Wordplay: An Artist Studio Visit with Fung Ming Chip

A week ago while I was in Hong Kong, I spent a lovely morning visiting the Sai Ying Pun studio of self-taught artist Fung Ming Chip, whose work has been included in collections at the Met and LACMA.

Fung Ming Chip in his studio (also his and Yim Tom's
home) showing me and fellow Chicagoan Inez Suen
his calligraphic artwork.

Thank you again, Ming and Yim, for welcoming me into your home, for your hospitality (tea, food, hugs), and—Ming—for waking up hours before you normally do to meet me (he usually gets up after noon—hashtag artist life).

Ming deconstructs Chinese calligraphy and pushes the medium in directions I never thought possible. With all the layers and depth, his pieces are “unphotographable,” and that need to see them in person is kind of the distinction between East vs. West; there’s an intimacy with traditional Chinese art in general, and before you open a scroll you don’t know what you’re about to find—you’re in for a surprise each time.

Also… Ming doesn’t have a website or anything, so you really do have to see his work in person!

Ming is also a photographer and showed us Polaroids he took back in the day.

If you’d like to reach Ming, get in touch with Yim Tom. She’s the wonderful woman I met at the Art Basel VIP Private View—in the Collectors Lounge someone called my name and it was a Chicago friend, Inez Suen, and Inez was there with Yim—and was the one from whom I learned “about how British colonial rule deliberately suppressed the development of culture and national identity in Hong Kong” (one of my “truth bombs” in my caption for this photo of me on Instagram and Facebook). And she and Ming are married, and they’re the perfect pair.

East Middle West // An Interview with ICY and SOT

Tabriz, Iran, 2012. (Image courtesy of ICY and SOT.)

When they’re not crashing at a Brooklyn warehouse among a collective of creatives they’re tearing across America in a van and trailer with a punk band (why don’t more visual artists do this?). Street art duo ICY and SOT, two young brothers from Iran, have been taking the underground art world by storm. In an onslaught of paint and paste and that old time punk rock and roll, these stencil artists have been touring the country with New York-via-Tehran band The Yellow Dogs, spreading art at every stop.

I met the brothers several months ago when they visited Chicago for the first time, and I corresponded with them when they hit the road again for their “East Middle West” tour. As a preview of their upcoming show at Co-Prosperity, below is our conversation about art, politics, their skate culture roots, life on the road, and more.

ICY and SOT’s exhibition at Co-Prosperity opens this Friday, March 22.

Istanbul, Turkey, 2012. (Image courtesy of ICY and SOT.)

Jenny Lam: How did the two of you first become interested in street art?

Hong Kong and China were niu bi // Shanghai off spray paint

I am back in Chicago, almost too jetlagged to be a functional member of society, wondering if the less-than-87%-humidity will dry out my skin, and missing Hong Kong dreadfully (I may or may not have typed that with a slight British accent in mind—damn you, remnants of Colonialism, telling me to “mind the gap” and “queue for lifts”!).

Oh, just kickin' it with my uncles. No big deal.

Finally, I’ve uploaded my photos of the art in Shanghai and Hong Kong to Flickr and Facebook! (Beijing photos can be found in these two posts.) I’ll focus on Hong Kong in my next post. In Shanghai…

Respirator mask, dude.

…I’d been crashing in a room my cousin and his flatmate use to dry their laundry and stockpile their liquor (seems reasonable). My cousin’s girlfriend Maggie had the following to say about art in China: that “Beijing is more political,” whereas “Shanghai is more international,” and that, because of its political bent, “Beijing is more passionate about art and music” (the Chinese are all about rock, and I thank my Shenyang-living friend for introducing me to a colloquialism young people shout at rock concerts: “niu bi,” which is slang for “awesome” and literally translates to “cow vagina,” which makes the phrase even more awesome).

Second city syndrome, anyone? As a local, Maggie obviously has a much more nuanced assessment of Shanghai and its relationship with the arts than I would. My explorations of the city, however, led me to believe that Beijing’s art scene has a formidable rival.

Shanghai’s main art hub is the Moganshan Road art district, which, like Beijing’s 798 Art Zone, comprises a complex of old warehouses converted into art galleries and studios. It’s less grandiose than 798, unsurprisingly, but it feels more accessible, and it isn’t without its fair share of provocative art. Moreover, Shanghai’s “international” character permeates its artistic community; among the first artists and gallerists I met there, for example, were expats from Seoul during an art opening at a Korean restaurant in the French Concession.

But what I loved most was ambling beyond the central gallery cluster and losing myself in graffiti, whether it coiled along a wall or punctuated a vast expanse of vacant lots populated by squatter homes, roosters parading in and out of garbage piles, and urban ruins long forsaken, crumbling, simultaneously weighed down by time and held up by color, by paint, suspended in a silently beautiful balancing act.

I spoke with a couple of the graffiti artists writing in broad daylight, and they explained that graffiti is, more or less, “tolerated.”

What I also loved: When Maggie asked if Chicago still has gangsters “like in the movies.” My cousin and I told her that was almost a hundred years ago and that they bootlegged alcohol. Her response? “That’s not very gangster.”

Midwesterner in the Middle Kingdom // The Outsider

I’m on a bullet train from Beijing to Shanghai and the guy behind me is watching / loudly listening to some epic Chinese war movie (truly the best kind of movie) and I’ve got about an hour on my laptop battery and it’s 106 miles to Chicago and I got a full tank of gas and half a pack of cigarettes and it’s dark and I’m wearing sunglasses so I’ll do what I do: write.

I’ve spent the past couple days speaking in pretty much nothing but Cantonese, as one of my Hong Konger uncles, a talkative retired elementary school teacher, was in town. Cantonese was my first language, a fact I always forget (as a baby, I taught myself English by watching Sesame Street, and because of that, I will always love you, television), but Mandarin is Chinese and Chinese is Mandarin, and I don’t speak or understand it at all. Yet here I am. What follows, then, is a reflection on language, on identity, on identity crises, on the diasporal disconnect and angst of first-generation Americans, and on vague pronouns.

In Beijing's 798 Art Zone. Photo by Andrew Scheineson, 2012.

I am a true outsider.

But allow me to start from the beginning.

Or, at least, Saturday, my first full day in Beijing.

I’d reunited with an old friend from college for the first time since graduation. He’s living in Shenyang and had hopped onto a train to Beijing—a 5-hour-long ride—to see me …and because he’s turning into That Guy who disappears on the weekends to kick it in a big city where there’s grass (this is not a euphemism) and where coffee shop owners aren’t baffled when you ask them if you can use their “community bulletin boards” to post your handmade flyers for an improv group you’re starting (apparently DIY culture is nonexistent in Shenyang).

We’d made good use of the beautiful day, wandering around the 798 Art Zone; lazing on a lawn while catching up on each other’s lives and then getting yelled at by men in golf carts to get off said lawn; drinking too much sweet tea; eating great food, at one point alongside Buddhist monks donning designer sunglasses and sneakers; succumbing to our weaknesses for Communist kitsch (come on, who can resist adorable plush pigs in Red Guard uniforms?); playing China Bingo (“ah, there’s another middle-aged man with his shirt pulled up over his paunch”); and being bemused by the number of young women wearing cat ears (a fashion / style trend that hopefully will not catch on in the West).

Later on we met up with his expat friends and friends of friends for dinner (at a Uyghur restaurant) and drinking (everywhere).

Guided by the supermoon, it was, overall, a wonderfully crazy night that ended up with us crashing a Canadian expat bachelor party van [with overly friendly Frenchmen] that took us to a seedy nightclub with Russian whores and hookah and gold-plated toilets (my friend and a friend of his and I bounced within five minutes and instead opted for the great American staple of searching for drunk food—we kind of succeeded). And they were / are all lovely people. But…

And now I shall switch tenses. (And inconsistently switch between first and second person. It’s my blog! I do what I want!)

In Beijing's 798 Art Zone. Photo by Andrew Scheineson, 2012.

Every single one of them is fluent in Mandarin, and every single one of them is white. They laugh over puns based on Chinese homonyms, over Chinese politics and public figures. They know how to navigate the city by bike, by cab, by train, by foot. They can converse effortlessly with the locals. I, meanwhile, am an ABC and speak not a word of Chinese. As I sit with the group, white kids joking in Chinese, the irony is not lost on me. (In fact, it oppressively hangs above me like a Russian stripper nightclub hookah cloud.)

“In China we don’t talk about anything other than China,” they explain good-humoredly to try to include me in the conversation when I haven’t chimed in for an achingly awkward amount of time. (Suddenly it’s like an undergraduate seminar all over again; the less you speak, the more profound you’re expected to sound.) To have these white American expats know more about your motherland than you do, know your motherland more than you do… Really, you’ve come to realize, you don’t know your motherland at all.

But even though you somewhat, sort of, maybe feel more at home in America, you are an outsider there as well. To most Americans, you look like a foreigner, even though you were born there and have lived there your entire life and most likely have a better grasp of the English language than they do. They ask you where you’re from, no where are you really from, no you know what I mean. They ask you what you “are” (human? about to run away from you? trying really hard not to kick you in the face?).

Here and now, in China, the people look like me. They are, essentially, “my people.” Shouldn’t there be solidarity? Shouldn’t we be brothers and sisters? Shouldn’t there be tearful hugs and clasps of the hands? “Right? We built their fucking railroads, the ungrateful bastards.” But instead, I sheepishly shake my head and dig out a typed page of Chinese phrases while they smile confusedly and apologize.

This is no Lost in Translation understated overrated nepotistic Coppola emo old fart pink wigged PYT Othered Asians as the backdrop hipster bullshit. I don’t want to hear it, Bill and ScarJo. Bitches, you’re white. You don’t need to say or do anything. You’re a walking “HELP ME” sign. Me? I have to endure a painful exchange of broken communication and broken expectations before they come to the realization that I am Not One Of Them.

Here, my difference is invisible. In America, where I will always be labeled a foreigner, my sameness is invisible. In this sense, Asian-Americans aren’t the invisible minority; our faces scream without sound. Invisible are the real and imagined identities we struggle with every moment of our waking lives.

Such is the inner anguish of the outsider.

No matter where you go, you don’t belong, and you never will.

But because you don’t belong anywhere, you are untethered. Because you are alone, you answer to no one. Because you have no place to call home, no place calls for you. You are free. You can roam. You can drift like a seed from the hero tree.

Perhaps you belong everywhere.

You are a child of the world.

That’s So R[i]ven // No really Beijing’s 798 Art Zone is like Riven in real life, minus the impossible puzzles

Hello from Beijing! First things first: The Gozamos video interview of me at the I CAN DO THAT closing reception is up. Watch me misuse the word “corkscrew” and talk with my hands / via hand flailing here.

All right. This. Place. Is. Unreal. I’d visited before as a teenager on a family vacation, hitting up all the requisite tourist attractions, and back then, Beijing felt like just another stop on a grand tour of the motherland. Or something. Coming here now, I didn’t expect to love it this much (no offense, Beijing), perhaps because my allegiances lie with Hong Kong, where I have family and have been visiting throughout my life. Well, I am absolutely enamored.

Feathery white seeds from hero trees drift through the hutongs, an unceasing summer snowfall. People walk arm in arm with one another—men with men, women with women—slowly, leisurely, almost deliberately. There is a general sense of lingering, and because of this, there is life on the streets, manifesting itself in an intense outdoor game of Chinese checkers or…

The art. The highlight is the 798 Art Zone. Take notes, Bushwick; 798 is an enormous industrial district of factories and warehouses converted into galleries, studios, and art spaces. (A friend told that me that he’d heard “they [nameless and faceless ‘they’] pour a lot of money into making it look run-down.” Sounds familiar [and reminds me of Williamsburg American Poorgeoisie / Fauxhemians with their grainy desaturated photo filters spending a fortune to dress like hobos]. But even if it’s true, I don’t care. I fell for the ruse and I fell in love.)

One could spend hours and hours wandering—it took me two days, and I still haven’t seen it all. Not even close. Photos of this art paradise here on Flickr and on Facebook.

More details in my next post.

Wanderlust

How did the artwork of I CAN DO THAT evolve over the course of two weeks? These are your creations and contributions! (For reception photos, check out this album.)

My first art-related trip of the summer begins today! In a few hours I’ll be flying out to Beijing, next week I’ll be in Shanghai, and the following week I’ll be in Hong Kong, my parents’ home city. I’ll be exploring the Chinese art scene, looking slightly out of place among the other VIPs at ART HK, and trying not to get into [too much] trouble. See you on the other side!

A Call for a Global Art History / It’s not all about you, dude

Before I get to the main point of today’s post: Three of my articles made Sixty Inches From Center’s Top 10 Most Read Articles of 2011 list, and I only joined SIFC in the Spring. THANK YOU for reading all the crazy things I write! Make sure you check out my latest piece, “Text, Drugs, and Rock & Roll // PART I.” (Part II will be live on Monday.)

Speaking of Sixty, last week, at WBEZ and SIFC’s “What’s Your Art? Celebrating the Art Centers of Chicago” event at the Chicago Cultural Center, a visitor approached me (“I know you! You put on the show where the woman rolled around on the floor!”), introduced himself (Dubi Kaufmann, who took a few photos of said woman rolling around on the floor), and told me that Exquisite Corpse inspired him to start his own project that engages artist collaboration. Like this audience reaction letter, it made my day. Thank you, Dubi.

On to a different kind of center… Let’s discuss the de-centering of art history, the need to expand mainstream art history’s focus beyond its Eurocentric bent. I came across The Art History Newsletter, which published “Art Historian, Globalize Thyself” yesterday:

Globalizing art history is “the most urgent task now facing art historians,” says David Carrier, professor at Case Western Reserve University. [...] Art history has moved beyond its blatantly Eurocentric, colonialist origins, when all non-Western art was considered “primitive”—if it was considered at all—but scholars say that serious problems remain. They note that Intro to Art History textbooks may now boast chapters on, say, “Monumental Olmec Sculpture” and “The Buddhist Temples of Korea,” but those make little impact alongside the books’ central narratives, which as always celebrate the long march of Western art from the Greek kouros to Jeff Koons.

To state the obvious, by limiting art history to the West, we severely limit ourselves. Obviously. What’s more, however, is that broadening our perspectives can allow us to re-examine and re-structure our established frameworks, to see our own world through a new—and better—lens. Take, for instance, the essence of Modernism itself. I can never get over how so much ancient Chinese art looks downright Modern—in the economy of line, in the minimalism, in the symbolism, in the abstraction. (In a similar vein are Tantric paintings from 17^th C. India:)

Image via NYT.

But then, in the article, things take a turn toward the problematic / offensive…

Elkins doubts we can write a truly global art history until non-Western countries start writing more of their own art history—they currently do very little, as he’s shown. Even then, he says, art history will remain “in its basic structure and institutional habits, permanently Western.” He notes that non-Westerners who take up art history typically imitate Western models and goes further to say, “The very idea of writing an art history of some country or region is Western.”

·         Yeah, no. The onus shouldn’t be on “non-Western” (an inherently imperialist term, making the West the norm and everything else something that deviates from that norm) cultures to write more about their respective art histories (which they already do). Rather, Western institutions should be the ones providing such educational platforms. Look at languages: learning English is often mandatory in primary schools throughout the world. Many Americans, meanwhile, know only one language (and it ain’t Urdu).

This insularity is not a problem limited to the primary school system. My alma mater, Columbia University, prides itself on its Core Curriculum—which might as well be called Kids, Let’s Talk About Dead White Men—comprising courses like Literature Humanities in which, if you’re lucky, a token or two (Jane Austen and/or Virginia Woolf) might be thrown into the mix. There is a Major Cultures requirement, but students must choose and specialize in one particular region (e.g. Africa, Asia, the Middle East). For art majors, one of the requirements is 20^th Century Art, and although it was one of my favorite classes (because it’s not like I’m into contemporary art or anything…), it really should be renamed White People In 20^th C. America And Europe And Not Even A Cameo By Basquiat.

·         History-writing / documentation is not a Western invention.

·         Etc.

What are your thoughts on the subject? If you’ve studied (or are simply interested in) art history, what has your experience been like?

The body as art / Art as the body // Photos galore

Photos of Caitlin Bergh’s Exquisite Corpse performance piece are now up on Flickr. (You can find more photo links in the previous post.)

Photo by Andrew Roddewig, 2011.

Here’s a short video clip of the performance, taken on an outdated point-and-shoot camera, and here are lengthier videos taken on Caitlin’s iPhone. (As you can probably tell by the quality and equipment used, documentation was merely and mostly for posterity’s sake. Indie indeed.) I like how you can hear me say, “Do one more roll,” at 2:33 in the last video. Because that one roll resulted in 2:42. Which was a perfectly unintentional and unintentionally perfect moment. [29 October edit: Caitlin accidentally deleted all of her YouTube videos. Stay tuned, as she’ll re-upload them soon!]

Those who watched the performance in person are right, however, when they tell me that the videos don’t do the experience justice; you really did have to be there. But, as has been mentioned, there will be more [and bigger! and better!] live collaborations between Caitlin and me in the future.

Not seen in the videos is the ending of the performance: We bowed. My obsession from the soundtrack blared. And the audience responded to Caitlin’s questions, “What is the best way to convey the body in art?” and “What is the best way to convey art on the body?”

Of course, the performance was only one small part of Exquisite Corpse. Photos of the exhibition are now up, arranged roughly in the order in which a guest to the gallery might view each collaboration. Keep checking the page for photos of the opening and closing receptions.

Unrelated to the show, the discussion is still going in the “Art as political weapon, artist as social instigator” post from June! If you’re new to the site or haven’t been checking back on the older discussion posts, join in on the conversation!

Discussion: Art as political weapon, artist as social instigator // This painting would look nice in my foyer

TED posted a talk by Shirin Neshat in which she illustrates the challenges she faces—as well as the stimuli from which she draws empowerment and inspiration—as “an Iranian woman artist living in exile”:

What strikes me most from Neshat’s talk is her characterization of the Iranian artist as the voice of the people:

We are considered, as artists, central to the cultural, political, social discourse in Iran. We are there to inspire, to provoke, to mobilize, to bring hope to our people. We are the reporters of our people and are communicators to the outside world. Art is our weapon. Culture is a form of resistance. I envy sometimes the artists of the West for their freedom of expression, for the fact that they can distance themselves from the question of politics, from the fact that they are only serving one audience, mainly the Western culture. But also I worry about the West, because often, in this country, in this Western world, culture risks to be a form of entertainment.

Western art, as Neshat sees it, is able to function outside of a political context, but does that mean it should? Does the artist bear a certain social responsibility to challenge the status quo? Or is it enough for the artist to entertain? What, exactly, is the role of the artist?

Discussion: Shit just got real

David LaChapelle recently made his Hong Kong debut, which coincided with ART HK 11. According to Art Radar Asia, here’s what the photographer had to say regarding the New York and Hong Kong art scenes:

Coming back from Asia, going to America, going to Europe, it feels almost sleepy when you get back. I don’t want to say ‘simple’, but there’s a certain enthusiasm [in Asia] that’s no longer in New York… I find that spirit more in Beijing and more in places like Hong Kong than you would in New York City, where it seems like a dullness of, ‘Oh, I’ve seen it all, done it all.’

OK, his words weren’t particularly incendiary. Although the title of the article, “Asian art scene buzzing while New York’s stagnates,” and the idea that the city that deems itself “the cultural capital of the world” is losing its energy, do stir up an interesting debate.

LaChapelle’s observations are consistent with my personal history and experience; my parents were born and raised in Hong Kong (Mom lived above a store, Dad in the now-demolished Shek Kip Mei housing projects), and when they immigrated to the States, they found the Western pace to be agonizingly slow. And that was decades ago; since their youth, their home city’s changed and grown exponentially, something I’ve seen each time I visit. This rapid growth is most evident in its cultural manifestation—we are witnessing a cultural shift. Chinese art is in increasingly high demand, while Chinese collectors are making more and more investments in art. Want to make it big in the art world? If you haven’t already, it’s time to turn your attention to the East.

And as for the West… New Yorkers, can you defend yourselves? Or are you nodding in agreement as you yawn your way down the streets of Chelsea? What about other art hubs like L.A., Berlin, and Venice, whose Bienniale just concluded? Regardless, we can view this as a call to the Western world to step its game up.