Anderson and Low have had an extraordinary journey since starting their collaboration as artists in 1990. Now exhibited worldwide, their work has graced institutions such as the National Portrait Gallery, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Their boundaries are limitless, with their most recent work, Endure – An Intimate Journey with the Chinese Gymnasts, exploring the quest for perfection at the Beijing elite gymnastics training facility through an enormous series of inspiring images; Anderson and Low are as yet the sole artists to be granted an unprecedented glimpse into this world. They also continue to receive attention for their project Manga Dreams, which has been extensively shown ad collected by museums on four continents in the last two years. I recently had the privilege of meeting this talented duo to get the lowdown on their recent exhibitions both here and across the pond, and pick their brains on everything from manga to the Olympics.
You recently had an exhibition in LA, ‘Endure – An Intimate Journey with the Chinese Gymnasts’, did you enjoy being in the US? Have you been there much before?
(JA)Yes, many times.
(EL) It’s the place that kind of launched us.
(JA) America embraced our art, it was the first place to really embrace our art.
Can you tell me a bit about the exhibition?
(JA) Perhaps the best thing is to set little background information about who we 
are and what we do. As you may or may not know, one of the recurrent themes in our work for more than 15 or 16 years now is in relation to sport and athletes. Sport has been something of a muse in our work for a very long time now and I suppose we are very well regarded for our ability to breathe stillness into exertion. Most of our images are the exact opposite of what you see on the last page of a newspaper. They are looking for that moment of action – of elation or despair, success or failure. We are interested in everything that came before that, in the process of sport. So we spend a lot of time examining the process of training in different countries and different sports; that led to our first sport-related exhibition for the Commonwealth Games in Malaysia in 1998 called ‘The Athlete’. Since then we were invited to work with US athletes, and we did a project based around athletes in the US military academy’s west point of Minneapolis and the air force academy and that was called ‘Althete / Warrior’ which was well collected by museums and 
enormously widely shown. We were official artists for the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Cultural Festival last year, so sport is something that we come back to again and again. We also did a project called ‘Champions’ to benefit the Elton John Aids Foundation where we used our connections with sport in order to do strike iconic portraits of famous sports people nude.
Ah, would that be the woman on a diving board who’s not wearing very much…?
(JA)Yes Carlie Gidman. Absolutely.
I love that image.
(JA) Thank you very much!
Anyway, due to this background with sport, we recently found ourselves in the unique position of being the only people in the world – eastern or western – ever to be given unfettered, uncensored, unrestricted and complete access to the elite Chinese gymnast training in Beijing. We worked repeatedly with them over 2009 and 2010. It was an incredible experience. The exhibition in LA was really studies of them, their character and as individuals, in the process of them training in the elite Olympic facility in Beijing.
And you now have an upcoming exhibition in Rotterdam, will that be along similar lines?
(JA)No, it’s going to be a completely different body of work, called ‘Manga Dreams’. It’s a project that we first conceived in 2004, shot from 2007 to 2008 and released it in the beginning of 2011. So it had a very long and complex incubation process and has taken on a life of it’s own. It was shown as part of the official 2011 Venice Biennale. There’s work up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It’s been in acquired museums by The Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, The Met in New York, Sainsbury Centre of Visual Arts in the UK and the National Gallery of Australia.
The basis of this project stems from the way that Japanese cartoons manga and anime has had this stylistic dissemination, initially throughout the Asian diaspora but now world-wide. Youth culture visually is influenced in its styling by manga and anime, in clothing, in hair, everything. Previously it was usually music driven; jazz, rock and roll, the beetles, punk, grunge, psychedelia, whatever it may be…and now for maybe the first time in perhaps a hundred years or more a visual art form has had this level of influence on youth culture.
When did you first come into contact with Japanese culture?
(EL)Well, I think for a long time we noticed the occasional kid with spiky hair, a bit like a cartoon, but what actually happened was that in 2004-2005 we went East to explore what was happening.
(JA) The climate is extremely hot and humid. When school ends all the kids just flood the shopping malls, not really to buy stuff but just as centers of recreation. You know when kids enter any place the energy changes and it becomes wild and exuberant. But what was interesting in 2004 was there was this visual assault in that suddenly we were surrounded by so many people with spiky hair, or hair flopping over their faces but perfectly tailored into points, and we realised something really interesting was going on. And we’re not talking about Cosplay, these are certainly not the kind of people who go to these comic book conventions and dress up as specific characters. This really was everyone. It seemed to us that manga was taking over the world, also creeping westwards – you just have to look at Nicki Minaj or Lady Gaga to see this.
(EL) There are two concurrent social things going along with this. Firstly, it’s now quite cool to be Asian. They are not emulating the west anymore. They are very happy to assert their own identity in a way which maybe 20 or 30 years ago was not the case. Back then they were looking westward and wanting to see what latest trends the west were. And now it’s as much the other way around as anything, if not more so.
You’re talking a lot about costume and clothing. Do you think you’d move into fashion at any point?
(JA) I wouldn’t say we’re interested in costume just for the sake of the 
costume…certainly with Manga Dreams it was in relation to how those costumes relate to individuals.
(EL) We are fascinated by fashion, and its relation to the sense of identity. We’re surprised that in our career we haven’t done much more fashion.
Could you ever see any collaborations potentially happening say with a fashion designer or with people who work in fashion?
(JA) Definitely, costumes interest us greatly whether it’s in relation to theatre or ballet or opera or just individuals on the street or at a fashion show.
So what’s next for you two? You have influences from the east and Asia and you’ve exhibited in the US and UK, do you see yourself expanding into other countries? Something that caught my eye recently, was an article in Vogue called the Beyond the Veil. It was talking about the blooming Middle Eastern economy and that brands caught the Muslim customs like never before. Do you think that could translate to art as you know they are opening up the Louvre and the Guggenheim in the Middle East soon.
(JA) It’s certainly something we’re really interested in. I think there’s great potential for some of our existing projects there. There is a wonderful abstract project we created called ‘Chrysalis’ which I think is suitable for the Middle Eastern market and certainly some Middle Eastern art influenced it. But there is 
also a real potential for creating new projects as well. Their art market by definition is relatively young but there is a great deal that they have to offer and we can learn from them as well as the other way around.
We’ve never been to the Middle East except stopping in Dubai for a few hours in the airport but we’d love to work out there to explore their female athletes as a future project.
So watch this space, Jonathan and Low have taken the US the UK and Asia by storm, could the Middle East be next?
