By Brady Ng /

Around the world, many public gardens, especially those normally maintained to symmetrical and groomed perfection, have been left untended during citywide lockdowns or movement control orders. In Paris, a friend walked by the Jardin de la Nouvelle-France, peered inside, and called it a “little jungle”. This wildness without wilderness is the consequence of eight weeks of precautionary restrictions. When people cannot visit parks and gardens, their upkeep is similarly affected.

While human activity in public ground to a near halt in many major cities, nature reclaimed its place in our constructed environs. Wild boar roamed down paved roads in Berlin. Dolphins frolicked in sections of the Bosphorus normally busy with tankers and cargo ships. Monkeys climbed up to my sister’s fourth-floor apartment in Singapore and tried to break in.

Taking its title from the name of a neoclassical garden in Kathmandu built in 1920, Garden of Six Seasons was a wide-reaching exhibition that also functioned as a precursor to the Kathmandu Triennale scheduled to open in early December and run for more than a month in the Nepali capital. The show was curated by Cosmin Costinaş, director of Hong Kong’s Para Site and the artistic director of this year’s iteration of the triennale in Nepal. It included works by more than 40 artists that highlighted pressing concerns from around the world when it opened, including the Covid-19 pandemic.

At Para Site, the main site of the show, a human body in John Pule’s oil painting Prototype – Site of Old Myths (1995) maps out the village where the Niuean artist was born, Liku, on the eastern edge of the island nation. The figure’s head represents the site where a church now stands, containing a frame in which a man kneels in an open field, Christian cross behind him, his penis erect; Pule was educated at a Mormon school and attended services every Saturday and Sunday when he was growing up. On the figure’s chest, right over his heart, is a motif representing the birthplace of Pule’s mother. Below that is where the artist was born. The figure’s legs lead down to the ocean. Pule draws on the informational energy of hiapo – bark cloth – to pack the rest of the canvas. There is an intimate biography here, paired with the resuscitation of a storytelling tradition that has faded in part because of colonisation, a combination that was present in other works in the show too.

In the same gallery, watercolours by Izmail Efimov also referenced age-old traditions, but propelled them in a different direction in contemporary settings. Originally trained as a socialist realist painter, Efimov eventually became one of the most original artists in the ethnofuturism movement, which came into accidental existence when a group of young artists and writers were spitballing in Tartu, Estonia in the late 1980s, during the Soviet Union’s twilight years. Facing an existential crisis, Estonia’s young intellectuals sought to redefine their forms of expression in literature, poetry and art – in turn forging the beginnings of a new identity for a sovereign nation emerging from the Kremlin’s rule.

Among Efimov’s works in Garden of Six Seasons, titles like Swamp Divinity (1993) and Ruler of the Mountain Tops (1996) recall ancient folklore shaped by centuries or millennia of oral history, while yonic shapes pack the totemic Attributes of the Finno-Ugric Everyday (2004). 

Ethnofuturists like Efimov wanted to join “the archaic, prehistorical, ethnic substance” unique to their nation with a “contemporary vision of the world”. The scholars and creators who were part of the movement tried to build a new head space for their people, one that connected their traditions with the future.

Traces of Efimov’s ethnofuturist tendencies were found downstairs in another artist’s work, mounted in Para Site’s ground-floor space. Janakpur-based Komal Purbe’s A woman flying a rocket (2019), an acrylic painting on lokta paper, shows exactly what its title describes. Drawing from Mithila art-making traditions that were passed down through generations by women in what is now southern Nepal and northern India, Purbe depicts jagged red combustion blasts trailing from three nozzles, her rocket decorated with rich geometrical patterns as well as fish and tortoise motifs. Like Niue’s Pule, Purbe taps a traditional practice that has been partially lost, especially at a time when globalised, massively disseminated visuals often supplant local image-making practices. Both artists keep their forebears’ art forms alive, adapting techniques and sensibilities honed over many generations to reflect the ideas, dreams and reflections of people who are looking at their art now.

Purbe is a member of the Janakpur Women’s Development Center (JWDC), which was founded in 1991 to open the possibility of using art as a source of sustainable income for the local Maithil women, as opposed to the meagre pay that was offered to art workers who churned out multiple copies of the same picture. Works by other painters who are part of JWDC were included in the exhibition too, over at Soho House, the show’s second site, including the self-taught Madhumala Mandal’s painting of a woman controlling an excavator, and Rebati Mandal’s depiction of a woman steering a combine harvester through a rice paddy. Both works are less fantastical than Purbe’s imaginative marine-astronautical imagery, yet still deviate from age-old representations of religious scenes or nature, preserving Mithila visual heritage while expressing aspirations for a fair social order in what is still a severely patriarchal and casteist society.

Also in Soho House, Lu Pan and Wang Bo make sense of the history and consequences of 19th-century European colonialism in East Asia in their two-channel video Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings (2017). The pair map out the connections between the British East India Company’s presence in Canton, now Guangzhou, its inspector of tea John Reeves’ encounter with Chinese draughtsmen and his botanical transplants to London’s Kew Gardens. These are linked with the British occupation of Hong Kong, the 1894 plague in the city, the belief in miasma before germs were discovered, and the western circulation of Chinese paintings and documentary photographs taken in Hong Kong. Segments from the 1955 film Love is a Many-Splendored Thing are cut into the video frequently, in which one of the leading roles, a Eurasian doctor named Han Suyin, is played by a Caucasian actress. Running at 28 minutes, Lu and Wang’s video unpacks many topics. It flicks at the appropriation of botany to realise colonial ambitions, documentary photography as a channel to propagate racial prejudice, and how cultural frictions persist even in what seem like harmless forms of soft power.

In another chamber, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster offered a quiet video recorded at Praça Paris, a neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro where the garden landscape is a copy of the symmetrical, formal layouts found in French gardens – a stylistic transplant rather than a literal one. Her five-minute video Gloria (2008) shows us stationary scenes of shrubbery and fountains, growing and thriving in natural, wild ways in the savanna climate, breaking out of the strict aesthetic boundaries defined by European tastes. Here, humanity’s imposition of order over nature is overturned. In 2020 this has become a new reality in some parts of the world, like the public parks and gardens of Paris.

Contemporary art’s cultivation, propagation and evolution depend on globalisation. Pule’s renewed interpretation of hiapo in part leans on an international audience, which circles back to bring about a new generation of practitioners, keeping the art form and heritage alive. The same applies to the paintings by the artists of the Janakpur Women’s Development Center. Their Mithila paintings are sold to buyers who are often overseas; the organisation’s website specifically emphasises that they ship their products all around the world. As for the actual Garden of Six Seasons in Kathmandu, the site was restored with the assistance of the Austrian government in the 2000s after lying in neglect for nearly four decades. Global capital, shipping lanes and cultural exchanges can keep alive ancient traditions and invigorate faded forms of heritage, but it depends on practitioners like those in the exhibition to keep them tethered to their original essence.

Garden of Six Seasons reached into many cultures and encapsulated a broad range of research, interpretations and myths from various corners of human civilisation and from across ages. There was a complex Navajo textile by Mae Clark, Batsa Gopal Vaidya’s symbols lifted from ayurvedic healing practices, Wing Po So’s repurposed traditional Chinese medicinal ingredients, and linen amulet vests from the Philippines, Burma and northern Thailand. In turn, the show offered alternative readings of globalised, flattened systems that we have all come to take as constant no matter where we land. In that spirit, the Kathmandu Triennale will be held later this year, in 2077 – according to the Nepali Bikram Sambat calendar.

在封城和禁足令期間，世界各地很多公共花園都無人看管，尤其是那些平常修飾得對稱整齊的花園。友人最近路經巴黎的Jardin de la Nouvelle花園，形容花園內像個「小森林」。這種市內的野外狀態是由於八星期的防疫措施的結果。當人們無法參觀公園和花園，園內的保養自然也受到影響。

在許多主要城市中，人類在公眾場所的活動幾乎完全停頓，但大自然卻在我們建成的環境中重新佔一席位。野豬在柏林的道路上漫遊、海豚在平常塞滿油輪和貨船的伊斯坦堡海峽嬉戲，猴子爬上我姐姐在新加坡的四樓公寓更試圖闖入…….

「一園六季」以於1920年在加德滿都建成的一個新古典主義花園命名，為將於12月初在尼泊爾首都開幕、為期超過一個月的加德滿都三年展的前奏，展覽內容包羅萬象。展覽由香港Para Site的執行總監康喆明策展，他同時為是次尼泊爾三年展的藝術總監。展覽包括40多位藝術家的作品，突出世界各地的迫切議題，包括新型冠狀病毒肺炎（COVID-19)）疫症。

展覽的主要場地Para Site，展出了約翰．普爾的油畫《Prototype – Site of Old Myths》（1995年），畫中一個人物代表了紐埃東部的利庫村，亦即該藝術家的出生地。普爾在摩門教學校接受教育，小時候逢星期六日都要參加禮拜。人物的頭部代表教堂現時的位置，裡面有一個框架，框中人的陰莖直立，跪在一個十字架前方空曠的地方。人物胸口的心臟上方的圖案，象徵普爾母親出生地，下方則是他的出生地。人物雙腿向下延伸至海洋。普爾利用樹皮布的訊息能量來充滿畫布其餘的地方。這是個親密傳記，配合了在殖民時代消失了的講故事傳統的復興，這種結合同時也在展覽中其他作品中出現。

在同一場地裡，亦展出了伊斯拉姆．葉菲莫夫的水彩畫，畫作同樣參考了古老的傳統，但在當代環境中以不同方向推進。葉菲莫夫起初接受社會主義現實主義訓練，後來成為民族未來主義運動其中一位最具原創性的藝術家。運動於1980年代末的蘇聯時代晚期，由一群年輕的藝術家和作家在愛沙尼亞塔爾圖集思廣益時偶然發起。面對存在危機，愛沙尼亞的年輕知識分子試圖重新定義他們在文學、詩歌和藝術中的表現形式，為離開克里姆林宮統治中崛起的主權國家樹立新的身份。

葉菲莫夫在「一園六季」的作品中，《Swamp Divinity》（1993年）和《Ruler of the Mountain Tops》（1996年）等令人回想起數百或數千年前的的古老民間傳說，而《Attributes of the Finno-Ugric Everyday》（2004年）則充斥著「約尼」圖騰。葉菲莫夫等的民族未來主義者希望把「古老、史前、民族」的獨特性質加入「當代世界觀」，參與運動的學者和創造者嘗試為人民建立新的思考空間，聯繫傳統與未來。

葉菲莫夫的民族未來主義傾向，同樣可以在於Para Site下層展出的另一位藝術家作品中發現——現居賈納克布爾的哥姆．樸比的《A woman flying a rocket》（2019年）。藝術家以「米提拉」藝術傳統作畫，在lokta紙上繪成的丙烯畫準確地畫出其名。這種傳統繪畫方式被現今的尼泊爾南部和印度北部的女性世代相傳，樸比描繪了飾有豐富幾何圖案以及魚和烏龜圖案的火箭，鋸齒狀的紅色火焰從三個噴嘴中噴出。樸比與來自紐埃的普爾都運用了部分已遺失的傳統作畫方法。在全球化的影響下，大型傳播的視覺元素取代了本地圖像製作，但兩位藝術家仍努力保持前人的藝術形式，在時代的變遷下調整技術和敏感度，反映出現在觀賞他們藝術的人的想法、夢想和反思。

樸比是賈納克布爾婦女發展中心（JWDC）的成員，中心於1991年成立，旨在為當地以「米提拉」藝術維生的婦女帶來可持續的收入來源，有別於向不斷複製同一幅作品的藝術工作者提供微薄報酬。展覽的第二場地Soho House亦有展出其他JWDC畫家的作品，包括自學並描繪一位操控鏟泥車女性的瑪杜芭拉．曼達，以及描繪一位操控收割機坎走過米田的女性的利巴蒂．曼達。兩件作品都沒有樸比充滿想像力的海洋航天畫作那麼奇幻，但仍跳出了古老的宗教場景或自然框架，保留了「米提拉」的藝術傳統，同時表達了在仍舊重男輕女的社會制度下對平等社會秩序的訴求。

同樣在Soho House中，潘律和王博透過雙頻錄像《瘴氣、植物、外銷畫》（2017年）帶出19世紀歐洲殖民主義在東亞的歷史和後果。影片勾畫了英國東印度公司在當時於廣州的業務、茶師李富士與中國製圖員的相遇，以及他把植物移植到倫敦邱園之事。與這些事情息息相關的是英國佔領香港、1894年的瘟疫、在細菌被發現前人們相信瘴氣，以及中國畫作和於香港拍攝的紀錄相片在西方傳播。影片中經常出現1955年電影《生死戀》的片段，主角之一為名為韓素音的歐亞混血醫生，由一位高加索女演員飾演。潘律和王博的影片片長28分鐘，涵益多個主題，輕描淡寫地談及以植物學實現殖民野心、以紀實攝影作為傳播種族偏見的渠道，以及文化摩擦如何仍然在看似無害的軟實力形式下存在。

另一個房間展出了多明妮克．貢札列-佛耶斯特在里約熱內盧的巴黎廣場拍攝的一段安靜的錄像。花園的景觀與法國的花園一樣採用對稱和條理分明的佈局，不止是名字相同，連風格也一樣。五分鐘的錄像

《Gloria》（2008年）向我們展示了灌木叢和噴水池在熱帶草原氣候中以自然、狂野的方式茁壯成長的靜止場面，突破了歐洲地區定義的嚴格美學界限，顛覆了人類強加於自然的秩序。來到2020年，這已成為世界上部分地區的新現實，就如巴黎的公園和花園一樣。

當代藝術的培養、傳播和演變取決於全球化。普爾對樹皮布的重新詮釋需要依賴國際觀眾帶來新一代的傳承者，令藝術形式和傳統得以保存。賈納克布爾婦女發展中心藝術家的作品亦然，「米提拉」畫作經常出售至海外買家，組織的網站亦特別強調作品可運送至世界各地。至於加德滿都真正的「六季花園」，則在被忽視近40年後，在奧地利政府的協助下於2000年代修復。全球資本、海上航道和文化交流可以保持古老的傳統並振興逐漸失去的遺產，但要依靠如展覽中的藝術家才能連繫其原始的本質。

「一園六季」觸及許多文化，並囊括了來自人類文明各個角落以及不同時代的廣泛研究、詮釋和神話。有由Mae Clark製成的複雜納瓦霍紡織品、Batsa Gopal Vaidya從阿育吠陀療法中提取的符號、蘇詠寶重新使用的傳統中藥成分，以及菲律賓、緬甸和泰國北部的麻布護身背心……反過來說，展覽提供了對全球化、扁平化系統的另類解讀，無論身在何處，我們都會看成為不變定律。按這種說法，根據尼泊爾的維克拉姆曆，加德滿都三年展將於今年2077年舉行。