Hou Hanru, Mutation of art language.



As a sign of the times, consciousness of networking and the intellectual base of the current cultural change provide a basic orientation to art language which is, as pointed out below, going through remarkable mutations. Art, to an unseen extent, is struggling to go beyond conventional space and time frames such as museums and other art institutions and increasingly invades urban space, transcending the borders between public and private, art and non-art, fiction and reality.

Obviously, global cities, especially non-Western "global" cities which are undergoing intense confrontations with globalization, are the most relevant contexts for such mutations. One should notice, however, that, as the Japanese architect Itsuko Hasegawa suggests, today's cities are evolving towards a kind of "process city" that continually changes scale, structure and function.

This constant evolution of the opening and modifying of new spaces offers infinite possibilities for artists to intervene in urban space with bold, imaginative experimental projects and improvisational actions. In almost every city connected with the global network one can observe these kinds of actions. In the drastically expanding cities of the Asian Pacific area, these interventions are particularly frequent, impressive and meaningful. Also, because of the lack of stable infrastructure for art experiments, artists automatically and systematically use urban space to present their ideas.

They launch actions to interrupt the "normal" rhythm of city life like urban guerrillas. They introduce various, and occasionally surprising, gestures. Introducing conceptual statements, installations, or performance, even by means of mass media and cyberspace, they turn urban life into events, or moments of reflection, critique and vision. Art is hence becoming a process of intervention in the process of urban life. More often than not, artists are particularly interested in collaborating with architects, urban planners and computer specialists in order to take art beyond its usual limits.

Contemporary art in the Asian Pacific region has a long history of confrontation and exchange with the West. Its current negotiations with, and creative rewriting of modernity, modernization and globalization are the results of this history. A history that has been determined by Western invasions and colonization. The first steps of global modernization posed a threat to the survival of many Asian economies. De-colonization and modernization presented a new challenge to these nations. Financial crisis due to the pressures of globalization places hurdles in the paths of these regions which they have to leap over. These and other socio-political issues have left profound marks in the history of Asian architectural and artistic creation. Their various responses, whether during economic boom or crisis, social reconstruction or turmoil, are often original, innovative and efficient answers to different challenges. The cityscapes of metropolitan areas like Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta are fruits of this kind of interaction, while the cities themselves are turned into laboratories for new ideas and expressions.

Walking their streets , one is struck by the incredible hybrid nature of architectural expression and the visual environment which comprise diverse mixtures of Western influences and local traditions. Meanwhile, the domain of visual art is even more precisely connected with, and conditioned by, such challenging reactions.

The internet also profoundly influences the content and meaning of language, while the artist's subjectivity has to be deconstructed and re-worked based on the principle of opening towards the Other. Art itself should inevitably become a cultural and linguistical hybrid, open to unexpected changes and influences of the Other, including the participation of the public. It is only by such processes that art can rediscover its position in a shifting reality.

If constant dynamic between networking, telecommunication, international travel and urban displacement is the concrete phrasing of our contemporary existence, then John Rajchman's comments on the new existential situation of urban humans can be understood as absolutely relevant to this debate: he stresses that the contemporary urban inhabitant is becoming an "anyone" rather than a someone .... once we give up the belief that our life-world is rooted in the ground, we may come to a point where the lack of firm ground is no longer experienced as a cause of existential anxiety and despair, but as freedom and lightness that finally allow us to move. Movement and indetermination belong together, neither can be understood without the other." (J. Rajchman "Construction", MIT 1998, pp. 88-89).

This constant movement and opening up of human subjectivity, or identity, of course, brings about alternative understandings of the notion of innovation, and creativity. It reveals hitherto unknown but extremely appealing spaces for the imagination. They are the perfect example of the innovative "profane spaces" described by Boris Groys. The conventional belief and evaluation of linear, stable and definite expression as the ideal language for artistic creation, (closely linked with Eurocentric rationalism and historicist ideology), are now facing their final fate. Traditional structures of power are deconstructed accordingly. Movement, instability, multiplicity and even chaos are now the real carriers of creativity. They are the most "harmonious" languages to express the wonderful and curious experience of roaming through the new urban and cyberspaces, allowing a new kind of "logic" of aesthetic expression to be invented. Based on these truly multi-cultural ideas and values, pertinent channels of expression can be found: how to open up these new spaces of expression in cyberspace is a particularly interesting and farsighted issue.

On the other hand, art is perhaps the most efficient way to develop alternative strategies to negotiate the standardization and sense of alienation of human life driven by globalization, new technologies and capital monopolization. Art now becomes a kind of "virus" dispersed and penetrating into the dominant system of global communication in order to provoke a consciousness of resistance.

Finally, and not without an element of irony, in using the most advanced technology, and especially the changing situation of human existence in such a "new world", art is the best way to expose the entropy of such a rapidly developing and saturating world itself: after entropy, there will be another unknown world.