SEPTEMBER 2004 FALL ISSUE

INSIDE

Intersection: An Exhibition of Contemporary Chinese Photography and Oil Painting Eccentric Notes on Dissent: the Art of Zhu Wei Mutations<>Connections: Cultural (Ex)Changes in Asian Diasporas An Interview with Yang Fudong

US$12.00 NT$350.00 US$10.00 NT$350.00

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 Editor’s Note  Contributors

 Intersection: An Exhibition of Contemporary Chinese Photography and Oil Painting Wu Hung p. 6  Eccentric Notes on Dissent: The Art of Zhu Wei Xenia Tetmajer von Przerwa  Zhang O: In Transit Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky

<> 

 Mutations<>Connections: Cultural (Ex)Changes in Asian Diasporas. An Introduction Alice Ming Wei Jim  Different Homes/Different Diasporas: Strategies of Survival for Chinese Overseas Artists p. 25 Melissa Chiu  Full Circle: Redefining Contemporary Asian Art and the Institution Pauline J. Yao  Ticking the Boxes: Definition and Categorization in the Work of Chinese Artists in the UK Sally Lai  Representation of Asian Canadian Identities in the Twenty-First Century Eleanor Ty  Hyphen-Nation: Building Multicultural Narratives in the Classroom p. 31 Ming Tiampo  Retraining Tongues for Eyes: Food Exchanges in the Asian Diaspora Sneja Gunew  Diasporic Becomings, Or How I Learned to Desire Contingency and Discontinuous Regeneration Randy Lee Cutler  Notes on Planetarity and Curatorial Practice Rajdeep Singh Gill

 An Interview with Yang Fudong: The Uncertain Feeling. An Estranged Paradise Zhang Yaxuan p. 44  The Way and Its Demons: Art, Politics, and Denial in Lyon Philip Tinari

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 Situating the Inaugural Beijing Dashanzi Art Festival: The Gateway of Infinite Wonders in Wang Mai’s Work David Tung

 Shanghai Biennale  Taipei Biennial  Exhibitions Listing  Chinese Name Index p. 94 Editor’s Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art

Volume 3, Number 2, September 2004 Yishu 10 brings into discussion a wide variety  Katy Hsiu-chih Chien of issues. The opening three texts by Wu Hung,   Ken Lum Xenia Tetmajer von Przerwa, and Patricia  Keith Wallace Eichenbaum Karetzky together explore painting   Zheng Shengtian and photography and the often complex interrela-   Julie Grundvig Paloma Campbell tions between them, as well as the connections   Larisa Broyde between artistic traditions and the contemporary.   Joyce Lin The selected papers published from the   Mutations<>Connections Symposium held in Judy Andrews, Ohio State University Vancouver bring new and provocative John Clark, University of Sydney Lynne Cooke, Dia Art Foundation perspectives about the Asian diaspora as it has Okwui Enwezor, Art Institute of Chicago Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar & Curator evolved in countries as varied as Canada, USA, Fan Di'an, Central Academy of Fine Arts Fei Dawei, Guy & Mariam Ullens Foundation Britain and Australia. Zhang Yaxuan‘s interview Gao Minglu, New York State University with filmmaker Yang Fudong offers invaluable Hou Hanru, Independent Curator & Critic Katie Hill, University of Westminster insight into his working process through an Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic & Historian Sebastian Lopez, Gate Foundation & Leiden University in-depth discussion of his film An Estranged Lu lie, Independent Curator Paradise. Philip Tinari examines the final exhibition Charles Merewether, Australian National University Ni Tsai Chin, Tunghai University in France’s “Year of China” cultural exchange and Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic & Curator discusses not only the work, but also the broader Wu Hung, University of Chicago context of presenting contemporary art from  Art & Collection Group Ltd. China in the West. David Tung’s review of the    Leap Creative Group Dashanzi Art Festival is reprinted in this issue.   Raymond Mah We apologize for the technical error that   Gavin Chow  occurred in the translation of the illustrations Jeremy Lee and that resulted in incorrect images being   relaITconsulting, Vancouver inserted into Tung’s text in Yishu 9.  Chong-yuan Image Ltd., Taipei  - Paloma Campbell, one of our two Associate Yishu is published quarterly in Taipei, Taiwan and edited in th Editors at Yishu, is leaving to pursue her curatorial Vancouver, Canada. The publishing dates of Yishu are 5 of March, June, September and December. ambitions. Paloma has been working with the Editorial inquiries and manuscripts may be sent to the journal since its inception in May 2002 and has Editorial Office: Yishu contributed greatly to its success. Although I 1008-808 Nelson Street, Vancouver, B.C. V6Z 2H2 Canada Phone: (1) 604-488-2563; Fax: (1) 604-591-6392 have worked with her on only three issues, it has E-mail: [email protected] been a thorough pleasure and I will miss her Subscription inquiries may be sent to either Vancouver address or diligence, efficiency and commitment, as well as Hawaii: Journals Department her gracious interpersonal attributes. I know University of Hawai’i Press that many of the writers for Yishu will also miss 2840 Kolowalu Street, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA Phone: 1-808-956-8833; Fax: 1-808-988-6052 Paloma, and on behalf of everyone at Yishu, E-mail: [email protected] or [email protected] we extend our thanks and wish her all the The University of Hawai’i Press accepts payment by Visa or very best in her future endeavours. Mastercard, cheque or money order (in U.S. dollars).

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We thank Mr. Milton Wong, Mr. Daoping Bao, and Paystone Technologies Corp. for their generous support. Keith Wallace Cover: Portrait of Yang Fudong (detail). Photo credit: Chen Xiaoyun

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MELISSA CHIU is the Museum Director at the Asia Society and Museum in New York. She is a faculty member of Rhode Island School of Design and teaches Asian contemporary art and design. Chiu has curated exhibitions over the last ten years that have included artists from Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, China and Hawaii at various galleries and museums in Australia and Asia.

RANDY LEE CUTLER explores the intersections of art, science and technology, and her practice investigates the emergence of new cultural forms. She is Associate Professor in Critical and Cultural Studies and Coordinator of Interdisciplinarity at Emily Carr Institute.

RAJDEEP SINGH GILL is a cultural theorist, curator, and art historian whose areas of research and interest include historical and contemporary cultural production within the colonial and postcolonial. He is presently curator-in-residence at the Vancouver Art Gallery. He is also co- founder of the Creativity Commons Collective and the editor of Planetarity: An Intra/International Collection of Creative and Critical Writings.

SNEJA GUNEW has taught in England, Australia, and Canada and has published widely on multicultural, postcolonial, and feminist critical theory. She is Professor of English and Women’s Studies and Director of the Centre for Research in Women’s Studies and Gender Relations at the University of British Columbia in Canada. She is author of Framing Marginality: Multicultural Literary Studies (1994) and Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalisms (2004).

WU HUNG is the Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor in Chinese Art History at the Department of Art History and the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He is also the founder and Director of the Center for the Arts of East Asia at the University of Chicago, and the Consulting Curator at the Smart Museum.

ALICE MING WAI JIM is Curator of the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Centre A). She has an M.A. from Concordia University and a Ph.D. from McGill University. Her research interests include contemporary Asian and Asian Canadian art, media art and criticism, spatial culture, and theories of representation.

PATRICIA EICHENBAUM KARETZKY holds the O. Munsterberg Chair of Asian Art at Bard College and has published several books on subjects such as the art of the Tang dynasty, Chinese Buddhist Art, and has served as editor of the Journal of Chinese Religions. She has written catalogues for and curated several shows on contemporary Asian art.

SALLY LAI is currently the curator at the Chinese Arts Centre for contemporary Chinese art in Manchester, UK. She is also an advisor on cultural diversity to Arts Council of London and is a Specialist Visual Arts Adviser to the Scottish Arts Council. She has written on Chinese contemporary visual culture including land and identity in Hong Kong art and the impact of the Cultural Revolution on contemporary Chinese fashion.

 XENIA TETMAJER VON PRZERWA is a writer in the field of Contemporary Chinese Art based in Beijing. She completed an M.A. in Chinese Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and received an M.A. in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

MING TIAMPO is a lecturer at Carleton University in Ottawa. Her research examines questions of cultural translation and transmission in an international context with a concentration on Japan’s relations with the West. In 2000, Tiampo was a fellow at the Ashiya City Museum of Art and History in Ashiya, Japan, where she conducted research and developed her current curatorial project, Electrifying Art: Atsuko Tanaka 1954-1968,which will be exhibited in New York and Vancouver in 2004 and 2005.

PHILIP TINARI is a graduate student in East Asian Studies at Harvard, spending the summer writing for the Beijing bureau of The Wall Street Journal.

DAVID TUNG is the Assistant Curator for the 25000 Cultural Transmission Center in Beijing and Director of International Affairs for the Long March Foundation. He holds a B. A. in Asian Studies and Chinese Language from the University of Texas at Austin.

ELEANOR TY is Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. She is author of The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives (2004), Empowering the Feminine: The Narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796-1812 (1998), and Unsex’d Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (1993). Her latest book is a collection of essays, Asian North American Identities beyond the Hyphen,co-edited with Donald Goellnicht (2004).

PAULINE J. YAO is Assistant Curator of Chinese Art at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and a specialist in modern and contemporary Chinese art. She holds an M.A. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago.

ZHANG YAXUAN was born in Heibei province in 1973 and graduated from Beijing Normal University with a major in film history and theory. She has published more than thirty reviews on the Chinese independent films and interviews, and is a columnist for Art World magazine. She has also curated and organized more than ten Chinese independent film festivals or screenings in cities such as Beijing, Nanjing, Kunming, Shenyang, Xiamen, Hong Kong, Macau and Brussels.

 :         

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Figure 1. Marc Riboud, A Student in the Central Academy of Fine Arts Making an Image of Mao Zedong, 1957, black-and-white photography. Courtesy of Chambers Fine Art

The exhibition Intersection,presented at Chambers Fine Art in New York City in June 2004, deals with a fundamental issue in contemporary Chinese art: the interrelationship between photography and painting. It is fundamental because few oil painters and photographers in post-Cultural Revolution China can escape this interrelationship which has influenced and even controlled their art in different ways and on multiple levels. From the 1960s through the 1980s, photography provided painting with a state sanctioned reality to depict (although the content of this reality changed greatly over time), while most “experimental photographers” (shiyan sheyingjia) that emerged in the 1990s and early 2000s were first trained as painters or graphic artists. How do painting and photography interact with each other in today’s Chinese art? To Chen Danqing, one of the six artists featured in this exhibition, “copying [photographs in oil] is not to imitate other people’s language. Like playing musical compositions, copying is itself a language.”The other five artists each answer the question differently; but all have problematized the painting/photography relationship in their works. By doing so, these artists—three photographers and three oil painters—demonstrate how this relationship has become a shared focus of their artistic experi- mentation. To understand the experimental nature of their works, however, we need to briefly reflect upon the connections between painting and photography in Chinese art since the 1960s.

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“Painting from photographs” became a legitimate artistic practice during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), when numerous paintings—portraits of Mao Zedong and his wife Jiang Qing, heroic images of the revolutionary masses, and narrative pictures of the Party’s glorious history—were

 Figure 2. Chen Danqing, Tibetan Series, Mother and Son, 1980, oil on canvas. Courtesy of Chambers Fine Art copied or recreated from photographs (fig. 1). This was not because there was a shortage of live models, but because officially sanctioned photography provided an “authentic reality” for artists re-present. Paintings based on such photographs took on the authority of their models; and painters who adopted such models could worry less about possible political criticism. Although it was no secret that official photographs were already heavily edited and idealized (by choosing special angles and lighting, and by using the editing technique known as xiuban—“repairing a negative”), painting could transform such propaganda materials into art by further appropriating them through adding colour, enlarging the dimensions, and combining multiple photographic images within a single pictorial composition. During this crucial period in modern Chinese history, therefore, photography and painting together constituted the basic technology of a symbolic art; their difference depended on varying degrees of idealization. Consequently, painters began to collect photographic reproductions—mostly newspaper clippings and plates removed from magazines—as sources for their paintings.

This situation underwent a significant change in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when a new generation of oil painters rejected the symbolic art of the Cultural Revolution and tried to resurrect a “genuine realism” freed from official ideology. Chinese art critics commonly consider Chen Danqing’s Tibetan Series (Xizang zuhua)— his graduation work from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1981—representative of this new art. Significantly, the contrast they find between Chen’s painting series and propaganda art is also the contrast they find between two different kinds of photographs: if a propaganda painting idealized an already idealized official photograph, the Tibetan Series is akin to a collection of anonymous, informal snapshots (and indeed Chen used such photos Figure 3. Luo Zhongli, Father, 1981, oil on canvas. in painting the series)(fig.2). It was also around this time Courtesy of Chambers Fine Art

 that a large number of painters began to take photographs for both personal and professional purposes. The pictures they took differed markedly from official photographs in both style and content. Used as sources for painting, however, these images continued to be treated as reality itself.

Many well-known examples of so-called “native soil art” (xiangtu meishu) of the 1980s, such as Luo Zhongli’s Father (fig. 3), can be reinterpreted in this light, a consequence of a “switch” in the Figure 4. Yu Hong, Flying, 1997, oil on canvas. Courtesy Chambers Fine Art painter’s photographic model. The next such “switch” occurred a decade later, in the early 1990s, when an upcoming “new generation” of artists (xinshengdai) further rejected romanticizing ordinary people (such as Chen Danqing’s earthy Tibetans and Luo Zhongli’s larger-than-life peasants), and developed a penchant for representing fragmentary and trivial urban life. Attracted by the meaningless scenes surrounding them, they portrayed beauticians with exaggerated fake smiles, lonely men and women in a sleeping car on a train, or yuppies jumping mindlessly on a trampoline (fig. 4). These skilled realist painters, the brightest products of China’s art academies at the time, continued to derive inspiration and images from photographs.

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In all these cases, photography’s participa- tion in a painting’s creation was never openly acknowledged. Rather, photogra- phy inserted an invisible layer between a realist painting and reality, secretly replacing the latter. To unambiguously acknowledge photography’s role as the direct source of pictorial representation, as Chen Danqing did in the early 1990s through a new series of oil paintings, exemplified an important breakthrough in conceptualizing realist painting. Each Figure 5. Chen Danqing, Expressions, 1991, oil on canvas. Courtesy of Chambers Fine Art composition in this series consists of two or three panels with radically different themes; what connect them into a single work are the artist’s intuitive reactions to their divergent source materials, mostly printed images he found randomly in magazines and newspapers. In the case of his painting Expressions (fig. 5), he wrote: “In the autumn of 1990 I happened to cast my eye on a photograph of a flamenco dance in an old magazine when I was in a French bookstore on Fifth Avenue. The urgent and desperate expressions on the dancers’ faces startled me. In a flash, I recalled a photograph published in Life magazine a year before, which showed Beijing students carrying a dying demonstrator hit by gunfire [in the June Fourth Movement]. I made an instantaneous decision to copy both pictures and put them together. This set of copies became my first diptych called

 Expressions.” Commenting on this and other images in the series, I wrote these words in 1995:

What do we find here? The 1989 massacre of pro-democratic students in Tiananmen Square must have re-connected Danqing to the Chinese scenes. But he was mature enough to know that this connection was established by the media. Media is reality; images constitute a visual world. Images make him laugh and cry, love and hate. Images connect with images, logically or arbitrarily, on the street and in his mind. Images produce images, through copying and appropriation. If fifteen years ago Danqing once believed that his Tibetan paintings represented real people, now he is depicting neither heroic Chinese students nor ecstatic Spanish dancers, but images that have made him laugh and cry, love and hate, images that are connected to one another only in his mind. There are deliberate fragmentation and unexpected linkages. These piecemeal yet interconnected images have become his reality.

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Chen Danqing’s new approach towards popular photography matches Hong Lei’s attitude towards classical painting. After graduating from the Nanjing Art Academy, Hong Lei entered Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1993. Although he later abandoned the brush for the camera, his academic training prepared him to develop a persistent engagement with traditional art. The majority of his works since 1996 have been based on Figure 6. Hong Lei, Autumn in the Forbidden City (East Veranda), 1997, colour photo- graph. Courtesy of Chambers Fine Art Song court paintings—the most exquisite ever produced in Chinese history. More specifically, he has “translated” these images into contem- porary artistic expressions through two kinds of appropriation: While the original masterpieces were on silk, they are now transformed into mechanically produced photographic prints, and the delicately painted images are replaced by real figures, animals and objects. But both kinds of appropriation serve to intensify his feeling about the original work—often a melancholy mood with a tragic underpinning.

Two of his photographs dating from 1997, for example, derive inspiration from Song bird-and- flower painting. To escalate the “morbid beauty” he found in the originals, he staged dead birds on verandas in the Forbidden City, their bodies entangled with blood-stained jade and turquoise necklaces (fig. 6). A year later he created After “Sakyamuni Coming Out of the Mountains” by Liang Kai of the Song Dynasty,a work with an even closer relationship to a particular classical painting (fig. 7 a-b). Turning the painted landscape into a stage set and substituting the image of Sakyamuni with a real figure, the photograph both acknowledges and reinterprets its model. Using Chen Danqing’s metaphor, here Hong Lei works like a musician interpreting a piece of classical music. As Chen writes: “A player cannot change the notes, beat and rhythm of the original music at will. ‘Follow the score obediently’—Beethoven demands in his manuscript. Yet we are presented with a large selection of performance versions of his music to choose from.”

This logic is reversed in Liu Zheng’s Four Great Beauties included in this exhibition. Instead of imitating well-known paintings, Liu has created large, dramatic photographs as grand oil paintings in a classical tradition. The different orientations of the two photographers may be partially due to their different educational backgrounds: unlike Hong Lei, Liu Zheng never studied in a privileged art school but was trained as an engineer in a college of science and technology with a major in

 Figure 7 a. Liang Kai (Song dynasty), Sakyamuni Coming Out of Figure 7 b. Hong Lei, After “Sakyamuni Coming Out of the Mountains” Mountains, ink on silk. Courtesy of Chambers Fine Art by Liang Kai of the Song Dynasty, 1998, colour photograph. Courtesy of Chambers Fine Art optics. After graduation he worked for a newspaper as a photojournalist before becoming a freelance experimental artist. To him, classical art remains remote and mysterious, and the dialogue he has developed with bygone “masters” (both photographers and painters) is more about negotiation than deconstruction.

Regardless of such differences, however, the issue that Liu Zheng deals with in his art is close to that of Chen Danqing’s and Hong Lei’s. A persistent theme in his work is again the erasure of distinction between images and reality, and photography allows him to articulate such erasure into an individual art style. His monumental series My Countrymen (Guoren,conventionally known as The Chinese ), for example, consists of one hundred photographs and links real people to dying, death, and posthumous mutilation on the one hand, and to fantastic or macabre figurations of the body on the other. In Liu Zheng’s own words, these images are installed in the series because they are “simultaneously real and surreal, both here and not here.”

My Countrymen is one part of a tripartite visual epic which Liu Zheng has been working on for several years. The other two parts are Three Realms (Sanjie) and Revolution (Geming). Three Realms, in turn, consists of “Myth,”“People,”and “History,”each forming a semi-independent series on its own. Four Great Beauties belongs to the last series and centres on Yang Yuhuan, Xi Shi, Wang Zhaojun, and Diao Chan—four famous femmes fatales in Chinese history. Pictorially, the four compositions resemble other photographs he has made for the Three Realms,such as two 1997 pictures in the “Myth” section that restage two Peking opera plays, Legend of the White Snake (Baishe zhuan,fig. 8) and The Monkey King Defeats the White-Boned Demon Three Times (Sun Wukong sanda baigujing,fig. 9). Like these earlier works, Four Great Beauties derive their subject from timeless fables in traditional Chinese literature and use live models to construct large, complex tableaux. Thematically, however, they shift from mythology to human drama, in which love turns into despair and lust prompts court intrigue and murder. Ambitious in conception and rich in tonal variation, these painterly photographs do not reconstruct history, but retell familiar stories through a more contemporary form of representation.

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In creating Four Great Beauties Liu Zheng took on multiple roles, first staging four tableaux of a historical drama and then transforming them into photographic images. The oil painter Shi Chong has developed a similar tactic, but has theorized it as forging a “second reality”:

In the process of employing figurative forms to represent a “second reality,”I try to incorporate the creative process and concepts of installation and performance, creating what I call “artificial artistic copies.”The incorporation of these concepts and techniques, as well as the employment of a supra- realistic pictorial style, not only increase the amount of visual information in a two-dimensional painting, but also inject the spirit of the avant-garde into easel painting.

Putting this idea into practice, each of Shi Chong’s supra-realistic paintings are the concluding point of a lengthy process that integrates five different forms of visual art—sculpture, installation, performance, photography, and painting—into a single artistic production. To take his 1996 project The Stage as an example (fig. 10), he first collected small objects and cast a mask from the female model’s face. This was followed by the second stage of the project, a “performance” during which the objects were attached to the model and the model was transformed into a still-life image. This performance thus produced Figure 8. Liu Zheng, The Legend of the White Snake, 1997 black-and-white photo- graph. Courtesy of Chambers Fine Art an “installation”—a static scene conceived as the third stage of the project. This scene was then photographed, and the photographs were synthesized and trans- formed into a painting. In this project, various kinds of “artistic copies” were created in a continuous process of image making, gradually distancing art from reality. Moving from three-dimensional to two-dimensional representations, the work became increasingly abstract and illusionistic. The final painting, the last stage of the project, responded to and reproduced previously manufactured forms. Instead of mimicking Nature, Figure 9. Liu Zheng, The Monkey King Defeats the White-Boned Demon Three Times, it was itself a “second reality.” 1997, black-and-white photograph. Courtesy of Chambers Fine Art

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The last two artists in this exhibition—the painter Li Songsong and the photographer Han Lei— have each developed a dialogue with the “old photo craze” (lao zhaopian re) in contemporary China. The strength of this cultural trend is best exemplified by the sweeping success of a tiny

 serial called Old Photos (Lao zhaopian) (fig.11). Launched by a provincial publishing house (Shandong Pictorial Press, founded in 1994), the first three issues of the serial became instant sensations in the mass book market. Each issue was reprinted six or seven times, from the initial 10,000 copies to a total of 300,000. For the fourth issue, the publisher decided to produce an astounding initial print run of 240,000 copies. These four issues, published within a single year from December 1996 to October 1997, eventually sold more than 1.2 million copies altogether, making the serial one of the most popular publications in post-Cultural Revolution China.

What caused the success of Old Photos was a prevailing sentiment of nostalgia in society and people’s desire to forge private histories—two factors which, to a large extent, shaped Chinese popular culture in the 1990s. Manifestations of popular culture included numerous reproductions of old photographs, postcards, posters, matchboxes, and stamps— ephemeral materials from a recent past that suddenly acquired historical and commercial value. Among such reproductions, old photographs were the most personal and emotional. The impact of such images on contemporary Chinese art is significant, although to my knowledge no art critic has discussed this impact in any depth. Generally speaking, post-Cultural Revolution experimental artists developed an intense interest in representing history and memory, and this interest has connected their art with the Figure 10. Shi Chong, The Stage, 1996, oil on canvas. Courtesy of Chambers Fine Art “old photo craze.”I have discussed representations of history and memory in experimental Chinese art elsewhere. So in this text I want to suggest that old photographs have not only supplied such representations with images and styles, but have also helped to negotiate the relationship between an elite “avant-garde” art movement and a popular cultural trend. This is a long story. Here I can only give some examples to demonstrate a wide range of roles that old photos have played in contemporary Chinese art.

Starting in the early 1980s, some young artists began to use images of stressed and damaged photographs to allude to the bygone era of the Communist Revolution. A remarkable painting, created by the Sichuan artist Wang Chuan in 1981 entitled Survivors (Xingcun zhe), is the earliest such example Figure 11. Cover of the first issue of Old Photos, 1997. I have been able to find (fig. 12). Ten years later, in 1992, Courtesy of Chambers Fine Art another Sichuan artist Zhang Xiaogang made two symbolic paintings. Entitled Genesis (Chuang shiji), each composition depicts a newborn baby lying in front of old photographs (those in one painting are portraits of Communist pioneers; those in the other painting represent “revolutionary students” during the Cultural Revolution).

 In more recent years, some artists have used photographic images to evoke memories of the Sino-Japanese War. Zhao Liang’s 1999 Untitled,for example, transforms a still execution photograph into animated images. In 2000, Miao Xiaochun projected a famous historical photograph onto a white curtain. The image is familiar: taken by the wartime journalist Wang Xiaoting, it shows a crying child at the Shanghai Railway Station after a Japanese bombing. The faint, barely visible projection in the installation, however, alludes to the disappearing historical memory of the event. To me, Wang Youshen’s 1995 Washing: The Mass Grave at Datong in 1941 remains the most poignant example in this genre. In this installation, the newspaper pages on the wall report the discovery of the pit, which contained the Figure 12. Wang Chuan, Survivors, 1981, oil on canvas. Courtesy of Chambers Fine Art remains of hundreds of thousands of Chinese who were buried alive during World War II. Below the wall, photographic images of the unearthed human remains were placed in two large basins under circulating water. “The water washes the image away,”Wang commented, “just as time has washed people’s memories clear of this atrocity that occurred fifty years ago.”

From the mid-1990s, an increasing number of experimental artists used family photos to forge “private histories,”and in so doing they also embraced contemporary art forms such as installation, video, and multi-media art. For example, Sui Jianguo, Zhan Wang, and Yu Fan staged their unofficial installation/exhibition Women/Here (Nuren/Xianchang) during the Fourth International Women’s Congress held in Beijing in 1995. Using photographs and memorabilia found in their mothers’ and wives’ private possessions, they hoped to present these “real Chinese women” to contrast with the official representation of a staged “global womanhood.”Following a different vein, the Beijing artist Feng Mengbo created an interactive installation in 1996. Entitled Private Photo Album (Siren zhaoxiang bo), it consists of several series of old photographs that re-stage the lives of his grandparents, parents, and himself. The fourth and last series in the installation reconstructs the visual environment of the Cultural Revolution based on the artist’s memory. Pursuing a visual autobiography in a more symbolic language, Yin Xiuzhen made a photo installa- tion in 1999, displaying her own photographs from different periods in old-fashioned women’s shoes (which she made together with her mother). Making these photographs into public art while heightening their intimate relationship with the artist herself, this work problematizes the nature of private memory in a public representation. Meanwhile, artists like Zhang Xiaogang continued to blur the boundary between political iconography and avant-garde art; paintings in his Big Family (Da jiating) series derive their format and style from Cultural Revolution studio photographs, exploring the hidden human relationship in these anonymous images.

Other works created since the late 1990s have demonstrated a conscious effort to explore photog- raphy’s role in forging “memory links” between past and present. In his Family History (Jiazu

 suiyue) from 2000, for example, Zheng Lianjie and his son displayed an enlarged black-and-white photograph forty-three years after it was taken by his family in 1957 in Tiananmen Square. Framed with- in the “present” image of the same place, the historical photograph acquires an acute “past” temporality. Similarly, Hai Bo has juxtaposed two photographs taken several decades apart. The first, an old group portrait photograph, shows young men or women in Maoist or army Figure 13. Anonymous, The Gate of the Great Qing,c. 1900. uniforms; their young faces glow with Courtesy of Chambers Fine Art their unyielding belief in the Communist faith. The second picture, taken by Hai Bo himself, shows the same group of people—or in some cases, the surviving members—twenty or thirty years later. In an almost graphic manner, the two images register the passage of time and stir up viewers’ recollections of certain moments in their own lives.

Going one step further, some experimental photographers take the vulnerability of photographic images—and hence the impermanence of the history and memory that Figure 14. Han Lei, Hunchback Bridge, 1998-2003, hand- painted photograph. Courtesy of Chambers Fine Art they represent and preserve—as their central theme. A series of photographs by Rong Rong, for example, studies the “mortality” of photographs by documenting the “lives” of various kinds of photographs displayed in public places. Faded and discolored, many such photos have become “ruins” of their former selves. Wang Youshen, on the other hand, has made installations to display eroded and scratched archival photographs. Significantly, he discovered these photographs in the archives of the official newspaper Beijing Youth Daily, at which he has worked as an editor since 1988. Similar to his Newspaper Great Wall series, these installations aimed to destroy media-constructed reality or mythology.

The relationship between experimental art and the popular “old photo craze” is a complex issue, which I hope to discuss more fully in a future study. For now, the examples given above provide a context for understanding works by Han Lei and Li Songsong in the exhibition Intersection.Han Lei’s photographs are intertextual in nature because they gain meaning from referring to historical photographs. A comparison between an old photograph which captures a glimpse of old Beijing around 1900 (fig. 13) and his Hunchback Bridge (Luoguo qiao) (fig. 14) demonstrates how he derives format, style, taste, and mood from historical photography. The bridge—a famous Qing dynasty architectural structure in the Summer Palace—appears as an image resurrected from the past, gloomy and desolate. The circular frame, seldom used by contemporary photographers, heightens the image’s identity as a self-conscious “art photo” of a retro type; and the tonal effect gives the picture an aged feel. It would be mistaken, however, to appreciate this work in a purely stylistic sense, because Han Lei’s purpose is not simply to make an “old looking” photograph.

 Figure 15. Li Songsong, Square, 2004, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist

Rather, he conceived the photograph as a memory-image. He has been quoted as saying: “Memory is itself a kind of image. What I have attempted is to turn such images in my mind into pictures in reality.” The “aged look” of his photographs thus signifies the artist’s personal connection with the past. They externalize his internalized historical sensibility and visual experience, transforming conventional old photos into contemporary, individual expressions.

This general significance of Han Lei’s photographs explains a particular feature of his works in this exhibition. Whether representing figures or landscape, the images are deliberately ambiguous and incomplete: the mountains seem to be vanishing from view, and a portrait refuses to stay within the picture frame. Frequently the prints seem overexposed or discoloured; their awkwardness distances the images not only from reality but also from “real” old photographs. We can relate these images to Li Songsong’s paintings, which likewise depict the artist’s recollections of historical photographs. For example, one painting (fig. 15) is clearly inspired by photographs of Chairman Mao’s funeral in Tiananmen Square in 1976 (fig. 16). All three paintings in this exhibition are also based on documentary photographs of the history of the Chinese Communist Party: Mao’s wife Jiang Qing waving the “little red book” during the Cultural Revolution; a gathering of Chinese leaders and their foreign visitors; and a performance of A Brother and a Sister Exploring Virgin Land (Xiongmei kaihuang) in the Communist base Yan’an. The paintings’ summery, untrammeled appearance makes them simultaneously copies and abstractions of the photographs. The fast movement of the brush both delivers images and erases details, so that we can imagine the scenes as either emerging or disappearing in front of our eyes. Because the original photos are familiar to millions of Chinese people, the paintings’ succinct brushwork has an indexical function to trigger the viewer’s memories of their photographic models, while demonstrating the painter’s admirable skill in translating conventional documentary photographs into artistic, painterly images.

***

The photographs in this exhibition are examples of Chinese conceptual photography, which became a major trend in contemporary Chinese art around the mid-1990s. Until then, experimental photographers had mainly established their alternative position by divorcing themselves from mainstream photography. But from the mid-1990s they also hoped to define experimental

 Figure 16. Anonymous, mass funerary ceremony for Mao in Tiananmen Square, 1976, colour photograph. photography as an art with its own intrinsic logic, which they found in theories of Conceptual art. Since then, their emphasis on idea and display has led to a wide range of constructed images. Their goals can be compared with those of American conceptual photographers of the 1970s, who, as described by Corinne Robins were “making up or creating scenes for the camera in terms of their [i.e. the artists’] own inner vision.” Taking place twenty years later, however, a Chinese “replay” of this history has also incorporated a strong sense of contemporaneity. Backed by postmodern theories and utilizing state-of-the-art technologies, experimental Chinese photography has actively interacted with other art forms including painting, sculpture, performance, installation, site-specific art, advertising, and photography itself, transforming pre-existing images into photographic re-representations. Similarly, the seemingly realist paintings in this exhibition actually subvert the notion of a realistic representation being a direct pictorial transference of reality. To this end, all six artists in the show have carried out experiments to interact with pre-existing images. No longer interested in capturing meaningful moments or images in life, they have instead focused on the manner or vocabulary of artistic expression. It is such experiments, plus their superb technique and their sensibility of visual forms, that make their works exciting and absorbing.

This is a revised version of the catalogue essay for Intersection: Contemporary Oil Painting and Photography presented at Chambers Fine Art in New York from June 8 to July 23, 2004.

 Notes 1 Chen Danqing, “An Informal Retrospective,” in Ackbar Abbas, ed., Chen Danqing: Painting After Tiananmen, Cultural Studies Series 6 (Hong Kong: Department of Comparative Literature, University of Hong Kong, 1995), 14-25; quotation from 24. The wording has been slightly modified with the artist’s agreement. 2 For example, there appeared a “photography fever” among students in the Central Academy of Fine Arts. See ibid. 3 For a discussion of Yu Hong’s painting, see Wu Hung, Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 1999), 142-47. 4 Chen Danqing, “An Informal Retrospective,” 22. 5 Wu Hung, “Once Again, Painting From Photos,” in ibid., 10-13; quotation from 13. 6 Chen Danqing, “An Informal Retrospective,” 24. 7 See Wu Hung, “Photographing Deformity: Liu Zheng and his Photographic Series My Countrymen,” Public Culture, 13.3 (Fall 2001): 399-428. 8 These two translations imply very different understanding of the series and the artist’s self-identity. I reject the second English title. I have discussed this issue in a forthcoming article, “Identities in Contemporary Chinese Art.” 9 Cited in Bingman [pesud.], “The Chinese Art at the Turn of the New Millennium: A Review of Liu Zheng’s Photographic Series ‘The Chinese’” (manuscript, n. d.). Translation slightly modified based on the original Chinese text. 10 For an introduction to Shi Chong’s art and theory, see Wu Hung, Transience, 88-93. 11 Cited in Huang Zhuan, ed., Zhoujie dangdai yishu xueshu yaoqing zhan 1996-1997 (The first academic exhibition of Chinese contemporary art, 1996-1997), (Guangzhou: Guangdong lingnan meishu chubanshe, 1996), 58. 12 Shi Chong’s art has been the subject of many articles published in Mainland China. Three representative discussions are Yin Shuangqi, “Chaoyue yuyang” (To go beyond language), Meishu wenxian (Art Literature) 2 (1994): 3-12. Peng De, “Shi Chong jijie” (A comprehensive interpretation of Shi Chong’s work), in Shi Chong (Guilin: Guangxi meishu chubanshe, 1996), 2-9; Huang Zhuan, “Shi Chong yishu zhong di gudian yichan yu dangdai wenti” (The Classical heritage and contemporary issues in Shi Chong’s art), Yishu jie 1.2 (1998): 4-19. 13 From private communication. 14 I have discussed this issue in a lecture entitled “The Old Photo Fever in 90s China,” delivered at the conference “From Prints to Photography” held at the University of Chicago in April, 2003. 15 Wu Hung, ed., Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art (Guangzhou: Guangdong Museum of Art, 2002), 142-45. 16 “Everyday Sightings: Melissa Chiu Interviews the Chinese Artist Wang Youshen,” Art Asia Pacific 3.2 (1996): 54. 17 Gu Zheng, “Han Lei de beilun: Youguan Han Lei shiying de zhongzhong yice” (Han Lei’s Paradox: Hypotheses on Han Lei’s Photographs), in Han Lei. Mosheng (Han Lei: Alienization) (Shanghai: Aura Gallery, 2003),10-15 quotation from 10. 18 For a general discussion of Chinese conceptual photography, see Wu Hung, “Between Past and Future: A Brief History of Contemporary Chinese Photography,” Wu Hung and Christopher Phillips, eds., Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China (New York and Chicago: ICP and Smart Museum of Art, 2004). 19 This attitude is clearly demonstrated in the introduction to the first issue of New Photo. 20 Robins continues: “To them [. . .] realism belonged to the earlier history of photography and, as seventies artists, they were embarked on a different kind of aesthetic quest. It was not, however, the romantic symbolism of photography of the 1920s and 1930s, with its emphasis on the abstract beauty of the object, that had caught their attention, but rather a new kind of concentration on narrative drama, on the depiction of time changes in the camera’s fictional moment. The photograph, instead of being presented as a depiction of reality, was now something created to show us things that were felt rather than necessarily seen.” Cited from The Pluralist Era: American Art 1968-1981 (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 213. 21 For a good discussion of this phenomenon, see Karen Smith, “Zero to Infinity: The Nascence of Photography in Contemporary Chinese Art of the 1990s,” in Wu Hung, ed., Reinterpretations: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art (1990-2000), 35-50, especially 39-41.

    :     

   

Most artists in China’s so-called avant-garde circle adopt Western media as a form of expression. Zhu Wei does not. Rather, he sees himself as the single artist who pushes the age-old Chinese painting tradition, both in content and style, into the contemporary.

Zhu Wei’s images are a mosaic of commentaries based on social and political issues that the artist observes in his daily surroundings. They portray Zhu Wei coming to terms with himself in China’s contemporary urban society in general, and the politically laden capital, Beijing, in particular. His images are neither objective nor distanced. The viewer sees the world through Zhu Wei’s eyes and thus follows the fantastic roving of his mind where time, place, and space coalesce.

It is Zhu Wei’s incisive observations and laconic humour that make his artwork so persuasive. The direct, intense, and sometimes even overbearing visual presence of his compositions, as well as their painterly diction, are rooted in China’s propaganda art. However, the technically refined and meticulous brushwork reflects his scrupulous training in traditional Chinese painting techniques.

***

Zhu Wei was born on the eve of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, the son of medical doctors working in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Historical circumstance would make him come of age in a world where individuality was frowned upon and deemed irrelevant. Hong Ying vividly describes this emotional landscape in her novel Summer of Betrayal:

… under the brilliant glare of the shining Red Sun we grew up pale and thin, hiding in dark, gray corners. Our youth was spent in the emptiness attendant upon a loss of faith, in ferocious attention to all kinds of hope, but when we wanted to cash in on them we discovered that the world is not built on hope alone. So the first half of our lives has been a series of contradictions. If there’s going to be a second half, it can only mean drifting along from day to day, resigned to circumstances, competing to be good at feigning ignorance.1

Yet, Zhu Wei has no intention of feigning ignorance or of succumbing to the various traumas that mark his generation. Despite the turbulent circumstances of his youth, he has developed a distinct—though often torn—sense of self. Seeing himself as a chronicler of an era, Zhu Wei stresses: “Unlike other contemporary artists, there is no direct political intention in my art.”2 Yet looking at his oeuvre, it is clear that Zhu Wei is deeply critical of China’s social and political situation and that his works aim to confront, to startle, and to indict.

Zhu Wei’s intense need to seek and reveal the truth behind the facades of everyday life underlies his artistic creations. More often than not, he displays his findings with a prickly dry humor to emphasize the absurdities he finds. Even in real-life interactions, Zhu Wei frequently reveals a similar playfulness and disjointedness. For example, he told a reporter interviewing him on a

 Figure 1. Zhu Wei, Comrades, 1995, ink and colour on paper. Courtesy of Plum Blossoms (International) Ltd., Hong Kong series of paintings with obvious humouristic undertones that he is not a funny person at all and actually often felt gloomy. When the reporter, taking him seriously, probed further, Zhu Wei replied that the only thing that can make him happy is “drinking beer.”3

A perfectionist to the core, Zhu Wei appreciates the meticulous labour that goes into the creation of his works. He uses a xuan paper (a special type of paper used in traditional Chinese painting), produced exclusively according to his detailed specifications, and carefully textures the background of each work. Depending on the size of the painting, Zhu Wei applies the first layer of colour either on the incised stone plates in his yard or on a finer rack inside the studio. After drying, the paper is treated once more on a more detailed surface, such as a sisal carpet. The often quite dominant background textures in his works are thus adjusted to the mood he aims to transmit. Depending on the scale—some of Zhu Wei’s works are up to three meters in height and two meters in width—the paintings are grafted together from several sheets of paper. When working on large compositions, Zhu Wei uses a small prototype of the image so that the shades and colour gradations of each section fit in with the overall composition and reveal a cohesive whole.

Zhu Wei’s hand, his application of Chinese ink and pigments, is unmistakable. During his education at the Art College of the People’s Liberation Army, he mastered the fine brush technique. According to his teacher Liu Tiancheng, Zhu Wei assiduously trained himself in the styles of the famous Tang and Song dynasty masters, as well as the figure painting style of the Five Dynasties. He researched early Buddhist and Daoist mural art and studied the pictorial representations on Han dynasty bricks. Internalizing these traditional techniques as well as the language of propaganda art, for which he was trained, Zhu Wei developed his particular visual vocabulary.

Zhu Wei vehemently detests any kind of categorization of himself or his art along the assigned lineages of contemporary Chinese art production, such as Political Pop or Cynical Realism. He keeps to himself, both personally and professionally. Similarly, Zhu Wei has seldom shown his works alongside his peers and does not spend evenings together with them discussing the underpinnings of their approaches. Zhu Wei wants us to experience the multi-layered aspects of his works and to see his as an independent voice. Although using some of its visual tools, he clearly counters the homogenous nature of propaganda art.

 Zhu Wei works in series. As a result, and despite his reluctance to allow classi- fication, the artist’s impressively large oeuvre—close to one thousand recorded pieces—already includes some pre-exist- ing caesuras. Furthermore, a number of thematic continuities can also be identified. Apart from issues relating to the artist’s psychology, they include his observations on the political and social fabric of contemporary society. The following selection consists of ten works that Zhu Wei completed between 1994 and 2002. Belonging to several different series, they are analyzed according to two Figure 2. Zhu Wei, Pictures of the Strikingly Bizarre: Serving the People, 1994, thematic topics. ink and colour on paper. Courtesy of Plum Blossoms (International) Ltd., Hong Kong

 :    One of the most conspicuous aspects often found in mainland Chinese contemporary art production of the 1980s and 1990s is its propagandistic aura. Although meant in the vein of dissent they all share a common root in the visual diction of Chinese propaganda art of earlier decades. As Geremie Barmé describes in his book on contemporary Chinese culture In the Red,4 dissident groups in mainland China “use the language of their enemies when writing their denunciations and attacking their foes at various forums.”5

Zhu Wei was trained to produce propaganda images for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during his education and is thus well versed in its rhetoric or, as Mikhail Epstein, calls it, “ideologemes.”6 The artist’s visual vocabulary follows the same path, although with different intentions from his contemporaries and often with more subtlety. Compared to Wang Guangyi’s Big Criticism series, for example, the critical articulations of Zhu Wei’s works are decidedly more refined both visually and intellectually. Where the artist mixes in a pinch of his laconic humour, the viewer is faced with the strikingly bizarre scenes to which Zhu Wei bears witness.

The ideologemes created by the CCP are grafted together from various visual, literary, social and political sources, including traditional symbols that are deeply engrained in Chinese public memory. The evocation of famous masterpieces of the Chinese art historical canon and their subsequent subversion thus neatly fits into the dissident discourse of China’s so-called avant-garde art world.7 Zhu Wei uses this tactic—down to the application of seals to imitate the traditional practice of identifying authorship and ownership—to lay bare the disconcerting daily realties he encounters. Comrades (1995)(fig. 1) and Pictures of the Strikingly Bizarre: Driving after Drinking (1994)(fig. 2) are some obvious examples.

The compositional structure as well as the formation and stature of the main figures in Comrades is visibly based on the third section of the Tang dynasty (618-907 AD) painting Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk (eighth century) (fig. 3). Instead of treating a roll of silk, Zhu Wei’s central figure—whose physiognomy bares an uncanny resemblance to Mao Zedong’s effeminate features—is in the process of dying red what used the be the British flag and thus patiently brings to life the likeness of the Communist Party flag. The allusion to Hong Kong’s return to the

 Figure 3. Zhang Xuan, Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk, eighth century, ink and colour on silk. Courtesy of Plum Blossoms (International) Ltd., Hong Kong

Motherland is emphasized by the depiction of bauhinias, the Special Administrative Region’s national flower, and the People’s Liberation Army soldiers in the background.8

The “mood of languor and melancholy typically associated with court ladies”9 that is evident in the Tang dynasty painting is coarsely interrupted by Zhu Wei’s cartouches in this work. They cite, as the art critic Jia Fangzhou notes,10 a popular underground poem from the revolutionary period in Russia:

Comrades, Comrades, you are high up and dry, what are you dragging me into the mud for?

Moreover you spit at me. But, comrades, despite being covered with mud and saliva I will still firmly stand amidst your ranks.11

Contrary to the visual allusions, there is nothing docile or refined about the text that accompanies this painting. Rather, Zhu Wei voices China’s resolution to walk as equals amongst the ranks of world leaders.12 On a deeper level, however, Zhu Wei also addresses the price China’s people had to pay for Mao’s visions. The Chinese characters for “…you are high up and dry…” [gao yu gan] in the first stanza are uncannily close to those for ‘high ranking official’ [gao (ji) gan (bu)]. The artists thus suggests, visually supported by the red drops of dye, that those high up rely on the blood of the people to accomplish their plans.

In Pictures of the Strikingly Bizarre: Serving the People,13 the compositional arrangement of Mao Zedong in a sedan chair surrounded by his entourage is manifestly based on the corresponding section of another Tang dynasty painting, entitled The Imperial Sedan Chair (fig. 4). The Tang work depicts Emperor Taizong greeting the Tibetan minister, who came to welcome Princess Wencheng (Taizong’s daughter) as the bride-to-be of the Tibetan King.14 The aura in this work is one of solemnity, poise, and authority.

In Zhu Wei’s painting, however, Chairman Mao is stripped of Taizong’s implied political superiority and dignity. The disproportionate representation of his body parts, the hot liquid he is being brought in a red cup inscribed with “Café,”and the grimacing expressions of his followers all work

 Figure 4. Attributed to Yan Liben, The Imperial Sedan Chair, date unknown, ink and colour on silk. Courtesy of Plum Blossoms (International) Ltd., Hong Kong together in deriding the strikingly comical veneration. Visually, Zhu Wei also plays a pun on the Chinese expression “blow the trumpet and carry someone in a sedan chair” (chui laba, tai jiaozi), meaning to flatter rich and influential people. The irony is pushed further by the evocation of Mao Zedong’s famous phrase “Serving the People”.The reality is that Mao was undoubtedly separated from the workers and peasants he claimed to serve. Rather, he was revered and waited on like a Chinese emperor by the cadres and the military, which profited from his power.

Zhu Wei is both cynical and disquieted with regard to the nostalgic revivalism of the Mao cult. In China Diary, No. 7 (1995) (fig. 5) the viewer is taken into a traditional study room with young boys. A child-like figure bearing a clear resemblance to Mao Zedong and another, in an army uniform, are coaching some youths. The absence of the teacher allows them to fill the heads of the students with “dangerous ideas.”What they are reading Figure 5. Zhu Wei, China Diary, No. 7, 1995, ink and colour on paper. Courtesy of Plum Blossoms (International) Ltd., Hong Kong is a copy of the Records of the Strange, Second Volume,15 a book that was traditionally blacklisted for youths as it was thought to instill negative tendencies in them. Another boy, probably in reference to the European origin of Marxist thought, is reading a text in Western alphabet.

The huge television in the background with the Great Helmsman—sporting a Red Guard arm- band—waving to the masses seems to function as an example of what fatal cataclysms Mao Zedong’s indoctrination sessions brought about. Alluding to his own experience of daily Mao Zedong Thought study, Zhu Wei puts himself into the painting. Little Zhu sits in the lower right corner but isn’t listening. Wearing headphones, he looks up sheepishly from flipping through a copy of his own first catalogue as an artist—identified by the title The Story of Beijing and the insignia of Zhu Wei’s sole agent, Plum Blossoms Gallery.

Zhu Wei also addresses the immense commercial value of the Mao cult by identifying the footage as a Channel V music video and by placing the television on a table—next to a bottle of Head and  Shoulders shampoo—where one would traditionally expect to see scholar objects. The dream-like time fractures in the image seem to underline the Mao Cult’s severe decontextualiza- tion of one of the darkest chapters in the history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

In another painting, Zhu Wei commemorates— not without a pinch of dry humour—the still visibly decreasing influence of Mao Zedong’s ideology on contemporary Chinese life. In China Diary, No. 4 (1995) (fig. 6) the viewer sees Figure 6. Zhu Wei, China Diary, No. 4, 1995, ink and colour on paper. Mao playing a flute—a pun on the expression Courtesy of Plum Blossoms (International) Ltd., Hong Kong “drum-blow” (gu chui) meaning to advocate (revolution) or preach. Zhu Wei depicts Mao in a stage-like setting, but the theatre is closed, as the municipal seal on the door announces. Red flags, paper flowers, and the Gate of Heavenly Peace in the background evoke the ambiance of extravagant Cultural Revolution parades. Zhu Wei’s cartouches read:

Saxophone entered China. But actually ‘Bailemen’16 and ‘Angel’ mounted the stage first. Everyone knew them. In the short 20s and 30s it already existed in the Western influenced metropolis.17

After 1949, it slowly disappeared and during the Cultural Revolution it was made to disappear even more. As a representative of rotten art, it suffered doubly. The 60s are gone. In 1994 Beijing held the first international jazz festival.18

The painting suggests that all of Mao’s propaganda tunes cannot stop the appreciation for Western music that had started in China in the early twentieth century. Now the Chairman sits on his stage but there is no one there to listen to him. If the viewer were not to read the cartouches, however, s/he could not have guessed that Zhu Wei is commenting on China’s first international jazz festival. He uses the visual vocabulary and iconography of the Cultural Revolution era to record a decidedly different event.

This dialectic relationship between Mao Zedong’s era and the contemporary shapes many of Zhu Wei’s works. The interlacing of text and image in these works is rooted in propaganda art’s didactic architecture. Yet, Zhu Wei undermines the government discourse, lays it bare and ridicules it. These works thus effuse an “ironic nostalgia” that Geremie Barmé situates in the realm of totalitarian nostalgia where the refurbished past is used to begin a new history.19

    The rapid changes that Deng Xiaoping’s Open Door policy brought about are another important topic in Zhu Wei’s art. He poignantly depicts the people’s blinded transfixion by commercial pros- perity20 and unveils the current government’s cunning appropriation of Mao’s propaganda machinery. Working at full speed, it now dispenses to the people a new kind of opiate: material wealth.

 Figure 7. Zhu Wei, Box, No. 3, 1995, ink and colour on paper. Courtesy of Plum Blossoms (International) Ltd., Hong Kong

In Box, No. 3 (1995) (fig. 7) Zhu Wei addresses China’s westernizing transformations. He depicts a traditionally dressed intellectual sitting at a bar and drinking Becks beer. He looks up at a parasol that is inscribed with the words “Raffles Hotel.”21 The West and its colonializing shadow appear to loom over the figure as he—critically eyed by a woman—seemingly proclaims:

Hey, I think the following. That flag wraps a box. What actually is in the box, no one has ever seen. Going back, that broken box is thrown away and that ragged flag is ripped apart.

Tell the victor that he made a mistake. The world already started to change long before.22

In these thoughts, Zhu Wei expresses his opposition to the deprecation of all things Western as well as the indiscriminate condemnation of all things traditional during Mao Zedong’s era. By including the banner of a pharmacy that claims to join Western and Chinese medicine and to be thus able to “heal the wounded and rescue the dying,”Zhu Wei also voices his distrust for the current status quo. The banner seems to allude to the Chinese saying: “What kind of medicine is sold from that calabash?”23 Zhu Wei thus questions the effect this miracle cure (i.e. westernized modernization) will actually have on Chinese society.

 In Supreme Treatise on Moral Retribution, No. 18 (2000) (fig. 8) Zhu Wei provides the viewer with an answer to the above question: it works like a drug. Zhu Wei most strongly expresses this physio- logical condition in the eyes of his figures. In their function as windows onto the soul, the eyes— either closed or open—take on the central role of transmitting emotion in Zhu Wei’s works and in this thematic context they are particularly dominant. The female figure seems to be in the process of swearing an allegiance, her eyes conveying reverence and submission. Similarly, the eyes of the two men in the background effuse transfixion mixed with a hint fascination and disbelief.

In the Chinese title of this painting, Zhu Wei alludes to Daoist beliefs of immortality. In Daoist lore a person that meets the celestial Laozi, the enigmatic father of Daoism, may be given a capsule imparting him/her with immortality. It is here that Zhu Wei draws the parallel with China’s contemporary situation. For the CCP Laozi’s capsule of immortality came in the form of economic moderniza- tion, giving the government a new lease on life. Moreover, as the figure’s expressions suggest, the populace’s striving for material wealth propels an obsession similar to the desperate search for immortality potions by Figure 8. Zhu Wei, Supreme Treatise on Moral Retribution, No. 18, 2000, ink and colour on some Daoist adepts. paper. Courtesy of Plum Blossoms (International) Ltd., Hong Kong

Zhu Wei pushes the concept of trance- like following to the point of fanati- cism in some other works. In Sunflowers, No. 30 (2000) (fig. 9), the viewer re-encounters the two men from the painting discussed above who are joined by an almost identical third figure. The window, through which the scene is observed, probably refers to Zhu Wei’s studio—the turquoise star depicted on the left wall is identical to his own bronze sculpture China Diary Star (1999). The viewer thus shares the artist’s perspective both visually and psychologically. As the title implies, the Figure 9. Zhu Wei, Sunflowers. No. 30, 2000, ink and colour on paper. Courtesy of Plum Blossoms (International) Ltd., Hong Kong figures pass by in a seemingly hypnotic state, transfixed by the object of their avidity. In Utopia, No. 32 (2002) (fig. 10) the artist portrays two bald-headed men that seem to absurdly cheer on an event beyond the picture plane. Like the figures in the painting above, their state is one of puppets in a carefully orchestrated spectacle. Hence, both works exude a chilling atmosphere of absurdity and docility.

 Interestingly, it seems that in Zhu Wei’s world, the people’s attitude changes little when the bubble of economic prosperity bursts. His Festival (1998) series focuses on the mass lay-offs of employees from China’s state-owned enterprises starting in 1998.24 It is the pallid faces of these people that the viewer sees in Festival, No. 21 (1998) (fig. 11). Although in dire straits, the eyes of the two men effuse the same hypnotic quality as the figures in the works discussed above. The arid landscape and the industrial area in the background, as well as the men’s apparent passiveness, strongly evoke the desolate state with which they are faced. Watching the government sponsored firework Figure 10. Zhu Wei, Utopia, No. 32, 2002, ink and colour on paper. display in celebration of the Chinese Courtesy of Plum Blossoms (International) Ltd., Hong Kong New Year,25 their expressions do not reflect the joyousness typically associated with the most important festival of the Chinese lunar calendar. But they also show no sign of rebellion. Deprived of any social insurance system and forced into poverty, they still stand there as onlookers—inert and anesthetized.

What makes them such docile creatures, Zhu Wei seems to imply, is the government’s aforementioned propaganda machinery. Despite the superficially increasing freedoms, this behemoth from the Mao era still works today as an alarmingly effective mind-control apparatus. It entertains the masses and promises everyone a better future. The privations of today, it pledges, will be the prosperity of tomorrow. By adding a dash of national pride26 to the mélange—as Zhu Wei also seems to suggest in his Utopia (2002) series—it has found a new Figure 11. Zhu Wei, Festival, No. 21, 1998, ink and colour on paper. and highly effective opiate for its people. Courtesy of Plum Blossoms (International) Ltd., Hong Kong

***

As can be seen from these works, Zhu Wei’s art is inextricably bound to China’s present condi- tion—from historical catharsis to social transmutation. The disjunctures that mark contemporary Chinese life are evidenced by the effortless coexistence of different times and events within the same painting. Zhu Wei’s keen observations allow him to successfully indict, unmask, and thus rebel against the status quo.

 Figure 12. Zhu We, Sweet Life, No. 38, 1999, ink and colour on paper. Courtesy of Plum Blossoms (International) Ltd., Hong Kong

Yet, Zhu Wei has a deep-seated love and reverence for his country and culture. The lyrics for “This Space”27 by the famous Chinese rock-star Cui Jian,28 which Zhu Wei inscribed on Sweet Life, No. 38 (1999) (fig. 12), reflects the artist’s torn, yet emotional relationship with contemporary China. They read:

I can’t open the sky and I can’t penetrate the earth. Anyhow, freedom is not a temporary prison. You can’t leave me and I can’t leave you. No one knows if in fact it’s love or dependence.

Money is just money and profit is just profit. But you and I are not slaves You can only serve me and I can only serve you. Just like pairs of small shrimps.

There is nothing fresh and new in this space Just like there is no secret in our love. I looked at you before but could not see into the depths. Who would have known that only after many encounters [I] understand that it’s a borderless void. Just like in this space.

All that I’ve thought I’ve not said and all that I’ve said I’ve not done. What makes me happy is playing the guitar and singing a song for you. Don’t intermittently cry and laugh. You’ve already know what kind of a thing I am for a long time.

Heaven is a pot and the surrounding is a desert. You are a dried-up well but the deeper the more beautiful. The fire in this breast, the sweat on this body That is the real sun, the real spring.

 There is nothing fresh and new in this space Just like there is no secret in our love. I looked at you before but could not see into the depths. Who knows that one can only understand after looking in and out that it’s a borderless void. Just like in this space.29

Set against the three factions that most strongly shape China’s reality: government, army, and the business world—personified by the gluttonous,30 businessmen in the background—Cui Jian’s lyrics reflect Zhu Wei’s independent spirit and underlines the contradictory structures that mark contemporary Chinese society. Whilst tracing society’s ugly face, Zhu Wei is able to pierce through its multi-faceted layering and see the beauty that lies beneath. It’s the source from which he derives his inspiration and it’s the soil that nurtures his dissent. In the same vein, he takes on the traditional Chinese painting medium only to transform it so that it may express his acute contemporary vision.

Notes 1 Hong Ying, Summer of Betrayal (New York: Grove Press, 1997), 132. 2 Interview with Carma Hinton, 1997. See digital disk Zhu Wei Diary (Hong Kong: Plum Blossoms (International) Ltd., 2000). 3 Sherman Chau, “Reality Checked,” in iConnect (November 3, 2000). 4 The cover of the book is in fact a portrait of Deng Xiaoping by Zhu Wei entitled China China (1997). 5 Geremie Barmé, In the Red (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 333. 6 Ibid., 326-327. 7 Examples are Wang Qingsong’s Night Revels of Lao Li (2000) and Hong Lei’s Imitating Zhao Mengfu’s Autumn Colors on the Que and Hua Mountains (2003). 8 The preparations for the repatriation of the then British colony, which included the creation of a PLA unit that was dispatched for special training in a Guangdong garrison in 1995, was a central political topic after the turbulent waves created by the Tiananmen incident turned into occasional ripples. At exactly midnight on the eve of the handover of Hong Kong, these PLA soldiers crossed the border in the New Territories in a symbolic act of military conquest. 9 Xin Yang et al., Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting (New Haven: Yale University and Foreign Language Press, 1997), 78. 10 Fangzhou Jia, “Zhu Wei and His Determination,” in Zhu Wei Diary (Hong Kong: Plum Blossoms (International) Ltd., 2000), 281. 11 Translation by the author. 12 This aspiration was most famously encapsulated in Mao Zedong’s ringing 1957 proclamation that China will be equal or even surpass Britain in industrial productivity within fifteen years. See Immanuel Hsü, The Rise of Modern China (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 655. 13 Records of the Strange, Second Volume is a Ming dynasty collection of short stories. Zhu Wei presents this series as a new edition of that book. Compilations of stories describing strange events have a long history in China. Liaozhai’s Records of the Strange by Pu Songling (1640-1715 AD) is one such example. In the same vein as Pu, Zhu Wei here presents himself to us as a historian of the strange. See Judith Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). 14 Xin Yang et al., Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting (New Haven: Yale University and Foreign Language Press, 1997), 61. 15 Ibid. See endnote 13. 16 This word refers to the name of a dancehall in Shanghai that opened in 1932. 17 This usually refers to pre-liberation Shanghai. 18 Translation by the author. 19 Geremie Barmé, In the Red (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 344. 20 Similar concerns can also be seen in a number of works by China’s youngest generation of contemporary artists. 21 The Raffles Hotel in Singapore is famed for its “Long Bar.” A connection can also be drawn to Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781-1826), who was an agent and colonial administrator of the British East India Company. In 1824 he purchased Singapore Island for the British Empire. 22 Translation by author. 23 A bottle gourd is a medicine repository for traveling monks. Their medicine is said to alleviate any illness and sometimes even impart immortality. 24 Within four years, a total of more than twenty-six million Chinese lost their jobs—out of which ten million remained unemployed by 2002. Already poor areas, such as China’s northeastern “rustbelt,” were hit particularly hard. See People’s Daily website: http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200210/27/eng20021027_105729.shtml. 25 Not shown in this work but in others that are part of this series. 26 Most directly apparent since the victorious bid for the 2008 Olympics in 2001. 27 From Cui Jian’s 1991 album Resolve. 28 Cui Jian is one of Zhu Wei’s closest friends. In the early 1990s he created the stage backdrop that Cui Jian still uses for his performances . 29 Translation by the author. 30 Holding one’s chopsticks close to the tip is a sign of greed.

  :  

   

Zhang O, a young photographer who emigrated from China to London, produces work that frankly portrays the human body. Her art functions like a fulcrum: one side reflects the visual language of contemporary art while the other mirrors the great artistic traditions of China. Though not always readily apparent, this heritage has had a determining role in the evolution of her practice. For Zhang O, as for many other contemporary Chinese artists, this heritage is the art of the literati, a centuries old tradition of creation for love, not money, and for sincerity of personal expression, not conspicuous virtuosity.

Modern events, such as the Cultural Revolution have had a significant impact on Zhang O. Although she was only a small child at the time of the revolution, her life was marked by continual relocation and adaptation to new environments. Not only did she suffer the turmoil of being uprooted, but, from an early age, she also had to learn new language skills and make new friends. Zhang O continues to live the peripatetic life of an urban nomad, and her art operates from the point of view of a detached observer. In her writings, Zhang O speaks in idyllic terms of her childhood in the countryside, to which she (at the age of one) and her parents were transferred as part of the re-education program of the Cultural Revolution. Present also in her work is the desire to recapture this tranquility:

From the age of one to seven, I was brought up in a very impoverished and remote little village in Jishou in Hunan province. During the Cultural Revolution, my parents as intellectuals (English translators) were sent to Jishou to be re-educated as peasants on a pineapple farm. Life was hard, but as a young girl I appreciated my time there, for Jishou has some of the most beautiful mountains and lakes in China. I played with leaves and sand, instead of with city children’s toys. I remember talking to trees and fish and drawing in the sand while my parents were working. From that moment I began to love nature. My friends in kindergarten belonged to the Miao and Tujia minority peoples and I spoke their language (which now I have forgotten) and learned much from their culture. These precious childhood experiences have been the basis of my aesthetic development.

In 1983, Zhang O’s family was relocated to bustling Guangzhou, the provincial capital of Guangdong. It was there, at the age of seven, that she began her artistic career, studying diligently at the Children’s Palace and continuing on at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. Having gained entry to the prestigious Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts, she resettled in the national capital and learned the Beijing dialect. During this period Zhang O felt estranged from the academic artistic milieu. Bored by the limitations of the traditional academic program, which stressed the acquisition of technical skills rather than individuality or self-expression, she turned to photography as an extra-curricular activity. Working from an outsider’s perspective, she explored the expressive possibilities of the nude body, and a conceptual process for the production of her art. Masterpieces in My Eyes (1998) related the aesthetic and political aspects of the female body in the history of art. Taking slides of Western masterpieces painted by men, Zhang O projected onto them slides of her own photographs of living female models. “The nudity of the modern woman acted as the canvas for the works of the old masters. This raised questions about sexual distinctions and domination, about seeing and being seen.”

After completing her degree, Zhang O grew disenchanted with the dominance of men in the artistic institutions of Beijing, and left for London. She participated in graduate photography

 programs at the Royal College of Art, London, and the Byam Shaw School of Art. Once again she had to learn a new language and adjust to a new social milieu. From the distant perspective of England, Zhang O rediscovered Chinese art. Continuing the conceptual basis of combining ancient art and modern photographs of nudes, she created Water Moon.But here she used ancient Chinese Figure 1. Zhang O, Blackhair 1, 2001, c print, 76.2 x 101.6 cm. Courtesy of the artist paintings as her source. The artist described her surprise and delight in finding a book on erotic Chinese paintings of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) entitled Clouds and the Rain: The Art of Love in China (published in 1969). The beauty and sensuality of this art struck her deeply and she realized the irony of having to Figure 2. Zhang O, Blackhair 2, 2001, c print, 76.2 x 101.6 cm. Courtesy of the artist discover her own culture in a foreign place. Due to the restrictive policies of the government, the book was not available in China.

In this series of works, Zhang O reversed her artistic process: she made slides of the paintings and projected them onto a nude model seated in a bathtub.

For me, water has an erotic connotation: two people having intercourse feel a similar sensation of wetness, and one can feel something of a link to the ancient book of love. The darkness in the bathroom obscures the dialogue between the paintings and myself, between the old narratives and my imagination.

Zhang O distinguished herself in 2000 with the series China Hair, in which she photographed long black tresses in a series of contexts. Her images combine portraits of contemporary nudes and Chinese artistic sensibilities:

I posed nude models in a bathtub, and then I arranged their long black hair on their skin as if painting strokes on a blank canvas. This is similar to Chinese calligraphy and ancient landscape paintings. I used a strong light source, highlighting only the female form, while the rest of the image was in darkness. I wanted to create a sense of feminine vulnerability and fragility.

Thus, Zhang O manipulated the long hanks of ebony hair, as though writing with it, into calligraphic patterns on the nape of the damp necks of nude women in a bathtub (figs. 1 and 2). Twirling and overlapping, the wet strands fluidly mimic pictographs. Multivalent metaphors of Chinese survival and artistic traditions, the luxuriant tresses carry the thousands of years of genetic material of the Chinese race, just as the writing is a continuation of the ancient artistic traditions of China. Both the writing and the woman are estranged from their habitat: the writing liberated from the paper and pen, the woman adrift in a Western-style tub of water. Erotic connotations inescapably arise.

 But in conformity with the conservative nature of Chinese erotic art, in which the figures usually remain clothed, the emotional and sexual situation is alluded to rather than explicitly stated.

Another photograph focuses only on the strands of hair interweaving and overlapping in abstract patterns that capture the dynamism of writing. Here, the tri-planar organization of pictorial space is rejected in favour of the 360-degree calligraphic space that is grounded on the two- dimensional plane. It is, nonetheless, an exploration of space created by interaction of the fluid ink lines that overlap, pull and push, Figure 3. Zhang O, from China Village Project, 2004, c print, twist and glide. In another photograph a fringe of 40.6 x 45.7 cm. Courtesy of the artist black tresses cascades from the top of the rectangular composition. Thinly distributed into linear columns, the hanks of hair allude to the method of Chinese writing from the top of the page in vertical columns. Each sinuously moving linear element recreates the cursive script and its calligraphic space. The photograph captures the vertical organization, the movement of the linear elements, and the monochromatic aesthetic that dominates calligraphy and painting. One can view the image as an abstract composition or as pictorial representation, as a written script or as a portrait.

In a third photograph of the series, a thick body of hair hovers above the London skyline. Like a bird, the disembodied tresses float high above the architecture, and their spatial juxtaposition with the cityscape below is dizzying. The composition forms a diamond-shape: at the top is the disembodied hair; at the bottom are two tall London apartment buildings. Only the tops of the towers are visible, like the peaks of distant twin mountains in a Chinese landscape painting. More concretely, they evoke the small, intimate and fragmented compositions of the Southern Song period (1127-1279). Placed at the top, the hair functions like the sentimental and personalized cal- ligraphic inscriptions that crown monochrome ink paintings of the literati school. The image can also be interpreted as a narrative statement: the floating tresses referring to the Chinese diaspora who, like Zhang O herself, are adrift in a large and alien Western metropolis. Zhang O seeks to integrate the disparate images, the floating hair and the urban towers, into one, a synthesis of East and West, of female allure and urban setting. The dark overcast skies are ominous, but there is a synthesis in the balance of the monochromatic forms of the composition.

Recently Zhang O has been working in the medium of video. Her aesthetic consideration of the idea of female sexuality has been transformed into a more conceptual one. She is interested in exploring the male-female relationship by “focusing on a couple comprising an Asian female and Western white male. Here is the subversion of people’s expectations, the confrontational aspects of sexuality and the race/power/gender relations, which are so deeply repressed.”One video work takes place outside, in the open air, rather than in a secretive darkened interior. Playground is a series of four short films made in collaboration with Shan Ng, a young female artist from Hong Kong. They wrote the script, created the story board, found the models, did the photography, and together completed the editing. In a sunlit playground, the model, as instructed, moved as she wished and did things that gave her pleasure. “The video highlights contradictory values: innocence and guilt, youth and age, restraint and freedom, East and West, and the ambiguity of work and play.”

 In the film Hair Impossible, Zhang O and Shan Ng again wrote the story, collaborated on the photography and editing, and Zhang O performed. Presenting the theme of “a man trapped by a mysterious young woman into a wild and insane game ...the film portrays the sinister side of human sexuality, as well as its funny aspects; the dilemma of love, and the absurdity of life; the subversion of white male power and the mysterious identity of female; the obsession of beauty and the ambiguity of sex.”

Zhang O returned to China to shoot her recent effort, China Village Project (figs. 3 to 6). “I felt the need to go back to my roots, to make art, and to consider the political aspects. Relating to my early childhood memories, I have gone back to a remote Chinese village to take pictures of innocent little girls.”Zhang O chose not to return to her old village, but to go instead to one nearby. She wanted the children to experience her as a stranger, an outsider. The photographs capture the look of the girls, isolated in a rural village, as they try to relate to someone who does not speak their language. Intrigued but slightly apprehensive,some smile guardedly, some stare unblinkingly at the camera, some are charmed by the attention.

Figures 4 to 6. Zhang O, from China Village Project, 2004, c prints, 40.6 x 45.7 cm each. Courtesy of the artist

Her installation of the twenty-seven photographs, exhibited at the Ethan Cohen Gallery in New York, is inspiring. Seven photographs show the girls against a brilliant blue sky as they squat looking down at the camera; these images are mounted on the upper wall of the gallery. At centre are a series of girls who crouch and look directly at the camera; they are placed in a green field of grass. In the lowest last row, the girls sit on their heels and look up at the viewer. Entering the pictorial space, one encounters the young girls both individually and collectively. This is a poignant subject for Zhang O; for her these are the lost girls of China who, having survived the waves of abortion and adoption that swept the country under the one-child policy, have struggled to survive rural poverty and ignorance in a male-dominated society. It would seem that when Zhang O returned to China, she saw herself in the faces of these young girls.

As Zhang O explains, “From a Communist community in a remote village in China to a capitalist international capital in the United Kingdom, I have had lots of experiences. It has become apparent that it is necessary for me to address my cross-cultural identity.”Contemporary in format and technique, Zhang O’s photographs are images of the self transplanted to the West. Seeking to contextualize the body in its new urban environment, these portraits juxtapose abstract images in flight outside of the home with intimate interior scenes of the nude body. It is also possible to see in them Chinese aesthetic traditions: the ancient calligraphy of the written language, monochromatic landscape paintings, the ideal beauty’s black tresses, and Asian anatomical characteristics. Zhang O takes these multivalent images and places them in a contemporary setting: the bathtub, the cityscape, the rural village. The body, a personal metaphor, is in placed in a global context.

 <>:  ()       

Melissa Chiu speaking at MUTATIONS<>CONNECTIONS. Photo credit: Zheng Shengtian

From June 4 to 5, 2004, the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Centre

A) held its third international symposium at the Emily Carr Institute of Art, Design and Media entitled “MUTATIONS<>CONNECTIONS: Cultural (Ex)Changes in Asian Diasporas.”

Organized in conjunction with an exhibition at Centre A by three Canadian artists of Asian descent, the event brought together over twenty-five artists, critical theorists, cultural organizers, curators and educators from Sydney, Singapore, New York, Manchester, Minneapolis, San

Francisco, and across Canada to present their views on the situation of contemporary art in Asian diasporic communities.

Over the past two decades, changing conditions of international contemporary art exhibition practices, local community networks, and opportunities to travel have reconfigured the ways in which work by artists of Asian descent is shown both locally and on the international stage. These activities are not only deeply implicated in, but intensified through, the continually evolving discourses of cultural politics and globalization. Consequently, questions of territorial representa- tion, cultural exchanges, and institutionalization are now central to how contemporary Asian art is being presented and received in different diasporic communities around the world. “MUTATIONS<>CONNECTIONS: Cultural (Ex)Changes in Asian Diasporas” sought to address these fields of inquiry in relation to Canada, USA, UK, Australia, and Singapore, by discussing critical frameworks, challenges, new approaches, and emerging contexts for exhibiting and disseminating the work of Asian artists in these regions. While diaspora, as a concept and practice, may be antiquated, the serious problematization of the significance of identity politics and the diaspora has been fairly recent. Notably, it has been within the fields of cultural production, visual culture, transnational and migration studies, so strongly involved in the politics of representation, community and cultural exchange, that heated debates about the currency, if not shortcomings of the concept itself, have been forefronted. Little consensus exists regarding how to conceptualize diaspora as a categorization of identity and measure of place-belongingness.

Taking this into consideration, the main question of the symposium revolved around how such connections, in relation to contemporary artistic practice, are being negotiated given the accelerated mutations of social structures, conditions and relationships. How, for example, are relationships between recent immigrant groups and third- or fourth- generation Asian Canadian, Asian

American, Asian Australian communities formed, sustained and at times conflictual? How is the current transnational mobility of ideas, artists of Asian descent, and their works reflected in shifting notions of identity, artistic interventions, exhibition practices, and dissemination of research? In what ways do aesthetic innovations and cultural differences persist or are even generated by new economic, cultural and technological apparatii? Does encompassment necessarily curtail artistic practice, agency and social activism?

This line of questioning informed the grouping of the symposium presentations into four panel discussion topics, namely, “Turf Wars: Geopolitics of Representing Contemporary Art by

Asian Diasporas,”“Image Connections: Exhibition Strategies Negotiating the Local/Global Nexus,”

“Fa(c)ulty Premises: Discourse, Pedagogy, and Institutionalization of Asian Art Histories,” and “Virtually Speaking: The Implications of New Media on Contemporary Asian and Asian

Diasporic Art.”

Curated by Alice Ming Wai Jim, in consultation with an advisory committee of local members of the arts and culture community in Vancouver, the “MUTATIONS<>CONNECTIONS: Cultural

(Ex)Changes in Asian Diasporas” international symposium and exhibition taken as a whole provided a space of dialogue and a critical look at the specificities, similarities and complexities of the current situation of contemporary art in Asian diasporas in the countries where the speakers were presently living and working. The following transcripts are edited versions of eight of the papers delivered at the symposium designed to stimulate discussion and critical discourse.   ⁄ :       

 

I would like to begin my discussion today with a comment from a leading Chinese artist, Cai Guoqiang. He has said of his work:

You can understand my [art] ...ifyou make an effort to detach yourselffrom the material or subject and concentrate on the underlying order that runs through them. The order and attitude never change, while everything else does. It is a matter of looking for the absence of change through a thousand changes.

This idea of the absence of change through a thousand changes is an idea that we might look at more closely in the context of this conference’s discussion of Asian diasporas. Cai Guoqiang is one of a number of Chinese artists who left China at a crucial point in their careers in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These artists played a role in the development of experimental art practices in their home country that culminated in the China Avant-Garde exhibition of 1989, and they migrated at a period called “leave the country fever” before the political crackdown following the events at Figure 1. Yan Pei-Ming, Mao applaudissant, 2004, oil on canvas, 250 x 250 cm. Courtesy of Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris Tiananmen Square on June 4th, 1989. Cai Guoqiang and his peers, among them Gu Wenda, Xu Bing, Hung Liu, and Yun Feiji, migrated to the United States while France became a destination for Chen Zhen, Yan Pei-Ming (fig. 1), Yang Jiechang (fig. 2), and Huang Yongping. Sydney was another significant destination—aided by the Australian government granting students residency after June 4th—which saw the settlement of artists such as Guan Wei, Guo Jian, and Ah Xian. The migration of leading figures from China constitutes something of an external Chinese art community, and critics such as Fei Dawei, himself an immigrant who settled in Paris after assisting with the Magiciens de la Terre exhibition at the Musée Georg Pompidou, described it as a split into two art worlds. Nearly ten years have passed since their migration, and much has changed in China with more and more fluidity between this outside and inside community (not least of which is the recent mainland Chinese government’s desire to include these overseas artists in their national shows). But what is notable is the international recognition of these Chinese diaspora artists. This group of artists offers a unique opportunity to study a diasporic community since they left China at about the same time and settled in different places around the world. In defining this diaspora both Xu Bing and Chen Zhen have spoken of their generation as having experienced unique cultural changes that affected their work.During the first decade they experienced the Cultural Revolution as idealistic youth. During the second decade they witnessed the liberalization and opening up of China that included an engagement with western ideas. And during the third decade they lived in the West. These

 commonalities lend themselves to a con- sideration of this generation as uniquely placed and offer us new ways to look at issues of Chineseness as it has developed outside of China.

Cai Guoqiang’s description of the absence of change through a thousand changes is a thread that runs through much of the artwork by the Chinese artists who settled in New York, Paris, and Sydney. It speaks about a residual attachment towards Chineseness within the radical change brought about by migration and, more specifically, accounts for the way that Figure 2. Yang Jiechang, Guillotine, 1990-94, ink on xuan paper, gauze, 105 x 110 cm. Courtesy of the artist Chinese diaspora engages in various ways with different cultures to reconfigure a notion of Chineseness. The renewed Chineseness apparent in overseas Chinese contemporary art is produced by the interaction between the new host culture and the originary Chinese culture. Any discussion of this kind of binary between homeland and site of settlement, however, must take into consideration the development of ideas about diaspora since this is one of the most important theoretical and historical frameworks.

So what is diaspora and what does it offer to this discussion of Chinese artists? The concept of diaspora has been, up until recently, mainly used to describe a Jewish experience even though the experience is much older. Yet the definition has broader applications, helping to explain the cultural effects of displacement as a consequence of migration. Since the title of this symposium includes diaspora it might be useful to consider some of the qualities that this term embodies. William Safran’s essay “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return” offers a comprehensive definition of diaspora as a community or people with the following qualities:

1) they, or their ancestors have been dispersed from a specific original “centre” to two or more “peripheral”,or foreign, regions; 2) they retain a collective memory, vision, or myth about their original homeland—its physical location, history, and achievements; 3) they believe that they are not—and perhaps cannot be—fully accepted by their host society and therefore feel partly alienated and insulated from it; 4) they regard their ancestral homeland as their true, ideal home and as the place to which they or their descendants would (or should) eventually return—when conditions are appropriate; 5) they believe that they should, collectively, be committed to the maintenance or restoration of their original homeland and to its safety and prosperity; and 6) they continue to relate, personally or vicariously, to that homeland in one way or another, and their ethnocommunal consciousness and solidarity are importantly defined by the existence of such a relationship.

In general, these conditions can be applied to overseas Chinese artists. The first four definitions, for example, correspond to the Chinese diaspora. In spite of the fact that over a decade has passed since the migration of the artists discussed in this paper, the reference points, themes and materials they sometimes utilize are identified with Chinese culture. Indeed, if one applies Safran’s comprehensive definition to artists who left China in the 1980s and 1990s, there is little doubt they would be considered a diasporic artistic community. This idea of a diasporic community is reinforced further by the self-conscious identification of an overseas Chinese artist community. What defines the overseas artists already discussed as a group is the construction of a relationship with China as the homeland in spite of their various sites of settlement in Australia, the United States, and France.

 Nevertheless, the most persistent problem with discussions of diaspora is an emphasis on the homeland over the new place of settlement. It is the focus on there (homeland) rather than here (residence), on the past rather than the present, that characterizes much diaspora theory. Cai Guoqiang’s idea of the absence of change through a thousand changes is one way of accounting for this fraught positioning of the past and present. He acknowledges the past that is China, but also acknowledges its transition to a thousand changes.

In something of a similar fashion, Chen Zhen has developed his own theory to account for his migratory experiences. He called this transexperience and one could think of it as an account of cultural transformation. Rather than being founded on a sense of loss or displacement from the homeland, transexperience provides a conceptual framework for addressing questions such as: to what extent has migration affected the work of overseas artists and their sense of Chineseness? Indeed, Chineseness may be the common ground among artists living in Australia, the United States, and France, but transexperience describes the desire to go beyond China as the sole reference point by exploring the transformation of Chineseness in new cultural environments.

While the concept of transexperience was developed by Chen Zhen for his own practice, I would argue that can be applied to the artistic expression of all the overseas artists discussed today. According to Chen Zhen, transexperience “summarizes vividly and profoundly the complex life experiences of leaving one’s native place and going from one place to another in one’s life.” Transexperience thus suggests not so much an individual’s experience of travel but a type of “internal ‘loneliness of spirituality and the overlapping of life experiences’,a type of ‘cultural homelessness’,namely, you do not belong to anybody, yet you are in possession of everything.” The sense of “overlapping” and non-belonging described by Chen Zhen provided him with a framework with which to explore a multiplicity of experiences. It also allowed him to incorporate his Chinese art training into his work, the content of which could be described as really about living in France. Chen Zhen’s approach towards transexperience also limited the salience of an oppositional relationship between China and the West. In general, however, transexperience applies to the work of Chinese diasporic artists because it does not rely solely on an interpretation of the dual relationship between the past (China as the homeland) and the present (Australia, the United States, and Europe). Instead, transexperience describes the transformation of Chineseness in different cultural contexts.

What transexperience encourages is a more fluid perception of the relationship to China, not only positing China as the past but also the present. This consideration of the homeland as both a residual and evolving influence rather than fixed at the moment of migration also goes against the grain of numerous accounts of diaspora, and provides evidence that aspects of the Chinese diaspora may not conform readily to strict definitions. Indeed, the interplay between the past and the present could be described as one of the defining characteristics of the Chinese artistic diaspora. Such a combination of time frames is played out in different ways in the work of all the overseas artists examined here, as well as others.

At least three main distinctive strategies are used by overseas Chinese artists to explore the past and the present, which are employed both simultaneously and alternately in their work. The three strategies are: firstly, the juxtaposition of memories of China with its current reality; secondly, the recovery of Chinese iconography as a way of remembering the past at a geographical and psychological distance; and lastly, the modification of Chinese signifiers, such as Chinese

 Figure 3a. Huang Yongping, Kearny Street, 1994, installation. Photo credit: Ben Blackwell. Courtesy of CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts characters, to make them accessible to non-Chinese. I would like to take a moment to outline these strategies in more detail.

The first strategy is one of comparative juxtaposition. By way of example, a number of Chen Zhen’s works sought to contrast his childhood experiences during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s with the turn towards a market economy and growing consumerism in the 1990s which he observed during visits back to China after migrating to Paris. Works such as Daily Incantations (1996) included chamber pots to symbolize his childhood and recall the daily ritual when, every morning on his way to school, women washed chamber pots in the streets as he recited sayings from his little red book. In contrast to these rustic, utilitarian objects, Chen Zhen included electronic detritus such as computer keyboards, cables, and monitors as symbols of Shanghai’s emergent manufacturing industry. Chen Zhen’s approach is based upon his own memories and responses to change in his homeland while Huang Yongping’s installations demonstrate a wider, historical view of the Chinese diaspora by exploring Chinese immigration as a central theme. His historical allegory of nineteenth century Chinese migration and anti-Chinese movements in Kearny Street (1994) (figs. 3 a-b) are contrasted with the story of more recent illegal Chinese immigrants in Human Snake Plan (1993) (fig. 4). These works acknowledge past and present-day

 Figure 3b. Huang Yongping, Kearny Street (detail), 1994, installation. Photo credit: Ben Blackwell. Courtesy of CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts

Chinese migration to the United States, which allows a comparison between the Chinese diaspora of the late nineteenth century and that of the late twentieth century. Works by Chen Zhen and Huang Yongping examine the past from the distance of their decade-long residence in the West.

The second strategy overseas artists utilize in referring to past experiences in China is the reinter- pretation of Chinese iconography. Works such as Cai Guoqiang’s re-staging of Rent Collection Courtyard for the Venice Biennale in 1999 is a good example of this form of appropriation (figs. 5 a-b). The original Rent Collection Courtyard was a sculptural tableau made in 1956 that subsequently toured throughout China during the Cultural Revolution as a statement against feudalism. Cai Guoqiang even contracted one of the artists who worked on the original sculptures. Yet when he re-staged this work, one of the most famous art works of the Cultural Revolution, it was distanced from its original political message. Overseas artists such as Yang Pei-Ming and Zhang Hongtu address the highly codified tradition of Mao portraits and both consider their consistent use of Mao during the 1990s as a form of iconoclasm not possible when they lived in China. The deployment of iconography from the Cultural Revolution is based on the formative period in these artists’ lives, when most were at school or joining the Red Guards.

The final strategy is the transformation of Chinese signifiers outside China. This includes the adaptation of Chinese writing, evident in Xu Bing and Gu Wenda’s invention of hybrid forms of Chinese characters. Xu Bing’s New English Calligraphy,for example, constructs a new script from English that resembles the form of Chinese calligraphy while Gu Wenda’s United Nations series of installations combines Chinese with other languages to create an entirely fictitious and unreadable language. Both artists reform their first language, Chinese, by combining it with English and in some cases other languages. One might say that this modification of Chinese acknowledges their residence outside China. In a different way, Yang Jiechang modifies the Chinese tradition of ink painting by excluding conventional subjects such as flowers, birds or landscapes. He removes all figurative references so that his paintings, consisting of hundreds of layers of painted ink, are records of time.

 These three strategies chronicle the ways that overseas artists figure China as a site of both past and present-day relevance. Moreover, by bestowing equal priority on the past and the present, equal weight and acknowl- edgment is given to Chinese and non-Chinese references. The idea of cultural identity in flux, elucidated by Cai Guoqiang and Chen Zhen, also allows a discussion of the factors Figure 4. Huang Yongping, Human Snake Plan, 1993, installation. that might influence changes in Courtesy Wexner Center for the Arts Chineseness. Key elements here include the place of settlement, the circumstances of migration (such as forced exile or refugee status), and the age of the migrant when they left China. When we analyze the work of overseas Chinese artists with these ideas in mind, we are able to see transitions and changes as responses to their immediate and present environment. Chineseness is a fluid entity with the potential to respond and reflect new experiences. Nowhere is this clearer than in Cai Guoqiang’s conception of Chineseness as an omnipresent yet responsive force. In his words, it is “the absence of change through a thousand changes.”

Figure 5 a. Cai Guoqiang, Rent Collection Courtyard, 1999, clay. Courtesy of the artist Figure 5 b. Cai Guoqiang, Rent Collection Courtyard (detail), 1999, clay. Courtesy of the artist

Notes 1 Cai Guoqiang cited in Fei Dawei, “To Dare to Accomplish Nothing: Fei Dawei Interviews Cai Guo-Qiang,” Cai Guo-Qiang (2000), 134. 2 The Oxford English Dictionary, for instance, defines diaspora as “Jews living outside Israel.” 3 William Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,” Diaspora 1.1 (1991): 86–87. 4 Zhen Chen, “Transexperiences: A conversation between Chen Zhen and Xian Zhu,” Transexperiences: Chen Zhen (Kyoto: Center for Contemporary Art CCA Kitakyushu, 1998), n. p. 5 Chen, 1998, n. p. 6 Such a dichotomy between China and the West is described by Wang Hui as a defining feature of Chen’s generation because they have had an opportunity to experience and engage with Western society and “the most accepted paradigms of contemporary Chinese discourse are located within the ‘China/West’ and ‘tradition/modernity’ binaries.” See Wang Hui, “Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity,” Social Text 55 (Summer 1998): 9–44. See page 11 for the citation provided above.

  :       

 . 

Figure 1. Asian Art Museum of San Francisco-Chong Moon Lee Center for Asian Art and Culture, new facility opened March 2003, San Francisco, California

At any given moment, the field of contemporary Asian art is being defined and redefined by a vast international network of curators, artists, scholars, dealers, critics and collectors. At the nexus of these forces is the institution, a contested site rife with historical and political agendas. Over the past decade, the institution has played a crucial role contributing to contemporary Asian art’s development and current state of heightened awareness. And yet, exhibiting modern and contem- porary Asian art in American institutions is a conflicting process engaged at once in promoting Asian identities that are seen as intrinsically different while at the same time proclaiming their sameness and uniformity through the rhetoric of globalization. Asia-specific institutions and organizations, often based on cultural models, face distinct challenges in presenting and interpreting contemporary cultural reality. Exhibiting in an Asian museum has the undesired effect of labelling oneself or one’s work as Asian—something not always welcome for those trying to break onto the international stage. To fully understand the task of non-Western institutions representing contemporary Asian art, we must first grasp how its history has been shaped by being positioned in Western art museums.

The institution known as the art museum is, in basic terms, a cultural device created by and centred on Western European thought. It is an organization endowed with a mission, the project of enlightening the fellow members of civil society. Large scale periodic contemporary art exhibitions like Venice, São Paolo and Documenta, while lacking a singular physical building to house and display art, have come to stand in for “the institution” in a larger sense, commanding an authority and level of international prestige surpassing that of most art museums. Still, when

 a member of the art world thinks of the word institution, they most often conjure up an image of a physical art museum: the stereotypical white box setting or glass cases with an overall authorita- tive voice of the Establishment. Being that the museum itself is a modern Western invention, the existence of museums focused on non-Western art causes certain disjunctions and complications. Significantly, we can speak of an indigenous art of Asia, but we do not speak of an indigenous Asian art museum, a unique Asian-model art museum. Thus, the presentation of Asian art in a museum is, in simplistic terms, equivalent to taking something outside the West and placing it into the container of Western European thought.

Over the last ten years the relationship between contemporary Asian artists and Western art institutions in the United States has been inextricably bound up with the pervasive effects of glob- alization. Many scholars and critics have commented on the upsurge in attention to contemporary Asian art in recent years, citing at first the conspicuous numbers of Chinese artists at the Venice Biennale in 1999, the proliferation of biennales in Asia, increases in collecting by galleries and individuals and so on. Yet, the internationalization and globalization of contemporary Chinese art is in large part due to a cooperative relationship with Western art museums that began in the late 1990s. With the arrival of globalization, Western art museums have expanded their purview to regions beyond America and Europe, escalating the attention paid to the diversity of artists, locations and cultural perspectives and incorporating artists working around the globe in the name of globalism. Whereas multiculturalism adopted a politicized view aimed at correcting past oversights; under the sign of globalization institutions profess a new style of pluralism that is truly international in focus. But just as we need to be cautious of some aspects of globalism, so should we remain when it comes to pluralism. Pluralism is to be admired as long as the vast numbers of different countries and cultures in existence today are given equal treatment. However, the danger with pluralism is the tendency towards maintaining each regional culture in a pure condition, in other words, highlighting difference and deemphasizing instances of mixing and hybridity. However, lest we be fooled into thinking that the Museum of Modern Art or other contemporary art museums are truly interested in giving equal measure to non-Western cultures, we must remember than this “post-Orientalist grasp for the Other” as Hou Hanru puts it, is mainly driven by the economic and political interests that constitute the globalization process.1

This “grasp for the ‘Other’” witnessed at modern Western art museums in the 1990s was fuelled in part by curators and artists in China preoccupied with receiving recognition from the West. Just as multiculturalism placed undue emphasis on “self-correcting” the past, so did internationalism of contemporary Chinese art overstate its dependence on acceptance and approval at Western art institutions. The fixation on becoming “accepted” onto the international (read: Western) stage is symptomatic of certain aspects of cultural thought in post-Mao china. The very birth of experimental art in China, which defined itself against the status quo, was shaped by the counter-discourse of Occidentalism, which presented unremittingly favourable depictions of the West and negative attitudes to China’s past. In Chen Xiaomei’s study Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China, she cites two types of Occidentalism: the first being Official Occidentalism, in which the Chinese government uses the essentialization of the West as a means for supporting a nationalism that suppresses its own people. In other words, the ‘Western Other’ is construed by a Chinese imagination, not for the purpose of dominating the West, but in order to discipline, and ultimately to dominate the Chinese at home. The second formulation is Anti-official Occidentalism, in which its purveyors are not the established government or party apparatus but the opponents of those institutions. Anti-official Occidentalism can be understood as a powerful anti-official discourse using the ‘Western Other’ as a metaphor for a political liberation against

 ideological oppression within a totalitarian society. It supports the status quo of a ruling ideology, such as the one in contemporary China, which sees in the Western Other a potentially powerful alliance with an anti-official force at home.2 During the 1990s, as many artists were experiencing forms of official and self-censorship and lack of support for experimental art methods, the Western Other was imagined in terms of success but also symbolic of emancipation from Figure 2. Zhang Huan, Dream of the Dragon, performance, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, Golden Gate Park, April 1999. Photo credit: Kaz Tsuruta. Courtesy of the the repressive art environment. Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

Various aspects of this discourse is evident from the exhibition Inside Out: New Chinese Art, the first major collaborative effort aimed at presenting contemporary Chinese art on equal footing with international forms of contemporary art. With much of the art coming out of the 1985 New Wave Movement, there was an overall critical slant against Chinese culture and a sympathetic attitude towards the West. Figure 3. Dream of the Dragon (detail) While the show had many positive effects, mainly for the Western art institutions, it set a precedent for Asia-specific institutions. Stated on very first page of the catalogue for the exhibition is one of its goals, “SFMoMA as an internationally recognized institution of modern and contemporary art, can now add contemporary Chinese art to its program of exhibitions and collections, while the Asia Society, with its focus on creating better understanding of Asian cultures past and present, can illuminate the culturally specific nuances of new Chinese art”.3 Though maintaining the appearance of equality, this statement actually reveals the different levels at which each institution is operating by suggesting that the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has the ability to add this new area to its programming and collections while the Asia Society is only allowed to illuminate their path, thereby playing a secondary and subservient role. In its presentation in San Francisco, the exhibition is not often remembered as being split between the venues of Asian Art Museum (fig. 1) and SFMoMA. Many more recall the exhibition at SFMoMA, despite the fact that the artists who showed at the Asian Art Museum—those whose work bore a connection to ‘tradi- tion’—are also the so-called household names for contemporary Chinese art: Zhang Huan (figs. 2 and 3), Xu Bing, Gu Wenda, Cai Guoqiang, etc. Indeed, at the end of the day, major gifts and acquisitions that came out of the exhibition were added to the modern art institutions leaving the Asian institutions with little to show for their efforts.

So, why mention all of this about the 1990s? What does all of this have to do with representing contemporary art by Asian diasporas, as today’s panel is focused on? What I have attempted to discuss up to now is how Asian artists, Chinese artists in particular (of the 1990s), in placing overwhelming importance on being accepted at museums of modern and contemporary art, have bypassed being shown in Asian contexts by institutions solely focused on Asia.

 Moreover, museums of modern and contemporary art like MoMA have taken advantage of this myopic view, appropriating contemporary Asian artists into their exhibitions to serve their own appearances of being international and ‘global’.If one consistent feature of globalization is the tendency to co-opt all “non-Western Others” into its cultural imagination, obliterating differentia- tion, then how do non-Western institutions take up the task of carving out an independent domain? Is an independent domain what we really want anyway? Being that most contemporary Asian artists have up to now been positioned as “international,”how and can we see them as “Asian” again?

The danger in saying this, of course, brings us to question of what “Asian” is in the first place. Without detailing the ambiguities and complexities of the term “Asian” and all of its implications towards shared nationality, cultural traditions and identity, suffice it to say that the term itself in certain contexts means almost nothing. While “Asian” may be the currently preferred term, appearing more specific and culturally sensitive than the term “Oriental,”the word Asian falsely implies a unification of nationality and cultural traditions where there is none. Geographically speaking, Asia covers vast, and in some cases debatable, territory. The problem of Asia is not a problem of Asian identity. It is impossible to find any Figure 4. Simryn Gill, Standing Still, 2000-2003, C-print, series of 114. Courtesy of the artist and Barbara Flynn, Sydney and New York sort of criteria that gives inherent unity to all regions from West Asia to East. In this sense, in Akira Tatehata’s words, “Asia is an impossibility.”4 At the same time, Asia is unavoidable because regions outside of it have made it the object of colonialism and orientalism and thus it is impossible to not be conscious of Asia whether in a positive or negative way. And yet, as a designation it is nearly impossible to avoid, merely because the Western world requires something to call that which it is not. Attempts to relate everything into a single factor—Asianism, Asianness—makes it easy to simply skim the surface and ignore the multifarious layers and complexities of Asia. Systematized cultural meanings tend to simplify “us” and “them” while the concept of a national imaginary is constantly redefined, reworked and circulated.5 Thus representing contemporary art in an institution dedicated to Asian art capitulates all of these factors.

First, to say something is “Asian” in the context of an Asian art museum, for example, means nothing. It is like saying a painting by Matisse is “Western” while standing in the MoMA. Thus in Asian focused institutions a need has developed for more specific categories divided along geographic and cultural lines. Unlike many museums which are divided according to media— painting, sculpture, video and photography—Asian museums are arranged geographically— China, Japan, Korea, South Asia, Southeast Asia, etc. Such categorizations, however, are difficult to translate to the field of contemporary art. Within this system, there is little opportunity for inter-Asian dialogue between different regions, thus simplistically dichotomizing the world into West and non-West, civilization and the “Other.”The division along cultural areas forces artists

 Figure 5. Michael Lin, North Court 11.06.-22.08.04, painted plywood. Photo credit: Kaz Tsuruta. Courtesy of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco to be assigned to categories and designated as singularly Chinese or Thai or Indian. But what happens to artists who straddle these groupings?

An artist like Simryn Gill, a Southeast Asian artist born in Singapore, raised in Malaysia and Singapore, and currently residing in Sydney, Australia, exemplifies the difficulty in “categorizing” artists according to one cultural region. Gill’s Standing Still series in Malaysia (fig. 4), is from a body of work that, among other things, comments on the contemporary socio-economic climate of Malaysia and Southeast Asia in general, Malaysia’s colonial past and uncertain future, and Gill’s own past of growing up in the region as well as her position of returning “home” after having moved away to Australia.

Informed by Gill’s own individual experience and background, which is in itself multi-cultural, the work straddles simple cultural designations based on regional boundaries and obfuscates any efforts to simply classify her into one exclusive group. The reductivist strategy of assigning artists to one specific cultural category is problematic because it presumes the existence of distinct, non-overlapping groupings in the first place. Thus, Asian institutions must strike a balance between being overly specific to the point of pigeonholing and generalizing conditions of Asia and Asian artists.

 Additionally, presuming pure conditions in terms of culture is something that ought to be balanced with the recognition of multiple influences across and within Asia. An example in this case is Michael Lin, an artist whose work simultaneously inhabits realms of painting and installation. Lin salvages textile patterns found in Taiwanese homes, enlarges them to grandiose proportions and inserts them into architectural spaces where viewers can walk, sit or sleep upon them (fig. 5). Most writings on Lin’s work mention how the textiles are Taiwanese and have origins in Chinese decorative motifs and leave it at that. Such a simplistic reading, however, not only leaves out the role Japan plays in Taiwan’s history, but denies the existence of artistic influence across cultural borders.6 Acknowledging more than one cultural influence might complicate matters and reduce the ease of promoting Lin as a Taiwanese or Chinese artist, but it serves the double purpose of reminding us that areas of confusion and blurriness are vital points for dialogue.

In closing, I will quote critic Manray Hsu: “What we are witnessing now is the birth of a multi- centered world with cities and countries constantly vying for attention and authority of artistic claims.”7 Though written in relation to a discussion of biennales and global geopolitics, I think the statement can be aptly applied also to the multitude of art institutions who are currently vying for artistic claims, through competition for private and government funds. As more general art museums, museums of modern and contemporary art “lay claim” to contemporary Asian art, we must rethink how institutions focused on Asia can contribute to a deeper understanding through providing cultural context and historical tradition, while at the same time contributing to a dialogue of what it might mean to be exhibited in an Asian museum. The cultural perspective an Asian art museum can provide is at once intriguing and yet filled with the same missteps that plague modern and contemporary art museums. Still, what was once seen as a disadvantage due to labelling and categorization, is increasingly being looked upon as an advantage due to depth of cultural specificity and potentiality of engaging past histories. As more Asian artists reach international status and the fear of pigeonholing dissipates, there is a desire among certain artists to return to these ethnicized spaces, not as simply moving back in time or returning to one’s roots but rather as a form of continuity, a way of acknowledging what has always been there. Through this circular movement Asian museums have the potential to become vital sites for discursively engaging in the returns and recalls that constitute our postcolonial existence.

Notes 1 Hou Hanru, “Strategies of Survival in the Third Space: Conversation on the Situation of Overseas Artist in 1990s” in On the Mid-Ground. Selected Texts Edited by Yu Hsiao Hwei (Hong Kong: Timezone 8 Limited, 2002), 66. 2 Chen Xiaomei, Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 3. Though Chen’s book is primarily concerned with literary criticism, there are distinct parallels to be made with concurrent trends in visual arts. 3 Inside Out: New Chinese Art, (Berkeley: The Asia Society Galleries, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and University of California Press, 1998), foreword. 4 Akira Tatehata, “Asia as Passage,” in Yokohama 2001: International Triennale for Contemporary Art,(Yokohama: Organizing Committee for Yokohama Triennale, 2001), 88. 5 Apinan Poshyananda, “Asian Art and the New Millennium: From Glocalism to Techno-Shamanism,” International Symposium 1999: Asian Art: Prospects for the Future (Tokyo: Japan Foundation Asia Center, 2000), 165. 6 For a more thorough discussion on Michael Lin and contextualization of his art in the Asian Art Museum, see my publication Spaces Within: Installations by Michael Lin and Wu Mali (San Francisco: Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, 2004). 7 Manray Hsu, “Taiwanese Contemporary Art in International Exhibitions: A Case of Global Mapping,” in Spaces Within: Installations by Michael Lin and Wu Mali (San Francisco: Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, 2004), 11.

   :            

 

Figure 1. Arts Council of England Equal Opportunities Monitoring Form. Courtesy of Arts Council of England

Most of us in the United Kingdom will have looked at a monitoring form as an uninspiring finale to funding applications. It is a far cry from the creative processes and projects, ends, for which they are the means. I am referring to a particular Equal Opportunities monitoring form from the Arts Council of England (fig.1). It comes out of an overtly culturally aware period in the arts in the UK in which the term “cultural diversity” has been relentlessly brandished. With the Arts Council of England running a program over the last few years called Decibel, established in order to distribute funds and initiate debates around issues of diversity in the arts, regularly funded organizations have had to produce action plans to address cultural diversity, which specifically

 Figure 2. Ming Wong, Whodunnit?, 2004, video installation. Photo credit: Tim McConville. Courtesy of Chinese Arts Centre and the artist and reductively refers to ethnicity. As the art establishment has become increasingly aware of the need to invest more representatively, its approach has itself become a subject of interest.

This monitoring form was a starting point for London based Singaporean artist, Ming Wong’s recent video work, Whodunnit? (fig. 2). Set on a theatre stage, Ming cast his actors for this quintessentially English Agatha Christie style murder mystery in response to the categories provided by the monitoring form. We have Asian Oriental, Asian Indian, Afro-Caribbean, African, Middle Eastern, Latino American, Greek Cypriot, East European Jewish, and Irish. Allowing the actors (who are second and third generation British) to perform their own constructed versions of foreign dialects as well as speaking in RP (received pronunciation)—the voice of upper class England. The piece consists of an unstable, perpetually shifting and interchanging of accents as the drama unfolds—the voices of contemporary Britain. As a looped work the piece consists of two cycles each seventeen minutes long, and if the viewer watches the piece through more than one loop, they would be disorientated and a reading of the work would be destabilized by the switch in dialogue from RP to foreign and vice versa. Literally ticking all the boxes, it demonstrates the multiplicity and shifting nature of British identity whilst highlighting the inadequacy of the categories of definition.

Through the discrepancy between the images (the different faces and “English” attire) and sounds (accents which act as signifiers) we (the audience) have to grapple with our own desire to define and situate the characters we are watching. If we take Barthes’ concept of the fashion system—a new fashion being a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding era,1 and the notion of the dandy through which people are able to express themselves through their clothes,2 then the characters dressed in their classical English attire are denied any assertion of their own identity (be it influenced by their ethnicity or contemporary cultures with which they affiliate).

The insertion of multiculturalism or redress has been a prevalent component of Ming Wong’s work. An earlier piece, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Now,a precursor to Whodunnit?, placed members of various Asian families at dinner with film icons such as Katharine Hepburn, Sidney Poitier, and Spencer Tracy. Running parallel and also as part of his artistic practice, Ming carries

 out education, outreach and interpretative work—often acting out of an in-between space by mediating one culture with another, art with audience. Another project which echoes the concepts behind Whodunnit? is Angel of Westminster (fig. 3). Working with a school in London, the piece takes the faces of thirty-four children as material from which to create a new work—a new identity. The layering of faces denies giving priority to any one child or having their visuality as represen- Figure 3. Ming Wong, Angel of Westminster, 2002, digital print and animation. Courtesy of the artist and Serpentine Gallery Education Project tative of a particular racial or ethnic group. Instead the faces fade in and out, overlapping, merging, evolving, connecting and culminating in a single yet multiple face—the angel of Westminster. It is a face that does not exist yet the parts of which do, an enigmatic face of the future, in the animated version a “continual hybrid,”a mutation. Significantly all three of these works move away from a wholly self-reflective investigation of identity to a broader exploration of cultural identity within UK society as a whole.

Playing with the inadequacy of the categories we are offered to define ourselves has also been utilized by other Chinese artists based in the UK. If diasporas bring together often seemingly disparate and unconnected cultures then it has not been more simplistically yet powerfully communicated than by Anthony Key’s self-portraits. Using food as metaphors, they are soy sauce/ketchup and bread/noodles (figs. 4 and 5).

All too often the question is posed “where do you come from?” and “what do you do?” The question has been playfully answered by Susan Pui San Lok who has introduced herself with the tongue twisters: “YBBAACYRWBBWA”(young black british anglo asian chinese yellow red white blue brown woman artist) and “HKCBAASYWBBEECPWAW” (hong kong chinese british asian anglo sino yellow red white brown black essex Figure 4. Anthony Key, Soy/Ketchup, Self Portrait,1997, assembled. Courtesy of and photo by the artist english cantonese pidgin woman artist writer), which ironically references the abbreviation “yba” (Young British Artists). These abbreviations hint at the complexities of geography, language, ethnicity and nationality that whilst often contradictory are necessarily incoherent and shifting. It strives for and yet deliberately resists definition.

 There already exists an overwhelming desire for migration to be categorized, to identify for what purpose people are in the UK be it disasters, persecu- tion or economic reasons. The posi- tion of Chinese people in the UK has recently been highlighted by head- lines around issues of asylum seeking and most notably the Morecambe Figure 5. Anthony Key, Bread/Noodles (naturalisation series), 1997, assembled. Courtesy of and photo by the artist Bay tragedy, in which Chinese cockle pickers drowned. Whilst in the past the role of Chinese people in the UK has stereotypically been bound up with takeaway businesses (primarily set up by Hakka immigrants from the New Territories of Hong Kong), and privileged economic immigration and travel, the demographics are changing due to increasingly problematic border crossing and illegal immigration.

Reflecting this change and such high profile incidents, Cai Yuan and JJ Xi (the duo known as Mad for Real), two of the most prolific Chinese artists based in the UK, are currently creating new work which highlights the positioning of Chinese people in Britain. Their exhibition integrates elements of installation and documented performance shown as a projection. As artists that emigrated from China as opposed to being born in the UK, or having moved from Hong Kong at an early age as with most practising Chinese artists in the UK, the piece will reconstruct and critique the process of attaining citizenship based on their own memories and experiences. The artists will enact the ritualistic tongue-in-cheek attainment of British citizenship including their own renditions of the National Anthem, exposing the system of officially becoming British, in which the Queen and British passport act as tropes in the procedure.

Whilst “ in-betweenness’ has acted as a terrain for elaborating strategies of self-hood … that initiate new signs of identity,”3 it is no longer necessarily about existing at the margins, about otherness, singular categorization, or occupying the space between two cultures. A more positive approach would be to acknowledge shifts, flexibility, surprising connections and contradictions, an approach that privileges personal not official or institutional definitions.

Instead of fixed definitions, the notion of “contact” as developed by Mary Louise Pratt in her idea about “contact zones,”which emphasizes “the improvisation of encounters and which allows for co-presence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices”4 is a great deal more useful in discussing the complex realities of diasporic cultures.

Notes 1 Roland Barthes, The Fashion System (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 273. 2 Cited in Claire Wilcox ed., Radical Fashion (London: V & A Publications, 2001), 5. 3 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 2. 4 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 6-7.

        - 

 

Unlike Asian American Studies, which started in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the wake of anti-Vietnam protests, Civil Rights, Women’s and Black Liberation movements, Asian Canadian has been slower to emerge as a field of study.1 As Donald Goellnicht notes, although there were “considerable similarities between the two countries’ historical treatments of minorities of Asian origin”2 in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a parallel pan-ethnic Asian Canadian movement did not emerge until recently because of Canada’s official multiculturalism policy, and the relative small sizes of Asian-origin population and the Black population in Canada in the 1970s.

In the last decade, however, the demographics of the Canadian population has shifted considerably so that it is now feasible to think of Asian Canadians as a collective and, hence, to speak of Asian Canadian culture and criticism. Statistics Canada has documented the changing pattern of immigration to Canada over the last hundred years. Compared to fifty years ago when immigrants to Canada came mainly from Britain and Europe, today the largest group of immigrants originates from different parts of East, Southeast, and South Asia. If one looks at numbers by ethnic groups, even the largest group of Asians, the Chinese came in at about one million in 2001 (about 3.7% of the population), but if one takes all Asian-origin groups combined, the number is closer to three million (about 9.5 % of the total population). In metropolitan centres like Vancouver and Toronto, this number is much higher. With the increased size of immigrant as well as first and second generation Asian Canadians, there is now the critical mass needed for the establishment of a scholarly area of study as well as a political and social body.

The question that interests me in this paper is the way Asian Canadian identities have been constructed in the past, and the ways we ought to be representing ourselves and conceptualizing

 our collective identity. I argue that, with the recent shift in demographics, it is useful to theorize ways of representation and subjectivity that take into account the varying psycho-social, cultural, and historical experiences of this increasingly large group. In the past, coalitions have been made based on the shared history of discrimination and racism against Asian Canadians. And while it is still important to remember this history and to speak of this experience, I question the efficacy of maintaining a group identity based on a perpetuation of the sense of otherness and non-belonging. As Lisa Lowe has argued in relation to the practice of identity politics within Asian American discourse, I acknowledge the power and political necessity of identification as Asian Canadians. Lowe reminds us that “Asian American is not a natural or static category; it is a socially constructed unity, a situationally specific position that we assume for political reasons”.3 Yet, as in the US, politics and the binaries of dominant and subordinate, oppressor and oppressed have become more complicated. The question for scholars in the field is how to approach this pan-ethnic group composed of Chinese, Indian, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Tamil, Cambodian, Taiwanese, and Laotian people each with their varying histories, categories of immigration, economic and religious backgrounds. The paradigms used to analyze and discuss the Russian, Irish, German, Italian, Polish, and other European immigrants of the first half of the twentieth century, such as immigration, settlement, acculturation, and gradual assimilation to the dominant society are not necessarily suitable. For one thing, Asian immigrants, like Blacks, categorized as “visible minorities,”will not follow the path of Irish and eastern European ethnics who, though initially seen as “not quite white” in the mid-nineteenth century, slowly became regarded as white over the course of the twentieth century.4 At the same time, other groups, such as South Asians and Mexicans, though partially identified as white became nonwhite in the US.5 As critics of White Studies note, whiteness, in part, was only made possible by the distinction made between Europeans and Blacks, and to a lesser extent, Asians who were figured as other and non-white.6 We are the “others” who make white identity possible.

 Another problem within the field of Asian Canadian Studies that did not occur with European immigrants is the rapid shift of demographics in the post-1970s group of immigrants. The accelerated pace of new immigrants from countries such as China and India in recent years means that there is less chance of a stable body of Asians settling and becoming absorbed by the existing communities around them. What Douglas Massey notes of the difference in the pattern of older European immigrants and those of Asian and Latin American immigrants in the US is applicable to our situation in Canada. Massey notes that for European immigrants, there was a hiatus in their immigration between 1931 and 1970 “which allowed the slow social processes that aid assimilation to take effect,”as well as a period of economic expansion which made economic and social mobility easier. These conditions do not exist for Asian and Latin American immigrants.7 In Canada, there was similarly a decrease of immigrants from European countries after the 1980s, and a corresponding increase of immigrants from Asian countries. But new waves of Asian immigrants encourage the maintenance of healthy ethnic and diasporic Asian communities. In addition, the advances in telecommunications and travel mean that transnational networks between immigrants and their homelands can be maintained. Today, roughly 50% of Asian Canadians are born outside of Canada, compared to less than 20% of ethnic Europeans. These differences will have a great impact on the formation of the ethnic identity of Asian Canadians, who are less bound by geography and national affiliations than the European immigrants.

The widely different economic, social, and religious backgrounds of Asian immigrants of the last twenty years have also rendered it more difficult to talk about Asian Canadians as a group. In the last twenty years, with the rise of transnational corporations and the dynamic economic growth of countries such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, and Malaysia, it is no longer possible to speak of Third World countries and people with the implication of poverty and

8 backwardness.Panel discussion, “EnvisioningAs Ien the Future Ang of notes, Contemporary Asia Art “is from touted Different ‘Glocal’as the Positions,” model China for National an affluent, Art Academy hypermodernof Arts, Hangzhou, March future, 2004. Photo credit: Zheng Shengtian not the residue of a traditional and backward past, as classic Orientalism would have it.”9 Susan Koshy points out the need to look closer at differences in class positions within national communities in Asian America: “the increase and mobility of Asian capital across national boundaries, and the entry of Asians into the technical-managerial class has created a situation where Asian America is a site of both resistance and exploitation. This is particularly problematic because the exploitation of Asian sweatshop workers, restaurant workers, and migrant workers by small and large Asian capital often deploys the discourse of ethnic and family loyalty to enforce discipline and extract compliance. In addition, the postindustrial forms of historic abuses such as slavery have assumed gigantic dimensions in the transnational era and flourish within closed national and diasporic networks that are difficult to penetrate.”10 As Kandice Chuh notes, “‘Oppression,’‘marginalization,’ and ‘resistance,’ keywords in dominant narratives of Asian American studies, are terms that each require redefinition within this globalized context, as ‘by whom’ and ‘against what’ are questions that are increasingly difficult to answer with certitude.”11

    In other words, one can no longer rely on those familiar oppositions of master and slave, colonizer and colonized, conqueror and victim, to look at the experiences and literary productions of minorities in Canada. Up until the mid 1990s, Asian Canadian cultural and literary efforts focused on the expression of an “authentic” voice, on writing/righting wrongs.12 One of the most successful Asian Canadian political endeavours was the National Association of Japanese Canadian’s movement for redress of Japanese Canadian internment during World War II which resulted in a redress agreement with compensation in 1988 with the government. This movement was greatly aided by the critical reception of Joy Kogawa’s account of internment in Obasan.Other scholarly

 efforts have concentrated on the articulation of an Asian Canadian sensibility. Asian Canadian poet and critic Roy Miki notes, for example, that at a “historic meeting of Canadian writers of colour” in 1992 called “The Appropriate Voice,”issues were raised concerning cultural appropriation, the “consequences of colonialism, racial oppression, and exploitation, the ‘misrepresentation of cultures and the silencing of their peoples’.”13 Asian Canadians, Miki asserts, have interrogated “representations of their communities manufactured by outsiders, often liberal and sympathetic white writers, artists, and filmmakers whose intentions may be sincere but who fail to account for differences based on subjectivity, language, history, and the problematics of appropriation.”14 Since literature by South Asian, Japanese and Chinese Canadians have tended to be read by leftist, post-colonial critics and scholars in Canada, this discourse of opposition, of us versus them, of the exclusion and lack of power of Asian Canadians versus European Canadians who are perceived to be in power, has been the running theme and emphasis of much critical writing by many Asian Canadian critics, including myself.

I am not suggesting that the urgent issues raised by Asian American, Asian Canadian, and postcolonial theorists of the late 1980s and early 1990s—of discrimination, racism, and equal opportunity—should be forgotten. The activism associated with those movements was what gave opportunities for much of the work we do today. But we need to be more wary of generalizations, especially with the emergence now of Asian Canadians as a large social group. One danger of this way of representing ourselves is that we perpetuate the very politics we seek to dismantle. For if the conditions of belonging to the group known as Asian Canadians is a feeling of exclusion, marginalization, and otherness, membership entails a reiteration and repetition of these feelings. I have suggested elsewhere that our bodies are visibly marked as different, and that these markings in turn affect the way we see ourselves, but this gaze of dominant culture is something we want to challenge, not internalize as part of our subjectivity.15 As long as our identity in some ways depends on a sense of marginalization, we will continue to occupy that position of “national abjection,”where, as Karen Shimakawa notes, the Asian American is “not absolutely or permanently excluded from” Americanness, “yet not quite representative of it.”16 Lisa Lowe suggests the use of “strategic essentialism” and asserts that an Asian American identity be adopted “for the purpose of contesting and disrupting the discourses that exclude Asian Americans.”17 The problem with this strategy is that psychically it is difficult to separate the moments when one is being “strategic” and when one is just living out one’s identity as an Asian American or Asian Canadian.

  The paradigms we have used to read Asian American and Asian Canadian texts in the past, such as highlighting issues of discrimination, legal and historical exclusion, otherness, differences between the Old World and the New World, abjection, worked very well for the group of authors who write about difficulties of immigration, settlement, integration, and assimilation. In Canada, the parallels to Asian American canonical writers such as Carlos Bulosan, Maxine Hong Kingston, and John Okada are Joy Kogawa, Sky Lee, Wayson Choy, Denise Chong, and Judy Fong Bates. But there are other writers emerging for whom these issues are not the main focus of the work, or who are trying construct different subject positions for themselves—positions other than as the abject Other of European white culture. This growing body of more recent works possesses more experimental forms, structures, as well as content; narratives with protagonists who are either less identifiably Asian or whose plots are not primarily concerned with the struggle between the traditions of the Old and New Worlds. This is not to say that autobiographical narratives or the Bildungsroman cannot be innovative in form and style, but these recent works are more overt in their rejection of easy assumptions about the equation of race, ethnicity, and identity.

 What I propose are three possible ways of thinking about, representing, and writing about Asian Canadians whose novels, plays, and films attempt to circumvent the unproblematized or essentialized link between ethnic identity and literary production. In my view, because an individual often manifests multiple allegiances and influences, it is more useful at this moment to think of interstices of power and cultural locations. Traditional concepts of nation, originary culture, and national affiliations give way to more fluid ideas about transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and globalism. Scholarly work from the fields of Sociology and Anthropology, Feminist, Global, Border and Migration Studies becomes useful in our examination of recent works of Asian Canadians from what can be called “transcultural” spaces. Instead of simply migration, for example, which suggests a movement from the originary country to the host country, transcultural suggests a place where a back and forth movement between cultures is possible, where cultures cross and learn from each other.

For example, anthropologist Aihwa Ong has coined the term, “flexible citizenship” to describe “mobile managers, technocrats, and professionals seeking to both circumvent and benefit from different nation-state regimes by selecting different sites for investments, work, and family reloca- tion.”18 Ong notes, “Transnational mobility and manoeuvres mean that there is a new mode of constructing identity, as well as new modes of subjectification that cut across political borders.”19 She gives instances of flexible citizens: “the multiple-passport holder; the multicultural manager with ‘flexible capital’; the ‘astronaut,’ shuttling across borders on business; ‘parachute kids’ who can be dropped off in another country by parents on the trans-Pacific business commute....”20 One weakness in the application of her theory to many Asian Canadian subjects lies in the fact that her examples are mostly East Asians who have the economic mobility for these types of crossings. For those immigrants and Asian Canadians who struggle in low paying jobs, the kind of “Pacific shuttle”21 described by Ong just is not possible. Examples of representations of transnationalism and flexible citizenship from recent Asian Canadian works include Anita Rau Badami’s The Hero’s Walk,Lydia Kwa’s This Place Called Absence, and the film Bollywood/Hollywood by Deepa Mehta.

Similarly, Kwame Anthony Appiah describes his citizen of the world as a “cosmopolitan patriot,” as someone who imagines that “everyone is a rooted cosmopolitan, attached to a home of one’s own, with its own cultural particularities, but taking pleasure from the presence of other, different places that are home to other, different people. The cosmopolitan also imagines that in such a world not everyone will find it best to stay in their natal patria, so that the circulation of people among different localities will involve not only cultural tourism (which the cosmopolitan admits to enjoying) but migration, nomadism, diaspora.”22 Though both Ong and Appiah’s imaginary citizens are rather idealistic and dependent in some ways upon having capital, these scholars present new ways of seeing transcultural subjects that break away from notions of centres and peripheries, from the hierarchical assumptions of West and Other, inherent in much postcolonial criticism. Many of Michael Ondaatje’s characters are cosmopolitans. Indeed, Ondaatje himself would rather be identified as an international, rather than an ethnic writer. Others writers, like Evelyn Lau, Chinese Quebecois, Ying Chen, and Kevin Chong can also be said to create cosmopolitan rather than ethnic subjects in their works.

Feminist critic Susan Stanford Friedman also presents an intriguing way to reconceptualize identities in multicultural settings. In an essay on the “new geographics of identity,”Friedman argues that “instead of the individualistic telos of developmental models, the new geographics figures identity as a historically embedded site, a positionality, a location, a standpoint, a terrain,

 an intersection, a network, a crossroads of multiply situated knowledges.”23 Identities are thus not fixed, but constructed relationally through difference from the other. In what she calls the “discourse of positionality,”identity depends “upon a point of reference; as that point moves nomadically, so do the contours of identity, particularly as they relate to the structures of power.”24 For example, she notes that Jews were seen as “non-whites” in America in the early part of the twentieth century, but welcomed for their “whiteness” in Cuba. Friedman also points out that situations bring out different aspects of one’s identity. What she calls “situational identity focuses on the way different aspects of subjectivity move fluidly from the foreground to the background in different locations.”25 In this model, one becomes conscious of the layers of one’s identity. In one situation, say, for example the workplace, one’s computer skill might be the most important factor of one’s identity; at home, gender might be foregrounded, whereas the colour of one’s skin may become the defining factor of one’s identity at a bar.

These notions of situationality and positionality are the most fruitful theories for dealing with Asian Canadian subjects who negotiate with multiple axes of identity. What Friedman calls the discourse of positionality and that of situationality enables us to see how someone can be a queer subject at one moment, a traditional Chinese daughter, a modern Asian woman, a multicultural Canadian, a sensual lover, a caring mother, an alien, and a local at the same time. An Asian Canadian owner of a business can be the capitalist exploiter of cheap labour, but in turn, can be the victim of racial prejudice in a social situation. The novels of Hiromi Goto and Larissa Lai explore the multi-faceted identities of Asian Canadian women often through shifting protagonists and texts that use magic realism and legends. What these novels thematize is the fluidity of contemporary transcultural identities, and the layering of subject positions within that identity.

The objective, then, is to produce what Rey Chow has called “tactics of intervention” in contemporary cultural studies.26 As Ien Ang points out, diasporic intellectuals such as herself exist in the space of hybridity. They wish to “hold on to this unstable, ambivalent, doubly marginalized positionality as the very place from where she can enact” a kind of power, “the power to interrupt, to trouble, to intervene tactically rather than strategically in the interrogation of dominant discourses.”27 Tactical interventions “never make counter-hegemonic claims to alternative truths but are limited to bringing out the contradictions and the violence inherent in all posited truths.”28 What is needed is not a revolution, but a way to point out “ambiguities, complexities and contradictions, to complicate matters rather than provide formulae for solutions, to blur distinc- tions between colonizer and colonized, dominant and subordinate, oppressor and oppressed.”29

By emphasizing place, location, and space rather than more rigid notions of nation, language, race, and ethnicity, I recognize the provisionality and permeability of identity and identification for many transcultural subjects. Though provisionality of subject positions can lead to a sense of non-belonging, it can become a positive and energizing effect of dislocation. Positionality, hybridity, and situational identity suggest openness and an ability to shift positions, consciously or unconsciously, depending on the situation. These notions work well with theories of power and resistance in explaining how transcultural subjects deal with different aspects of their social, institutional, legal, religious, and familial lives.

All charts are courtesy Statistics Canada Website.

 Notes 1 Donald C. Goellnicht, “A Long Labour: The Protracted Birth of Asian Canadian Literature” in Essays on Canadian Writing 72 (Winter 2000): 9-10. 2 Ibid., 3. 3 Lisa Lowe, “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences” in Diaspora 1.1 (1991): 39. 4 David Roediger, “Whiteness and Ethnicity in the History of ‘White Ethnics’ in the United States,” in Race Critical Theories, eds. Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg (Malden, MA: Basil Blackwell, 2002), 329. Roediger has pointed out that in the process of becoming Americans, groups such as the Irish, the Poles, Greeks, and Italians also acquired the status of white Americans (333). Myrna Kostash has also noted that “in 1908, Ukrainians were not white. Two generations later we are. How can this be?” Quoted in Sneja Gunew, Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalisms (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 26. 5 Ibid., 326 6 See Susan Koshy, “Morphing Race Into Ethnicity: Asian Americans and Critical Transformations of Whiteness” in Boundary 2 28.1 (2001): 156, 165, 185-6. 7 Ibid., 189. 8 See Ien Ang 6, On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 6. 9 Ibid. 10 Koshy, 163. 11 Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 7. 12 See Terry Watada, “To Go for Broke: The Spirit of the 70s,” in Canadian Literature 163 (Winter 1999). Special Issue on Asian Canadian Writing: 80-92. The author provides an informative account of artistic efforts of Japanese and Chinese artists in the 1970s. 13 Roy Miki, Broken Entries: Race, Subjectivity, Writing (Toronto: Mercury Press, 1998), 104. 14 Ibid. 15 See Eleanor Ty, “Introduction,” in The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). 16 Karen Shimakawa, National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 3. 17 Lowe, 39. 18 Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), 112. 19 Ibid., 18. 20 Ibid., 19. 21 Ibid., 110. 22 Kwame Anthony Appiah, “A Cosmopolitan Patriots.@,” in Critical Inquiry 23 (Spring 1997): 618. 23 Susan Stanford Friedman, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geography of Encounter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998) 19. 24 Ibid., 22. 25 Ibid., 24. 26 Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 15. 27 Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 2. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid.

 -:       ,     

 

Yesterday morning, we were asking ourselves how to engage in a discursive cultural practice that addresses questions of identity politics without being pigeonholed, marginalized, or ghettoized. It is my belief that as important as reflecting upon how we, as diasporic Asians, define ourselves and articulate our histories, there is an attempt to redefine the new nations of which we have become an integral part. Thus, rather than relying upon tactics like strategic essentialism, or interventions to disrupt the hegemonic narrative, we must take apart the centre and remake it in our image.

What I am suggesting is not as subversive as the complete collapse of the dominant order that Ken Lum joked about yesterday. It is about recognizing that we have become part of the dominant order—that it is impossible to speak of Canadian culture, for example, without thinking about the multiplicity of cultures that now make it up. Furthermore, it is also no longer possible to look at the technologies of cultural articulation: television, radio, newspapers, museums and universities, and claim that the purveyors of the hegemonic narrative are in complete control. Visible minorities now occupy curatorial positions at major museums, artist-run centres, international biennales, and in the academy. It is our right and our responsibility to institute reforms.

In this short presentation, I will describe the strategies that I have undertaken over the past year to reform the curriculum in the art history department at Carleton University in Ottawa, pointing to an area in which surprisingly little has been done to respond to the vastly changing demographics of the country, of our cultural imaginations, and of our student bodies.

Despite the increasing complexity of artistic and critical discourses in the contemporary art world vis-à-vis the internationalization of art, art practice, critical theory, and exhibitions, the canon taught to undergraduates remains relatively unchanged. Departments are, happily, appropriately concerned about this gap between the subtle complexities of our critical discourses and the sclerotic constructions of the Western canon, which continue to persist, particularly at the introductory level. In art history departments, the response to this concern over the narrowness of the curriculum is typically to hire a member of faculty who can teach non-Western art. Be it an Asianist or an Africanist, Islamicist, or less likely, a Latin Americanist, this person is expected to offer classes that provide students with an Other perspective, and an Other history, or an insight, for diasporic students, into their “own” cultures.

As with the museums that Pauline J. Yao was referring to, who pride themselves in adding Chinese contemporary art to their programming as a mark of cosmopolitanism, departments who expand the curriculum without re-examining the fundamentals of how art history is taught, simply “collect the world” to borrow a turn of phrase from James Clifford. The notion that non-Western art is Other remains intact as long as students are simply required to take one non-Western art history class to graduate. I remember my own resentment at having to take such a course as an undergraduate, believing that the history of Chinese bronzes would have no bearing upon my understanding of Art History! (It was a wonderful course though.)

 What to do? My approach in both research and teaching has been to rethink the geographical boundaries of art history—what anthropologist Nina Glick-Schiller has referred to as its “disciplinary nationalisms.”

The strategy in my teaching has been threefold: I offer classes in Asian Art which address Asia’s historical cosmopolitanism; I co-teach the first year survey of art history as an inter- connected series of narratives from around the world; and I teach a class Figure 1. Michel Tapié (l) and Jiro Yoshihara (r) shaking hands at the International Art of a New Era exhibition, Takashimaya, Osaka, 1958 © The former members of the Gutai, called Hyphen-Nation: Contemporary Courtesy of the Ashiya City Museum of Art & History Art in Canada that attempts to think about an art history that The Globe and Mail has recently been trying to redefine as “The New Canada”—a nation in which all of us are hyphenated.

First, I offer classes in Asian art—that is ostensibly what I was hired to do. Even in these classes, I attempt to take a transnational approach, teaching students about the history of transnational contact and the transmission of cultures both within Asia, and beyond. In my survey of Asian art, I put an emphasis on crucibles of cultural cross-fertilization such as the Silk Road. Students are, for example, always surprised and fascinated when I show them the African tribute bearers to the Tang court in Ren Bowen’s fourteenth century copy of Yan Liben’s seventh century hand scroll, Tribute Bearers. When I teach modern art, I take the opportunity to encourage students to rethink their ideas about the master narratives of the twentieth century. In teaching the Osaka-based post-war art movement Gutai, for example, I stress how self-consciously international the group was by addressing their contacts with figures like the French critic Michel Tapié (fig. 1) as well as their importance in the larger history of art as innovators whose works, such as Murakami Saburo’s 1955 Passing Through (fig. 2) were precursors for Happenings, Earthworks and installation art, among others.

Second, I teach the survey of Art History. Although it was thrust upon me as the newest faculty member, I have come to regard it as a stage from which to proselytize an inclusive history of art. The story that I weave for my students attempts to reveal how the history of Western art is just one narrative out of many, that at many points it is deeply interconnected with those other narratives, and that the relationships between those narratives are structured by geopolitical power relations.

What I did in that class, was to take points of contact—like the Baroque period, in which objects from China, India and the Middle East began to appear in paintings such as William Kalf’s Still Life with a Late Ming Vase (1669), and when Mughal imperial painters began copying Christian icons brought by the Jesuits (fig. 3)—as portals through which I could construct a larger narrative about Mughal Miniatures and Ming dynasty art. Other points of contact were the Jesuit encounter with the Huron and Iroquois in the seventeenth century, the Japanese “Occidentalism” of the nineteenth century in which yoga or Western painting was born, and the corresponding Japonisme of the French.

 There are advantages and disadvan- tages to this approach of course, but one distinct advantage was that it maintained a narrative that students could grasp in one term, maintained the relevance of the non-Western material to a larger history of art, and provided a broader understanding of the history of art, suggesting to students that there was something more if they wanted to look for it. The disadvantage, of course, is that it is still a Eurocentric approach—simply placed within Figure 2. Saburo Murakami, Passing Through, Second Gutai Art Exhibition, Ohara Hall, Tokyo, 1956 © Makiko Murakami and the former members of the Gutai, Courtesy of the Ashiya City an international context. Museum of Art & History

Before I move onto the final strategy, I would like to address the question of textbooks. As Sadira Rodrigues mentioned, this is the greatest hurdle in reforming introductory level courses. This past year, I supplemented Marilyn Stokstad’s Art History with Laurie Schneider Adams’ World Views, which was a reasonable compromise. Schneider Adams makes a great effort to situate the histories of non-Western art that she provides within the context of the Western canon through sections entitled “Windows on the World” so it was useful in terms of helping students to understand that all of this material is interconnected and all of it will be on the test. Unfortunately, the fact that I was working with two separate volumes undermined the institutionalization of inclusion that I was attempting to enact in my teaching. Unfortunately, although these “Windows” are built into her larger Art Across Time textbook, they have been reduced to the point of being almost useless.

This year, I will be team teaching the first-year class from prehistory to the present, which will be a new challenge. After much reflection, my colleague, Mitchell Frank and I have created a curriculum that is about forty percent non-Western material and much of it is not sectioned off, but interwoven into the history that we are presenting. How this will interface with the new textbook we have chosen is yet to be seen. Of all the textbooks we reviewed, the new edition of Gardner’s Art Through the Ages seems to have the most thorough coverage of non-Western art. Unfortunately, it does so in chapters that are almost completely disconnected from the long march of the European art historical canon, forcing us to provide those links ourselves through moments of contact and chronological thematic categories such as: Art and Death, which covers Ancient Egypt, tombs of China, and Aztec tomb art, or Art and Text, which covers Carolingian medieval manuscripts, Islamic and Chinese calligraphy.

My third attempt at curriculum reform is a class entitled “Hyphen-Nation: Contemporary Art in Canada,”a course whose beginnings owes a lot to long discussions over the phone with Alice Ming Wai Jim. This class self-consciously attempts to construct a notion of Canadian identity that is constituted through hyphenation, thus considering the work of artists of colour an inextricable part of the landscape of Canadian art. We began by interrogating the hyphen, and questioning the basic premise of the class. Who is hyphenated? Why are they hyphenated? Am I hyphenated? Are you? What is the meaning of “Just plain Canadian”?

 In considering these questions, we examined the series “The New Canada” which The Globe and Mail published last year in two install- ments—one around Canada Day, and the other around Christmas. In this high profile series of essays, which has now been published as a book, The Globe and Mail were themselves attempting to redefine “The New Canada” as a country whose very identity was predicated upon its multiculturalism, positing a national identity dependent upon the dissolu- tion of a unitary identity—the world’s “first postmodern nation-state.” Through these discussions, students began to reveal to themselves the discursive assumptions that some Canadians are hyphenated, and others are not. Rather than removing the hyphen, however, they concluded that Figure 3. Bichtir, Jahangir Preferring a Sufi Shaikh to Kings, from the St. Petersburg album, all Canadians are hyphenated. early 17th century, detached folio, opaque watercolour and gold on paper. Collection of the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

With the heuristic definition of the course blown to pieces in the first class, we then proceeded to examine Canadian contemporary art thematically, concentrating on the art of artists of colour in Canada. I resisted the idea of teaching the class in units divided by ethnicity, but chose themes that were both specific to the experience of being a visible minority or immigrant to Canada, and themes which would disrupt their understanding of the mainstream narrative of Canadian art by providing an alternative viewpoint on problems that they had considered in other classes.

The themes that we addressed included both those specific to a hyphenated analysis of culture, as well as new perspectives on larger questions in art history. In the first category, we examined issues around Cultural Translation, Identity Politics, and Home, which took a cue from Ken Lum’s work Home that was so effectively installed in Ottawa at the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography across from the Parliament buildings. In an effort to make the course relevant to what the students would be learning in their other art history classes, and to stimulate the students to question their received knowledge, I also covered themes such as Landscape, Curatorial Narratives, and Gender and Sexuality. By introducing works such as Jin-me Yoon’s 1996 Group of 67 into the debates about landscape, the Group of Seven and Canadian national identity, and Alvin Erasga Tolentino’s 1998 Swan Diva (fig. 4) into discussions of gender and sexuality, I was able to push students to think about some of the main issues in art history within the context of race and multiculturalism.

Although the class was disproportionately weighted in favour of issues around the question of identity, it attempted to move beyond those issues for precisely the reasons that Rachel Kalpana James of the South Asian Visual Arts Collective mentioned yesterday. It was important for me to

 introduce students to questions of identity politics, but also to remove artists of colour from the “ghetto” of work that is “only” identity-based.

Yesterday, Roy Miki posed the question: Is it possible to move beyond identity politics? What do critical interventions that expose the contradictions in the dominant order do to articulate a future? I posit the following view: that identity politics are still important, and will always be. But I believe that this discourse has matured to a point where it need not dwell in the margins. Indeed, it is because of our frustration with being ghettoized that we, as intellectuals, have been trying Figure 4. Alvin Frasga Tolentino, Swan Diva, 1998. Photo credti: Kiku Hawks. to find new solutions. Courtesy of the artist

I thus propose attempting to remake the centre to reflect the interconnectedness of our various histories, and the complicated structure of our culture and society. From the perspective of an educator in the academy, this means reworking the curriculum, and engaging in a grass roots rewriting of the history of art. I have spent some time outlining what this means for me today.

It is, however, not the only technology of creating and disseminating the history of art. For me, this project is also part of my research, although in a much more restricted sense—I cannot attempt to rewrite the entire history of art. In my research, I try to write across disciplinary nationalisms, and am in the process of creating an intellectual community of scholars who resist the boundaries of Nation. Along with two colleagues at Carleton, Dr. Sarah Casteel (English) and Dr. Catherine Khordoc (French), I am establishing the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis.

I cannot begin to speak for museums, galleries and artist-run centres, but I do believe that an effort needs to be made to indicate that the boundaries of each narrative contained within each institution are not absolute, and that there is room in both museums that make a claim to universality like Museum of Modern Art in New York, and museums with a geographical focus like the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, to reform their narratives so that a larger, more inclusive history emerges. Articulated from many perspectives—from the culturally contextualized perspective of the specialized geographical museum, and from the perspective of the master narrative at a general museum or international biennale—this complex story can be told dialectically.

In conclusion, I ask you all—is time to take identity politics to the centre?

Should you be interested in joining the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis, please contact us at [email protected].

    :      

 

Mr. Bao said, “We Americans can’t eat chicken the way you Chinese can. The Chinese have a special tongue that can spit out chicken and fish bones. Hey Laurie, you didn’t leave Hong Kong until you were twelve so you probably have the trained Chinese tongue.”1

Nurturing the Soul— Igniting the Senses— Creating with the Heart— Senses—Soul and Heart

Kylie Kwong’s Voice-Over: I really love working with beautiful ingredients. Cooking is such an art; it’s so organic. As a little girl, my mum’s cupboard was a continual source of wonder to me. It was so full of mysterious Chinese ingredients; the most wonderful smells and spices, flavours I grew up with. I never dreamed that one day I would be using these exotic ingredients in a restaurant of my own.2

This short paper will be predicated on the understanding that racism and a racist history are often the background of the diasporic experience of the hyphenated subjects about whom I will be speaking. I have written at length elsewhere about these mechanisms3 and here I would like to focus on the details of the two texts above. Indeed the “frenzy of the visible” (as Jean-Louis Comolli calls it)4 is a salient element in my analysis, for example, the reference to wide-angle and close-up shots. Both Laurie Wen’s film The Trained Chinese Tongue (1994) and Australian chef Kylie Kwong’s series on the Food Channel, Kylie Kwong: Cooking with Heart and Soul,could also be described as auto-ethnographies in which there is an ethnographic analysis by an insider of one’s own culture.5 At the same time, the ethnography is an exercise in mediation, that is, it is manufactured to some degree for the consumption of those outside the culture.

What is interesting about these two texts is that the Point of View (POV) in Laurie Wen’s film initially approximates that of the outsider and, in eerie ways, of the stalker. Indeed, the Voice-Over (VO) describes the filmmaker as being a “private investigator.”The camera approaches several women and asks them to “explain/translate” their cooking practices by allowing her and us into their domestic private spaces where the camera angles are mostly wide-angled. What distinguished Kylie Kwong’s cooking show series from Wen’s film are the many close-ups and to some degree this is an intrinsic feature of the cooking show genre. In this case, its affective effects are “uncanny,” rendering the strange/exotic familiar and vice-versa.6 The camera often uses the forensic close up, an intimate foreclosure on the spatial, as though the camera itself (and through it the viewer) were devouring the visual objects. This is also an example of synesthesia, where the characteristics of one sense are transposed onto another.

But before we go into more details about each text, let me give you a very abbreviated summary of some theories and theorists to set the context. In one of the classic studies of Asian American literature, Reading Asian American Literature,Sau-ling Cynthia Wong begins with an extended analysis of what she terms “necessity” and “extravagance” in Asian American writing. Her first chapter is informatively titled “Big Eaters, Treat Lovers, ‘Food Prostitutes’,‘Food Pornographers’ and Doughnut Makers.”Her comments on food pornographers designate them as those who peddle “bastardized ethnic food”7 for consumption by “outsiders.”In other words Wong’s “food pornography” is a form of an internalized subjugation which traditionally characterizes power relations in the diaspora. This tradition, however, has been critiqued or rendered more complex by recent theorists.

 From a somewhat different perspective, Yau Ching’s analysis of several recent films and videos made by diasporic Chinese filmmakers discovers within them an “inauthenticity” in which ‘Chinese’ food is invented outside China and Chinese seek it out because that is all they have available to them. Indeed after several generations there is a somewhat mocking and playful embrace of the “ersatzness” and hybridity of this manufactured “authentic” cuisine.8 In a fascinating and comparable study of the invention of ‘curry powder’ by the English colonizers of India, Uma Narayan looks at the multiple ways in which India was ingested into the Empire: “So for the British, eating curry was in a sense eating India—at least ...the imaginary India whose allure was necessary to provoke an imperial interest in incorporating this Jewel into the British Crown.”9 What was consumed in England as “Indian” food in its various manifestations did not exist within India itself where food was contemplated, as was the case in China, in terms of its regional varieties. Taking issue with the well-intentioned contention made by Lisa Heldke10 that food tourism is a type of food colonialism that consists of a further colonization and appropriation of a subjugated other, Narayan suggests instead that one might consider the ways in which immigrants gain agency and self-sufficiency by selling their own invented ethnic cuisines to the dominant group. Like many recent postcolonial critics she also cautions that one should not conceive of these interactions as always being in relation only to the dominant group. The ethnic cuisines purveyed also allow minority groups to interact with each other, rather than always being relayed in primary reference to the hegemonic or colonial culture.

Taking up this component of agency amongst those traditionally perceived as victims, Ann Goldman’s study of ethnic working women’s autobiographies and their references to food, suggests that “reproducing a recipe, like retelling a story, may be at once cultural practice and autobiographical assertion.”11 And later: “Emphasizing the labour involved in the reproduction of cultural practices . ..does work (at least on the textual level) against the politics of assimilation by insisting on a historically grounded sense of cultural specificity and by maintaining an ethnic difference that in turn provides the self with authority to speak.”12 It is interesting that the production of food (in any modality) should so automatically and intrinsically convey the status of victim—perhaps because it is associated so often with the domestic female sphere. If we consider another dimension, the underlying symbolism of food as synonymous with the body, then the eating of the cannibalized body functions as the consumption of a quintessentially passive victim. And yet the Christian Eucharist, or the more generalized motif of the corporeal sacrifice of a deity, suggests other kinds of power relations with regard to the consumed body.

Goldman also throws some useful light on a contentious issue Wong mentions in a discussion of her concept of food pornography. As Wong herself suggests, how does one judge this? Should it be “read into” or “read out of” a text?13 Wong’s further schematic of intra- inter- and extra-contextu- ality is less than compelling. Rather than trying to legislate on whether or not descriptions of “ ethnic food” fall into morally reprehensible categories to the extent that (as Shirley Lim suggested in a recent paper14) any description of food becomes suspect, we might heed Goldman’s suggestion that we note the narrative authority, the authorizing voice, which underpins such descriptions. In speaking about the difference between autobiography and ethnography she makes the following statement about books which, “confound the line traditionally drawn between autobiography proper, where the subject is presumed to constitute herself as unique, and ethnography, whose postcolonial origin has situated the subject as representative of a culture, typically a culture of “dying breeds”....By making ethnicity concrete, representing it as experienced by the individual, rather than invoking Culture as abstraction, such auto-ethnographic texts discourage cultural appropriation.”15 Thus the concept of auto-ethnography to some extent problematizes Wong’s

 concept of “food pornography.”If it is clear that the ethnicity is a lived everyday experience, a kind of barrier is set up to appropriation (and full identification) by outsiders to the culture.

It is often the case that in the “ethnic” or diasporic text, food traditionally functions to mark the memory of another kind of corporeality, of the body moving through a different daily repertoire of the senses. And this body acquires other connotations when viewed from the perspective of contemporary psychoanalytic theory, as exemplified in the following quotation:

Through oral dietary satisfaction, there emerges, beyond it, a lust for swallowing up the other, while the fear of impure nourishment is revealed as the deathly drive to devour the other.16

Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror is a text that explores the psychoanalytical formation of subjectivity in terms of the process of putting in place a “clean and proper” body, a body with clear boundaries and borders, by means of progressing through the stages of abjection. Kristeva defines abjection in the following way: “It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.”17 In her account, writing and language function in primary ways as signifying the expulsion of the maternal, linked as it is with primary nurturing. The cost of this nurturing is the lack of boundary between self and other and significantly: “food is the oral object (the abject) that sets up archaic relationships between the human being and the other, its mother, who wields a power that is as vital as it is fierce.”18 Thus the maternal becomes singled out as that which needs to be expelled, as the fundamental signifier of impurity and the corporeal.

In the process of abjection, the mouth becomes a privileged zone for the formation of subjectivity, just as the eyes are, and we need only think of the symbolism associated with Lacan’s mirror-stage in the formation of subjectivity to understand this. But the mouth (or what I have elsewhere called “mouth work”)19 is the place where the subject-in-process takes in the not-I, takes in something that is not itself and turns it into the self. And in the mouth primarily both speech and eating take place. Indeed, a theorist like Maud Ellmann contends that eating and language are to some degree in competition with each other in the always destabilized subject-in-process.20

But let us explore further the title of Wen’s film, The Trained Chinese Tongue and the clip which gave rise to it. In a fascinating essay Gerald aand Valerie Mars speak of the “habit of hands” involved in learning the rituals of traditional cooking. Here memory is constituted by a “way of relating ritually to objects and the processes they are set out to serve.”21 The analogy I am making here is with orality. The body, more particularly the “habit of mouth,”acquires very specific physical traits in the process of utterance. These might then further animate the whole body as in the example of gesticulation (or lack of it) associated with some languages.22 We learn, we train, to mouth particular languages, particular sounds in order to communicate. The habits, repetitions of one’s body, signify familiarity with a language and through them a culture. We “unthinkingly” inhabit a culture with which we are intimate. But for auto-ethnographers there is of course a palpable split. On the one hand these habits are there and on the other they need to be defamiliarized in order to carry out the work of the ethnographic project, translating one culture into another.

Laurie Wen describes the impetus for making her film in the following way, “because I was saddened and inspired by the ways people grapple with alienation and displacements. The Trained Chinese Tongue examines how Chinese immigrants live at the complex crossroads of food, language, colonization, and immigration. I approach a series of strangers—all immigrant women—in a

 Chinatown grocery store and follow them home for dinner.”23 The film relies on internalized rules of hospitality to set up reciprocal relations with strangers, presumably those who are familiar strangers and not complete strangers.”24 Interestingly, while there is a kind of kinship shared among the various women and the filmmaker, in the voice-over she describes herself as constituting her own “private investigator” charged with finding out more about herself. And, indeed, the various sites and interactions do precipitate her own memories of dealing with the difficulties of emigration and assimilation. By way of navigating the various domestic spaces of these strangers’ kitchens and homes, the filmmaker realizes the many internal segmentations and differences within the Chinese-American diasporic experience. For example, in many she is not able to speak the right dialect to be understood and has to rely on translators. The rationale in the film could be described as the search for family—as the voice-over describes it, the women take pity on her like a stray cat and take her in. There are four meetings described and the final one is an old lady who uses the stray cat analogy and invites her into what is described as a “tribe.”The narrative trajectory of the film means that we end with the sense of an intrinsic Chinese hospitality preserved in diaspora in which people (strays) are invited in with grace to “an incredible ordinary feast.”

The narrative teleology is surprisingly similar in the Kylie Kwong series where the final episode is choreographed around a steamboat where Kylie and her various friends enjoy a communal meal—the apotheosis of a multicultural merging. The Kylie Kwong series also might be described as the search for not simply family but hyper-family.25 The series is choreographed around Kylie’s own family history, as we saw from the opening clip, and in the earlier episodes in particular we encounter her brothers, mother, family and niece, as well as the uncle who runs a noodle factory, with further reference to the great-grandfather who is the founding ancestral patriarch. Note, for example, the following description in the online journal AsiaInc:

Kylie Kwong is a member of possibly the largest Chinese family in Australia. “I am the first daughter of the fifth son of the first son of the third wife of Kwong Sue Duk,”she says, “which makes me the 29th generation of Kwongs.”Her paternal great-grandfather was born in 1853 in the village of Wong Nai Chuen in Guangdong province. He migrated to Australia when he was 21, and established a general store and real-estate business. Apparently, his four wives and 24 children lived harmoniously together. Kwong, 34, is steeped in the extended Chinese family culture, which of course includes the bubbles and smells of the kitchen . . . 26

The series could be called “The Trained Australian Tongue” because while Kylie is visually “Chinese Australian,”she has a reassuringly familiar Aussie accent and the series is made by the national broadcaster, the ABC, with its pun on Australian-Born Chinese. As Kylie tells us in one of the episodes, none of her family speak Chinese but they were brought up liking both Chinese and what she terms “Western” or simply “Australian” cooking. In the book which preceded the series, the latter is glossed as English cooking27 but there are also references throughout the series to the information that Australia is now made up of many different ethnic cuisines and that she is able to draw on them all, including a memorable segment on Middle Eastern cooking which constantly describes the spices used as “exotic and romantic.”The series is also punctuated with statements beginning with “Chinese people love . . . ” So one could say that the trajectory here is to render the (Chinese) stranger familiar or part of family, indeed as the model family or the paradigmatic model for family relations.

There is a palpable tension between straddling “Chineseness” and “Australianness” in the eight-part series. For example, Kylie refers to her favourite cleaver in the following manner, “My well-loved Chinese cleaver reeks of antiquity, with its battered iron blade that bears the scars of repeated

 sharpening, and a rustic wooden handle worn smooth over the years. The natural weight of the cleaver is just perfect for my hand span and grip.”28 It is an antiquity she has achieved through the “habit of hands,”the corporeal hollowing out which earns her the right to be part of an “offshore” cultural history. In Recipes and Stories, the book she published before the series became established, there is a recovery of her family history embedded within Chinese Australian history. The family recreates a history of migration and settlement—“Aussie battlers” (a familiar paradigm in Australian culture) who have an authentic link to the homeland. This method of using food and cooking is reminiscent of an earlier publication by Annette Shun Wah (also a media personality) who published her book Banquet as a way of imparting a semi-popularised history of Chinese Australian immigration and settlement.29

The subtitle of Kwong’s series “Cooking with heart and soul” carries through the episodes in that the senses are constantly referenced, rather than relying simply on quantification (so many teaspoons or lengths of time). The series attempts to convey the feel of the cooking from within, that is, the habit of hands referred to earlier. Some of this “intimacy” is produced by means of the close-up. Viewers are reassured that they will come to know this cuisine from within, but the link of the close-up technique with a tradition of visual voyeurism is inescapable.30 That voyeurism links in turn with centuries of producing taxonomies of the ‘other’ as created by a repertoire of imperial technologies whose details are documented in the vast field of postcolonial studies.

Finally, synesthesia, where the characteristics of one sense are attached to another, is also a recurrent device with Kylie stating something like, “Can you just hear that? It’s so delicious!” These constitute attempts to manipulate the visual to encompass the domains of the other senses. For example, at the opening of the third episode, Kylie is preparing Sichuan pepper and salt in a smoking wok that she carries like an incense burner throughout the restaurant so that it imparts simultaneously a welcoming and exotic smell to the space for her guests. Obviously there is much more to be said about this complex (and I should add to me attractive) series, but the overt suturing of a variegated audience to an Australian-Chinese hyphenated subjectivity is what I have focused on here. How this series is received in the global context associated with its wider marketing would be a whole other study. One could make a start by observing that or North American audiences, probably its most “alien” or exotic feature is that in every episode Kylie exhorts us to retain fat since it holds the secret of flavour. Such exhortations do not sit easily with current phobias concerning fat-free diets or the panic generated by the supposed wide-scale escalating obesity of North American populations.

 Notes 1 The Trained Chinese Tongue, Director Laurie Wen, 16mm./20 min. 1994. 2 From the first episode of Kylie Kwong: Heart and Soul,Food Channel (52), an eight-part series. 3 Sneja Gunew “The Melting Pot of Assimilation: Cannibalizing the Multicultural Body,” in Transnational Asia Pacific: Gender, Culture, and the Public Sphere, eds. S. G. Lim , L. E. Smith and Wimal Dissanayake (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999),145-158. 4 Jean-Louis Comolli, “Machines of the Visible”, in The Cinematic Apparatus, eds. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (London: Macmillan, 1980), 122. 5 See Deborah E. Reed-Danahay, ed., Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social (Oxford: Berg, 1997). 6 See Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” in Art and Literature, 14. The Penguin Freud Library, trans. J. Strachey (London: Penguin, 1919/1985). 7 Sau-ling Cynthia. Wong, Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 61. 8 Yau Ching, “Can I Have MSG, An Egg Roll To Suck On And Asian American Media On The Side?” Fuse Magazine 20.1 (Winter 1997): 27-34. 9 Uma Narayan, Dislocating Cultures (New York, Routledge, 1997), 165. 10 Lisa Heldke, Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer (New York: Routledge, 2003) 11 Ann Goldman, “‘I Yam What I Yam’: Cooking, Culture, and Colonialism,” in: S. Smith & J. Watson, eds., De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender and Women’s Autobiography (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 172. 12 Ibid., 179. 13 Wong 66. 14 Shirley Geok-lin Lim, “Crossing the Great Food Barrier.”, Unpublished paper delivered at the Food Workshop, University of British Columbia, 2000. 15 Goldman 189. 16 Julia Kristeva,. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 118. 17 Kristeva 4. 18 Ibid., 75. 19 Sneja Gunew, “‘Mouthwork’: Food and Language as the Corporeal Home for the Unhoused Diasporic Body in South Asian Women’s Writing,” paper to be delivered at the University of London, June 2004. 20 See Maud Ellmann, The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). 21 Gerald Mars and Valerie Mars, “Food History and the Death of Memory,” Food and the Memory: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2000, ed. H. Walker (Totnes, Prospect Books, 2001), 159. 22 Examples that come to mind are Eva Hoffmann’s Lost in Translation (New York: Dutton, 1989) where the narrator speaks of having to learn to sit on her hands when she moves from Hungarian to English. 23 Laurie Wen, “Director’s Statement” accessed May 2004, http:://www.city.yamagata.jp/yidff/catalogue/en/97/asia88html. 24 See Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Postcoloniality (London: Routledge, 2000) 25 The series is accompanied by Kylie Kwong, Heart and Soul (Sydney, Australia: Viking/ABC Books, 2003) but was preceded by an earlier publication on which I draw for my information. See Kylie Kwong, Recipes and Stories (Camberwell, Victoria: Penguin Books, 2003) 26 AsiaInc, “Kylie Kwong: Restaurateur and Chef, Billy Kwong”. Accessed May 2004, http://www.asia-inc.com/Dec_Jan/Haustra_kylie_dj.htm. 27 Kwong, Recipes, 40. 28 Ibid., 110. 29 Annette Shun-Wa and Greg Aitkin, Banquet: Ten Courses to Harmony (Sydney: Doubleday, 1999). 30 See Peter Gidal, “Technology and Ideology in/through/and Avant-Garde Film: An Instance”, in The Cinematic Apparatus, eds. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (London: Macmillan, 1980), 151-165.

  :          

  

Figure 1. Vanessa Kwan, American Eagle Quilt Series, 2004 Left: Fall, American Eagle clothing, cotton batting, thread, 144.8 x 190.5 cm Right: Spring, American Eagle clothing, cotton batting, thread, 144.8 x 190.5 cm Photo credit: Cedric Bomford. Courtesy of the artist Vanessa Kwan’s work is interesting in how she brings her digital sensibility and conceptual basis to a networked and lo-fi interpretation of creativity. A recent Graduate of Emily Carr Institute with a degree in Media Arts, Kwan’s practice is multi-directional. In the American Eagle Quilt Series, she enlisted a group of artists to help produce the blankets, bringing contemporary aspects of mediation and communication to the traditional practice of quilting. The American Eagle Retail franchise and its mass produced clothing becomes a paradoxical symbol for both authenticity and ubiquity. Interested in forms of repetition, this project engages with similar concerns evident in her video and performance work.

This talk, with its rather ambitious title, attempts within a very small space of time to explore diaspora both as a zone of speculation and as a biological metaphor. Looking at the fissures and fault lines of the term, I am interested in emergent aspects of global dispersion and its attendant creative mutations.

But what of new media you may ask.

Type “new media definition” into Google and you get the sense that it means electronic media, generally interactive, and often a Web page. The term refers to the large number of new types of documents and media creations that have sprung into existence around the Web.

But new media means different things to different people. Like the term diaspora, new media is a contentious label for scattered and mutating practices. It is virtually limitless in its implications, applications and becomings. Often we call technologies new media when they are at the initial stages of their potential, just emerging, coming into formation. The appellation “new” seems to suggest something in process, mobile, shifting, unfolding.

Many artists that employ new media in their practice do so from a broad approach or a wide spectrum of media. They use both digital and lo-fi platforms in order to visualize ideas from different angles and perspectives. New media is an artistic toolbox. Indeed I find it is difficult to talk about new media as an isolated or discrete practice particularly as it is but one of many materials employed by artists to tell their stories and visions.

 The two subjects of this panel, diaspora and new media have much in common: both announce states of becoming as well as points of convergence. So rather than address both topics overtly, I have decided to take a different approach. It is my intention that during the next fifteen minutes, diaspora and new media will stereoscopically resolve into a mediated experience of mutation. For now let’s talk diaspora.

Throwing instrumentality and caution to the wind, I submit for your delectation diasporic becomings through a chiasmus of speculation, metaphorical, virtual and otherwise . . .

    Given the task of presenting a short paper on diaspora and new media in the local context of Vancouver, I began with an informal email questionnaire and face to face chats with local emerging artists who, in some form or another, reflect the label Asian diaspora, and most of them engage with new and/or digital practices. For the sample group, terminology was a key point of discussion. Most people I spoke with did not identify with the term diaspora. Some even asked me to define it for them. Others found diaspora hard to talk about as it has been discussed so often they no longer know how to broach it. By contrast, a common experience was a strong sense of displacement, not by virtue of race as much as geographical origin and artistic sensibility. The connections appear to be in the fault lines and mutations of globalized experience.

Ultimately, the artists I interviewed felt uncomfortable discussing only one aspect of their experience. One’s race cannot be isolated from gender, sexuality, age, etc. They dismissed Asian diaspora as a rallying cry as it reflected the concerns of the previous generation. While the term is acknowledged for offering a sense of agency and vividly describing communal experiences that mobilized a generation, at present it appears to have no such effect. Currently occupying a different cultural moment, Asian diaspora, for many artists, doesn’t resonate, echo back or trigger the imaginary. Global diaspora was posited as a possible update, a different entry point to situate oneself within an understanding of diaspora, but one not particular or exclusive to Asia.

This accounts not necessarily for the movement of readily identifiable cultural groups of people, but instead reveals that as a result of hundreds of years of movements of peoples, cultural complexity cannot only be explained through the process of ‘Asian’ diaspora. Instead, it is equally as interesting to look within cultures for micro fissures that reveal different conceptions of diaspora.1

Indeed, the concerns of emerging artists are not reduced to one platform but rather are woven through diverse strands of interest and affiliation. They are attracted to various collectives of peoples and practices, always melding, unfolding and open to multiple forms, media and methods. “This allegiance to any community [is] seen as provisional; it’s part chosen, and part fortuitous.”2 This is similar to how many artists take up new media; that is, by chance, on a project-by-project basis, and in addition to other artistic strategies.

Employing Asian diaspora as a topic of discussion and speculation was an intriguing challenge. I wondered why some people I know had not heard of the term diaspora and why it felt so natural for me to take this up. Self-definition and agency are the legacy of identity politics in that we continually need to reinvent ourselves in our own context. As each generation comes of age, we necessarily seek reinvention and make new affinity groups. New names and terminology are invented to distinguish ourselves from the past. In this familiar process, language mobilizes experience and heralds new becomings.

 There are many diasporas, all contributing to a global dispersion, migration and unfolding of peoples. While languages, customs and traditions are distinct, all diasporic experiences share a similar sense of displacement, of seeking a sense of belonging. Even within one group of peoples, say an Asian diaspora there are multidirectional associations and affinities. So what do we do with the term diaspora, a term that is too restrictive for some and no longer useful for others? Is diaspora a lived reality, a zone of speculation, and where’s that biological metaphor I quickly dangled in front of you during the introduction?

As most of us know, the term Diaspora, from the Greek for scattering or dispersion, is historically and more formally used to refer to the resettlement of the Jews after the Babylonian and Roman conquests of Palestine. Archaeologists and anthropologists also use the word to suggest any large-scale migration such as the African diaspora into the Americas or the South Asian emigration to the Pacific coast. As a Jew whose ancestry goes back to the Ukraine, Byelorussia and presumably further a field, I am comfortable exploring the notion of Diaspora; its second nature. While current and historical events in the Middle East make my thoughts on homeland particularly complicated, terminology such as Diaspora and exile has in many ways constituted my own formative identity.

Diasporas produce multidirectional associations. To complicate this experience of dispersion I submit my queer status as further credentials for embodying diaspora. As a homosexual Jew, my homeland is twice removed. Coming out has meant leaving behind or sacrificing the security and heterosexual entitlement I came to expect as a child and young adult. I cannot presume the same rights or privileges as those inhabiting a normalized straight world. Like many who have left or been forced to leave their homeland, I sometimes find myself speaking a foreign language and assuming unusual cultural customs to name but two distinguishing features of those living within a diaspora. I do not see this mutation as a compromise to identity, but formative and constitutive of it. Life is more than an evolutionary progression propelled by survival and self-reproduction. Deviations from the norm are the stuff of life; they certainly propel artistic experimentation.

Mutations from normative and homogeneous models offer up the liberatory potential of what I call diasporic becomings. While some of us make attempts at assimilation and resettlement, there is the equally attractive and emancipatory move toward displacement, scattering or dispersion. In this sense, I understand diaspora as an opportunity to spread out and explore new territories, reinventing oneself perpetually. We live in a global diaspora where displacement, contingency and constant changes are experiences shared by many.

Diasporas are frequently understood as the scattering and disintegration of peoples. Their discon- tinuous circulation also suggests sowing and propagation. Thus diasporas can also be a form of discontinuous regeneration, producing unusual connections, couplings and offspring amongst new breeding grounds. As people migrate across countries and hemispheres they are disassembled from the familiarity of continuity and traditions. Affinity groups are made through shared experiences, fortuitous encounters, and chance meetings. Diaspora becomes diaspora.

Biology 101: Spore formations are a mode of re/production where an organism breaks up into a number of pieces, or spores, each of which manifests new life. Spores can survive under a variety of conditions, contexts and migrations. Widespread, they are ideal for transportation of organic life in harsh conditions and resistant to decay. Many spore formations are self-pollinating and do not rely on exterior vectors for transportation. I find spores to be intriguing figurations for thinking about creativity in global diasporas.

 Spore-like in their morphology, diasporas offer up new ontological possibilities. They are fluid becomings rather than static beings. While conventional understanding around diasporas focus on the past, they might also tell us something about the future. As Benedict Anderson noted, “But why do nations celebrate their hoariness, not their astonishing youth?”3 Becomings are bodies in process, mobile, an open network of connections. When art practice is added to the mix, all sorts of wonderful mutations begin to gestate. Like new media, diasporas engender alteration, modifica- tion, variation and innovation. These mutations are one-offs, strange anomalies, dispersions of connections, and the progressive integration of many separate elements.

Pollens and spores are critical parts of the vascular life cycles and, because they have very resistant walls, pollen and spores typically are the most abundant, easily identifiable, and best-preserved plant remains in sediments and sedimentary rocks. In addition to studying them as geological artifacts, these sporadic scatterings initiate new life. Often responding to adverse environmental conditions, spores are a reproductive body capable of growing into a new organism.4 They can be opportunistic, multidirectional and playful metaphors for thinking about future incarnations and new breeding grounds

Figure 3. Ron Tran, video stills from The Peckers, 2003, digital video installation, 9-minute loop. Courtesy of the artist Another recent Emily Carr Institute graduate in Media Arts, Ron Tran has produced a humorous and anomalous video installation. The Peckers is a wonderful example of scattering and misplaced identity formation. In a well-used busking space near Granville Island Public Market, the artist set up musical equipment covered with birdseed. What ensues is a musical composition formed by chance, pigeons and avian appetite. After nine minutes of cacophony, the birds fly off for greener pastures, the denouement of silence particularly poignant. The temporary nature of the busker performance highlights mobility, variation and innovation.

Spores are a kind of mutation. As metaphors for diasporic becomings, they describe productions away from the ritualized status quo. They are interdisciplinary, beyond the borders of discipline and specific practice. Indeed, a new generation of artists practicing within the experiential field of diasporas are incubating all genus of dislocations, transplantations and anomalies. In this way, they reflect their own cultural moment fraught with seductions of speed, connectivity, graphical interfaces and immersive technologies.

Sporadic models that inform becoming manifest human subjectivities that are constantly reshaped by new affiliations, displacements, desires and contingencies. Multiple models and systems of becoming inflect artistic strategies, which dissolve and resolve at the same time. In the examples shown today, digital communications become collective, cross-platform quilt making; diasporic scatterings emerge as avian busking styles.

A sampling of an emerging generation of artists and cultural workers who, by default, might fall into the category of Asian diaspora are not directly concerned with the politics of discursive diaspora. Rather than seek a common or imagined community, many Vancouver artists whether Korean, Australian, Indian, Chinese, Malaysian, etc., and/or mixtures therein, find the term problematic and, frankly, unappealing. In its place are coalitions of displacement, and sporadic

 strategies of representation. Digital culture plays into this de-territorializing affect by engendering and facilitating constant mutations via the adjustments to the high speed, information-rich, constantly mutating cultural scene. The mutations are the points of connection whether inflected by way of race, class, gender or sexuality.

Virtually speaking, the implications of new media for contemporary Asian and Asian diasporic art are virtually limitless. The topic suggests ambivalent intersections of experience that in many ways constitute our contemporary moment. The question of diaspora here narrated as figuration, fabula and metaphor shift the representation toward images that signify the affective life of individuals living in a global diaspora.

Notes 1 Sadira Rodrigues, email correspondence, April 2004. 2 Adrienne Lai, email correspondence, April 2004. 3 Quoted in Homi Bhabha,”DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margin of the Modern Nation” in The Narrative Reader, ed. Martin McQuillan (London: Routledge, 2000), 294. 4 U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey. “Spores and Pollen,” URL: http://geology.er.usgs.gov/paleo/sporepollen.shtml, Last modified: 10:43:58 Fri 07 Feb 2003.

      

  

Rula Halwani, Irrational,a collection of photos of the settlements, 2003. Courtesy of the artist. Usually I call these words a statement, but actually I do not sit and write. I write while I'm taking photos. Usually my statements reflect my feelings towards my work, but for these photos no words could be written. I could not find my words because I could not find the images from my childhood of the pure hills of the West Bank. They were no longer there. The landscape of Palestine that I grew up with is gone. There are no longer ancient villages melting into the mountains, there are no shepherds wandering freely, no olive trees hugging the beautiful hills. All I can see now are newly developed, ugly constructions. They are called “Israeli settlements.” They grow like monsters slowly killing every hope of whatever current peace process is being discussed on the news and not on the ground. In these photographs I am speaking to my land, to my Palestine and I am saying sorry but these irrational monsters will be gone one day.

We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.1

Audre Lorde

A word in Okanagan, xaxá? refers to the meaningful essence of all creation. The word has been translated to mean “the sacred aspect” of being….We are sacred and precious. In knowing this we become xaxá?, and cannot escape knowing that all life is likewise xaxá? and our full creative power as humans is to know this and to express this through all actions.2

Jeanette Armstrong

I wish to thank Centre A for inviting me to speak and to everyone for being here at the conference. I am also deeply honoured and privileged to be speaking on Coast Salish territory today.

Before I begin my talk, I wish to contextualize my presentation in relation to discussions that have occurred over the last day or so. A major focus has been on how to define Asian diasporas, how these diasporas are racialized, how they articulate themselves, and more specifically in relation to the institutionalized art world, how artists are categorized, how their work circulates, and how they attempt to disrupt some of these restrictive narratives.

 The debate has been about access, about being defined from the outside and the critical responses to it, and to some extent my fellow panelists have also provided critiques of how diasporic voices come to operate within global contexts. However, there has not been a sustained effort to put under scrutiny notions of artistic production and curation. By exercising this scrutiny, I wish to move beyond the site of the institution and the location of diasporic articulations within its crite- ria, or in resistance to it, thereby opening up curatorial and artistic/creative practice to the planet at large, with the “high” art world being but one extremely tiny cross-section within it. The re- imagining of curatorial and creative practices is part of my larger desire to construct a collective vision for effective political strategies, with the notions of responsibility and answerability being central in this regard.

These notions are highly pertinent in the context of the art world, a site of enormous privilege, that many of us here at the conference work within, although in diasporic enunciations within this specific context, the position of the victim, equally appro- priated by the art institution as well as the diasporic subject, is too precious to let go of along with strategies of commodification, co-optation and upward mobility. Also, curatorial inventiveness within a professionalized Faye HeavyShield, body of land, 2002. Photo credit: Keith Pearson. Courtesy of the artist and the Kelowna Art Gallery setting, especially in elite enclaves of urban sites both in the North and the South, may easily navigate debates around hybridity, identity and postcoloniality. However, these curatorial gestures can become entrenched symbolic facades for art institutions to not expand their visions and engagements, along with the attendant changes in institutional composition and policies, that a more serious commitment to decolonization necessitates.

Further, if ethics is envisioned as a call to a relationship, rather than a problem of knowledge, which indigenous philosophies both in the Americas and elsewhere have strongly emphasized, then a very important site for institutional engagement is relationship-building with responsibility. This is an extremely intricate task and involves a commitment and vision far beyond the speediness of electronic capital, the expeditious inventiveness of many curatorial strategies, the spectacularity of art biennales, the rationale of funding applications, and the successful negotiation of bureaucratic norms. And as ethical flows and exchanges are unpredictable and without guarantees, they cannot match the glamour, the sanctioned “solidity” and the “measurable results” of being responsive and compliant to hegemonic discourses within the entangled arenas of art world institutions, government bureaucracies and corporations. All too often, creative and curatorial practices outside of these conjunctions are disappeared and/or construed as “unworthy,”“unsophisticated,”etc., or domesticated by hegemonic whims, necessities and agendas, underscoring the profound disposability of subaltern creative and curatorial endeavours within the art world nexus.

In order to develop many of these points further, I will now turn to a few specific examples. The first one is of Deepa Mehta who came to Canada from India in the 1970s and turned her filmic gaze onto the subcontinent in her movie Fire (1996). In many ways, the film is much more about

 her own identity and concerns rather than the pulsating and dynamic social realities of urban India. It is seriously mistaken in this instance to ignore how Mehta herself has been reshaped through her location in Canada and to only see her as an “independent” filmmaker interested in forging a different image of India abroad. This construct of the bold yet marginal diasporic filmmaker in the North is a facile one and ignores how the tropes of individual choice (imagined in a very narrow way), tradition versus modernity, as well as a generalized patriarchy, all energized by Fire, participate in a transnationally hot and consumable Northern rhetoric, both popular and feminist. What is also significant to realize is that Mehta’s voice is very problematically articulated as an authoritative one on India, both personally and structurally, along with carrying a lot more international weight and circulation than critical voices from within India.

The general problematic for diasporic articulations within privileged domains in the North, then, points to how privilege and oppression go hand in hand, and if only the position of the “margins” is evoked within these articulations, then the need to be accountable and responsible to those who are represented or engaged with is cleverly circumvented. At the same time, as responsibility is shirked, authoritativeness on various narratives remains intact, and this came to the fore when Fire was released in India and Mehta underplayed the centrality of queer desire and instead posited the film as a universal narrative regarding individual choices. Though the publicity and circulation enabled by international gay and lesbian film festivals was quite welcome, Mehta was deeply hesitant to have Fire read as a queer narrative and seemed unwillingly to use her privilege in furthering the dialogue around women’s sexualities and queer rights in India’s public spheres. As the organization Campaign for Lesbian Rights and the report Khamosh! Emergency Jari Hai and Lesbian Emergence strongly asserted, Mehta had commodified queer women’s sexualities and their lives for her own upward mobility and did not seem interested in engaging with the questions and concerns of those she purported to represent in Fire.3

As a general theoretical point, I do wish to emphasize that Fire like any other cultural text can and was and continues to be appropriated along different subversive routes. I address this in an upcoming paper on the film but the resistances that come to inhabit the film and its cultural politics are not due to its pedagogical thrust, which is quite problematic, but rather its performative (d)effects.4 This important distinction, well theorized by Homi Bhabha, still leaves open the question of incorporating such critiques within a more collective vision and I will turn to this crucial element, through planetarity, later in the paper.

My next example is of two Mexican artists, Silvia Gruner and Gabriel Orozco, whose work, at least in part, engages with issues of indigeneity. Gruner was trained in occupied Palestine (Israel) and the US, and Orozco now lives in Mexico City, New York and Paris. These transnationally mobile “conceptual” artists are highly smart, ironic and playful in ways appreciated by the professionalized art world. Their work provides sharp critiques of primitivism and its modernist underpinnings, opening up the traffic between the past and present, and also addresses some of the national and global capitalist appropriations of indigeneity. However, what is also significant to note is how these artists construct themselves and their work, and how others come to locate their practice. For example, Gruner constructs herself and is constructed by critics like Cauhtemoc Medina as working from the margins of Euro- and/or Euro-North American modernisms. Orozco’s work occupies a similar place and is interpreted by major critics like Benjamin Buchloh as being a sophisticated misreading of the “centres” that is informed by the lived hybridity and fragmentation of the geopolitical margins.5

 In the case of Gruner and Orozco, the “margins” are carefully homogenized and commodified for accessing mobility and presence in the contemporary art world. Though the indigenous is not romanticized or frozen within these artists’ works, sustained dialogue with those inhabiting indigeneity is constantly deferred; in occupying the “margins” and accessing its geopolitical realities without much ethical effort, there is a powerful collapse between mestizo/criollo responses to modernity and the indigenous responses to modernity. The forgetting of the fundamental fact that Mexico is still a settler colony allows upper class white and mestizo artists like Gruner and Orozco to be seen as being on some kind of periphery rather than being part of a national settler colonial elite that complicates easy imagina- tions of the flow of power lines across the so-called “First” and “Third” worlds.

I wish to pause here and elaborate on some key theoretical issues. In part, the creation of a homogenized periphery is achieved through the eliding of the question of the nation- state and one’s location within it. Underdevelopment and dependency theories may also play their part in that they emphasize imperial economic relationships but often put under erasure the long and complex entanglements of socio-political and other colonizations, especially in relation to the settler-coloniality of many nation-states in the South. Further, the thunderous focus on globalization or the global/ local nexus has at times led to a dismissal of the critical value of taking the nation-state as a strong site of investiga- tion; however, as Carl Good has succinctly argued, the nation is what it “always already has been: a deterritorializa- tion of itself” and that “the increasing fluidity of national borders is a nation—the very nation that cradles our institutions in its ever increasing complexity, transformation and juridical de-centring.”6 Such a framework allows one to critique the idea of nation as an organic entity while at the same time allowing one to take it as a point of departure.

Further, hybridity of places and identities is not a condition specific to the twentieth or twenty-first century. All social realities and social identities have been and are always already hybrid, and instead of contemporary art institutions thinking that they need to “educate” the public on the reified “complexity” of institutionalized art, or assuming that subaltern creative sites are “unsophisticated” compared to their own, they need to realize that the fundamental problem is with our own vision. We are the ones that are Rula Halwani, Intimacy, 2004, black-and-white photographs unable to read hybridity from below. We are the ones who of Qalandia (Israeli checkpoint). Courtesy of the artist

 refuse to learn from below as it implies a deep challenge to our power and authority within the distorted structures of the art world. It is our responsibility to ethically engage with subaltern sites in all their richness and vitality and to not violently erase or make ghostly the powerful creativity that inhabits these sites and the planet at large.

Moreover, why only articulate Euro and Euro-North American modernisms as “central” sites? Instead of focusing on modernism, why not open up to the larger terrain of modernity/coloniality utilizing indigenous narratives, theorizations and ethical strategies? Significantly, why not acknowledge and engage with all the different spatio-temporalities, along with modernity, which inscribe our planet?

I will now shift to a discussion of the Zapatista movement and the reworking of subalternity. Zapatismo is a movement devoted to broadening citizenship rights, and not only for indigenous people—part of its program is to demand democratic transparency for the entire national com- munity of Mexican citizens.7 What Zapatismo has done as a mass social movement is to show how indigenous struggles have a tremendous amount to teach, not only to Mexican society but also the world at large.8 The “Indian” is no longer a spectator of modernity but rather an astute critic of its contradictions and an important figure whose philosophies and struggles contain the seeds to democratize the world for all citizens. This ethicality which crosses different borders and engages diverse collectivities is part and parcel of planetarity.

Zapatismo is also different from indigenismo.It has at its base massive indigenous support, voice and membership, rather than being formulated by a criollo and mestizo elite in the name of Mexican national interests.9 Yet, rather than being a movement that “essentializes” or creates an “authentic”“Indian,” Zapatismo has allowed a heterogeneity of indigenous voices and self- representations to emerge, and has actively reached out to and included various local, national and international non-indigenous constituencies. In other words, the movement has made possible an exchange between multiple players while at the same time heterogeneous modes of indigenous thought and action have been forcefully articulated as valid, useful and powerful in contemporary society.

How is the Zapatista movement’s creation of a new discourse on difference and utopia relevant to the question of artistic practice and the work of Orozco and Gruner? It is clear that in so far as the work of these contemporary artists critiques the old and burdened myths of primitivism, indigenismo, the Mexican nation-state, and global capitalism, they also echo Zapatismo. Nonetheless, all too often art historical discourse and artistic practice does not accept the challenge of reinventing ethical relationships with subaltern knowledges as much as it acts out the “crisis” of identity from a proclaimed margin/periphery that is really directed towards upward mobility within an opaque and elite global art world. Ticio Escobar has warned that today one should remember that the critique of myths is always accompanied by the creation of new ones. And if the creation of these new myths has anything to do with social justice then “difference” should not be evoked to further reify subalternity or to forever defer a dialogue with it—rather, it needs to foreground the question of ethics as it relates to one’s practice. This ethical call to relationship needs to involve substantial participation and collaboration with indigenous communities in the context of exhibiting, curating and writing about art as well as creating it, especially if the question of modernity and its relationship to coloniality needs to be made relevant in a deep sense to the contemporary moment.

 Fabiola Nabil Naguib, Flying through the warm dry air I see the river below me The river knows all of our stories She flows, twists and crosses the reified borders we call our homes occupied regions too many times over cut out of our lands one arbitrary or strategic piece at a time....

This river does not touch all of our borders but she does hear the stories of all those who flee across, around and beyond her from all directions... witnessing the injustice and supporting our resistance to it.

As I fly the wind and sun sweep against my face I squint while looking down I can see them All of them small, greedy, foreign powers colonially trained elites and dashing diasporics with wide grins I can almost see their teeth I can hear them too laughing about their latest conquest sanctioned by the UN's Turn the Other Cheek Act.

The participants?: the upper crusts of browns, reds, yellows and blacks, least we forget whites. All of them co-optedly appointed incorporations of racist imperialist capitalism Patenting and commodifying our resources Damming and diverting our rivers Raping and polluting our oceans Ravaging the daily lives of billions with their multiple inhabitations of greed Attemptedly whiting-out our peoples, histories and memories

All the while forgetting the inevitability of connection. Our ancestral rivers seas oceans brooks lakes and streams witnessing merging teaching us to come together...regardless. 2003, site specific work. Courtesy of the artist

 I am deeply inspired in my thinking through of ethics within a planetary framework by indigenous writers such as Jeanette Armstrong, Lee Maracle, Patricia Monture-Angus, Assia Djebar, Fabiola Nabil Naguib and Leslie Marmon Silko. Gayatri Spivak has also theorized planetarity in her new book Death of a Discipline,but what I find problematic in this work is the lack of, as well as the kind of, overall acknowledgement given to indigenous philosophical and theoretical articulations. In illustrating her larger arguments, indigenous inhabitations get codified as “aboriginal animism” and “pre-capitalist cultures;”10 however, it is to be noted that the idea of overriding the global, imagined as an abstracted category allowing arrogant claims of human control, with inscriptions of the planet as “the species of alterity belonging to another system” that “we inhabit ...on loan,”11 flagged as a key reworking by Spivak, has always been a powerful indigenous theorization. The elaboration of alterity as being underived from human beings and planetarity “contain[ing] us as much as it flings us away,”12 as I choose to interpret it, is a way of invoking non-humancentricity/ non-centricity which is much more profoundly inhabited in the complex richness of an indigenous call to power, connection, ethicality and dialogue, “all our ancestors and relations.”

The reconceptualization of creativity as planetary is to acknowledge it, non-humancentrically, as the world’s commons. Creativity, both human and non-human, is present everywhere, challenging the art world and its discursive arenas to open up to its vitality, criticality and sacredness; no one body can hoard creativity, nor can it be contained. Planetarity, which is at the heart of indigenous theorizations of creative process, does not base itself on ideas of centre/periphery or self/other—it does not give dominant discourses that defining power, nor does it possess the dehumanizing and disempowering arrogance of Eurocentric and colonial paradigms.

Such a paradigm asks for curation to be seriously rethought as well. As I see it, curation is about nurturing and engaging with creativity on the planet and apart from giving non-human actors curatorial agency, this reworking also acknowledges the curatorial work put in by families, communities and individuals, irrespective of, and in an extremely tiny way in conjunction with, the professionalized art world.13

I now turn to the work of Lee Maracle and Fabiola Nabil Naguib, who shore up the unsettlingly open, reflexively rich inscriptions of planetarity in their own powerful ways. The first excerpt is from a forthcoming essay by Lee Maracle:

There never was a frontier. We were never on the edge of anything. We have and always will be in the Center. Borders are determined by where our imaginations take us in the moment. There is no center and so we cannot live on some kind of periphery. We are the heart of our nations. We erect and dismantle borders at will, but we will never acquiesce to someone’s illusions of Fronteras....

We are not assigned place, position or borders, we assume them, we relinquish assumptions or we contrive and respect the borders others take on, but no one but ourselves can define place, position or power.”14

Shifting from the First Nations to the Coptic indigenous context is a passage from “Sturdy like My Ancestors” by the artist and writer Fabiola Nabil Naguib:

I am sturdy like my ancestors In them With them I am steadfast from adversity Solid from retaining our memories

 and embracing the few possibilities of justice . . . left

As I walk in my two ‘home’ countries I continue in the endeavor to restore my faith that anything… will ever be different

I am sturdy like my ancestors Still here and when I go others will follow our tracks like I follow the shadows of my ancestors

I am sturdy Like my ancestors our hearts our spirits our memories our minds our bodies…

Still here.15

Notes 1 Sister Outsider (Freedom: The Crossing Press, 1984), 42. 2 A Collaborative Discourse between Douglas Cardinal and Jeanette Armstrong: The Native Creative Process, with Photographs by Greg Young-Inn (Penticton: Theytus Books, 1991), 46. 3 Khamosh! Emergency Jari Hai and Lesbian Emergence: A Citizen’s Report (New Delhi: Private Circulation Only, 1999). 4 By pedagogical, I mean how the film desires to make the patches and rags of everyday life read coherently by putting a narrative on it. See Homi Bhabha, Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994). This narrative in the film is one of transition—from the home to the outside, from the denial of desire to its awakening, and the move from “tradition” towards “modernity.” However, this coherency is constantly undone through the performative aspects of the film. 5 See Cuahtemoc Medina, “Prohibition as Incitement” in Silvia Gruner: Reliquias (Centre de la Imagen, 1997), 66-75. See also Benjamin Buchloh, “Gabriel Orozco: The Sculpture of Everyday Life” in Gabriel Orozco (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2000), 66-104. 6 Carl Good, “Introduction: Ungoverned Specificities,” eds. Carl Good and John V. Waldron, The Effects of the Nation: Mexican Art in an Age of Globalization (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 3 and 5. 7 See Josefino Saldana-Portillo, “Who is the Indian in Aztlan? Re-Writing Mestizaje, Indianism and Chicanismo from the Lacandon,” ed. Ileana Rodriguez, The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 402-403. 8 See Jose Rabasa, “Beyond Representation? The Impossibility of the Local (Notes on Subaltern Studies in Light of a Rebellion in Tepoztlan, Morelos)” in The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, 191-210. 9 Authors like Natividad Guiterrez, Nationalist Myths and Ethnic Identities: Indigenous Intellectuals and the Mexican State (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999) have noted that “although the Chiapas conflict is rooted in genuine indigenous claims and demands rising from injustice, poverty and marginality,” it remains the case that many indigenous intellectuals and figures insist that Marcos or other mestizo membership of the EZLN should not be the only ones representing them. As Guiterrez point outs “Indian” spokespersons have not been given much prominence in the debates, negotiations, and theorizations that have entered the mainstream discourse regarding the Chiapas rebellion against the stereotype of the “Indians” lacking the means to make themselves heard or that they are easily manipulated is widespread (see Nationalist Myths, 195-201). Thus, one should not forget that though Zapatismo has been a powerful political phenomenon, to be able to “heard” it has had to rely on language and rhetoric that is able to reach the ears of young, urban, educated, middle sectors of society. This is part of undoing the subalternity of indigenous views but what about narratives that we cannot make sense of, that we cannot “hear” thanks to the complicity of our privilege and our location in the coloniality of power (as a very basic starting point, we have to access to the voices if they are uttered in English or Spanish rather than indigenous languages). This serious caution must be maintained. 10 Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discpline (New York: Columbia University Press), 73 and 101. 11 Ibid., 72-73. 12 Ibid., 73 13 For those interested, more detailed theorization of creative production and curation along these lines is being undertaken by Fabiola Nabil Naguib and myself as the cofounders of the Creativity Commons Collective. Our work is upcoming soon in the edited publication as well as curatorial archive, Planetarity. 14 Lee Maracle, “Untitled Essay,” ed. Rajdeep Singh Gill, Planetarity: Intra/International Collection of Creative and Critical Writings (Vancouver: Creativity Commons Press, forthcoming). 15 Fabiola Nabil Naguib, “Sturdy Like My Ancestors,” Sturdy Like My Ancestors: The Poetry and Poetic Prose of Re/membering (Vancouver: Creative Commons Press, forthcoming).

     :   .   

       

35mm, black-and-white, 76 mins, 1997-2002 Director: Yang Fudong Cinematography: Wang Yi and Liu Tao Music: Jin Wang @ Shuijingdie Band (Crystal Butterfly) Cast: Zheng Hong, Zheng Chunzi, Qi Wei, and Shen Xiaoyan

 Zhuzi, a young intellectual, lives in Hangzhou, a city praised as a paradise for its beautiful scenery. Zhuzi and his fiancé, Lingshan, live a carefree life in the city. Every year, the city welcomes its rainy season in the months of March and April, but this year, the rainy season comes a bit earlier than usual. The drizzling rain makes the whole city seems cold and humid. Zhuzi, out of the blue, feels an unfamiliar discomfort, mixed with unease and anxiety. He does not know why he feels this way. Maybe it is some kind of disease? Zhuzi then starts to go to the hospital regularly for physical examinations. Again and again, doctors check his body—eyes, nose, ears, bones and so on—and again and again the doctors conclude that he is very healthy. Nothing is unusual. Gradually, Zhuzi thinks that the doctors’ diagnosis is right, and does not worry about his “disease” anymore. He was trying to avoid his uneventful life before, and he was afraid of its stillness. Zhuzi realizes that he actually loves his life, and that he should have a happy life. By then, the rainy season in Hangzhou is ending.

   In early November of 1996, my first script, Buxing Bei Moshengren Yanzhong (Unfortunately Predicted by Strangers), was finished. Although it had less than two thousand characters, the script was substantial for me. The moment I finished the script, I was extremely excited. I felt like I had already finished shooting the movie and the project was completed.

I suddenly thought that it was easy to make movies. Indeed, I still think so now. All you need is a camera to film. As long as you believe you are able to, then you can make movies. It is as simple as that. All problems can be solved on your own. The first time I said the word “action,”my blood was running quickly through my body and I felt that no other sound was more beautiful than the one coming from a movie camera. When I was alone watching the dailies in a screening room and listening to the dada-like sound of the projector, I knew what I wanted to achieve.

Later, the name of the movie changed to An Estranged Paradise,because it was shot in Hangzhou. The title, Unfortunately Predicted by Strangers, was changed because it was too pretentious. The movie is seventy-five minutes long.

At the time, some friends asked me what I was doing. I said that I was making a movie. As an actor? I answered no. What kind of movie? I said a black-and-white movie. What’s the movie about? I said it was a minor intellectual movie (xiao wenren dianying). Minor intellectual movies are about walking in the rain on a rainy day. They are about your emotions and moods; about the dreams that you cannot make true but cannot let go. They are about each detail of your life; they are what you think your life should be; they are the books you have read; they may also be

  a cliché. This is what “minor intellectual movies” are about. Maybe, but it sounds more like “minor capitalist movies.”“Minor capitalist movies” are not “minor intellectual movies.” This is what I think.

 Zhang Yaxuan: You are from Beijing, currently living and working in Shanghai, and this movie was shot in Hangzhou. The geographic relationship here is a bit unusual. Why do you have such a special love for the southern cities?

Yang Fudong: Before I start, I want to thank all my friends and family who have helped me. I think this movie could only be made in the south. As I grew up, I wanted to learn and experience new things. I went to college in Hangzhou. Many experiences, feelings, and judgments developed around the process of growing up. Later, one starts to contemplate them, and eventually one comes to prefer certain things over others. I think most people would not feel bad about going to college, especially about going to college in a city like this [Hangzhou]. There were a lot of wonderful feelings.

Zhang Yaxuan: You said that after graduating from the Zhejiang Institute of Fine Art, you did not have a job between 1995 and 1997, so you hung around in Beijing. Were you planning to make An Estranged Paradise then?

Yang Fudong: I had the idea right after graduating from college, but did not realize it. Around 1996, I rented a place in a courtyard across the street from the National Museum of Art. I wanted to do something meaningful and interesting, so perhaps I thought of making movies then. At first I took some classes at the Central Academy of Film, and worked with a production team for several days. But I felt distant. I wanted to get closer to films, but the close feeling could not be obtained from being with a production crew or from taking classes. It seemed that although you were standing there, you felt like you were being pushed further away. But the feeling was sort of like a catalyst, accelerating your decision. Instead of waiting and looking around, it was better to make a step and try it yourself. Therefore, before the end of 1997, perhaps around October, the script was finished. I then needed to make an effort to shoot the movie.

Zhang Yaxuan: How long was the script you wrote?

Yang Fudong: Five pages. Not very detailed. It was only a structure.

Zhang Yaxuan: Did you write it in accordance with the geographic space of Hangzhou?

Yang Fudong: Yes.

Zhang Yaxuan: Was it difficult to raise money?

Yang Fudong: I was very optimistic at the time, and did not think this kind of thing would be diffi- cult. If I liked something, I was hypnotized by it. If there was the tiniest opportunity, I would be happy for a whole day. If anybody promised something, I would be dreaming of it for a long time.

All images are stills from An Estranged Paradise. Courtesy of the artist

 I believed that as long as I kept trying, it would be done. Looking back now, if I was a little more relaxed, I would not have been able to find the money, and the movie would not be finished. Of course, this only applies to the early stages of production.

Zhang Yaxuan: Did the early stages cost a lot of money?

Yang Fudong: At first it was not a lot, but later on it was. I assumed that after the shooting, the movie would be finished. But who knew that the post-production work was actually the larger part of the whole process. It was not until I started that I realized that the beginning was only a small part of it. I borrowed money from friends, and wanted to borrow money from whomever I saw. It was actually not a good thing, because it was so easy to upset my friends. At the time all of us had just graduated and started to work, and each of us had a difficult time. I was about twenty-six when I was making the movie. Now I know that I was too naive and inexperienced.

Zhang Yaxuan: How many people were on the crew?

Yang Fudong: A director, several actors and actresses, a cinematographer and two friends who were helping me. This was the crew. We did not record sound. All sound was added later. How could we have found the money to record sync-sound?

Zhang Yaxuan: How did you collaborate with the cinematographer?

Yang Fudong: We fought at the beginning, because I always wanted to check the frame. If it was a still shot, I would take a look at the composition of the picture. If I felt it was not bad, then it was okay. If it was a tracking shot, I would look at the beginning and the end of the shot. At first he was not used to it, and he felt that I intervened too much. By the middle of the shoot, our relationship improved a great deal. It is not easy to do anything, and he could understand. Also, after a while, he knew that I was not playing around, but seriously trying to do something. He was very professional. There was not much money, but he stayed on the job for almost a month.

Zhang Yaxuan: What was the shooting ratio?

Yang Fudong: About one to three. I was very wasteful because I had no previous experience. Although the funds were limited, we actually shot too much film, which meant less money to develop the film. But how was I to know this at the time? In a way, I made all the mistakes that you are warned about in textbooks. When making a movie, you have to have a plan. You need to budget filming and developing costs. Not to mention script supervision. It was the cinematographer who crossed off the list what had been shot. I didn’t even know that each shot had its own number and that each piece of film was numbered accordingly. All I knew was shooting. So it was a bit hectic, and thirteen of the rolls we developed were blank. I was so heartbroken afterwards. Well, now I just consider it as tuition.

Zhang Yaxuan: How did you find the actors and actresses?

Yang Fudong: The actor we initially chose suddenly disappeared. But everyone else was on the set and ready for shooting, so we had to look locally for somebody else. Zheng Hong, the actor you now see in the movie, is a teacher at the Hangzhou Academy of Silk Technology, and he also has

 a degree in oil painting. I told him that we would finish shooting in about two weeks, but how could that be possible? Everything took longer, which made him angry at me. But he is a really good guy. It eventually took about four weeks. The actresses were from art schools, mostly recommended by friends. The first was a music teacher Zheng Chunzi, the second was Qi Wei from the same college I went to but she was several years behind me, and the third was a student of Chunzi, Shen Xiaoyan. I asked them to come over to help, and they agreed immediately. Anyway, they are all really nice.

Zhang Yaxuan: Do you think they match the characters you imagined?

Yang Fudong: In a sense, I had no choice but to look for people that matched the characters as closely as possible. When I first met the actor, I was not sure if he was right for the part. Then I gave myself a couple days to contemplate the script and to comprehend its mood. When I was clear [about the script], we started to communicate.

Zhang Yaxuan: How did you collaborate with the actors and actresses?

Yang Fudong: We rehearsed and shot at the same time. I gave each of them a copy of the script. There were very few words, only one or two pages, or even half a page, for each person. Their acting was basically walking from one point to another. The rest of the time I just told them what to do. They tried to act with the flavour of real life. Sometimes people would joke with each other. They [the actresses] always said that he [Zheng Hong] tried too hard to be cool.

Zhang Yaxuan: Your script was very simple. Was there a lot of improvisation?

Yang Fudong: A lot, maybe one third.

Zhang Yaxuan: Did you edit the film yourself?

Yang Fudong: An older film editor helped me. He did it. He also gave me many suggestions because he was very experienced. If you told him which section you wanted to include, he would tell you which pictures fit the best. He would also give advice on specific details.

Zhang Yaxuan: The film took five years to finish. What is your strongest impression of it?

Yang Fudong: I do not feel excitement any more. On the contrary, I feel I am lost. Maybe because five years was not a short time, and many of my thoughts and feelings diverged from my original ideas. But unexpectedly my desire was revived. I wanted to make another movie.

   Zhang Yaxuan: Did you often go to the places in the movie when you were in college?

Yang Fudong: They are all in places where I used to rent apartments, so I am familiar with them. When I was shooting the movie, or writing the script, I knew that if I made a movie in Hangzhou, I would go to this place and that place. I knew them by heart. Maybe because of this, I still think that many of the pictures are pretty good.

 Zhang Yaxuan: So the movie shows the Hangzhou you remember? I heard that Hangzhou has changed a lot, and it is now very different from what it is in the movie.

Yang Fudong: Not exactly. You can say that a movie is always something in your memory. When such a memory is shown in a movie, you give that memory to the audience. You cannot say that memory is an emerging point, nor a diverging point, but it gives you the feeling of both. Today Hangzhou is like a mini-Shanghai. The road that the taxi drives through [in the film] does not exist anymore.

Zhang Yaxuan: So what kinds of places did you choose?

Yang Fudong: The places he [Zheng Hong] lived: the serene countryside. I chose the famous classical buildings in Hangzhou. The same went for the gardens. I wanted to make the movie sort of like the hanging calendars of the 1980s, which were very popular at the time. The pictures in the calendars were ostentatious in a sense, but from another point of view, they were perfectly beautiful. I borrowed their standards. They were precise, with no flaws. I think that Hangzhou is a beautiful city, especially in that season [rainy season]. The images have the atmosphere of early spring, a time when it starts to get a little warmer but is still chilly.

Zhang Yaxuan: Do you have a special impression of the rainy season in Hangzhou?

Yang Fudong: Hangzhou is not exactly a place to do things. Or maybe that’s the case just for me. Laziness and comfort saturate the air and there is a feeling of moody relaxation. Sometimes it may sound maudlin, but you can feel it. The rain during that season can affect your mood, but it is not an annoying rain. I like the rainy season. Everything is wet and surrounded by rain and mist.

In terms of time, the movie gives a distant feeling. I think it is timeless and ambiguous. I don’t just feel that way because the movie was made five years ago. It was one of the effects I wanted to achieve at the time. It is like any rainy season, not from a specific year, and not with specific people. The rainy season comes every year, and everybody will have some kind of feeling or reaction to it. You may feel melancholy or happy. There is no need to anticipate. Year after year, it is always there to touch your heart. It is not possible to define a specific image.

Zhang Yaxuan: But eventually it is a movie of a specific time. If you have to define it, what kind of specific meaning does it have in terms of time?

Yang Fudong: It is connected to my generation, including our mentality and our experiences. The feelings [of our generation and of those expressed in the movie] are very similar. The movie is abstract and unfamiliar. The English word “estranged” means distant. It is sort of like you live in a place, but you do not know anything about the place.

    Zhang Yaxuan: At the beginning of the movie, you included a long lecture on landscape painting. It seems irrelevant to the rest of the movie.

Yang Fudong: I meant to emulate documentary movies, just like the lectures on flowers and birds shown on TV. These lectures are similar to well-known adages. Lecture about them once, and they

 all sound correct. I do not know if I have achieved such an effect, but it is what I intended to show to the audience. The adages are correct, even if you do not feel comfortable about them, or if you do not like them, or even if you actually like them. No matter what, they have been lectured to you and imprinted in your mind. You will eventually, at some point, appreciate what they have taught you. It is like going to school, where you are educated gradually. Many people tell you what to do and what is correct, and maybe you would think that it is meaningless. But everybody ignores the fact that all these adages are correct.

If you have to interpret the movie, isn’t it a story of a person who has nothing to do but tries to find something to do? He does not realize that the best things are those closest to him. Or, if he cannot find the best things, he then has to learn to compromise. Actually, well-known adages, to a certain degree, should be the conclusions after compromise. They are all correct—the things older people tell you such as truth and virtue, and the principals of being a human being. Subconsciously, people still have a lot in common, such as moral values. We are in the habit of inheriting and carrying on. Maybe you have tried to step out of it, or even tried to stand in opposition to it. You refused to acknowledge it, but eventually you have to accept it. Such is the adage. You run around in a big circle, and at the end you feel like you have not said anything. This is the underlying meaning of the movie. It is like a lecture or a proverb. It is a little boring.

Zhang Yaxuan: In terms of the narrative, your movie is about one man and his relationship with three women. His life is ambiguous and adrift, without the slightest certainty.

Yang Fudong: The movie is also an imagined feeling, a feeling that he lives a comfortable life in a nice environment in Hangzhou. In the easiest interpretation, he has a wife, a fiancé, and an understanding lover. He actually feels very good. He also has some unexpected encounters. All these feelings exist, but they somehow are not in accordance with each other.

He chooses to marry the third girl, and eventually becomes physically healthy after making the compromise. But once he recovers, his emotions become unstable. There were a lot of good things offered to him before. Once everything starts to be quiet and uneventful, he actually becomes paranoid. Healthy is also unhealthy. To make it abstract, it is actually the contemplation and appreciation of the subconsciousness buried beneath your heart.

Zhang Yaxuan: From a different narrative angle, I think the movie has something pessimistic in it. This pessimism cannot simply be interpreted as uncertainty. To me, it comes more from the relationship between Zhuzi and hospitals, and the changes in him before and after the rainy season. You also shot images of policemen several times, which become part of the space in the movie. To understand them from Foucault’s point of view, they are all tools to regulate society. So for me, Zhuzi’s unspeakable discomfort and his later change is very special.

Yang Fudong: Sometimes I feel a bit proud of myself. This movie is different from other movies made in China. I can only give you this explanation to the feelings you described— I knew the way I wanted to shoot this movie, and I knew the flavour I wanted to give it. I did not really think of how deep or how important it would be. I only knew the feeling I wanted to express. I watched the movie after finishing it, and I know that I more or less conveyed that feeling. Movies can speak for themselves. It is all in there.

 Sometimes you have such strong emotions but you do not know how to express them. The things you said, I can feel them myself. I can even feel them very strongly, but sometimes I feel helpless in expressing them. Because I feel helpless, I want to express such feelings. It is a very depressing feeling. I cannot do anything even if I want to. This feeling drains you.

In fact, some plots came to me only by chance, and were not designed by me. For example, when we were shooting the girl crossing the street, to our surprise, a policeman actually followed her. When she was explaining to the policeman what she was doing, we were still shooting. We shot the scene several times, and when I looked at all of them, I instantly felt the shot with the policeman was the best. So I did not use the others. I think being inexperienced has its advantage. You do not have to follow plans or rules. There are a lot of uncertainties when you make a movie, but they may be helpful.

Zhang Yaxuan: Zhuzi uses a blow dryer and points it to himself. This is a little offensive. Did you use the blow dryer on purpose?

Yang Fudong: Yes. Among the limited props available at the time, this was a relatively more interesting one. We shot three takes and told the actor to improvise. There were some basic moves, such as turning the blow dryer on and off, switching hands, and walking back and forth. I told him to choose the pace, just not too slow. At the time, I vaguely knew that I wanted to use indication and subtle suggestion, but what would be indicated or suggested should be very clear. The actor had his own way of going about this, including acting bored and hopeless. He did not really know what to do but still kept trying.

I edited the movie in 1997, and that was it. Now, looking back on it, the movie is actually a bit silly. If I could re-do it now, I would probably take the blow dryer scene out, because in recent years this kind of straightforward expression has become too popular in art. There is too much emphasis on the conceptual, and what has been emphasized is not necessarily good.

Zhang Yaxuan: Did you try to achieve the symbolic and indirect effect we see in the movie?

Yang Fudong: I believe so. Some of the scenes have such feeling, but what they convey is not necessarily the original meaning. Some things appear again and again in the movie, such as the postman. He shows up again later, but I totally missed him when I first saw the movie. This [using of the postman] was specifically designed, but I did not do a good job with it. Nobody sees the scene clearly. I wanted to use the postman to say that on the way to the hospital, Zhuzi feels that everybody is just a stranger passing by.

Also, the girl on the pedestrian overpass is not his fiancé. My intention of having the same actress playing these two roles [the girl on the overpass and his fiancé] was to create the feeling of sameness. We go back to uncertainty. It looks like everything is changing, but they only change to become uncertain. It is like compromise in your life. I think the movie is actually a pessimistic reflection. When you are in a pessimistic mood, your life may change to fit you, but you may also have to change in order to fit into life. Once you fit into your life, you also lose the mood. This uncertainly is possibly a good thing. Subconsciously, you are looking for a normal life, but such a life is boring. You are happier but more bored.

 Zhang Yaxuan: The worms are strange too. They are also repeated in the movie.

Yang Fudong: I was thinking of using some kind of slithering thing. It had to be something alive but also something that could be raised in captivity. It is hard to explain. These ideas were all subconscious.

Zhang Yaxuan: The scenes at the beginning and at the end of the movie are in contrast with the rest of the movie. So is the rock n’ roll music. These scenes gave me a feeling of freedom, or, of not being in despair.

Yang Fudong: The music was chosen in 1997. It was by a friend’s band [Crystal Butterfly]. The music was intended to break away from the movie. I think the music is beautiful. It is called A Mysterious Journey.

By the end of the movie, what took place at the beginning has been compromised but the change is happy. The insane young guy at the railroad track [Gu Lei] has not changed. Actually, he is, in an incomprehensible way, the person who holds the truth.

Zhang Yaxuan: Then why did you choose the railroad tracks?

Yang Fudong: The idea only came up on location. We were waiting to shoot a train, and I saw him smoking a cigarette. I said to myself maybe we could add one scene? I asked Gu Lei: how about standing on that platform and goofing around? So we filmed him with the camera. We shot two rolls of Gu Lei and both were included in the movie. One was with Gu Lei fully clothed. In the second, I asked him to dance and jump around while gradually taking off his clothes. I included almost the entire length of negative when editing. It was more than one minute long, and went well with the music. Later, some people said that he was the best actor in the movie.

They [Zhuzi and Gu Lei] actually have two different personalities. Zhuzi (Zheng Hong) is depressed and moody, while Gu Lei is like a street boy. It is hard to describe him. He is open and straightforward, and even swears. When Gu Lei swears, I think his swearing is a way of releasing emotion. The scene means that one can persevere, perhaps unconsciously.

Zhuzi smiles in the scene with the wedding gown. When you compromise in order to fit into life, your smile is charming, but your future is uncertain. In the scene with the wedding gown, I meant to say that on the surface it is beautiful and satisfying. This is what everybody wants.

Zhang Yaxuan: You said that when you watch the movie now, you think some parts are a little rough. Which parts?

Yang Fudong: The part of imitating a radio broadcast. Now it seems to me a little unnatural, but several years ago, it was just the way I liked it. Also, the scene of the swimming pool is too weak. The part of people walking back and forth seems a little unnecessary, the same for the newspaper-reading sequence. I wanted to create a real life, and I thought it was interesting at the time. Now I think it is too simple. I was hoping to directly convey the message by using small details—people, laziness, doing chores, and being naked. Also the swimming scene. I planned to have the boy swim together with his buddies, but later changed it so the boy was watching from above, like a passer-by.

 Zhang Yaxuan: I think this is a good change.

Yang Fudong: Yes, it was changed on location, and it was a good change. The bad part is when they go down to swim. The atmosphere is not strong enough. I feel the part where Zhuzi and his parents are rowing a boat is pretty good. The music is good too. I knew Jin Wang would be great. He is the composer for the movie, a star student from the Shanghai Conservatory. His music makes the movie beautiful. Maybe it would be better if the voice of the girl had some local accent. Putonghua [official Mandarin] makes it a bit unsophisticated. The scene with the girl eating ice cream is also a bit rough. The meaning is unclear and the flavour is not strong enough.

     Zhang Yaxuan: You gave a minor intellectual the name Zhuzi [literally meaning column or post]. I think it is a funny name, because it is almost the opposite or false image of a city. Does it have some symbolic meaning? Where did the name come from?

Yang Fudong: I used to have a classmate whose nickname was Zhuzi. At first I was hesitant to use the name of a friend, but I felt it sounded comfortable and right. The girl’s name, Lingshan, is actually the name of the heroine in a novel by my favorite writer, and not the Yue Lingshan in Jin Yong’s novel. Names are just symbols in any script. All the other names were picked randomly.

Zhang Yaxuan: You said your movies are about minor intellectuals. What is a minor intellectual?

Yang Fudong: The term xiao wenren [minor intellectual] is something I made up. The words feel right to me. To call it a minor intellectual movie is not to purposely differentiate it from other movies. It means that from the writer’s point of view, there is a group of special people, who may not do anything astonishing or remarkable. They may not create masterpieces but they have their own qualities. Maybe you do not notice them on a daily base and they will never be anything special, but when you suddenly discover them they are very adorable. They can touch your heart. I think minor intellectuals have this kind of spirit.

Zhang Yaxuan: You identified Zhuzi as a minor intellectual. What is your relationship with Zhuzi?

Yang Fudong: It is not a strong relationship, but we have some connections. Doesn’t everybody like to express their feelings through other people or objects? Maybe I subconsciously gave him some of my feelings, but not directly. You may not admit such feelings, but your movies naturally have them.

Zhang Yaxuan: Are you Zhuzi? Or is Zhuzi an image of you?

Yang Fudong: This is not the case. Whether the answer is yes or no, it should be the yes of half-yes-half -no, and the no of a half-no-half-yes.

Zhang Yaxuan: Then do you think you are an intellectual?

Yang Fudong: I think I am, or at least a half intellectual. I don’t want to define it on a literal level, the level on which everybody agrees. The spirit of intellectuals is the dream you have for yourself

 and the sensation of chasing a dream in dreams. In other words, being an intellectual means imposing the status of being an intellectual upon oneself —that is the flavour. To assume oneself an intellectual—that is the spirit. Being an intellectual also includes the meaning imposed by others. Of course, an intellectual needs to have the spirit in himself and in his bones.

Zhang Yaxuan: How do you differentiate these intellectuals from other people?

Yang Fudong: It is the difference between the inside and the outside. You may say that he is snobby or self-absorbed. He can appreciate the spirit in himself, and you will feel the spirit when it is least expected. Similarly, each plant will have its own beauty, such as a wildflower. When the rain drops on its petals, or when the sun touches it, the flower is always beautiful. Maybe the power of such beauty is not very strong, but it will somehow touch you one day. Such is the spirit of the intellectual. The seasons are also this way. One day when you get up and take your first breath, you know that the spring is here. A warm spring is coming but it is still a little chilly. Actually I am not the only one who has this feeling. Everybody has it. I think the closer you are to being an intellectual, the more sensitive you are. This movie is sensitive in the same way. It has something similarly touching and will move intellectuals.

 Zhang Yaxuan: Don’t you like the movies made in 1930s China?

Yang Fudong: I like them a lot. I remember the time when the Central Academy of Film had several special screenings, including Clouds and Moonlight Along Eight-Thousand Li Road (Baqianli Lu), Red Flag (Hongqi Pu), Crow and Sparrow (Wuya Yu Maque), and Family-Spring- Autumn (Jia Chun Qiu). I especially liked Spring in a Small Town (Xiaocheng Zhi Chun). But Xiaocheng Zhi Chun has become trendy and overly popularized. If you follow trends, any old film is a classic nowadays.

Zhang Yaxuan: Do you think your movies are related to those old movies?

Yang Fudong: There might be some similarities, but I did not do it on purpose.

Zhang Yaxuan: If Chinese movies have traditionally been related to intellectuals, then I think your movies have inherited this cultural tradition. But at the same time, I feel they convey complex feelings. Do you have a special interest in the tradition of Chinese culture?

Yang Fudong: I do have a special interest in it, but it is more superficial than serious. Maybe I have the love for Chinese culture, but have not really understood it. [My understanding only goes] skin deep. Yegong hao long [a Chinese proverb which describes somebody who worships dragons in theory but is terrified when he encounters a real dragon] may not be the most accurate way to describe me, but I think I may have such a “phony” tendency. I am actually proud of such artificiality in myself. Even though [my understanding of Chinese culture is] never clear, I am often completely moved by it. Something is not just a matter of inheritance, but it is a kind of emotion and love. If you prefer something, you may have developed such a preference because of your life, and how you learned it, or discovered it. The things that triggered these preferences and emotions are the result of certain traditions. They make you understand beauty, and they penetrate everything.

 Zhang Yaxuan: What do you think of current Chinese movies?

Yang Fudong: Current Chinese movies need changes. This does not just apply to the movies we see. I am willing to be part of the other movies in order to propel change in film. I want to express some different ideas and feelings. Even if there is a limited audience, these movies are an undeniable part of Chinese film history. I do not dare say more. I just want to do it.

To a certain degree, there is still an emphasis on spirit and culture. If there is a group of people doing something, then there is some kind of spirit there. It may have little effect, but it still exists and it is part of the process of cultural development. This process is important. There is also a big group existing within or outside such spirit, and this group also has a very important and strong effect on cultural development. Many cultural movements are started by a group of pioneers who inspire many followers. Experiments may fail, but as long as there are people who try, it is always good.

Zhang Yaxuan: It took you a long time to finish the movie. What is your reaction when you see it again? Do you feel connected to it?

Yang Fudong: Very much so. I have seen the movie no less than a hundred times. I saw it when I was making it, by myself, and with other people. I am sort of tired of it now. Sometimes I also feel it is not so good [to see it too many times]. This is very damaging.

Zhang Yaxuan: Do you have any expectations from the audience? Do you want to show the movie to certain people, in a specific place?

Yang Fudong: It should be like a book on a bookshelf. If you don’t want to see it, it will be there. Occasionally when you see it, you feel it is kind of interesting.

Zhang Yaxuan: No matter what other people say, what do you think of your movie?

Yang Fudong: I feel at first it is a movie about intellectuals (a minor intellectual movie). It is quiet and also meaningful, and sometimes it is a bit boring. It does not just include what you see. There is also uncertainty. I am not trying to differentiate my movie from other movies, but it has a spirit and at least that is something different. It has the feeling of wandering around. It is like throwing a pebble, and circles emerge on the water.

     : , ,    

 

A month and a half after Fei Dawei’s massive exhibition opened in Lyon, I found myself looking at Roman busts without noses on the ground floor of the Shanghai Art Museum. Shanghainese were crowding the temporary exhibition hall, reading simplified wall texts in simplified characters. A brutal period of civil war separated the Republic and the Empire, the texts said. Agriculture continued to develop. People worshipped household gods.

Was there any connection between the basement holdings of various Tuscan museums, dug up and sent to Shanghai for Men and Gods in the Rome of the Caesars, and Le Moine et le Demon, the largest exhibition of Chinese contemporary art—if one’s metrics are budget and floor size—yet mounted in Europe?

Le Moine et le Demon,which occupied the entire exhibition space of the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon between June 8 and August 15 of this year, meant different things to different participants. For curator Fei Dawei, it was a comeback, the first major exhibition he would curate since 1997. For the Guangdong Museum of Art, which lent its imprimatur and its budget, it was a chance to be the first Chinese museum to sponsor an exhibition abroad, cementing its authority as the most forward-looking of state museums. For collectors Guy and Myriam Ullens, who underwrote the show to the tune of €750,000, it was a way to move beyond their 2002 collection show Paris-Peking, and, through the vehicle of their smart foundation, into the headier realm of a museum show. For the Lyon museum, it was a way to end the French “Year of China” with an exhibition it considered more intelligent than the several dozen that had preceded it. “Other museums have done China; we’re doing artists,”said museum director Thierry Raspail to a room of reporters.

But for the artists, it was to be pure liberation. As Fei Dawei wrote in his preface:

This exhibition is unlike other exhibitions held in the West, because in it, Chinese contemporary art is not posited yet again as a collective entity, or a manifestation of social phenomena, but as an individual undertaking. The participants have been selected not because of their identity as Chinese artists, but because of the quality of their work. The entire structure of the exhibition is based on displaying individual artists and works. The works exhibited here are not illustrations of the changes in Chinese society, nor are they reports on the latest trends. They are simply juxtapositions of different works by different artists.

The title comes to us from a Chinese Buddhist proverb: “If the way (dao) grows an inch, the demon (mo) gains a foot.”Nomenclature was not an easy task: at last check, the English title was “The Way and the Demon.”The Chinese title, originally “Mo Yu Dao,”or “Demon and Dao,” ended up as “Li Li Wai Wai,”roughly translated—and the slippage here is ironic—“Inside Out.” The titular proverb was intended to suggest that for all Chinese art’s recent popularity abroad, and for all its increasing “legitimization” in the homeland, we must remain constantly vigilant.

Explaining this in his catalogue preface, Fei Dawei invoked a less highbrow American proverb: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”Beware artists, the warning goes: for every new gallery in Factory 798, for every Ullens wannabe with a $10,000 cheque, there is an imperialist Western curator looking to turn your work into “an illustration of social change in contemporary China.”

 Figure 1. Sui Jianguo, Clothes Wrinkle Study: Right Arm, 2003, sculpture. Photo credit: Bruno Amsellem. Courtesy of Guy and Myriam Ullens Foundation

This show was to be both a new beginning and a final solution: a presentation of artists as artists and works as works. And how better to end the “Année de la Chine en France” that began with a “flea market” exhibition at the Pompidou and climaxed at Chinese Spring Festival with the Eiffel Tower bathed in red and a dragon-dance goose-step down the Champs Elysée? Looking back on a year of Airbus orders, Carrefour openings, and joint naval war games, the Chinese and the French would make another pact: Chinese artists would “say farewell to their collective image,”as the headline of the Southern Weekend review went on to put it. The subaltern would speak, and then eat andouillette.

Thus, without irony, an exhibition looking to overturn the twin orthodoxies of political pandering and misunderstanding abroad, and self-censorship at home was mounted at the end of a blatantly Orientalist celebration, financed by a pre-eminent Western collector, and orchestrated by a Chinese museum that in the spirit of retired Chairman Jiang’s Three Represents (The Party represents: the most advanced culture) was stretching its limbs abroad. And all within days of the opening of the Wu Hung/Christopher Phillips photo carnival in New York.

And what better work to install in the first hall of an exhibition aimed at challenging our deepest held perceptions of Chinese art and politics than ...the giant hand of Mao Zedong (fig. 1)? A massive outstretched right arm from Sui Jianguo’s “folds” series gobbled up its white room and invited viewers in, coated in a gloriously thin patina of Dashanzi mud.

A tiny video screen hung from the hallway into the next room, looping Yang Zhenzhong’s video Shower,set up the real tension that ran through the exhibition. In this brilliant little video, a mentally handicapped man clothed in Red Army gear frantically soaps and soaks as uptempo military marches play in the background. Contrary to the exhibition’s theoretical premises, Sui’s hand and Yang’s screen appeared as Beijing and Shanghai versions of the politically illustrative work the exhibition claimed to despise. Consistent with its achievement, they were also some of the best-installed versions of that genre yet to emerge.

The Shanghai irony-mongers and videographers who have become darlings of European exhibitions were well represented: Yang Fudong, Liang Yue, and Lu Chunsheng. Yang Fudong

 Figure 2. Xu Zhen, Comfort, 2004, installation. Photo credit: Bruno Amsellem. Courtesy of the artist showed another edition of Unknown Paradise, and Liang Yue a self-absorbed video with as many minutes as she has years: twenty-three. Lu Chunsheng showed The Curved Line that Coughs,a sweet video on a tiny screen that looks down at a line of people from an apartment window.

Two Shanghai artists got big play: Yang Zhenzhong, who also showed an eight screen circular projection, and Xu Zhen, who transformed a Third World bus into a washing machine. Yang’s work, Encircled, was realized in Shanghai with sixty actors. Concerned with how to truthfully record movement, Yang settled on using a shaky camera hand. The result, in which vaguely familiar Shanghai art scenesters undulate toward the viewer, is claustrophobic, even though the installation was one of the exhibition’s largest. (In defiance of catalogue essay militancy, the materials released by the Lyon museum tell us that “This work is representative of the vision of the young generation living in a Chinese context of extreme change.”)

Xu Zhen’s work, entitled Comfort (fig. 2), involved shipping a shoddy fifteen-passenger bus from China, sealing it, filling it with water and soap, and wiring it into a washing machine. Through the windows, viewers could watch clothes wash. As with most of Xu’s works, this one defies exegesis. He thought it might be funny, and it kind of was.

As in Xu Zhen’s now-famous Tw ins exhibition in a Jinshajiang warehouse during the 2002 Shanghai Biennale, each of these Shanghai works had their Beijing doppelgangers. Yang Zhenzhong’s was by Wang Gongxin, whose four-screen video Courtyard was mounted in the same room that once held Kim Soo-ja’s Needlewoman. One stood among the quadruple projections, waiting for the Capital-style doors to open and close, revealing scenes of construction and folk dancing. Xu Zhen’s was by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, who shipped over a construction site cement mixer and a healthy supply of human ash to mix into bricks. If Xu’s work was silly and light, Sun and Peng’s was needlessly heavy-handed and self-consciously edgy.Yes, the vestiges of shock still litter the Beijing scene, but this effort to inject a bourgeois museum with a little piece of Beijing basement at the turn of the millennium seemed poorly rationalized, if chillingly executed.

The other Beijing videographers—Li Yongbin and Song Dong—made a strong showing. Li Yongbin, that unfailing minimalist, recorded a sunset the length of a VHS cassette. It was projected

 Figure 3. Gu Dexin 06.08.2004, 2004, installation. Photo credit: Bruno Amsellem. Courtesy of Guy and Myriam Ullens Foundation in a tiny room set off from the crowd. Guy Ullens called it his favorite work. Song Dong showed a giant hand slapping the floor, projected from above in a semi-dark room.

But two walk away Beijingers had no Shanghai counterparts: Zhuang Hui and Gu Dexin. Zhuang re-installed his Beijing Biennale darling, a giant steel press made of styrofoam. The narrative behind the work is that Zhuang once worked in such a factory in his native Henan, where he witnessed a foreman’s legs crushed the night before Spring Festival. How much better things would have been had those machines been as light as foam! The installation in Lyon was meant to protect the work—viewers could not touch the machines, as they could in Beijing, where their fingernails left damaging traces. The room was so dim that this reviewer actually believed the artist had shipped over real machines—which seemed not at all ridiculous in keeping with the exhibition’s shipping budget largesse. So Zhuang Hui succeeded at industrial mimesis, creating a convincing factory room that from a distance did not reveal its satire.

Gu Dexin launched the closest thing he has ever had to a retrospective (fig. 3). In a room with blood-red walls, he arranged dozens of works held together by a shared formal conceit: squiggly lines. One wall was inset with glass cases full of little clay aliens procreating. Another was hung with industrial plastics resembling seaweed that Gu had collected over the years. Another was hung with his drawings of the same clay figures, variously engaged. As usual, the floor was covered with green apples, tempting viewers into original sin. Rising from the apple-floor came a set of supermarket freezers, filled with squiggly pig brains, and a table bearing the boxes of dried meat that were the basis for some of his earlier works.

The exhibition’s two painters were well chosen: Beijing-based Xie Nanxing, whose wistful triptych sought to capture the feel of a rainy windshield, and Shanghai’s Wang Xingwei, who served up his typical smattering of hastily painted scenes on strange materials. One painting of a football pitch, tempera on cardboard, was particularly memorable.

Rong Rong and inri transplanted part of last autumn’s Beijing solo show, a set of romantic distant nude self-portraits taken in and around Mount Fuji. Rong Rong also showed the standard East

 Village prints. But every exhibition needs its new discovery, and this one had Wang Ningde. The thirty-two- year-old Guangzhou photographer made his Beijing debut last fall at the same Gu Zhenqing-curated satellite show that supplied so many other works in this exhibition. His diligently composed and haunting pictures show soldiers, teachers, families, little kids—all with their heads slanting downwards and their eyes closed.

If Beijing-Shanghai tension was at the heart of the show, another dialectic, between the diasporic Chinese artists Figure 4. Huang Yongping, Tête d’Or, 2004, installation, 5 x 4 x 4 m. Photo credit: Blaise Adilon. Courtesy of the artist and a diasporic Chinese curator, framed it nicely. Huang Yongping, Yang Jiechang, Shen Yuan, and Lin Yilin provided emblematic works outside the museum; Lu Jie’s recapitulation of The Long March: A Walking Visual Display occupied the museum’s entire top floor.

Huang’s work was typically brilliant: a tête d’or for the museum, situated across the street from the Parc de la tête d’Or (fig. 4). The park’s name refers to a Christ-head buried there by a Jew in 1853. In Huang’s piece, cultural exchange takes the opposite turn, as a gold-plated pavilion in the Song dynasty style is mounted squarely above the columns of the museum’s façade. There was an urban myth that Beijing’s mid-1990s mayor would approve any construction project with the hint of a Chinese roof. Huang artfully rendered this same urge for slap-it-on culturalism: as it opened itself to China, the Lyon museum wore a funny little Chinese hat.

Shen Yuan’s was less brilliant. In mock honour of a 1914 exhibition of Chinese three-wheeled cycles held in Lyon, she simply imported several dozen of the vehicles from Fujian, and had them set out in the Place Bellecour in the city centre.

Yang Jiechang hung a fine curtain over the museum’s main staircase, embroidered in gold with human bones. Entitled Scroll of Secret Merits (fig. 5), it invoked divination practices. He then hired a troupe of Guangdong folk singers to mount a tiny stage by the door during the opening, singing political tunes in provincial dialect incomprehensible to all but a few. (The singers—who had never left Guangdong—proved an even greater asset at the banquet which followed the opening, angering the several diners who were not part of the museum group.)

Lin Yilin’s kylin bursting through a cinderblock wall allows us to have the whole China fantasy in one work: the land of mythical eastern animals and speedy construction. Though the work was installed inside the museum, it was chosen for the exhibition posters that were hung around town.

On the third floor, The Long March finally accomplished its dream of exhibiting beyond China (fig. 6). Curator Lu Jie plastered a giant room with photographs, and filled it with artifacts ranging from tiny Mao sculptures to the Apple PowerBook he took with him on the road. Those familiar

 Figure 5. Yang Jiechang, Scroll of Secret Merits (Parchemin Divinatoire), 2004, installation. Photo credit Bruno Amsellem. Courtesy Guy and Myriam Ullens Foundation with the Long March—including many of the artists exhibited in Lyon—felt a sense of completion; those unfamiliar—i.e. the French viewers for whom the display was intended—were given little to go on. A one sentence text on a large white wall gave only the most basic outline of the project; beyond that viewers were left to indulge their own Marxist utopian visions by looking through a room of what must have seemed images of nostalgic cultural tourism. (Full disclosure: this reviewer worked on the Long March between August 2002 and August 2003.)

One was hard pressed on opening night to say who had it better, or who was looking at whom. Was it the globe-trotting Chinese artists, or the artsy French provincials—all of whom managed to skip the tedious welcoming speeches in order to grab a cigarette on the terrasse. There was something so Chinese-urban about Renzo Piano’s Cité Internationale—which housed the museum—even beyond the name, which would work perfectly in Mandarin as Guojicheng.The glass and steel mid-rise apartment houses could as easily have graced the banks of Suzhou creek; the sole neoclassical façade, left to front the Musée d’Art Contemporain Lyon, could as easily have housed a restaurant in Xintiandi, the plot of gentrified, redeveloped colonial mansions surrounding the site of the Chinese Communist Party’s first meeting.

Even politically, one was unsure whose government was more deluded: was it the Chinese, whose embassy served up a red-dressed foreign ministry matron spewing the obligatory thanks in perfect French in the mayor’s brocaded office? Or was it the French, whose cultural bureaucrats constantly invoked the politics of friendship and the dubious logic of le jumelage? (Canton and Lyon, we were told repeatedly, are cities “full of sun.”) Only a sound work by Xu Zhen could provide an intelli- gent rebuke of all to this posturing, interrupting the officials’ opening-night declamations with a shrill, piercing scream played over speakers in the courtyard outside.

Equality is only ever equality of capital, and this exhibition, in its richness, provided Chinese artists with a chance to be made to look good. Artists got what they wanted, shipping cement mixers and minibuses down the Pearl River and across the continent, and not having to worry about how many LCD projectors they could secure. But there were no breakthroughs in Lyon, which despite its protests, was exactly what it claimed not to be: an exhibition of Chinese contemporary art.

 Figure 6. The Long March: A Walking Visual Display, 2000-2004, installation. Photo credit: Bruno Amsellem. Courtesy of the Guy and Miriam Ullens Foundation

And what’s wrong with that? Exoticism persists (on both sides) not out of malice, but because our brains are small and our vision limited. China can only be displayed to Lyon as a far-off land of kylins and cinderblocks, just as Rome can only be displayed to Shanghai as a set of busts and coins framed by historical tidbit. Even if simple Orientalism is becoming geopolitically untenable, even if Chinese art, now semi-implicated in the Chinese state, is looking to speak for itself, and even if a millennial Medici in a finely tailored khaki suit with the very best of intentions enlists a Chinese Parisian to try and change all this, we’re going to be ogling each other’s broken noses and outstretched arms for some time after the “Year of China” ends.

Notes 1 Yang Ruichun, “Chinese Contemporary Artists Say Farewell to Collective Image,” Southern Weekend (June 24, 2004). 2 “In 1934, followed by thousands of supporters, Mao Zedong undertook the Long March, which, from 1934 to 1936 and over 9654 kilometers, led him to the head of the Chinese state. In 1999, Lu Jie, independent curator, decided to re-make the journey of the Long March with some artists. In 2002, in association with Qiu Zhijie, an artist himself, there were more than two-hundred and fifty artists, of all origins, who traveled together to thirteen of the original twenty-one sites. Each of these was an occasion for dialogue and exchange with the local population.”

       :         

 

Figure 1. Wang Mai, Uday and his Blonde Girlfriends No. 1, 2004, graphite on silk scroll, 125 x 77 cm. Courtesy of the Long March Foundation

 A few years ago, while I was attending an art exhibition at Beijing’s Xidan Bookstore, Wang Mai shoved a piece of coal into my hand. This was my first contact with Wang Mai, or better yet, Wang Mai’s artwork. This was also the first time in all my life that I walked out of a bookstore without buying a book. Rather what I left with was the dirtiest piece of artwork that I have ever encountered. Afterwards, the proposal that Wang Mai would submit for The Long March: A Walking Visual Display again involved coal. However, this time it was not a piece of coal, but a whole pile of it.

Lu Jie, Curator and Director of the Long March: A Walking Visual Display and the Beijing 25000 Cultural Transmission Center

Although the pile of coal will not be on display at Wang Mai’s solo exhibition Gateway of Infinite Wonders,opening April 24th at the 25000 Cultural Transmission Center in Beijing, the exhibition includes ten years of Wang Mai’s fundamental works spanning different mediums including performance, installation, photography, and painting. Also opening that day with great fanfare is the inaugural Beijing Dashanzi Art Festival. Amidst the media frenzy and artistic hype surrounding the festival opening, Wang Mai’s work allows us to see what the Dashanzi art community, a place that has been likened to New York’s Soho in the 1970s, really is: an abandoned electronics factory turned into a dumping ground for Chinese contemporary art. The story of contemporary art in China is about displacement and dislocation as well as marginalization. It is also about constructing a history from the scraps, remnants and debris of both Chinese and Western traditions. The kickoff of the Dashanzi Art Festival on April 24th could mark yet another chapter in this process of relocation and dispersal.

Born in 1972 in the northeastern Chinese province of Heilongjiang, Wang Mai has been actively involved in the contemporary Beijing art scene since 1993 when he moved into the Beijing Yuanmingyuan art community. However, his stay there would be short lived. In 1995, police forcibly evicted over one hundred artists from the Yuanmingyuan art community due to “questionable behavior.”Wang Mai was one of the many artists forced to find new residences in which to carry on their work. He, like many artists, would move to the outlying Beijing suburb of Tongxian. Here the government did not bother the artists, yet many artists found it difficult to thrive in the relative isolation and distance from the urban centre. To this day, there still exists a thriving art community at Tongxian. However, what were once idyllic sorghum and corn fields increasingly have become a desert wasteland created by the Beijing’s unquenchable demand for water.

In 2002, Wang Mai, along with several other artists, began migrating back to the city when news of available and affordable spaces in the suburb of Dashanzi became known. Originally an old military electronics factory, the Dashanzi area has slowly been converted over the past three years into a series of artist studios and art galleries, and has become the centre for Beijing’s contemporary art scene. Despite its rise to prominence both nationally and internationally, the tenants of Dashanzi are facing eviction at the end of next year when their leases expire. The Qixing Investment Group that owns the property refuses to renew leases and is widely believed to have plans to construct high-rise luxury apartment buildings (like those that dot the Beijing landscape) where the art community currently stands. Even though the festive mood has been dampened, and amidst rumours that the festival will be cancelled, the Dashanzi art community continues to move forward in preparation for the event. Today, as artists once again face the prospect of dispossession, or

 gentrification (a different type of desertification), we can perhaps begin to read more into the meaning of the festival not only for the artists at Dashanzi, but for contemporary Chinese art.

As Bakhtin formulates in his analysis of “carnival,”festivals are not merely an occasion in which celebrate. Rather, their usage in society has been to relieve tensions that arise due to inequalities in the social systems. While the Dashanzi Art Festival is a celebration that demonstrates the achievements and accomplishments created by the art community in a short period of time, this view is inherently limited in understanding how festivals also function as a means to invert power hierarchies in which the base and degraded become celebrated. Without a doubt, the art festival serves as a symbol of the continued viability of contemporary art in China and its willingness to challenge established aesthetic systems by celebrating these seemingly “questionable behaviors” of contemporary art that normally receive censure. However, this is due more to a seemingly anti-authoritarian and anti-government stance than an actual inversion of aesthetic hierarchies. Artists have continuously used media to leverage Qixing Investment Group to preserve the area, and Qixing has turned towards governmental organizations to put a check on artist activities, creating this illusionary conviction of the avant-gardism of the art community because it is “anti-government.”Rather, it is the combination of abandoned factory space and neglected socialist historic memory used as a forum for contemporary art that should perhaps be seen as the “avant-garde” nature of the festival.

Although the timing of Wang Mai’s exhibition along with the opening of the Dashanzi Art Festival was by chance, his works foil the absurd contradictions that belay the festival. Wang Mai has been likened to a sorcerer and magician because he takes things and transforms them into something else. Yet, this is only accurate in the sense that the spell he casts on the audience is the belief that he in fact has alchemic powers. Rather, Wang Mai is a recycler. If one carefully examines the “materials” of Wang Mai’s works, be they installation, performance, or drawing, one is continually confronted with the idea of society’s refuse (both physically and metaphorically). An old wooden cabinet made in a communist factory serves as the primary component of his work Misty Rainbow Pass, cultural institutions ritualized to the point of banality serve as his topic in Spring Festival Variety Show and May 1st International Labour Day, and the overflow of news media is refashioned in a series of drawings of Uday (fig. 1). These are society’s leftovers and throwaways. Wang Mai does not transform society’s garbage into gold so much as he transmogrifies it into art. Like other artists at Dashanzi, his studio is “remade” from an abandoned factory building; whereas the new high-rises that will come to occupy Dashanzi at the end of next year are truly a “transformation” of this site. He does not transform old cabinets or the detritus of media broadcasts into artworks, but like the piece of coal, they are the artworks themselves.

What these works reflect is the lot of contemporary Chinese artists. Contemporary Chinese art is still seen as inferior copies of Western art. This viewpoint arises from a stagist and progressivist understanding in which modernity flows outwards from the centres of Europe and the United States, and reaches these outlying regions in mere echoes of “pioneering European gestures.”1 What is not examined is how modernist forms reformulated and produced in these supposed “Third World” centres have contributed to and even at times initiated modernist movements in the West, or at least how they are interrelated processes. At the same time, the word “modernization” in China is increasingly becoming aligned with official discourse; modernization is made to appear as if it permeates out from the central government (the irony that some of these ideas are borrowed from the West is perhaps lost) and people are expected to fall behind the government’s

 Figure 2. Wang Mai, Bao Pagoda on Mountain Top, 2004, installation. Courtesy of the Long March Foundation authority. Therefore, contemporary Chinese artists are caught in a liminal space; not only do they sit on the fringes of the postcolonial world awaiting judgment from the “modernist” centres of Europe and the United States, but they must also conform to the modernist discourse that is generated by the Party. One aspect of this discourse has been to eradicate signs of “backwardness” in an attempt to create a modern and cosmopolitan Beijing by destroying old structures and replacing them with new shiny ones. Bao Pagoda on Mountain Top metaphorically encompasses this idea by having a Communist hammer break the famous Yan’an Bao Pagoda in half (fig. 2). In this environment, Chinese artists are increasingly squeezed out of spaces internationally as well as locally. From these marginalized positions, they are asked to refashion themselves with the remains and refuse of what society no longer wants, desert wastelands and old factories being the most visible signs.

In this regard, the art festival is a showcase of the remains/garbage of these marginalized positions. This “inferior” art is in fact celebrated. However, rather than use this as a departure point for reinterpreting modernist aesthetics, the festival falls into a self-glorified manner that attempts to say, “look, we have contemporary art here in China that proves that we are modern too.”The framing of the festival in such a manner is an attempt to align contemporary art practice in China with an “advanced” culture (implicitly Western) and therefore another step in the progression towards China’s modernization (as is evident by the “Soho” label that everyone has seized upon as a reason why the factory should be preserved). Unfortunately, while promoting artistic endeavour in China, the festival falls back into the modernist trap that figures things temporally through stages and progress. Said more crudely, the festival attempts to call for a preservation of a site by equating itself to Western art communities rather than utilizing the garbage heap that is Dashanzi to engage in a social indictment that exposes the short comings of modernism’s drive for all encompassing consumerism. The ironic nature of this position undermines the true power of the festival itself and its ability to invert power structures by elevating that which is base, the celebration of a garbage dump. Yet, it is exactly this contradiction that needs to be exposed and played out. It is not that the artists are harbouring anything valuable, but instead are harbouring

 the final remains of what once was valuable to society, now stripped of its glossy aura.

One should not read Gateway of Infinite Wonders as a cynical criticism about the empty “selling-out” of the Dashanzi art community to the commercialized interests of the art market in order to preserve what amounts to a landfill. Rather, Wang Mai’s art shows how garbage is also “power laden” by recycling both icons, many of which have lost their lustrous exterior, and restoring them to (and sometimes creating for them) a fetishized and posh nature. In Outdoor Antenna No. 2, the viewer is presented with a woman sitting atop a television screen (fig. 3). With a cigarette in one hand and a microphone in the other, she rules over a giant mound of garbage. The amount of refuse we generate, as we are reminded by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, is a signal of wealth; the power elite can also, “gentrify a slum, make landfill a ground for Figure 3. Wang Mai, Outdoor Antenna No. 2, 2003, oil on canvas, 160 x 100 cm. Courtesy of the Long March Foundation luxury apartments, or dump toxic wastes into a poor neighbourhood. They can even recycle their own fat from rump to cheek in the form of plastic surgery.”2 Wang Mai’s work is not just a reflection of this absurdity being played out in the form of the Dashanzi Art Festival. Rather, it is an imitation of this process that calls it into question through simulation. The dregs of the media and the leftovers of a factory are beautified art that masks the true nature, or perhaps in the inverse process of subaltern studies, elevates the base and menial to the highest esteem, only to break them down by contradictions that they hold within themselves. This is the reversal, the upside down aesthetics that Wang Mai presents in his works; the beauty of the base that is presented beautifully. His art attempts to question the idea that we actually know that which we intend to know. While the Dashanzi Art Festival seeks to show the world the emergence of contemporary art in Beijing, Wang Mai’s solo exhibition asks us to look beyond the glossy nature of contemporary Chinese art and see the beauty of garbage as garbage, to see coal as art.

Notes 1 Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, “Narrativizing Visual Culture: Towards a Polycentric Aesthetics,” in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 1998), 27. 2 Ibid., 43.

 Shanghai 5 Biennale Techniques of the Visible

Shanghai Art Museum September 29 - November 28, 2004

Organized by the Shanghai Art Museum, the Shanghai Biennale will open the 28th of September 2004 and will run until the 28th of November. As in previous years, the Biennale will take place at the Shanghai Art Museum, and for the first time will also be adjacent to the People’s Park.

Continuing a commitment to contemporary artistic practice, the theme of the 2004 Shanghai Biennale, Ying Xiang Sheng Cun, “Techniques of the Visible,” will focus on the relationship between art, science, and technology, in particular drawing crucial associations between contemporary art and historical precedents, revealing the interconnected social and political forces of art that engage technology. Taken from the ancient Chinese terminology of ying and xiang, the concept emerges from an interest in the visual products of modern technology that retain critical historical and emotive references.

This year’s Biennale will be curated by Xu Jiang, President, China Academy of Art (China), Zheng Shengtian, Independent Curator (Canada), Sebastian Lopez, Director, Gate Foundation (Netherlands), and Zhang Qing, Director, Shanghai Biennale’s Office (China). The curators will bring to the thematic a diversity of contemporary practice by featuring artwork from Asia, South America, Africa, Europe and North America. Reflecting this diversity, the Biennale is also committed to showcasing a range of contemporary media including painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, performance, interactive technologies and digital art. To further critically engage the theme of the Biennale, a symposium will also be presented, bringing together contemporary artists, curators and theorists.

Large exhibitions such as the Shanghai Biennale provides the occasion for a truly international exchange of ideas. Bringing together artists, curators, writers, theorists and art supporters from around the world, the Biennale presents a critical space for dialogue within an increasingly global art market. The presence of the Biennale in Shanghai also foregrounds the increasingly important role of artistic production in the Asia-Pacific region.

It has been ten years since the launch of the first Shanghai Biennale in 1994. Seen as critical to the healthy development of the Chinese art scene, the Shanghai Biennale has established Shanghai as an appropriate site for the convergence of international contemporary art. Shanghai is the city where the most interesting and challenging developments of modern art have taken place in China during the twentieth century, a role the Biennale continues to emphasize.

The 3rd Shanghai Biennale Shanghai Spirit, held in 2000, invited international curators and artists to participate for the first time, and defined itself as a global event for contemporary art. The subsequent 4th Shanghai Biennale in 2002 Urban Creation displayed 300 artworks from all over the world. In addition, more than twenty artists and architects produced site-specific works, and the International Student Works Show took place in the former Shanghai Art Museum building. This was the first exhibition in China to combine visual art and architecture.

 Curatorial Team

Xu Jiang (Head Curator) was born in Fujian, China. He is currently the President of China Academy of Art, and the Vice Chairman of Chinese Artists Association. As a practicing artist he has had one-person shows in Berlin, Hong Kong and Hamburg. His work was also exhibited in the first Guangzhou Triennale (2002), the 14th Asian International Art Exhibition (1999), The 24th São Paulo Bienal (1998), the 1st Shanghai Biennale (1996) and the 1th Asian Pacific Triennale (1993). He has curated and contributed to international events such as Living in Time (Berlin) and Edge of the Earth: Migration of Asian Contemporary Art and Regional Politics (Tokyo, Bangkok, Istanbul, Teheran, Hangzhou).

L. to R. Zhang Qing, Zheng Shengtian, Sebastian Lopez, Xu Jiang. Photo credit: Geng Jianyi

Zheng Shengtian was born in China and taught at the China Academy of Art. He is currently the Managing Editor of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (published in Taipei), and a board member of the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. As an independent curator his curatorial work in recent years includes Jiangnan: Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art (Vancouver), The Art of Proletarian Cultural Revolution (Vancouver, Toronto, Winnipeg), and Shanghai Modern (Munich). He has contributed frequently to periodicals and catalogues of contemporary Chinese and Asian art. He was the Vice Director of the Academic Committee for the 2nd Shanghai Biennale and Committee member of the 4th Shanghai Biennale.

Sebastian Lopez was born in Argentina. He is currently the Director/Artistic Director of the Gate Foundation, Amsterdam. He taught at the Art History Institutes of Amsterdam and Leiden University. He has curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions including East International; The Democracy Show; Talking Back to the Media; A City-A World; Art > Work > Nature; Not a Chinese Show and A Short History of Dutch Video Art in Amsterdam (the latter toured to San José, Madrid and Zagreb). He has also contributed to exhibitions such as Latin American Artists in Europe. Creativity Between Cultures, 1945-1982 (Venice). He is the editor of Van het Post-Modernisme (On Post-Modernism) and Talking Back to the Media.

Zhang Qing was born in Suzhou, China. He is currently a Curator at the Shanghai Art Museum and the head of Shanghai Biennale’s office. He was chosen as one of the “Best Curators in China” in 2000 by CCTV and forty-nine other media organizations. Among the exhibitions he has curated or co-curated are CityNet Asia 2003 (Seoul), Art of Cai Guoqiang (Shanghai), Junction: Architectural Experiment of Contemporary Chinese Art (Shanghai). As a member of the Editorial Board of Art China, a bi-monthly periodical, he has frequently contributed essays and interviews on contemporary Chinese art and has published a book Chinese Art, 1990-1992. He was the co-curator of the 3rd Shanghai Biennale.

Shanghai Art Museum 325 West Nanjing Road, Shanghai, 200003 China

For more information please contact Ms. Hua Yi at the Office of the Shanghai Biennale

Tel: 86-21-63274896, or 63272829-ext. 258 Fax: 86-21-63272425, or 63272429 E-mail: [email protected] Website:www.shanghaibiennale.com

 2004 Taipei Biennial Do You Believe in Reality?

Taipei Fine Arts Museum October 23, 2004 – January 23, 2005

The Taipei Biennial is the first large-scale international art event organized by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in Taiwan. Following its successful beginning in 1998, the 2000 and 2002 editions confirmed the Taipei Biennial’s importance in the international arena. The first edition entitled Sites of Desire, curated by Fumio Nanjo from Japan, initiated the biennial with a focus on contemporary Asian artists. The 2000 edition, The Sky is the Limit, co-curated by Jerome Sans from France and Manray Hsu from Taiwan, followed by the 2002 edition, Great Theater of the World, co-curated by Bartomeu Mari from Spain and Chia-Chi Jason Wang from Taiwan, demonstrated the Taipei Biennial’s international ambitions. For the 2004 edition, Belgian curator Barbara Vanderlinden has been invited to curate the exhibition with the Taiwanese curator Amy Huei-Hua Cheng.

Entitled Do You Believe in Reality?, the 2004 Taipei Biennial responds to an urgent call. Everywhere artists, filmmakers and intellectuals are grappling with profound transformations in contemporary society. Instead of yearning for abstractions or grandiose ideals, the forty participants in Do You Believe in Reality? identify another challenge: as citizens they turn toward reflecting the reality in which we live. With their eyes wide open they welcome us to back to reality.

The exhibition will feature works grounded in contemporary human experience and reflections on everyday life, with Asia as a crucial paradigm for a society in a state of radical change. It will demonstrate artists’ practical engagement with witnessing, documenting, archiving and, finally, translating their L. to R. Barbara Vanderlinden, Huang Tsai-lang, Director observations into aesthetic form. There are both poetic and of Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Amy Huei-Hua Cheng documentary qualities to many of the works that retrace and commemorate everyday reality. The artists’ engagement with reality will not only reveal itself through individual artistic practices and image-making, but also through collective practices, filmmaking, installation, and artistic activism that respond to local and international situations. The complexities of the ways reality is represented will resonate throughout the exhibition, accompanying publication, and conference.

Barbara Vanderlinden is an independent curator based in Brussels and founding Director of Roomade, an independent art organization responsible for initiating projects in collaboration with artists. She curated a major exhibition at the 1998 World Exhibition in Lisbon and was one of the co-curators of Manifesta 2 held in Luxembourg in 1998. She initiated and co-curated Laboratorium in Antwerp, co-editing its accompanying publication. Author of numerous essays on contemporary art and exhibition practice, she has initiated several long-term projects, including most recently, Revolution/Restoration, an exhibition series at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, co-curated with Dirk Snauwaert.

Amy Huei-Hua Cheng lives and works in Vancouver and Taipei, and is active as a freelance writer and art critic for various magazines published and distributed in Taiwan and China, including Modern Art and ARTCO. Most recently she curated Invisible City at the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Ruins and Civilization, Eslite Art Space, Taipei.

Taipei Fine Arts Museum 181, ZhongShan North Rd, Sec. 3, Taipei 104, Taiwan Phone +886-2-2595 7656, Fax +886-2-2585 1886 http://www.taipeibiennial.org EXHIBITIONS LISTINGS

TWILIGHT TOMORROW MADE IN BEIJING: Curated by June Yap REFLECTION OF CHINA 20 May to 26 September 2004 STANDARD CULTURE Singapore Art Museum 16 June to 16 August 2004 71 Bras Basah Road, Singapore Gallery Pahk www.nhb.gov.sg/SAM 988 Madison Avenue New York, New York www.gallerypahk.com

MEMORIES OF HOME: FIFTY YEARS OF PUBLIC HOUSING IN HONG KONG IMAGES: ASIAN PHOTOGRAPHY AND 2 June to 11 October 2004 VIDEO EXHIBITION Hong Kong Heritage Museum Curated by Shin-yi Yang 1 Man Lam Road, 20 June to 8 July 2004 Sha Tin, Hong Kong Museum 63 Artist Commune, Unit 12, www.heritagemuseum.gov.hk Cattle Depot Artist Village, 63 Ma Tau Kok Road, Kowloon, Hong Kong www.artist-commune.com WANG YUPING: WHO CAN PLAY WITH ME? 5 Jun to 4 July 2004 Red Gate Gallery JIAN-JUN ZHANG. TIME CHAPTER: Dongbianmen Watchtower CHELSEA Chongwenmen, Beijing 23 June to 2 August 2004 www.redgategallery.com DTW Gallery 219 West 19 Street New York, New York www.dtw.org INTERSECTION: CONTEMPORARY OIL PAINTING AND PHOTOGRAPHY 8 June to 23 July 2004 SPACE ANEW: QIU ZHIJIE, Chambers Fine Art WANG JIANWEI, AND YANG FUDONG 210 Eleventh Avenue, Second Floor 26 June to 11 July 2004 New York, New York Shanghai Gallery of Art www.chambersfineart.com Three on the Bund 3 Zhong Shan Dong Yi Road Third Floor, Shanghai www.threeonthebund.com BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE: NEW PHOTOGRAPHY AND VIDEO FROM CHINA Curated by Christopher Phillips JU MING: and Wu Hung WORLD PREMIERE TAICHI SERIES 11 June to 5 September 2004 1 July to 31 December 2004 Singapore Art Museum International Center of Photography 71 Bras Basah Road, Singapore 1133 Avenue of the Americas www.nhb.gov.sg/SAM at 43 Street New York, New York www.icp.org YANGZHOU FRIED RICE INCIDENT LOG: Asia Society and Museum A SUMMER WORKSHOP 725 Park Ave 2 to 25 July 2004 New York, New York Parasite Art Space www.asiasociety.org Number 2 Po Yan Street, Ground Floor Sheung Wan, Hong Kong www.para-site.org.hk

BEAUTY ON THE EDGE: AN EXHIBITION OF PAINTING, PHOTOGRAPHY, AND SCULPTURE UH-OH! PANDAMAN. ZHAO BANDI BY WOMEN ARTISTS FROM CHINA, AND THE PANDA JAPAN AND KOREA 3 July to 28 August 2004 17 March to 4 April 2004 Aspex Visual Arts Trust/Gallery Para/Site Art Space 27 Brougham Road 2 Po Yan Street, Ground Floor, Portsmouth, UK Sheung Wan, Hong Kong www.aspex.org.uk www.para-site.org.hk QIU ZHIJIE: SOCIAL PORTRAITS MADE BY TIANDE 4 July to 28 August 2004 8 September to 23 October 2004 CourtYard Gallery Chambers Fine Art 95 Donghuamen Dajie 210 Eleventh Avenue, Second Floor Beijing, China New York, New York www.courtyard-gallery.com www.chambersfineart.com

LAND_SCAPES EIGHTEEN SOLO EXHIBITIONS 25 July to 15 August 2004 Curated by Cai Guoqiang Shanghai Gallery of Art 11 September 2004 to Three on the Bund 10 January 2005 3 ZhongShan Dongyi Road Bunker Museum of Contemporary Art Third Floor, Shanghai 60 Ming Shen Road, Kin Chan Town, www.threeonthebund.com Kinmen County Taiwan, R.O.C. www.caiguoqiang.com/bmoca

SHIFT: THE IMPERMANENCE OF EXPERIENCE Curated by Marsha Bradfield FIFTH SHANGHAI BIENNALE and Yin Choi 28 September to 28 November 2004 30 July to 21 August 2004 ShanghART Gallery 2A Gaolan Road Centre A Shanghai 849 Homer Street www.shanghart.com Vancouver, B.C. www.centrea.org

ONLY THE CAT KNOWS: WORKS BY TWO WOMEN ARTISTS CHEN QINGQING AND YUAN YAOMIN 14 August to 14 September 2004 L.A. Gallery Beijing Beijing Lao Dong Renmin Wenhuagong East of Tiananmen, Beijing www.la-gallery-beijing.com

CAO FEI AND OU NING: THE SAN YUAN LI PROJECT 22 August to 16 September 2004 CourtYard Gallery 95 Donghuamen Dajie Beijing, China www.courtyard-gallery.com

EMBRACING INFINITY: WORKS BY TAN SWIE HIAN 25 August to 19 December 2004 Singapore Art Museum 71 Bras Basah Road, Singapore www.nhb.gov.sg/SAM

MAP OFFICE 3 September to 3 October 2004 Parasite Art Space Number 4 Po Yan Street Sheung Wan, Hong Kong www.para-site.org.hk   

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