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I am continuously intrigued by the contrast and relationships
of the physical and digital worlds that is shaping our regard
of our societies and ourselves. Artists have also engaged these
problems often by total (and exclusive) immersion in one or the
other - embodiment in flesh and all its processes - or projection
of an invented self into the detached ethereality of networked
space. This also relates to other dichotomies I perceive and experience.
One is the simultaneous sense of cultural alienation and immersion
one has of being a foreigner living abroad. I am a Korean living
in New York, though I make frequent trips to Asia and Europe as
part of my curatorial work. New York itself is an unusual American
city because it is built of so many diasporas of the world - from
Asia, Africa, Europe, South America, etc. One has the sense of
constantly transiting different planes of reality - even without
going anywhere. One location is not the same place for all. When
I curate any exhibition I always have to deal with the space as
a contact zone of what is brought into it. Also the problem is
compounded with being an Asian person curating international artists.
Obviously there ensues a dynamic of relationships that have to
be evaluated both in terms of their proximity as well as their
political and cultural legacies. So in considering the transactional
relationships of physical state versus "virtual" state, and place
versus displacement I was naturally led to think about how Performance
and Body artists expressed dilemma of culture and place in their
work. In particular I became interested in East Asia. Despite
the great cultural differences among their countries, there are
fundamental threads connecting the development of their thinking
in the form of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. Westerners have
traditionally had a tendency to think of structure in terms of
bureaucratic hierarchies, whether social or religious. The Eastern
mind is also familiar with the feudal sense of order, as evidenced
in Confucianism, but it gives more emphasis to a contradiction
of relationships that are the same, as expressed in Taoism, and
to a sense of all things having equal effect and consequence as
in Buddhism. It is the Myth of Creation versus the Wheel of Life.
One is finite ascension or descension, the other is continuous
- no alpha and omega. Perhaps I might venture to also say that
concepts like those of Non-Linear Dynamics and the Internet are
much more readily embraced in the East and are evidence of a major
shift in Western consciousness towards an Eastern approach to
existence. Furthermore I was also interested in the perspectives, relationships,
the influences between Asia and the West, and the roles they have
each played in determining contemporary culture. It seems to me
that Western art history has failed terribly in the record of
its relationship to non-European cultures and has a definite tendency
to mistranslate, misinterpret and denigrate art that has come
from Asia, Africa, the Middle East and South America. So in evaluating
art from these "other" cultures certain perspectives have to be
discarded and new ones formed that take into account the legacies
of colonialism and imperialism. That being said, much of contemporary
performance and body art from East Asia confounds expectations.
It ranges from dramatic and intense political protest to the complexities
of social and emotional alienation. In Japan, for example there
are now so many overlays of physical and virtual performative
action that it is almost impossible to separate commercial culture
from popular culture. Japan has had a radical history of Performance
Art since World War Two. Coinciding with their country's economic
boom of the 1980's, Japanese artists explored and immersed themselves
in the use of high technology translating its electronic mediums
to express the schizmic nature of a culture that existed both
on the planes of conformist reality and also of fantasised reality,
as evidenced by the subcultures of Manga, Anime, and Otaku, with
all their expressive ambiguities of identity, gender and sexuality.
As with mainland China, performative action in Taiwan has often
been a medium of political protest. The artist Chieh-jen Chen,
for instance created a performance in 1983, during a state of
Martial Law, in the township of Xi Mun Ting in which five people
whose heads and faces were covered in a black executioners cloth,
their limbs bound together with bandages, struggled and bellowed
as they attempted to walk through the town square until they were
eventually arrested. Today, Chieh-jen Chen continues this metaphor
of political torture and repression with cloned digitised images
of amputated and reassembled figures in dramatic urban landscapes,
such as his multiple self-portrait, "Revolt in Soul and Body".
In Korea performance art occurred in many different kinds of public
spaces such as parks, studios, mountains - and often the area
close to the Military Demarcation Zone. Though often a form of
protest, Korean performance art draws on various strands of influence,
not the least of which are the contradicting ideologies and belief
systems that have evolved in the decades following the Japanese
occupation and the subsequent turmoil of the Korean war that resulted
in the division of the North from the South. Korea has been subjected
to a steady import of Western culture, from America in particular,
and more than 40% of the country is said to be Christian, rather
than Buddhist. Yet there is a resilient core to the Korean mentality
that redefines itself according to circumstance and remains definitively
Korean. Perhaps this is true of all Asian cultures, and anyway,
a "Western" import may just be a returned article, albeit transformed
in transit. I refer to the borrowing and export of ideas to the
West from Asia over the centuries and especially the reliance
of Modernism on forms and concepts from China, Korea and Japan.
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