam.) (approx.) with 70 shikas of various dimensions / Originally commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation / Purchased 2021 with funds from Metamorphic Foundation through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane / © The artists
Stories that inspired the artwork are drawn from families that had followed the railway tracks from what is now Bangladesh into India, after the British East India Company established the Eastern Bengal Railway. Operating under British Indian rule from 1892 to 1942, the railway served the profiteering trade interests of British India, fuelled by locally produced commodities such as jute, indigo and opium. The domination of these cash crops led to food scarcity, debt and land loss, forcing people — such as the ancestors of the Thakurgaon jute makers — to turn away from farming their own lands.
Families gradually left their homes to follow opportunities along the railway to Assam; however, during the 1947 Partition of India, they found themselves separated from their homes by a new national border, only to be forced back over from India into what had become East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh). They settled along the Brahmaputra River in the regions by the new border dividing Bengal. As this vast river continually eroded, their plight turned from political to ecological migration, slowly moving westwards until they settled in Thakurgaon.
Over more than 20 years, Kamruzzaman Shadhin has developed new possibilities for contemporary art in Bangladesh, centred around the communities of his home village of Balia in the far north-western state of Thakurgaon. In 2001, he established Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts to work with local indigenous Santhal communities. The foundation seeks to be a catalyst for social inclusivity through collaborative approaches.
Shadhin is also one of Bangladesh’s foremost contemporary artists, known for his installations and performances that address environmental and social issues, particularly those facing regional Bangladesh and its communities. Together with Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts, he produces ambitious contemporary art projects, driven by the principles of community development and exploring shared culture and histories.
Working with 13 women hailing from jute-making families to construct the shikas, along with a handful of other local craftspeople to create the pots and connecting jute ropes, Shadhin and Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts have constructed a giant hanging system of shikas, laid out as the map of the historic Eastern Bengal Railway that began this story.
The women created their own designs on the shikas, so each is unique and features various wrapping and knotting techniques and additional decoration. The shikas hold brass, jute and clay storage pots, which are suspended over water for APT10. The hanging pots each symbolise the stations of towns and cities on the railway map — from Calcutta (now Kolkata) and Chittagong (now Chattogram) in the south, to Darjeeling and Guwahati in the north — signifying the defining role this piece of colonial infrastructure has played in shaping their lives. In Shadhin’s words, the installation is
an attempt to interweave these historical and cultural strands that seem apparently and innocently disconnected, and connect these to the present-day peasant conditions in Assam and Bengal.
The project draws together members of communities to explore their own stories and cultural practices — and is a product of the unique practice Shadhin and Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts have developed. Imbued with local and social values, it is a practice that advocates and finds in regional communities new pathways for contemporary art that are not reliant on art centres or global arts discourse, revealing new possibilities for art production to audiences far from where they emerge.
Tarun Nagesh is Curatorial Manager, Asian and Pacific Art, QAGOMA
This is an edited extract from the QAGOMA publication The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art available in-store and online from the QAGOMA Store.
