Raed Yassin’s work across vastly different media stages head-on collisions between time periods, cultures, memories, and historical narratives, taking joy in symbolic regimes of popular culture and mass production. Yassin is also among the most active members of the Beirut music scene. He has released several solo music albums, worked with groups such as “A” Trio and PRAED, founded the record label Annihaya, and co-organized the Irtijal Festival for Experimental Music.
The Taipei Biennial 2023 exhibits Yassin’s China (2012), a set of seven porcelain vases depicting battles from Lebanon’s civil war (1975–1990), and produced in Jingdezhen 景德鎮 in Jiangxi province, considered China’s ancient capital of handmade porcelain. For the scenes depicted on the porcelain, Yassin asked former fighters to recall key battles from the war that changed Lebanon demographically, including details of traumatic moments, significant locations, and military equipment. From these interviews Yassin illustrated one battle for each vase, and then asked a Lebanese comic artist to render the scenes in the style of miniature painting from Persia—an area historically connected to China by trade (Persia was the source for the cobalt blue ink of classical porcelain) but also currently connected to Lebanon’s political divisions today. The beautiful objects that result arise from an artificial process of crisscrossing cultural and historical continuities and discontinuities. Perhaps we are not yet qualified to even ask what China’s broken and intact traditions and exuberant overproduction have to do with the specificities and details of Lebanon’s civil war, which engulfed an entire region in a madness that continues up to today—with no beginning and no end, like the simple circularity of a vase.
