2000 as the theme

By Hou Hanru.

The year 2000 is currently the hottest topic throughout the world. Almost every country or region is organizing significant events to celebrate the coming of this particular year and the new Millennium. Even the art world which usually "transcends" mundane celebrations is entering into competitive Year 2000 exhibitions.

Most of these events, along with their perspectives on the future, tend towards historical reflections upon the fading Millennium. Such thoughts towards the past are often closely associated with the history of Christianity. One of the most popular publications on the subject is a series of articles "Les Gisnies du Christianisme" in the French daily "Le Monde", reviewing historical figures and moments in Christianity as a world-wide dominant religion and ideology spanning the past two thousand years.

How far this should be seen as a "natural phenomenon" however, is questionable, since the concept of the Millennium itself is purely a product of Christianity: a thousand years of Christ's proposed reign in person on earth.

With the expansion of Western cultural dominance and its roots in Christianity ( via colonization and globalization,) the concept of the Millennium, has not only determined notions of time and history in the West, but also turned into a "universal" notion of time everywhere else in the world, far beyond Western borders. It is a fact that the Millennium has turned out to be one of the quintessential topics linking different regions and nations on our planet. Despite the fact that time and place differ between cultures and religions, it remains alive and effective.

Certainly, "Millennium" as a physical incarnation of the historical evolution of global modernization and modernity itself has exerted decisive influences on history and reality. This important effect, like the necessity of modernity and modernization (rather than a specific Western model of modernism) regarding the existence and development world-wide can by no means be denied.

However, the formation of the contemporary meaning of the term "Millennium", like the comprehensive significance of modernity, embodies a whole process of the evolution of notions of time along with the historic and geographic shifts of global culture, economy, politics and everyday life.

Hence the term has created an influential historic trajectory, one that not only reflects the distribution of Western culture internationally, but also, more remarkably, signifies the contribution of globally different, especially "non-Western" cultures in the making of such a "dominant" discourses of power. Rather, "Millennium", like modernity, is a product of confrontation, of historical clashes, conflicts, exchanges, translations and negotiations between the West and "Non-West".

Such a process will continue in the new "Millennium". More significantly, the distinction between the West and Non-West will collapse and be "sublimated" in the accelerating globalization. However, it should not simply be seen as the "next" step in a linear progress of history. Instead, it's outcome will be multi-orientated and multi-stratified, shifting between varying conceptions of time and space, as well as different Weltanschauungs (world-views). This vision May appear rather optimistic, but in fact, one can observe that we are still living in a world which is closely and continuously related to the specific history of Western hegemony. The globalization of economies, and cultures still form part of the conscious or unconscious agenda despite Western hegemony now facing its fatal deconstruction.

Of fundamental importance is how to urgently turn current globalization into a process which benefits "Non-Western" populations, while political, economic and cultural efforts of deconstructing the Western hegemony are re-enforced.

To achieve this, there needs to be innovative, imaginative and dynamic capacities to perceive a more open and globally equilibrate future. Certainly, envisioning the future is exciting and challenging, but also a precarious one and prone to uncertainty. It is in coping with such contradictory tasks that our imaginations and fantasies discover their real cultural and social function. It is also the way that art can become more vital within society.

The Paris-based Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping, (selected as one of the artists representing France at the final Venice Biennale of this millennium), understands such a commitment for art to take up such challenges. For his installation in the French pavilion he produced "One Man, Nine Animals", to deconstruct the highly symbolic structure which have been Euro-centric and nationalistic ideologies. The artist introduces instead, an "Other" form of symbolism, a world vision and time-place system that refers to Chinese mythology and meta-scientific tradition.

He places nine fantastical creatures all predicting uncertain, contradictory future, on the top of the same number of pillars that extend from the ground and break out through the roof of the building. Aiming to represent an alternative vision to the dominating world orders, Huang Yong Ping's re-negotiations and re-mapping of the past begins to construct new borders between East and West in the future "South-Pointing" Chariot with a bronze figure on the top, was originally an ancient Chinese scientific invention, here it is installed in front of the "troop" of fantastical animals, at the very center of the "radiation" of the powerful, but conflicting predictions of the future embodied by the nine different beasts. It s presence appears to intensify the inevitable destiny of the coming Millennium: that the world will be de-centralized into a new, multi-central constellations in which differences, paradoxes, conflicts, will become part of everyday life, while dialogues, translations and negotiations between different cultures, people and regions in the world remain a constant and necessary way of existing in the world.

No doubt, art, which will also be pushed by the expansion and acceleration of "globalizing modernity", has to carry out profound changes of its own discourses. In order to survive such a fundamental shift, art has to find ways to explore a world driven by new technologies, new economic, political and cultural orders. It has to obtain new forms, new languages and new methods to generate alternative meanings to the "real" and hyper-reality. Possibilities are infinite. What is needed is an emphasis on multi-orientations, fluidity, flexibility, uncertainty, "immateriality" and cultural hybridity.

This approach May ultimately reflect the final collapse of the industrial consumerist way of life and its values, and prefigure the innovative but unpredictably surprising possibilities of production and communication of humans in the "post-industrial" era.

Remembering just one of the fantastic moments in contemporary art in the last years of this Millennium: New York artist David Hammons sold snow-balls of varying prices according to size with a work entitled "Blez-aard, ball sale", at Cooper Square, in 1983. Hammons was also pointing to the inescapable absorption of African- Americans by the Capitalist consumerist economy and its social system. Through a powerful but deliberate, sophisticated and humorous visual poetry Hammons' also revealed the very fate of the hegemony of such a system: one which will vaporize into nothingness, like the snow balls, whatever their size, or cost.

It is in this "nothing-ising" process that moments of liberation of the oppressed appear. The future is as uncertain as the evaporating snow; what can only be certain is an unknown, but potentially emancipating world emerging on the horizon.

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