NY starts global disclosure of Asian contemporary art

By Astri Wright

NEW YORK (JP): The symposium titled Fast Forward: The Contemporary Art Scene in Asia has turned out to be very lively, with around 250 people attending the first day at the Asia Society and about 130 people at New York University the second day.

Audience members consisted of a mix of academics, gallery and museum people, curators and artists from both Asia and North America, foundation people and collectors. The format varied between conference papers and artist roundtables with one moderator or discussant and questions from the open floor.

The symposium, co-organized by the Asia Society and New York University, and held one day at each site, was opened by Vishakha Desai, director of galleries at the Asia Society. After a few remarks about the background of the Asia Society's involvement in showcasing contemporary Asian art, Desai handed the podium to Arjun Appadurai, Professor at the University of Chicago, who spoke on Genealogies of the Present: Asian Modernity in the Era of Globalization.

The symposium was closed by Apinan Poshyananda, an art historian and curator from Thailand. Poshyananda also curated the exhibition.

Appadurai set out the broader thematic framework for the showing of contemporary Asian art in America in his characteristically eloquent analytical fashion. He spoke of the two main developments that have lead to what gets called globalization today: the striking scale and speed of mass migrations, both forced and voluntary, and the efficiency and spread of information through the electronic media.

What is new, he said, is the merging of these two forces. In this process is found the tension between different cultures, and different races, with their diverging perceptions of time and space, and the consequent changes in relationships between people and history, and people and land, or place, that these global shifts have brought about, in particular in the creation of Asian mega-cities.

Highlights from the symposium were Jim Supangkat's and Julie Ewington's panel presentations titled Patronage and Support of the Artist, the former speaking from an Indonesian historical and current institutional perspective, the latter speaking from a Southeast Asia perspective, combining artist-centric and institutional views.

A much less enlightening part of the symposium was the incoherent, nearly content-less lecture given by Thomas McEvilley of Rice University, based on his catalog essay that was supposed to address exhibition strategies and histories of exhibiting contemporary non-western art.

Because he limited himself in both talk and essay to looking only at events in established private galleries and museums, and those mainly on the East Coast, which focus on African or other non-Asian art, he completely left out the historical beginnings of the interest in contemporary Asian art.

The most interesting parts of the symposium were perhaps the two artist roundtables, where a selection of artists were asked questions both from the podium and the floor. An interesting intervention or symbolic statement was made by Indonesian artist Dadang Christianto. When his turn came to speak about the main concerns in his art, he pulled out a scarf, tied it around his head, and proceeded to speak a muffled non-language for several minutes, complete with gesticulations and body movements. After removing the scarf, Dadang said: "This was the voice of the voiceless."

This masquerade of nonsense as sense elicited both chills and laughter from the audience. It put into a new perspective the emphasis on talk and lack of action surrounding such events as exhibitions and symposiums, and indirectly highlighted the severe displacement that occurs when artwork, created in a highly charged sociopolitical context, often addressing life-and-death concerns, such as human rights, is moved into a commodified art culture far away, where the original message is ignored, or considered irrelevant.

The challenge faced in both the exhibition and the symposium was how to present Asian traditions as a source of inspiration in contemporary Asian art, not as a static heritage of repeated forms or ideas, and "western" influences in Asian contemporary art, and not as "derivative" or superficially incorporated, but to provide a framework in which the two are seen to be syncretically combined in various ways through the lens of individual artists' own hybrid identities, with interests and experiences that operate at the local, national and international levels.

This being the first time that this argument has been presented in North America at a highly visible forum, and in connection with an art exhibition, it was an event of great importance, both from the perspective of how history has been and will be written, and from the point of view of educating the general public.

Problems

A fundamental problem with the events was that the symposium was not prefaced with a statement from the curator about the choices that went into framing the exhibition. As it was, no broader context was given to the artists and works chosen, which although excellent in their respective genres, represented a very narrow selection of the contemporary art produced in the region. Thus, to the many members of the audience who were there to learn about contemporary Asian art for the first time, the impression of the field was a very partial one. It would not have taken very much to offer a schematic backdrop overview against which to discuss the choices made, before discussing some of the artists relevant to the exhibition. Several of the paper presenters attempted this, but due to time constraints and the inclusion of topics that seemed hardly related to the event at hand, only very partial pictures could be given.

Another problem with the linking of the exhibition with a two- day symposium was that the artists were not accorded the same time to present their ideas as were the scholars, and not all the artists present were invited to participate in the staged roundtable discussions despite their efforts at being present from thousands of miles and a dozen time zones away. And in the written biographies of the presenters at the symposium, the artists were only introduced in the most cursory fashion, with no mention of their most important exhibitions, while important publications of the scholars were listed.

Another issue was that the connection of the symposium and its various components to the exhibition was not clearly spelled out by the organizers. For example, two of the three papers on the first panel, which dealt with literature in Japan and colonial spirituality in India, had no references to visual art, whether traditional, modern, or contemporary.

It is possible that a framework might have been found that could incorporate these aspects, as parts of the necessary interdisciplinary background studies from which to approach questions of modern Asian cultural developments. Since, however, no such framework was established by the organizers, the offerings seemed completely out of place and left the audience impatient for the art related talks. Added to this was the fact that the art related talks were given too little time to finish comfortably, and that many of the visiting artists could not understand academic English, so their patience and interest could not help but suffer.

An underlying ideological problem with the framework of the symposium was the imbalance in the theoretical framework, where "white" and "Asian" all too often were placed in a new kind of polarized relationship, just reversing and refining the old and much-criticized "orientalist" model. Although the organizers argued implicitly and explicitly for "hybridity" as a model for contemporary Asian identities, in which individuals are to be regarded as complex products of personal, local and historical specificities, at the same time they referred to contemporary white people as a single group, an essentialized "other", with monolithic identities, and characterized most fundamentally by imperialist tendencies and colonial shame.

A less ideologically positioned view, and a more current one in cultural studies, is that all people, although not hybrid, mixed or complex identities in the exact same ways as people from other places, increasingly share in post-colonial, post- industrial, mixed-ethnic and mixed-geographical heritages and challenges.

Although no two groups arise out of the exact same historical bases, hybridity is not the prerogative of any single group of people. It is not enough for Thais, or Indians, or Norwegians, or Nigerians -- all people in the past relegated to dominant groups' margins -- to rewrite history completely from the opposite perspective. It is too much of an essentialist simplification to speak about "Asia" and "the West" or "Asians" and "whites".

Furthermore, within the kind of black and white presentation of history evident in the talks by the organizers, the existence in Asian countries and regions of internal forces of racism, exploitation, social and economic elitism and marginalization were not acknowledged. Neither were the new institutions of local and international art world influence that some have referred to as the new "contemporary Asian Art mafia" in the region.

This development, nothing but the result of the process of the emergence of new margins and peripheries, as old ones are challenged and disappear, must nonetheless be acknowledged, so that new margins can become visible.

Although the organizers in their past and present statements, both written and oral, referred to the use by western corporate cultures of art as a "lubricant" to facilitate the development of western, especially U.S. economic interests abroad, none addressed the intersection between international and Asian national business interests. Furthermore, coming from an organization with a long history of providing information and linkages between American business and Asian counterparts, Desai did not address the question of how the Asia Society's current patronage and promotion of contemporary Asian art constitutes a departure from earlier uses of Asian art as the "ritually proscribed rhetoric", or the "jewel in the crown" of basic economic interests.

New worlds

All the above critical points aside, one of the important roles of written and oral presentations is that they stimulate discussion and revision and addition to the canon, be it the one enshrined in past centuries, or the one enshrined yesterday. Insofar as the new stars of contemporary Asian or Asian-American art writing do not slide comfortably into their own new and powerful "centers" and forget the varied and often painful dimensions of the experience of being on the margin, the Asia Society exhibition will have succeeded in contributing to opening up a progressive ground of lively intellectual and artistic discourse, which is more global and current than anything seen in New York since the late 1960s.

Another force which will work against the dominance of any small group of institutionally powerful Asian art world actors lies in a central characteristic of socially and personally profound art: It is so multilayered and complex that it is impossible to contain it for very long within a single framework. Most of the artists themselves are not interested in fame and exposure at the cost of their freedom to define themselves and their art on their own terms, nor in the labels which would be convenient for international marketing.

Finally, the process of how artistic or aesthetic messages are communicated from the artwork to members of the audience, whether directly in gallery spaces, or indirectly through photographic reproductions, is a process that cannot be constrained to limited agendas or self-serving ideological messages.

Hence, the very act of bringing this art to New York -- and later to Vancouver and select places in Asia -- opens up the global discourse on contemporary art in ways beyond what has been done till now. And in the aftermath, in all the places that will be touched by it, this showing will no doubt be felt for a long time.

The writer, Associate Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art, University of Victoria, Canada, extensively researches modern and contemporary Indonesian art.