The following reflections of Simryn Gill’s Washed Up (1993‒1995) were written from a distance, both from the artist and artwork. The artwork was first seen through archival slides in Meanjin/Brisbane, and this text was first drafted in Naarm/Melbourne. The latter was only later read by Simryn in Warrane/Sydney, where we made factual corrections and discussed positionalities. I write this essay in full acknowledgement of the blinkers I unconsciously wear and—except for matters of historical fact—emphasise that my analysis betrays my biases and pre-conceptions. My reading may not even be shared by the artist.

This extended acknowledgement of idiosyncrasy is the central thesis of how I will discuss Washed Up. I read this work as deeply ambivalent on the question of belonging and origins. As I will demonstrate through reading the work differently in three different exhibitions (TransCulture, Venice, 1995; Here Nor There, Meanjin/Brisbane, 1992; TransCulture, Naoshima, 1995-1996), belonging had less to do with origins than with the present.

Cosmopolitan Art in Venice

In 1995, the Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte Venezia, commonly known as the Venice Biennale, celebrated its centenary. Identity and Alterity, Figures of the Body 1895–1995 (12 June to 15 October 1995), curated by Jean Clair at the Palazzo Grassi and Giardini di Castello, was the primary exhibition that year. The 1995 Esposizione had 50 participating countries presenting national pavilions, including Australia but excluding Singapore.¹ In addition, there were 22 officially endorsed exhibitions, including TransCulture at Fondazione Levi, curated by Fumio Nanjo and supported by The Japan Foundation.

The Transculture exhibition featured works by 15 artists who “deal with the issues of communication and dialogue between individuals with different cultural identities.” ² The artists were:

Gordon Bennett (1955‒2014)
Frederic Bruly Bouabre (1923‒2014)
Cai Guo Qiang (b. 1957)
Ping Chong (b. 1946)
Joseph Grigely (b. 1956)
Simryn Gill (b. 1959)
Masao Kohmura (b. 1943)
Shani Mootoo (b. 1957)
Takashi Murakami (b. 1962)
Shirin Neshat (b. 1957)
Reamillo (1964–2023) and Juliet (b. 1966); worked together from 1993‒2023
Technocrat
Adriana Varejao (b. 1964)
World Tea Party (est. 1990 by Daniel Dion, Bryan Mulvihill and Su Schnee)
Rene Yung (b. 1951)

As part of the exhibition, Gill presented Washed Up (fig. 1), an installation of sea-washed glass collected from the beaches of Port Dickson, Malaysia, and St John’s Island, Singapore. These glass shards were heaped in a pile next to a door to the balcony.

Fig. 1. Simryn Gill. 'Washed Up'. 1993–1995. Found glass, engraved. Installation view at 'Transculture: La Biennale di Venezia', 11 June–4 September 1995, Fondazione Levi, Palazzo Giustinian Lolin, Venice, Italy. © Simryn Gill.

In the fading light of Venice, the shards of Washed Up shone indeterminately and unevenly. Venice is well known for its history of glass and glass-making. For Gill to bring glass to the city of glass was an implicit call for material inspection and valuation. Yet these shards were not the stock standard, high-quality, glass fired from silica harvested from Murano island or crafted by Venetian techniques—at least, there is no way to tell. Handpicked by Gill from the beaches of Port Dickson and St John’s Island, south of Singapore’s Sentosa Island, they were essentially of unknown origin and had been unevenly polished by the movement and force of sea waves. Ryota Imafuku, writing in the Transculture catalogue, felt the shards referenced “cultural hybridity […] in the brilliance of the Venetian art of glassmaking.” ³ Each shard, uneven in shape and visually distinct from each other, came from different glass bottles, glass blowers and places of origin. Even if they were Venetian in make or origin, those markers are now long lost. In Fondazione Levi, they were merely pieces of glass, objects that cohered because of their material homogeneity.⁴ The glass shards traced their tenuous Venetian heritage through material coincidence alone. Sunlight shone through the window of Fondazione Levi and refracted through the pile of broken glass, presenting this pile of sea junk as a single work of art.

Historically a mercantile port city and considered by some as the first international financial centre, Venice had always welcomed a comparatively large number of people who came from elsewhere. They gathered as part of the single network of international trade. The Espozisione was similarly international. Unlike regular exhibitions, the primary audience of the Esposizione was not Venetian locals but the globetrotting, cosmopolitan and art-critical visitor. This well-travelled and discerning visitor typically formed the minority elsewhere even while remaining highly visible as writers of the accompanying literature. This nomadic demographic forms a poignant counterpoint to Washed Up. In a later installation titled Garland (2006–), Gill expanded her collecting criteria from glass shards to broken pottery, shells, plastic shards and other pieces of sea junk. Garland’s shards, according to curator Russell Storer, had become “local” by dint of coincidence in one place.⁵ I make the same observation here: the shards of Washed Up were insistently from elsewhere while engaging in a recognisably Venetian belonging.

How much time must lapse for something—or someone—to be recognised as "local"? Here, I am primarily thinking of two factors: Visualised biological origin and physical presence. I believe the significance of the former far outweighs the latter, with complicated ramifications: Let me explain. The glass shards used in Washed Up do not inform or otherwise change the reputation of Venetian glass. That seems reasonable, as they are clearly distinguishable as foreign even though they were presented in Venice. Yet this premise of visually insistent foreignness makes me uncomfortable. There is a historical resonance here I am further considering: Venice was a regular pit stop for the international seafarer. They were part of the Venetian community in cultural and economic terms and yet were not seen as “Venetian.” Furthermore, as they spent most of their time at sea, these sailors’ claims to “local” identity “back home” would be similarly tenuous. No longer bearing the polished markers of Venetian glass, the sea-washed shards of Washed Up could only be recognised as foreign. This could not have been far from Gill’s mind when she collected and placed objects from three different coastlines belonging to two different nations together in a single artwork. In this historical city of travellers, foreign sea-washed glass shards cohered as a single entity: Washed Up. They were here together now. At the Esposizione, the question of "from" was deferred in favour of the declaration of "now."

I have made my analysis as informed by the curatorial context designed by Fumio Nanjo in Venice. A different context can provide a significantly different reading of the artwork. In the next section, I will describe how in Meanjin in 1993, "from" was the more urgent question.

Hyphenated Art in Meanjin/Brisbane

Washed Up had its debut in the exhibition Here Not There (6 to 28 August 1993). Held at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) in Meanjin, it was curated by Hiram To and Nicholas Tsoutas and highlighted the idiosyncratic approaches of artists labelled as “Asian” or “Australian.” Other than Gill, this exhibition included:⁷

Steven Alderton (b. Aotearoa New Zealand. Lives and works in Warrane)
Vicente Butron (b. 1959, Philippines. Lives and works in Warrane)
Maria Cruz (b. 1957, Manila, Philippines. Lives and works between Manila and Berlin)
Felicia Kan (b. 1966, Hong Kong. Lives and works in Warrane)
Robert Nery (b. Philippines. Lives and works in Warrane)
Laurens Tan (b. 1950, The Hague, Netherlands. Lives and works between Warrane, Beijing and Las Vegas)

In IMA Meanjin, Gill's glass shards were distributed across the concrete floor in the centre of the gallery to look like they had been arranged by the impact of a crashing wave on one side (fig. 2). Visually reminiscent of the shoreline in Port Dickson, St. John’s Island, or any other beach, Washed Up drew a line across the space, dividing paintings by fellow artists Leo Tien and Steven Alderton and ending at Vicente Butron’s The Aberrant Colours (series 6) (1993). As a line or a cleave, Washed Up (1993) split the exhibition space into two, visually emphasising the split identities of Australians who felt that they belonged neither here in Australia, where they lived, nor there in Asia, where they may claim heritage.

Fig. 2. Simryn Gill. 'Washed Up'. 1993–1995. Exhibition view at 'Here Not There', 6–28 August 1993, Institute of Modern Art, Meanjin, Australia. © Simryn Gill.

Gill’s family is from Port Dickson, southwest of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. She was born in Singapore on 12 July 1959. This commute from a portside town to the big city for better healthcare would have been unremarkable if not for Singapore’s split from Malaysia in 1965. At the time of Gill’s birth, Singapore was part of British Malaya. ⁸ Furthermore, as the administrative centre for British Malaya, the State of Singapore boasted one of the busiest and best-regarded maternity hospitals in the postwar world, Kandang Kerbau Hospital (known as KK Hospital today).⁹ Singapore was in fact a little bit of a maternity hub, with several private maternity clinics like Salmon’s Maternity Hospital on Armenian Street supplementing what KK Hospital offered to the British Malayans.¹⁰ Singapore was just another state within the same Empire as Port Dickson, and the commute would not have been remarkable.¹¹ Yet post-independence political history means that we are seemingly left with paradox when describing Gill: She is from Malaysia, having grown up in Port Dickson, but also somehow from Singapore by birth, a different nation. Furthermore, as an ethnic Punjabi, Gill can trace her ancestry to India, yet another ex-British colony. These contradictions were not far from Gill’s mind when preparing for Here Not There. Writing from Singapore on 22 July 1993, a few weeks before the exhibition opening at IMA Meanjin, Gill wrote in her artist statement:

I am trapped between shores, as many of us are. People like us are banished, it seems, to an endless self-conscious sifting. And yet, you know, I can still remember back to the time when I was so sure that I was, simply, Indian. [italics in the original]. ¹²

Gill’s artist statement, written in the first few months of her residence in Singapore for an exhibition held in Meanjin, expresses the tension between itinerancy and belonging. Gill had moved to Tarntanya/Adelaide in 1987 and resided there until her move to Singapore in 1993. She returned to Australia in 1996, and later presented Here Art Grows on Trees (2013) as the Australian Pavilion of the 55th Espozisione (2013). Biographically tied to Singapore while identifying with Port Dickson, and resident on the island of her birth while feeling a sense of belonging to a third geography, Gill was “trapped between shores” arbitrarily divided by contemporary politics into distinct nations. She was not "simply, Indian" but also from a place that was neither here nor there. Reading through her biography, as cued by the accompanying artist and curatorial statements, I see Washed Up reflecting upon that strangeness of being from neither here nor there; not exactly local anywhere.

According to Sara Ahmed, affect becomes a measure of community-building or capital accumulation when circulated among different people.¹³ Simultaneously, affect describes potential, not the realisation of form. Art, described by Raymond Williams as relating to “emergent formations” rather than what is already manifest, becomes the visualisation of this affect. ¹⁴ What Washed Up visualised in Meanjin was distinct from Venice because of its site and the organising intents. This is not a wilful contradiction in the artwork or in my analysis of the art but a consequence of the differing contexts of presentation: Both forms of being “here” in Venice and Meanjin were distinct and imminent in the art. They were simply realised at different times.

Washed Up visualises distinct but resonant formations of different communities present in each location and exhibition. As I will further describe in the next section, through the second staging of TransCulture in Naoshima, Japan, the expected audience for the artwork is crucial in understanding the elasticity of the emergent form.

Finding Art in Naoshima

Nanjo would present the installation Washed Up twice in 1995, first in Fondazione Levi, Venice, and then in a homecoming exhibition at Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum (currently Benesse House Museum), Naoshima, Japan. At Fondazione Levi, Washed Up was installed indoors, as a small round pile of blue and green glass shards on the marble floor in front of a large window. In Naoshima, Washed Up was instead installed outdoors, as a line, in an outdoor exhibition space overlooking the sea.

Throughout the 20th century, the islands of Seto Inland Sea, including Naoshima, experienced a population drain. This was a global story: young people headed to the big cities in search of education and work, leaving behind an ageing population, increasing desolation, and abandoned houses.¹⁵ The Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum was conceived and opened in this climate, as part of Fukutake Shoten’s (present-day Benesse Holdings) redevelopment of Naoshima that began in 1992. Benesse’s highly successful efforts in art-based tourism have since made Naoshima an exemplar in the study of Japanese island revitalisation through art, a process aided by actors like Nanjo bringing internationally recognised exhibitions like TransCulture to the island. The world-renowned Setouchi Triennale (f. 2010) continues from this legacy from the earlier two decades. TransCulture was presented at the Museum in its second year when the revitalisation project still looked uncertain, and was part of early efforts to describe the site. It is in that context of delineating contemporary Naoshima that Gill’s art provoked—for me—reflections on loss and belonging, a grain of sand buffeted and placed by sea currents.

Reminiscent of coastal debris, Washed Up harkened back to its original form as a shoreline. On an outdoor exhibition space overlooking the sea, a sharp, clean line was drawn with glass shards. Additional shards added depth and contoured the platform, the visual effect being an echo of the real beach below. The sea glass was now back in a context that is at once familiar (the shore) and unfamiliar (Japan) to its supposed marked “origin” point in the Malay Peninsula. In this space, Washed Up did not create a cleave between two sides like it did at IMA Meanjin. Rather, the Naoshima installation highlighted the natural seascape of Naoshima island while gently pointing out the significance of global ocean currents in creating and maintaining shorelines. Reflexivity was multiplied through the defamiliarisation of art: as an artistic intervention into Naoshima’s coastal landscape, Washed Up declared itself as a foreign presence of junk glass against the dynamic local shoreline of Naoshima. Further, in the moment of recognition, the viewer simultaneously recognised the “local” Naoshima shoreline as being connected to and shaped by oceanic currents. Some of the sea glass in Washed Up could very well have drifted to the Malacca Strait from the Seto Inland Sea. Naoshima is only one small stop in the journey of any given grain of sand or piece of coastal debris, even as it adds to and literally delineates the local coastline. The permanence of the Naoshima ground was revealed as insistently ephemeral. This naturally “local” shoreline was dynamically changing in the contemporary moment even as Gill’s “foreign” Washed Up remained present, static, and unchanging.

Fig. 3. Simryn Gill. 'Washed Up'. 1993–1995. Found glass, engraved. Installation view at 'Transculture: La Biennale di Venezia', 1995–1996, Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, Kagawa, Japan. © Simryn Gill.

Gill is an ethnic Punjabi born in Singapore, British Malaya, bred in Port Dickson, Malaysia, and previously resident in Tartanya, still a part of the British Commonwealth. The fact that her artwork had washed up to this shore from Venice was, to take a broader view, merely incidental. In this instance, the viewer recognised the coeval strangeness, foreignness, temporal belonging and nomadism of Washed Up being situated on the literal ground of Naoshima; the artwork contrasts with the solidity of Naoshima as a conceptual place. What matters more than where the shards are from is how and what they were doing in Naoshima: washed up and outlining the contours of the island’s shore.

People Like Us

Identity is the common thread in my readings of this work. Gill was caught between identities as a cosmopolitan individual, and was condemned to—to quote from her statement for From Here Not There—“an endless self-conscious sifting.” In Venice, “people like us” referred to all non-Venetians, while in Meanjin, “people like us” further referred to those given the labels of “Asian” or “Australian” and laden with the burdens of ethnic and national expectation. In Naoshima, “people like us” referred more generally to all of us whose searches for our own origins can only be in vain, and whose ideas of belonging have to be balanced between the past and the present. At every step, I had viewed glass shards as metaphors for people. Through each distinct installation, I was led to different interpretations.

When speaking to Gill about this essay, I made a promise to emphasise my perspective and interests. I am doing so explicitly here: While I have her blessing, she may or may not agree with my reading of the artwork. We jointly agree that this analysis is primarily reflective of the issues and themes that interest me, and not her; my interests are around cultural and national identity, and how they are shaped by historical fact and contemporary situations. I have kept this partiality in mind when structuring this essay to reveal conflicting ideas possible in Venice, Meanjin, and Naoshima. Other contradictory responses are possible, especially with the artwork’s current residence in Singapore’s National Collection (fig. 4) and any future installations that may take place.

Fig. 4. Simryn Gill, 'Washed Up', 1993–1995. Found glass, engraved. Collection of the Singapore Art Museum (SAM). Image courtesy of SAM.

Artist Bio
Simryn Gill (b. 1959, Singapore; lives and works in Port Dickson, Malaysia and Sydney, Australia) works with a wide range of methods for thinking and making, including writing, drawing, photography, printmaking, creating collections of things, altering objects and publishing. Collecting materials and images from her immediate surroundings, Gill generates poetic and philosophical explorations into the places that we inhabit and carry within us. With Tom Melick, she runs Stolon Press, a publisher in Sydney that makes books and pamphlets, and organises occasional meals and conversations between people working in different modes and practices. Gill has had numerous solo exhibitions in institutions such as Art Gallery of New South Wales (2002, 2022), Tate Modern (2006) and Lund Konsthalle (2017). Gill has also participated in many international exhibitions, including the Singapore Biennale (2006), documenta (2007, 2012), Istanbul Biennial (2011, 2022), Venice Biennale (2013) and Dhaka Art Summit (2018).

Author Bio
Chloe Ho is an art historian currently based in Naarm Melbourne. Her PhD thesis was titled “A Singaporean Art? Performance and installation art, 1985–2024.” Her current research interests include digital humanities, performance art forms in the Asian context, artistic migration, print histories and global art histories.

Endnotes
¹ The 1995 Australian pavilion presented a solo exhibition by Bill Henson (b. 1955).
² Fumio Nanjo, “A Book That Is Never Finished,” in TransCulture: La Biennale de Venezia 1995, ed. Fumio Nanjo et al., trans. Stanley N. Anderson (Tokyo: The Japan Foundation and Fukutake Science and Culture Foundation, 1995), 15.
³ Ryota Imafuku, “Glass Made of Water,” trans. Janet Goff, in TransCulture: La Biennale de Venezia 1995, 58.
⁴ Imafuku, “Glass Made of Water,” 54.
⁵ Russell Storer, “Simryn Gill: The Gathering,” in Simryn Gill, ed. Russell Storer and Linda Michael (Köln; Sydney: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König and Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, 2008), 47.
⁶ Hiram To, “Orient (No National Ad-Dress),” in Here Not There: Artists Steven Alderton, Vicente Butron, Maria Cruz, Simryn, Felicia Kan, Robert Nery, Laurens Tan, ed. May Lam and Hiram To (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 1993), unpaginated.
⁷ As the question of origins is something the curators highlight, the artists’ locations of birth and work are listed here where possible.
⁸ Singapore gained self-governance on 3 June 1959 but was still a British State.
⁹ Joanna Tan, “Labouring to Deliver: A History of Kandang Kerbau Hospital,” BiblioAsia 18, no. 1 (June 2022): 47.
¹⁰ Simryn was born in one of these private clinics.
¹¹ Nonetheless, not everyone went to a hospital. Home births remained commonplace during this time.
¹² Simryn Gill, “Neither Here nor There,” in Lam and To, Here Not There, unpaginated.
¹³ Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22, no. 2 (2004): 119.
¹⁴ Raymond Williams, “Structures of Feeling,” in Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 134.
¹⁵ A recent article addressing this phenomena through art in Japan is Carolin Funck and Meng Qu, “Art Tourism and Paradigms of Island Revitalization in Japan,” Contemporary Japan 36, no. 1 (2 January 2024): 20–40, https://doi.org/10.1080/18692729.2024.2306112. For a more precise and current look at depopulation in the Seto Inland Sea region, see Amy Chavez’s column in The Japan Times.