On ‘Post-Production Fever’
By Ian Tee

Ho Rui An, ‘Post-Production Fever’, 2024, exhibition installation view. Photo by Quinn Lum. Image courtesy of A+ Works of Art.

Ho Rui An is an artist and writer working in the intersections of contemporary art, cinema, performance and theory. He is best known for his performance lectures that examine the relations between labour and capital in different systems of governance. Rui An has presented projects at major international biennales in Shanghai, Bangkok, Gwangju, Sharjah, among others. He was awarded the Young Artist Award (2023) by the National Arts Council, Singapore, and the International Film Critics’ (FIPRESCI) Prize at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany (2019).

I spoke with Rui An on the occasion of his new solo exhibition ‘Post-Production Fever’ (2024). Curated by Zian Chen with Clara Che Wei Peh, it is the most comprehensive presentation of the artist’s work to date, featuring a new large-scale installation and works shown in Singapore for the first time. In this conversation, Rui An unpacks the ideas and intentions behind each of the three sections in ‘Post-Production Fever’.

Ho Rui An, ‘24 Cinematic Points of View of a Factory Gate in China’, 2023, 4K video, 24 min 45 sec. Photo by Quinn Lum. Image courtesy of A+ Works of Art.

I would like to start the conversation by asking how you got to know Zian Chen? You have been working with him for some years now, and you recently collaborated with him on the lecture ‘Spinning Time’ (2023) at Rockbund Art Museum.

We met in 2016 so it has been eight years of working together across different projects. He is based in mainland China, so it is mostly through my projects in China that I have worked with him. In the last two years, we have been working collaboratively on a long-term research project about the textile industry in the Yangtze Delta region. This project takes the textile industry as an entry point to investigate broader economic and political changes in China over the last century or so, with a focus on the advent of industrial capitalism in China.

This recent textile project grew out of many prior engagements with economic narratives around China. ‘The Economy Enters the People’ (2021-22), which I showed at ‘Lonely Vectors’ (2022) at Singapore Art Museum, was probably my first work that addresses the Chinese economy. In that work, the main entry point was a Singapore connection in the 1990s, when the Chinese government took Singapore as a model for the reforms that they were experimenting with. That work was very much about state-building within a global capitalism system so it focused on the formation of a kind of technocratic subjectivity that is especially observable in Singapore.

For my more recent projects, I have been looking at things more from the perspective of labour. This entails considering the space of the Chinese factory, interviewing workers, and examining films set in factories in China. This eventually gave rise to the work that is featured in the exhibition called ‘24 Cinematic Points of View of a Factory in China’ (2023), which is the first work you see in the exhibition.

‘24 Cinematic Points of View…’ was previously screened at the Singapore International Film Festival in December 2023 and it has been adapted for this presentation. What can viewers expect?

The content of the video has not changed, but within the exhibition, we are also showing a selection of archival material that informed our research process. In Shanghai, the textile and filmmaking industry effectively developed in parallel to each other. We observed that in virtually every period of filmmaking in Shanghai, there would be a number of films set in a textile factory, some with plots that were explicitly about the textile industry.

One of my strategies for this project, and my practice broadly, has been to try to understand broader economic social phenomenon through visual culture. In the archival section, you will see materials that we have collected from different factories across different periods. These include publications that were self-produced by the workers, like factory newsletters from the 1950s. There are also different kinds of film memorabilia. After launching the Great Leap Forward, there was a push to make what they called “artistic documentaries” at that time. This was the result of budget considerations, as a dramatic feature costs much more than doing a documentary.

So for instance, there's this film called Huang Baomei 黄宝妹 (1958), which is based on the story of this real-life model worker, as they call it, in China, who plays herself in the film. In fact, the entire film is set in the factory where she works and every other worker is playing themselves. So you can see how cinema and life in a factory converge in the film.

Chinese Factory Archive, 2023 –, books, prints and videos, various dimensions. Photo by Quinn Lum. Image courtesy of A+ Works of Art.

What role do these archival objects play in the exhibition?

Many of these objects are different kinds of print material that we have gathered during our research process. And we are showing around 100 objects across the entire exhibition, including the archival selections.

My aspiration for the show is to be able to treat these objects as aesthetic objects. That is, I would like them to be approached not only for the historical value or the information they provide, but also for the aesthetics deployed in the making of the materials. Effectively, I hope to frame these objects in a way that allows us to regard them as artworks in themselves. And that is how we have designed the exhibition in every section of the show, all the artworks are always in dialogue with a broader archive of audio-visual materials.

Ho Rui An, ‘A Petropolis in a Garden with a Long View’ (detail), 2024, video installation with laser etched crystal, acrylic awards, books, globe-shaped book holders, office table and chair, wall shelves, planter boxes, assorted plants and wallpaper, various dimensions. Photo by Quinn Lum. Image courtesy of A+ Works of Art.

The second section in the exhibition turns inward to address the Singapore context more directly, in particular the oil industry.

This section looks at the oil industry in Singapore, which is kind of like an under-examined aspect of the Singapore economy. I am trying to understand the so-called invisibility of oil, despite the reality that almost every product you can see in your household has at least one component that is made out of petroleum. The work explores this contradiction and contrasts this seeming invisibility of oil with the hyper-visibility of trees in Singapore as the result of its garden city initiative. What does it mean for a country that has always called itself a Garden City and which has, more recently, used this metaphor in an ecological sense, to be a major player in the oil industry?

I think it is important to know that historically, despite the current ecological narrative that is attached to the policy, Singapore’s greening initiative was not conceived with primarily environmental considerations. It was actually a supplement of industrial policy, of which Jurong is a perfect example, insofar as it was designed as a garden industrial town. When the urban planners were thinking about the garden, they were thinking about how greenery can contribute to building an industrial city that is still liveable for the workers.

A key image that I have been working with since 2018 that will appear in the exhibition is a photo of Goh Keng Swee inaugurating the construction of Shell’s oil refinery on Pulau Bukom by felling a tree. It is a very strange image for a Singaporean to encounter, because we are so used to politicians planting trees in Singapore as a way to inaugurate something. The tree planting movement in Singapore was only launched in 1963, whereas Goh’s photo was taken in 1960. So within those few years, you can see the shift in the logic of the urban imaginary, specifically the role that trees play within the landscape in relation to the socioeconomic compact that was being consolidated.

Operation Coldstore happened in February 1963. This means that the planting of that first tree by Lee Kuan Yew just a few months later marks the moment when the social compact was being strengthened, partly through the elimination of the strongest opposition to that social compact.

The installation ‘Petropolis in a Garden City with a Long View’ (2024) is designed to look like a botanical-themed oil executive’s office. It is almost like the garden city has taken over the office. The office is a display system for different objects I have made that relate to the oil industry. I will say that many of them relate to Shell specifically as a company that has played the most formative role not only within the industry, but also upon our entire model of governance. We are at a remarkable moment now as Shell is currently divesting from Singapore, having already sold its refineries on Bukom.

“What does it mean for a country that has always called itself a Garden City and which has, more recently, used this metaphor in an ecological sense, to be a major player in the oil industry?”

Ho Rui An, ‘Fuelling Apocalypse’, 2024, digital prints on paper mounted on acrylic glass with aluminium backing, each 150 × 60cm. Photo by Quinn Lum. Image courtesy of A+ Works of Art.

On this topic of scenography, can you talk about the significance behind the different environments in each section of the show?

Each section is anchored in a different set of spatial and aesthetic metaphors: Factory—Cinema—Cell, Office—Computer—Pixel and Studio—Cloud—Noise. When viewers enter the exhibition, they first see the darkened space of the cinema. But cinema here is also the equivalent of the factory in the representational sphere. To begin, there was Louis Lumieres’ film Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon (1895) that inscribed the factory at the origin of cinema. But you can think of the regimented mode of attention that the cinematic apparatus imposed upon us as belonging to the same disciplinary logic of the factory.

From the factory/cinema, we move into the office. In this section, even though I am talking about the oil industry, I am actually more interested in the forms of intellectual labour that goes into the oil industry, which is why I chose to depict the office, rather than a refinery or other production facilities. The computer becomes the representational schema for this space because it exemplifies the kind of labour that is at the base of the knowledge economy.

The third section addresses the question of artificial intelligence (AI). The section is designed like a post-production studio. Another metaphor we are working with is the cloud, which speaks to kinds of networked infrastructures into which we have all already been subsumed, whether we know it or not.

Ho Rui An, ‘Figures of History and the Grounds of Intelligence’, 2024, lecture and video installation with live AI-generated images, wallpaper and sand, 75 min. Photo by Quinn Lum. Image courtesy of A+ Works of Art.

In the third section, ‘Figures of History and the Grounds of Intelligence’ (2024) is a new commission that includes live AI generated images. Could you give us some background behind it as well as how the AI generated images function in this work?

This section features a new co-commission by Centre Pompidou and KADIST. It is a nice coincidence that the work will be shown in Singapore first as the exhibition in Paris has been postponed to September. As a commission, it includes a live performance with AI-generated images.

The Singapore presentation will not include a live performance, but there will be a video installation with live-generated images so you are seeing something new each time you are at the installation.

The History of Intelligence in Singapore (detail), 2024, installation view. Photo by Quinn Lum. Image courtesy of A+ Works of Art. — A History of Intelligence in Singapore (detail), 2024, installation view. Photo by Quinn Lum. Image courtesy of A+ Works of Art.

Is there anything else you would like to add or point people’s attention to as they visit the exhibition?

Another curator is Clara Che Wei Peh and we worked together most on this third section. There will be a large timeline installation called ‘A History of Intelligence in Singapore’ (2024). It is a 200-year timeline that begins in the colonial era.

Although we started by thinking about the history of AI, we realise that in order to do so we must first address the broader history of intelligence itself, which we realise almost comes to encompass everything. It is an explicitly political history insofar as technology and politics are inseparable in the show.

We are organising different public events, including one workshop on generative AI on 28 July with Phoomparin Mano, the Thai software engineer who worked with me on this artwork. There will be some hands-on activities as what we want is to get everyone to be less passive users of these AI models. We will be exploring different tools and different ways to have more control over these models.

“When I approach my own research, I am always thinking through the question of form, not just in an aesthetic sense but more broadly about how something quite abstract can become sensible for me”

Lastly, in your opinion, how does artistic research differ from other modes of knowledge production?

I would not say that artistic research is completely distinct because there are many overlaps with other forms of research. But when I approach my own research, I am always thinking through the question of form, not just in an aesthetic sense but more broadly about how something quite abstract can become sensible for me. And I would say I begin each project usually with an image or set of images that I seek to understand. So even though the eventual work often involves making arguments in a rather textual sense, the entire process is actually built around looking at images, or rather, it is only first through looking that any kind of reading can then follow. It is important to mention here that for me the act of reading or writing can never fully exhaust the act of looking. There will be something about the image that escapes the text, which creates this constant back-and-forth between text and image.

Within the context of exhibition-making, I am interested in playing with different forms of attention for the audience, as you will be able to see throughout this exhibition. There are works that you experience as if in a cinema. Then there are others that are literally screensavers that you can have a quick look at without feeling any commitment to dwell longer. There are also works that involve reading, as well as different kinds of reading, each with its own temporality.

Ho Rui An’s ‘Post-Production Fever’ is on view at ArtSpace@Helutrans, Singapore, from 13 July to 11 August 2024.