The Space 'In -between': Curatorial strategies for Chinese Contemporary Art

By SUE ROWLEY

In and Out is a remarkable exhibition. The curator, Huangfu Binghui, has brought together the artworks of Chinese artists living in Beijing. China, and Sydney, Australia. The artists are all cognizant of the trends in international contemporary art and seek to locate their work in this international context. Like Huangfu Binghui herself, the Sydney artists included here came to Australia in the late 1980's, having trained and practised as artists in China. The exhibition of Beijing and Sydney artists whose paths have diverged so recently permits the very interesting comparisons and insights that the curator has suggested might be drawn.

The questions and insights raised by the exhibition-both by the works of the individual artists and by their relationship to the comparative thematic context-ate informed by Huangfu Binghui's own experience as an artist, a translator, a writer and a curator. In this exhibition, the curatorship crosses many of the same boundaries that Huangfu Bignhui has herself negotiated in her varied career within the contemporary visual arts between China, Australia and recently, Singapore.

As an artist, she has articulated with sensitivity and eloquence the diasporic experience of being ' in-between'. "Coming to Australia," she wrote in 1995, "changed my outlook psychologically, artistically and philosophically. I responded positively to the personal and intellectual freedom in Australia, but other pressures, not the least of which being the loneliness of exile, created a nostalgic longing for the place I had left and could not return to." 1

In her art, Huangfu Binghui described the feeling of being in-between two different cultures, in-between the past and the present, in-between two places. "Being in-between means that I have to understand both situations." This exhibition takes the project of understanding both situations further and broadens the focus from the personal experience of one artist to consider the multi-faceted expressions of the emigre experience by four Chinese artists. Looking at the works of these artists, we are reminded of Homi Bhabha's observation that 'in-between' spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood-singular or communal-that initiate new signs of identity and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself'. 2

The notion of cultural interstices, so directly applicable to the experience of Chinese-Australian artists, is applicable to the situation of many contemporary artists works in Beijing. From the late 1990's artists have participated in an international art world and their work employs the modes of expression (such as installation and performance) which have high currency in contemporary art exhibition. Frequently these practices are dependent on audiences for the realization of the artwork, and in China the question of audience is still unresolved, as Huangfu has noted. "In China today, however, this kind of art frequently meets with opposition and since 1989 it has not been possible to publicly exhibit performance and installation art. So on the one hand, these artists are trying to compete in the international arena and therefore are turning to these forms of art; but on the other hand they have no local outlet for their work and must be careful to avoid state action against them." 3

The question of audience is a crucial one for both Australian-Chinese and Beijing artists. Until recently, international audiences have tended to register Western responses to Chinese art. These responses - which also become the bases of inclusion in major exhibitions and the criteria employed in criticism have foregrounded constructs of 'Chineseness' and negotiations of 'Chinese identity'. The emergence onto the international stage of Chinese curators and critics from many countries including China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Australia is breaking down the dominance of Euro-American frameworks for interpreting and evaluating Chinese contemporary art. Currently the dynamic contribution of curators and critics from the Asia-Pacific region is re-shaping the critical reception and the curatorial strategies for contemporary art of the region. In this context, the more complex, nuanced experiences, identities and intentions of artists working at the intersection of international and local axes can be more readily appreciated.

In this exhibition, though a relationship between Chinese artists and 'Western' audiences is implied by the Australian venues, it is relationship between 'overseas Chinese' and Chinese artists living in China that is the critical fulcrum. Again, Huangfu Binghui has been guided by her own experience and her research in Sydney and Beijing. She has observed that many Chinese artists and commentators believe that 'overseas Chinese artists should undertake the task of promoting Chinese contemporary art abroad, and that they should develop their creative thinking at least along the same general track as artists inside China. If the work of overseas Chinese were to stop dealing with strictly China-related questions and develop in its own directions, the in the eyes of artists in China, overseas Chinese would be 'dissidents', detached from Chinese reality, and thus 'not qualified to represent Chinese art.'

Recently, the concept of diaspora has been the subject of art, criticism and scholarly consideration and this concept has been usefully applied to 'overseas Chinese' experience. James Clifford describes diasporas in terms of a separation, like exile, constituted by a taboo on return, or its postponement to a remote future and on-going transnational entanglements.4 Diaspora cultures, Clifford writes, "thus mediate, in a lived tension, the experiences of separation and entanglement, of living here and remembering/desiring another place". The notion of diaspora brings into focus three sets of relationships: these are the relationships between dispersed peoples and their real or symbolic homeland, between dispersed peoples and their host countries and between the multiple communities of the dispersed population.

The first of these relationships is emphasized by William Safran, whose list of the main features of diaspora includes myths or memories of the homeland, desire for eventual return, ongoing support of the homeland and a collective identity importantly defined by this relationship.5 In this exhibition, a relationship between the artists living in and outside China is mediated through a shared and /or desired participation in another transnational community formed by international art networks. If an on going identification with China is a focal concern for artists now living in Sydney, for Beijing artists a relationship with 'overseas Chinese' artists, curators and critics facilitates international exposure and recognition.

The relationship of Chinese artists living abroad with host communities is also the subject of this exhibition. Their artwork articulates strategies of accommodation with and resistance to Australian culture. For artists, as Huangfu Binghui has observed, this dual negotiation with homeland and host cultures can be enabling to the extent that it shapes an 'in-between' space for creative practice. "For overseas Chinese borrowing or incorporating elements from Chinese art and culture is essentially the same process as borrowing from the new culture in which they find themselves. Cultural choices made on this level are profoundly voluntary and individualistic.

The third set of relationships-those which connect transnational diasporic populations-is evoked in this exhibition between artists and audiences in Singapore, where the exhibition had its first viewing. In the context of Singapore's tri-racial cultural policy, and its consequent over-determination of 'Chineseness', In and out bears witness to the multiplicities of Chinese identity and cultural forms. Ian Eng and Jon Stratton comment that "just as Singaporean national identity is to be an avowedly synthetic construction, so Chinese-ness, Malay-ness and Indian-ness are also becoming synthetic cultural formations"6. Eng and Stratton describe Singaporean Chineseness as 'an enigmatic discursive construct-portrayed essentialistically as traditional culture encapsulated in Confucian values and Mandarin language-which is often at odds with the wide range of concrete cultural and linguistic practices of ethnic Chinese people'. This exhibition refuses the homogenization and reification of Chinese cultural forms. The specificity of identities implied by the terms 'Sydney' and 'Beijing', and the vitality and engagement of the artworks with international art as well as local concerns is a powerful corrective to an imposed, unified and static identity, whether determined by the state or a more diffuse cultural mediation.

One further notion-that of 'translation'-underpins the curatorship of In and Out. Huangfu Binghui's own practice as a translator and interpreter between Chinese/Mandarin and English informs her perception of the incommensurability of meaning that enriches the negotiation of Chinese identities and prevents their collapse into a unified fabrication. This issue of translatability emerges in the charged political art reassessment of modernity. At the 1996 Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at Queensland Art Gallery, artists, critics and curators explored the multiplicity of modernities and rejected the priority of western modernity in laying the ground rules of modernism in art. The idea of translation is used to counter the sterile denigration of Asian modernist art as derivative of Euro-American modernism. The idea of translation unfolds the complex layers of meaning that are built up through the interaction of visual languages and parallel experiences of modernity, postmodernity and transnationalism. The point here is that the act of translation creates a kind of interstitial space, a space 'in-between'. In negotiating the difference between languages, translation becomes a creative act. As Walter Benjamin argues in his 1923 essay 'The Task of the Translators'7, translations bring about a 'becoming of language'. In this exhibition, artists create visual language through their acts of translation-translation of the language of international contemporary art as much as realizations of their insight into the cultural, political and personal domain which gives rise to content in their

In and Out sets up a dialogue on the work of Chinese artists, and creates a transnational space for dialogue between artists, curator and audiences. This essay has introduced some ideas that might assist audiences to appreciate the exhibition itself as a context for viewing the works of individual artists. These ideas are, in summary: cultural interstices as spaces for creative invention, diasporic experience of separation and entanglement as generative of transnational identities, and translation as creative act. Each of these ideas contributes towards an appreciation not only of Chinese artists living in Sydney, but also those who live in Beijing. What these ideas have in common is their emphasis on the tension between critical insight into troubling, unresolved experiences and the creative acts of the artist.

'In and Out' can be taken to refer not only to the locations of the artists-inside and outside China-but also to the process of knitting or weaving identities out of the thread of experience. There may be 'pattern' suggested by the practices in international contemporary art or preconceived constructs of Chinese identity, but the responsibility rests with the artists to create the rich fabric of art and the fitting garments of cultural identity.

1 Huangfu Binghui, 'In between', The Journal of the Asian Art Society of Australia, February 1995,p.13.

2 Homi Bhabha, The location of culture, Routledge, London and New York, 1994,p.2.

3 Huangfu Binghui, 'In between',p.13.

4 James Clifford, Routes: travel and translation in the late twentieth century, Harvard University Press, Cambridge & London,1997,p.246.

5 William Safran, 'Diasporas in modern societies: myths of homeland and return', Diaspora, vol.1 no.1,1991,pp.83-99.

6 Ian Eng and Jon Stratton, 'Straddling East and West: Singapore's paradoxical search for a national identity', in Asian and Pacific inscriptions: identities, ethnicities, nationalities (ed. Suvendrini Perera), Meridian,vol.14,no.2,1995,p.186.See also Aihwa Ong, 'Chinese modernities: narratives of nation and capitalism', Ungrounded empires: the cultural politics of modern Chinese transnationalism (ed. Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini), Routledge, London and New York, 1997,pp.171-202.

7 Walter Benjamin, 'The Task of the Translator', Illuminations (ed.Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn) Fontana, London,1992,pp.70-82. See also Rethinking translation (ed. Lawrence Venuti), Routledge, London and New York.

End