April 14, 2012, McAulay Studio, Hong Kong Arts Centre
The new ‘show’ at Para/site art space in Hong Kong takes the form of a series of lectures and discussion roundtables during three April weekends. The April 13/14 series was announced under the ‘Forms of criticism’ topic. Speakers included Lee Weng Choy, Galit Eilat, Pauline Yao and Keiko Sei.
Lee Weng Choy, an art critic from Singapore, talked about the perception/imagination of future in Singapore/HK, spiced up by a number of anecdotes and illustrations of Singapore artist’s works. The most interesting point I took from his lecture was the concluding point about the relationship between the artist performing in a public space, the audience and the crowd of onlookers. It touched on often discussed topics of the role of art in public space. The purpose of art stressed in Lee Weng Choy’s take on this was the role as a communicative vehicle for engaging the ‘uninvolved’ crowd which is observing the process of observing taking place between the art audience and the artist performing in a public space. The distinction between the unengaged ‘crowd’ and engaged ‘audience’, both mingling, was interesting, it stressed the autistic, self-contained nature of today’s art scene, who self-justifies itself by the utopian idea that some members from the crowd will join the audience and engage with the artwork.
Galit Eilat from Israel talked about the in my opinion already over-discussed Israel-Palestine conflict, and different projects that are trying to work against the Israeli politics of spatial separation of Israel and Palestine. These projects ranged from making the border wall build by Israel ‘transparent’ by a projection from both sides, to organizing field trips into the Palestinian territory. She also briefly touched briefly on the topic of public spaces – or the lack of them – in her talk. Specifically the lack of public spaces within Palestinian refugee camps and the Israeli approach of treating even private space as public during their move through the camps. Overall, the talk just reinforced my previous impression that Israel is actually a highly tolerant and democratic country. How could it otherwise be possible that there are so many projects taking place on and around the wall, so many videos, performances… I wish I could hear more about this kind of ‘activist’ projects in ex-soviet middle East countries, or current Tibet/Xinjiang, or Africa, etc. I do not doubt the genuine involvement and motivation of artists involved in Israel-Palestine activism, but my impression is that doing ‘Israeli activism’ has become a genre in itself, which is recently turning around in circles.
Pauline Yao from Beijing took the audience on a very very quick ride through Chinese text-based conceptual art, which was much too brief to give a deeper insight, but at least it highlighted a number of interesting points, like the heavy dependence on materials and labor in Chinese ‘conceptual art’, which does contradict the early aim of ‘dematerialization’ in 1960’s American conceptual art. It also illustrated the disintegration of the ‘conceptual art’ term that took place since the 1960’s which has become almost meaningless today. Another interesting point I took from her lecture, which was actually initiated by a question from the audience, was the observation how Chinese art ‘constructs it’s own myth’, and it is close to impossible to distinguish ‘genuine’ intentions (oppositional standpoints) from ‘fabricated’ ones. I see the difficulty originating in the strange-ness of the whole concept of western modernist/postmodernist art in relation to China. As the whole concept of art is transplanted from the outside, it is then difficult to tell whether someone has genuinely accepted it as a framework for his work, or whether he is just using it as a vehicle to construct his own personal myth. This point lined well into the original title of her lecture – ‘The dematerialization of the art critic’, which in the Chinese context may as well be called the disappearance. I am not surprised, as ideas of dualism and critical distance are also just transplanted from outside. And ‘driving’ the vehicle of criticism in China is not unfamiliar with driving a German car in China – even though the car is German, it is still driven based on local ‘traffic rules’ (honking the horn at each crossroad, crossing red lights, etc..).
Keiko Sei, a media activist living in Thailand, was a welcome refreshment concluding the lecture series. She chose the refreshing approach of starting with telling a story by Jun Ishikawa. This story was than used to describe the process of how a community is defining itself – based on territory, belief and a common culture (‘hearing the same song’, as Keiko Sei said). She talked about sound waves, ultrasonic waves, about waves that connect a community. An analogy between inaudible sonic waves and the collective imagination of ghosts/spirits reminded me of both of the Japanese Shinto where spirits (‘kami’) reside in natural objects and of Thai folk beliefs that inspired films like Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film Uncle Boonmie. In Ishikawa’s story, the art object itself is destroyed, and the artist dies. What is left is a sound, a sound wave, a ghost, that is collectively imagined and awed by the community. We are back at the utopia of art as an agent of social transformation, but this time in a more refined way. The result of artistic action – success or failure both have the same meaning and same value here (because: who is judge?) – is a ripple on the surface, a wave that resonates in a collective consciousness. It is not an agent of change, but it infuses the atoms of society with energy to keep oscillating – moving their minds.