Before introducing what we are,I hope to make clear what we are not,what we reject and what we discard.

“Farewell to Post-colonialism” was the critical curatorial starting point for the Third Guangzhou Triennial, as well as a difficult question presented for it. The curatorial team received various critiques from different positions when the theme was put forward: For artists in China, it would be difficult to engage the topic in-depth, given that China has no painful history of being colonized. Without experience of colonialism, how can we talk about post-colonialism, let alone bid farewell to post-colonialism?1 For many international artists, it is obviously “politically incorrect,” and the rise of the Right. And a multi-culturist would resolutely criticize that it represented a regression to colonialism, or a new kind of “great-power chauvinism.”

In fact, the idea of a simple correspondence between post-colonialism and colonial history, and politicized argument with clear positions, are the very things we are attempting to reject. In today’s ‘world, where post-colonialism and its discursive practices are well guarded by “political correctness,” its ideological features are thoroughly exposed. I do not intend to argue against the theories and politics of post-colonialism, but to express a dissatisfaction over the obvious harm done to art and politics by the politicization of art.

First, I want classify the different “identities” of “post-colonialism.” Post-colonialism is not only an experience, but also a context; not only a vision, but also a perspective, a discourse, an interpretation mechanism, and a system of spectatorship. As a mechanism, it operates like a net fishing what it can and wants. Sometimes, it even becomes a creative system, infiltrating artists’ minds.

“Post-colonialism” is a discourse at the curatorial level, but as a context, we all share it. However, this context is not a by-product of the so-called “post-colonial reality” or historical experience of post-colonialism,2 but rather an institutional and ideological experience. Meanwhile, it is neither a theory, viewpoint or identity feature, but “a system of spectatorship.” Regardless of whether an artist is familiar with or cares about post-colonialism, s/he has already been included within its context through visiting or taking part in international exhibitions, cooperating with or confronting curators, and in the process of being read, watched and explained. In this sense, there is no specific post-colonial artist, but all artists are in the post-colonial context.

The issue of “Farewell to Post-colonialism” originated from a strong sense of fatigue. Of course, we can keep on analyzing and identifying carefully post-colonialism as an experience, a discourse, a context and an ideology, but here, I just want to state a basic, perhaps subjective and willful reason for choosing this topic.

Here, we are not going to discuss the ideology of post-colonial discourse, the “spectacle of politics,” vulgar “identity” or the rubber check of multiculturalism in major international exhibitions. They have already been discussed a lot in the past year in the forums in motion of the Guangzhou Triennial. What I ask myself is—What do I most want to confess to my colleagues in the art world right before the opening of the Third Guangzhou Triennial.

So here, I want to try to make some tentative observations and presentiments regarding “after post-colonialism.”

 

The Ideologicalization of Post-colonial Discourse

Post-colonialism has strived a world from the closure and dominance of nation-states to the historical view and world view. It has been integrated with various social movements in the past 40 years and has cleared new critical and narrative ground. Its merits are obvious in literature, art and politics. However, these merits have quickly degenerated to routines within the last 20 years. For instance, we often see and hear symbolic forms of cultural critique in various international exhibitions and seminars labeled with key terms like “identity,” “the other,” “translation,” “immigrant,” “migration,” “local,” “difference,” “diversity,” “hegemony,” “marginalization,” “minority,” “alter-modernity,” “oppression,” “visible-invisible,” “class,” “gender,” “nation” and so forth. Today, given the existing post-colonial toolkit, these concepts and ideas that once possessed revolutionary critical force have already become a form of dominant power discourse in the name of “political correctness.” The formerly deconstructive and anti-hegemonic critical strategy is setting up its regime, a “regime of the others” within academia. For over a decade, post-colonialism has become an aggregate of theoretical criticism and strategy, a catchall field of discourse and a “politics of discourse.” What this politics of discourse has created is a society formally free but unable to realize true freedom, a society that praises difference but cannot create difference itself.

Multiculturalism and political correctness—from the essence of these things, every one has the right to safeguard himself, and every one should tolerate the others. However, once politicized and transformed into an ideology, diversity and tolerance quickly degrade to cultural relativism, or even cynicism on value, thus constituting the emasculation of the cultural ideal. Politics and capital will quickly occupy the territory left behind by the retreat of value judgment,  strategy and operation will naturally be pushed to the frontline, resulting in the combination of “hegemony of the managers” and “tyranny of the others.” Unfortunately, it is just the combination of power and interest that supports the industry of major international art exhibitions, and endlessly creates the stereotype of stars of multiculturalism and the “post-colonial subject.”3

We do not oppose a certain ideology, but ideology itself, and what are becoming and have become ideologies. However, this is actually an impossible task, because new ideologies will inevitably continue to spring forth. Ideology that covers on a living subject is a symbolic system of cognition and expression, a system of narratives, senses, imaginations and desires. Ideology changes an individual into a social subject—an inevitable function of reality—making it difficult to detect, and yet we are covered and drenched in it at all times. It is the background of our existence; therefore, we cannot choose to be “outside of ideology” because we are born into it. It is a given fact. Just because it is the system of a subject “narrates, feels, imagines and desires,” so it is the “solidification of meaning” (意底牢结), as the Chinese translation of the word “ideology” in early 20th century. It doesn’t control and provide a narrow political agenda; it is a basic framework to define the relationship between reality and self. It integrates reality, presents reality before our eyes and provides us with an unconscious “second-hand reality.” So, ideology is unconscious; it is an innate personal principle. Ideology is what Lacan called the “Big Other.” The only difference is, Lacan’s “Big Other” is a pair of eyes staring from an extreme distance while ideology is an invisible net.

In the past two decades, post-colonialism has gradually woven this invisible net. The Guangzhou Triennial attempts to present those things the net failed to fish. Those “fish that escaped from the net,” at the same time, is the dark area where popular discourses on post-colonialism and multiculturalism cannot reach.

 

The Cost of Post-colonialism

The politicization of art and ideologization of politics, or perhaps the “politicization of discourse,” are two major problems of post-colonialism and its social practice. It is widely regarded that post-colonialism inherited the critical spirit and social legacy of the Revolution of 1968, along with post-structuralist thought. Yet, this legacy has a cost that remains to be repaid. Critiques of the European historic knowledge-power structure put forth by philosophers like Michel Foucault are deconstruction and reflection of themselves and their history. In contrast, Edward Said and his followers make critiques “among cultures,” and this is revisiting, re-imagining and re-forming themselves and their history. Not to mention that the two kinds of thinking differ greatly in quality, it is especially necessary to be wary of the self-objectification of post-colonialism in the course of its disclosure and resistance of “western” narratives. In fact, this self-objectification has happened, and moreover, it has caused the worst subsequences—nationalism and fundamentalism. This is the greatest regret cited by Said in the preface of the last version of Orientalism that published before his death.

The trends of social thought in 1968 had very different influences in “Western” and “non-Western” contexts. Similarly, post-colonialism takes on completely different meanings within “Western” and “indigenous” contexts. Post-colonialism, as a theoretical discourse and a critical method, was introduced in China about 15 years ago. It was the time when people criticized the cultural “spring roll,” or “exotic tastes” generated by identity politics. It should be noted that the discourse of post-colonialism was introduced in China first as Western discourse, but its significance as a non-Western or anti-Western discourse was invisible for a long time, and this ambiguity of identity made its introduction in China with peculiar effects. In February of 1995, the journal Twenty-First Century published two essays, one was “The Post- ism and the China’s Neoconservative” by American Chinese scholar Zhao Yiheng which analyzed the relationship between post-colonialism, postmodern discourse and conservative thought in China, and the other was “The Situation of ‘Third World Criticism’ in Contemporary China” by Xu Ben, which unveiled the change of Western post-colonial critique and Third World critique in China. These were profound analyses and critiques of post-colonial discourse by overseas Chinese scholars.

As Arif Dirlik has remarked, post-colonialism emerged in a time when non-Western intellectuals entered Western discourse circle. Why, then, are the overseas Chinese scholars so vigilant against post-colonialism?

In the early 1990s, Chinese academic circles were busy reflecting on the over-simplistic idealism and cultural criticism of the 1980s. Such reflection was related with a shift in Chinese intellectuals’ basic understanding of the intellectual history of the 20th Century. Right at that moment, the introduction of postcolonial discourse hit a sensitive nerve in Chinese contemporary culture. Reflection on the May 4th Movement, probes into schools of thought including Critical Review School, national quintessence faction, and Neo-Confucianism, as well as the cultural nationalists’ “Oriental cultural renaissance,” integrated closely with the post-colonial discourse shortly introduced into China, and formed an ideological neo-conservatism. Just as Tao Dongfeng pointed out: “Post-colonialism is a radical, marginalized, anti-official and anti-institutional political-cultural discourse inside the West society, but this criticism and radicalism cannot remain when it enters a socio-cultural context different from the West. On the contrary, it may have a vague and intertwined relationship with the mainstream culture and the existing system.”

In Chinese art circles, post-colonial discourse takes the form of resistance against the so-called “Western” perspective of the late 1990s, and an emphasis on indigenous, Chinese nature and special modernity. As Xu Ben wrote: “The core of China’s post-colonial critique is its indigenous nature rather than anti-oppression; it only opposes the oppression from the First World, but not that from its local culture.” Post-colonial discourse has “anti-oppression” connotations in the European and American intellectual world, but becomes an enemy of the cultural “left” in China, a country with a century-long history of the left. The relationships between the other and the left, the left and the right, the oppressor and the oppressed, always remain ambiguous. Regarding this, China had a painful experience in the 20th Century. As a matter of fact, in both China and modern “Western” society, traditional political classifications, whether left or right, freedom or totalitarian, are no longer clear. Totalitarianism and democratic politics can interchange quickly, communism taking universalism as its ideal can fall into radical racism rapidly (such as the ethnic cleansing in Serbia), neo-fascism and chauvinism re-emerge in Europe in the name of “cultural defense.” All these indicate the complexity of modern politics which is far beyond any explanations offered by current theories.

 

Anxiety of Return

Upon returning and awaking in his home island of Ithaca, no one recognized Odysseus, nor could he recognize his home. Athena had to appear and confirm that it was, indeed, Ithaca.

Edward Said, a great master of post-colonial criticism, described his cultural background as a series of irrevocable displacements and homelessness, as he was always between two cultures. He mentioned regression on several occasions, suggesting that the true return is up in the air. Indeed, the key subjects of post-colonialism are diaspora and return. For Said, regression means a return to oneself and to history, thus enabling us to truly understand what has happened, why it happened and who we are. This reflects an anxiety of root-seeking, an anxiety of return.

In the novel Roots by Alex Haley, the protagonist returns to a remote African village to seek his ancestral roots, but is not accepted by the villagers.4 Roots is the modern version of Odyssey, altered by Western power discourse and colonial history. After a 300-year vagrancy, the modern returnee faces a fate worse than that of Odysseus. To avoid being recognized by his fellow villagers, Odysseus disguises himself as a beggar, while the returnee is involuntarily transformed by modern culture—his fellow villagers surround him, looking at an “American with black skin.” He realizes that he is of mixed race. In a crowd of people of pure blood, he is made aware of his own impurity, and feels ashamed. He has nothing left, save for a few words in his mother tongue.

Roots is turned into a tasteful comedy by New Zealand artist Daniel Malone, who assumes the character of the returnee. Many key scenes of The Lord of the Rings, completed from 1999 to 2001, were shot in New Zealand. The films had a great impact on New Zealand’s national identity and sense of national recognition. Upon the international release of The Lord of the Rings, the entire country of New Zealand began to engage in a form of “cosplay.” 5 Things ranging from airline advertisements to tourist brochures extended the fantasy of the film into real life. On the new tourist map, many towns that had been used as film sites for The Lord of the Rings were renamed according to their film names, even though these very places had only recently had their aboriginal names restored after independence from the colonial system.

To me, this is a pertinent example to respond to those who attempt to engage with problems of post-colonial narrative and identity. A film can alter a country’s identity imagination, creating an utterly new symbolic system. This is different from the residences of Joyce’s fictional heroes that have been established by the city of Dublin. The nationwide “cosplay” in New Zealand is not only a confirmation of egocentricity—by turning the “end of the world” geographically into the “central land” fictionalized in the film—but more practically, and more importantly, for the publicity effect and business and tourism opportunities caused by the films. This New Zealand footnote to the making of The Lord of the Rings reveals two realities: First, we live in a time when reality imitates fiction. Today, colonialism is no longer between different races and cultures, but between media and reality, which means the virtual world colonizing the real world. Second, this story sheds light on the vulnerability of so-called cultural identity in a post post-colonial world. It is no longer the cultural “root” that a post-colonialist subject seeks, nor the rhizome that keeps generating new centers as mentioned by Gilles Deleuze.6 After post-colonialism, “identity” is just an artificial limb in the cultural political game. It is a fictional and simulated illusion and desire, and a pseudo-myth continuously generated and renovated by global business, public culture and tourism. 7

Curator Francesco Bonami mentioned at the forum of the Guangzhou Triennial in November last year that Edward Said’s idea of “Orientalism” was approaching the end of its relevance.8 “The Orient” reappears today as a changed one, and has become a new invention of the Orient people themselves. Indeed, from Roots to The Lord of the Rings, we find that the social features of post-colonialism have changed on an everyday level; we have no reason to be entangled in unreliable historical roots when the memory of colonialism has been shelved away in the back of our minds by a surging and constantly updating eality. The once “post-colonial subjects” are generating new contemporary culture belong to themselves (even if these creations are based on a “self-other-isation”), which is a mixed creation composed of global capital, public culture, mass media and artistic experiments.

After post-colonialism, history is in the future. As long as we eradicate the metaphysical pathos of “root,” we will no longer care about who we used to be, but only who we will be. After post-colonialism, there will be no anxiety for return, because our existence will be unfolded on different interfaces—we cannot and need not return.

As a matter of fact, for an artist, even in the realm of daily life, identity can be a loose and exchangeable experience. Poet Xiao Kaiyu wrote on his way to Qinghai: “One’s race and homeland are issues determined during reincarnation. They are accidental, and one accustom to it and claimed as his fate…. However, are we not a nation that has not been named yet? Entering and leaving the sprawling streets, I naturally have in me icebergs, deserts, and wild beasts, temples, reconciliation, and dreams.”

 

The Society Under Siege or Political Spectacle

After post-colonialism, artists’ main task is to clean or escape from this over-politicized international art scene. The main problem brought forth by post-colonialism and multiculturalism to contemporary art is politicization of art. Of course, this is related to the transmutation in modern politics itself. In the last 40 to 50 years, politics has gradually freed itself from the framework of national state, and entered the realm of everyday life. The society and daily life are presented as a series of conflicts, and the reality has been deconstructed into a mosaic of different ideas clashing with each other. The mirror of reality’s appearance has been broken; we are no longer able to reach the center or edge of the mirror. The main picture in front of us is the cracks in the mirror; that is the inner frontier of daily life. Reality is expressed by new social movements and post-colonial theory as ideological operations composed of a series of center-periphery, visible-invisible. What we see from the broken mirror is no longer reality in its entirety, but cracks of reality overlapping each other, wreckage of fighting between feminism and male chauvinism, the West and the non-West, black and white, homosexuality and anti-homosexuality.

Contemporary art has engaged with society and various social movements over the past 40 years. What has resulted is not only political art, but also artistic politics. In the field of contemporary art, words such as strategy and power are used loosely and vaguely both with love and hatred. Art activism has gone so far as to be degenerated into a “pseudo-representative regime” in major international exhibitions. What has this bogus and superficial representative regime brought to art and politics, other than “political spectacle” in major international exhibitions?9

Today, in a highly media-intensive society, our real political situations become increasingly more complex. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman used the phrase “society under siege” to describe our current situation. “Society under siege” refers not only to individual social politics, but also to the nightmarish totalitarianism described by George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, and the invisible power control as analyzed by Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. In a “society under siege,” individuals are endowed with formal political freedom, but the freedom is never realized—because each individual is willingly engaged in a sophisticated relationship of management agency, and politics, power and freedom have all been mediated. The “Big Brother” in the novel 1984 became a leading character in an entertainment TV program in 1999; the “Big Brother” is no longer a mythic ruler, but a composite of many invisible people—masses that have been sidelined by the mass media. Politics is not given, represented, or representative, but directional and critical. Politics is a collective, effective and visible action, a collective presence. However, such collective action has resulted in the debasing and entertaining of politics. Politics should have had critical and practical effects on reality, but it has become a spectacle of representation and performance, and even degenerated to management—a mechanism of maintenance and preservation.

“Society under siege” is a world besieged by life politics, a world where one cannot discern the individual from society, the self from others, the authors from spectators. It is also a world of systematic knowledge representation, a world without places strange in distance, and a world without myths and unknown realm. At the same time, it is also a world thoroughly open to and monitored by Google Earth and GPS, a “world without exteriors.”

How, then, can we resist a society under siege and a hard reality? How can we escape from a world dominated by auditing and management, and from the stagnant pool of pluralism, as well as from the empty promise of freedom?

While mass media brings all human beings into a globalized life, it has also created a pluralistic living situation—after post-colonialism, multiple realities and pluralistic histories have become personal living experiences we can really feel, and this has opened a new space for us.

 

Anxiety of Creation

If the anxiety of post-colonialism is the anxiety of return, what individuals will suffer after post-colonialism is the anxiety of creation.

Put simply, the “active practice” of post-colonialism is value negotiation, critique, and social intervention on the institutional and political levels. The passive practice of it is listening, unlocking and making available space blocked by cultural differences, learning from others and self-enlightening. Whether active or passive, as a cultural practice, post-colonialism is far from channeling the ethical and political burdens into true creative energy (but has simply provided some good excuses and reasons). It is more appropriate to say that it has removed and eliminated the issue of creativity in contemporary art. It is post-colonialism’s addiction to cultural politics that causes it to neglect the changes taking place in everyday life and the potential impetuses these changes have on the art experience.

Today, real life is challenging the myth of art creation with unprecedented richness and imagination. The development of network media and virtual technology has brought us brand new passions and life experiences. Hyper-reality, fictional history and “Second Life” have all gradually formed a new “subject” of experience, a substitutive living world.10 Discussions of diversity and difference have long moved beyond the scope of race, culture, gender and class that is restricted by obvious identity dividers. Virtual networks, remote monitoring and real-time technology have changed our experience of identity; diversified living environments mean more than colorful ethnic mingling, but also the existence of one life in multiple worlds and sites. Today, “heterogeneous existence” does not mean “living among others,” but also amidst diversity. It is a personal, existential thought experiment, and times of marches towards strange new realms.

We have exclaimed countless times that life is more vigorous, more imaginative, more absurd and more incredible than art. In a world that is constantly expanded and supplemented by the media, life takes the form of multiple realities. In the multi-reality world of virtual networks, diversity and difference have been internalized, and “possible worlds” are all around us.11 Arthur Rimbaud’s “La vie est ailleurs (real life is elsewhere),” Ernst Bloch’s “daydream” and the surrealists’ “alternative world” and “transcendental experience,”12 all that art promises can be easily realized through virtual technology and virtual space. What, then, is the true significance and implication of artistic transcendence? Can contemporary art deeply engaged with various social and political issues restart the exploratory journey of artistic creation? Would that be a regression to early modernist ideal, or the wrong path after post-colonialism?

 

The Ruin of Babel Tower

During the past year and a half, the curatorial team of the Guangzhou Triennial has moved forward in incessant discussion (even debate). We have reflected on post-colonial discourse and multiculturalism in regard to cultural politics; we have analyzed the “spectacle of discourse,” the “ideological readymade” and “undigested reality” in art making in regard to curatorial context; we also have discussed the living situation in a society besieged by life politics and social management systems, and explored the “present modes of possible worlds.” Then we gradually shifted focus to the issue of “possible worlds” and the “current state of creativity,” both of which are main concerns of artists, as well as existential issues confronted by all the individuals.

In fact, the Guangzhou Triennial’s criticism on post-colonialism discourse and its ideology primarily originated from a reflection on current exhibition experience and its “internationality.” The questioning of the international exhibition platform is not new. In 2007, a book titled “The Next Documenta Should Be Curated by an Artist” was released at the opening of Documenta 12 in Kassel and caused a widespread response. It showed the fact that artists’ discontent with curatorial practice had reached an intolerable level, compelling one to ask: What, exactly, are artists dissatisfied with? Is it the international exhibition system, the spectacle of discourse, or the plethora of cultural-political strategies with similar essence deployed in curatorial practices?13

All these troubles seem to stem from the annoying “international” element. However, for contemporary art, what kind of space is considered “international”?14

On this “international” platform of contemporary art, we are working and living within the historical influences of post-colonialism. The departure point for our thinking process is a “readymade” multicultural context. Each culture and each artist shoulders a different version of art history, while the clues and narratives in each art history are said to be legitimate. Art history has plenty of sources; contemporary art moves and circulates around the world, continuously creating different versions of local narratives. In such a situation, how can we redefine “creation” in a diverse and mixed, non-linear historical view? If the key issue of post-colonialism in international curatorial practice is “negotiating value,” will this negotiation ultimately reach a consensus?15 Or rather, do we need to reach a consensus? Can the consensus eliminate difference?

Heraclitus wrote, “For those who are awake there is a single, common universe, whereas in sleep each person turns away into (his) own private (universe).” According to Heraclitus, a person who is asleep is someone who remains beyond the logos (“dialogue”), and the mission of thought was to awaken sleepers slipping into individual dreams and summon them to the world of common logos. Today, it is noted that an international exhibition is one such gathering and platform for dialogue, where differences emerge and are presented. However, in a time when individual identities are institutionally mediated and fabricated, it is more appealing to be a sleeper in a world full of those who are awake. In this situation of “internet” replacing “international,” the living world has already become one of the many worlds. We have no way of determining whether we are clear sleepers, or sleeping awakener.

Each international exhibition promises to set up a platform for dialogue, but why are we still making dialogue after so many years of dialogue? Are we really making dialogue, or are we simply performing dialogue? Aside from the “spectacle of discourse,” what else does dialogue have to offer? A ruin of the Babel Tower piled with discourses?

 

The Yellow Flight

In 1995 at the Frankfurt International Airport, Wu Shanzhuan and his friends (Wang Guangyi and Wang Youshen) were waiting for a flight to Hong Kong. During the dull wait, Wu Shanzhuan came up with an outlandish flight itinerary: Departing from Beijing, transiting at every international terminal, and then arriving in Hong Kong in several years.

In this rhapsodic trip, Hong Kong represents the perpetually postponed object of desire. It is the transit, rather than arrival, that matters most. Prior to the final arrival are endless stopovers and next stops. The destination is constantly postponed without a confirmed arrival time. This is a long journey without a clear purpose, and since it is impossible to determine whether the travelers are in China or the world at large, the flight from Beijing to Hong Kong essentially blurs the line between domestic and international.

The flight itinerary exiles the passengers to the “international space” of airports in an experience better described as loitering rather than vagrancy. If one is loitering with no confirmed return, how is arrival determined?

An international airport does not belong to a single country or government, it is a ubiquitous “republic” beyond any country, an aperture between nations, a political “enclave” of identity, an “internationalized” place and a perpetual “between.” So “inter-nation” is both a broken and incessant space, it exists outside and inside of every country; it is the outside of the inside and the domestic international.

What exists in this international space is overlapping broken timelines,16 rushed passengers, the same international brands and various local products. Transnational capital moves endlessly across the numerous “local nations,” while at the same time, symbols, forms and ideas constantly change and shuttle between the global and the local. The international airport, a transitory and lingering place, is also a shopping paradise: Duty-Free, Identity-Free! Both international and domestic are available—how similar international airports are to international exhibitions of contemporary art! Importantly, there is a self-reflective representational relationship, a system of “multi-cultural managerialism,” as termed by Sarat Maharaj, and a tacit marriage between the global and the local.

So let’s forget our destination! Once we replace the arrival with the transit, we realize that identity vanishes in the republic of the airport; what is left is the body without identity. Here international space presents another possibility: it is a hunting ground for identity politics and a drifting field for identity freedom.

It should be noted that Hong Kong held a complex and unique significance in this trip. For a Chinese, it would be difficult to determine whether the flight is domestic or international. It is a visa-free international trip, possible only on a flight to Hong Kong, a “Special Exception Zone” (pre-1997, Hong Kong was officially known as a Special Administrative Region, or SAR)—a domestic area (colony) that requires a special permit, a place between “domestic” and “foreign.”

Is this a call for post-colonialism? 1995, just two years before the return of Hong Kong to China, was a short time before the return journey. Wu Shanzhuan named that flight “The Yellow Flight,” which not only indicated the identity of the departure point and destination, but also implied a special historical view—the possibility of surpassing 1997 and its identity. 1997 was the year of the Hong Kong handover, political turnover and identity change. The artists would be en route to Hong Kong and travelers on the Yellow Flight would easily escape the limelight of the international political celebration in their perpetual transit.

The passengers on The Yellow Flight set out for a perpetually postponed destination—Hong Kong, a former colony, the departed and returning Hong Kong. Is the destination of the flight post-colonial Hong Kong?

The Yellow Flight posed a series of questions: Will the trip that began in 1995 arrive in Hong Kong? Is the post-colonial narrative applicable to Hong Kong? How does the post-colonial Hong Kong redefine its “post-postcolonial” identity? Would it be an “Asian international metropolis,” or a “special administrative region” with its current system remaining intact for the next 100 years, a border city with altered horizons, or a self-growing “rhizome”?17

The significance of The Yellow Flight has changed by now. In 1995, Chinese artists were just beginning to show in international exhibitions. It was the prime time for identity politics and ideological symbols, when international exhibitions willfully created the political identity of Chinese contemporary art. Chinese artists with newly acquired “international experience” eagerly desired to transcend the persistent definition of identity in the endless flights and transits to enter an “identity-free” zone, sans baggage.18

The times have changed, the meaning of this international flight has changed, and its destination is no longer valid.19 The Yellow Flight shuttles between different international airports in constant transit, between taking off and landing, between departure and arrival. This will be a journey with no end, loose and flowing; it has taken off, but has not landed. The subject of the flight is forever relegated to the “inter-nation,” the transiting space.20 The stopover has become the destination, it overflows the container of history and reality, so we cannot tell whether it is a return journey or a departure, the right way or the wrong way.

 

After Post-Colonialism—Return or Departure?

When Odysseus awoke, he had returned to Ithaca. However, no one recognized him and he could not recognize his hometown.

After his long and arduous journey, Odysseus suffers an embarrassing identity crisis, and this situation is all too common in contemporary art. Like an international airport, an international exhibition is also an “enclave.” As a public platform beyond national frameworks, it has long formed a specific system of cultural authenticity. It is a place in which belonging and difference are made obvious and magnified, while at the same time increasingly solidified. The advent of an international exhibition is a cry for multitudinous discourse and a commitment to “sharing a horizontal platform.” It encourages cultural diversity and “transnational global cultural production,” but manufactures a global spectacle of discourse and cultural tourism industry. It is committed to a space where value can be negotiated, but construct a “tax-free zone” for transnational capital, and immunity from value judgments brokered for cosmopolitanism. A major international exhibition is a transit depot. It gathers the “local” of the world, and different versions of “international.” Artists arrive from their respective contexts, and gain a transient release on a shared platform. Here, communication equals or even bigger than creation, but interaction is superficial at best, because every subject of identity has already been self-confined to the siege of mirrors. Therefore, this space of value negotiation and this international communal platform becomes a chain of self-reproduction transit stations. Given that international exhibitions occupy a status of cultural authenticator and also the discrepancies between the international and local art scenes, a dual value standard has been created.21 That is why some artists who have the limelight in the international platform are unable to achieve local recognition to the same degree. For instance, upon winning the Nobel Prize, writer Gao Xingjian was given the cold shoulder by China. Similarly, contemporary artist Cai Guoqiang has garnered totally different evaluations in and out of China. In the constant stay and delay, the news of the return journey has long been cut off.

In an article written in 1983, Italo Calvino reminded his readers that the Odyssey—the epic poem about the Greek hero Odysseus and his long journey home—existed before his actual return. That is to say, the story emerged before the narrated event. We must seek, think and remember our way back, because the real risk is in forgetting the way back before it takes place. Thus, the way back is destined to be the lost way, because its destinations have been lost. In searching for the route of return, we should not rely wholly on memory, because only when memory gathers both the vestiges of the past and plans of the future, it would have real meaning. The return requires planning, and it has to be told repeatedly. This telling is not a retrospect of the past, but a presentiment of the future. Thus, the way back shall become the exit of the labyrinth of reality,22 and become the departure and the return.

During the Triennial forum held in November 2007, Sarat Maharaj presented a documentary of African dancer Seydou Boro. In the film, Boro asks how to travel to the adjacent country of Brazzaville. The reply is, “First, go to Johannesburg, then go to Central Africa, then transit to Paris, and finally, you will reach Brazzaville.” Professor Maharaj hoped to express the network of colonialism and the colonial territorialism that dominates Africa (one needs only to look at the rigid lines on any international map to see this). In The Yellow Flight, “transit” is the very thing that the artist ruminates over. According to Said, living in the space “between” cultures has made his return ever delayed; but in The Yellow Flight, “between” is a place to linger that is worth pondering. The artist enjoys the happiness of wandering and delaying in the perpetual “between.”

The international space experienced in The Yellow Flight is a pluralistic world. What we encounter is a world with worlds. The world in it has no boundaries; it exists outside of boundaries. So both departure and arrival points become distant destinations. The long flight within this international space is a continuous process of recuperation,23 because the departure and arrival points no longer exist, and each transit is an arrival.

 

Translation by Bai Mingliang

 

Notes：

1. Most Chinese artists hold an indifferent attitude toward the colonialism discourse, which is rather unique in non-Western countries. I think this phenomenon might be explained by the “dual colonization” China experienced in the 20th Century: we have experienced colonization both by the “West” and the “anti-West”; the colonization both by technology and Utopia. The social transformation beginning in the 1950s not only eradicated the heritage of the “traditional society” in China, but also cast away the history and experience of international cultural exchange commencing the late 19th Century. In the second half of the 20th Century, the Chinese people suffered from a deeper historical pain than colonial memory. That is why contemporary Chinese art in the 1980s had nothing to do with post-colonialism. The “West” was only an intangible object at that time; the immediate objects to be “revolutionized” were the social system and the “new traditions” accumulated in the past dozen or so years.

2. The leading discourse in the 20th Century in China was about cultural competition between the East and the West. In the early 20th Century, the Chinese intellectuals created various “self-otherizing” and mixed cultural schools of thought, such as national quintessence faction, Critical Review School and Neo-Confucianism. While in Mao Zedong’s article “On New Democracy” written in 1940, there are numerous arguments similar to “post-colonialism.” It can be said that “post-colonial reality” appeared much earlier than “post-colonial discourse.”

3. In post-colonial discourse, the new ethnic group created by major international art exhibitions has exceeded the limits of Orientalism and Occidentalism. They have multiple identities. Where are they? Are they free?

4. “The seventy-odd other villagers gathered closely around me, in a kind of horseshoe pattern, three or four deep all around; had I stuck out my arms, my fingers would have touched the nearest ones on either side. They were all staring at me. The eyes just raked me. Their foreheads were furrowed with their very intensity of staring. A kind of visceral surging or a churning sensation started up deep inside me; bewildered, I was wondering what on earth was this… then in a little while it was rather as if some full-gale force of realisation rolled in on me: Many times in my life I had been among crowds of people, but never where every one was jet black! Rocked emotionally, my eyes dropped downward as we tend to do when we are uncertain, insecure, and my glance fell upon my own hands’ brown complexion. This time more quickly than before, and even harder, another gale-force emotion hit me: I felt myself some variety of a hybrid… I felt somehow impure among the pure. It was a terrible shaming Feeling.” From Roots by Alex Haley (1976).

5. Cosplay, short for “costume play,” is a type of performance art whose participants outfit themselves, with often-elaborate costumes and accessories, as a specific character.

6. For Gilles Deleuze, the “rhizome” does not have a single base and is not fixed to a certain place. The “rhizome” extends on the surface of the ground and takes temporary roots, generating new “rhizomes” which will continue to extend.

7. In a media-intensive society, all traditional notions of political struggle and debate appear shallow and false because in today’s reality, diversity happens within every individual. Furthermore, each individual’s search for an identity label has changed into the search for a substitutive experience, the differentiation and analysis of difference has turned into the very existence of difference. Cookie-cutter identity labels become something to be desired and the impetus and passion for self-release and self-renewal.

8. This was the second station of Forums in Motion (forum series) for the Guangzhou Triennial, entitled “Limitation of Multiculturalism,” and held from Nov. 19 to Nov. 20, 2007, in Guangdong Museum of Art.

9. This operation has gained the renowned title “identity politics”—beyond state politics but within the cultural field. However, the revolutionary nature of identity politics itself is false, and its pursuit of political correctness takes the form of a revolutionary stance, i.e. the position of the disadvantaged. The phoniness and pathology of this politics rests in the fact that in a pseudo-revolutionary context, neutralism means no position, the right, while reactionaries such as the anti-feminists and anti-racists are in fact absent. So the politics of art is simplified as the struggle for status and the struggle for the others. This typical “ethics of intention” has reduced the new social movement to an autocratic logic of cultural revolution. Cross-cultural plurality and identity politics still take the false “representative” system as its principle. This cultural representative system, like the “representative system” in politics, is a mediating system.

10. The biggest difference between “Second Life” (an Internet-based virtual world) and other previous Internet games is that it provides a totally simulating reality by making the total replica its goal, rather than illusion and charm, as is the fashion. Its charm seems to lie solely in the fact that it provides another opportunity. Here, we need to consider: What on earth does Second Life duplicate? Is it life logic or life form? What is the relationship between Second Life and our life? The relation between spectator and stage? One game with another game? In the hyper-reality characterized by Second Life, what do realism and surrealism mean?

11. Leibniz first proposed the concept of “possible world.” He said: “The world is the combination of possible things, and the real world is a combination (the richest combination) of existing things and possible things. There are different combinations of possible things, with some combinations being more perfect than others. So there are many possible worlds. Each combination of possible things is a possible world. The world could have taken on a different form; time, space and resources could have produced completely different movements and shapes. God has chosen the one most appropriate to it from among the innumerous possibilities.” We may use the concept of “possible world” to study the art history of modernism, expressionism, suprematism, abstract art, futurism, dada and surrealism—all studies of the relationship between reality and possible worlds. Transitional life, transitional society, creation and criticism, daydream and Utopia are all modernist impulses related to the thought process behind regarding “possible worlds.”

12. “Dream is a second life.” —Declaration of surrealist Gerard de Nerval

13. The question is whether artists can solve the curatorial problem. This is an entangled and complicated art system—in contemporary artistic practice, it is difficult to identify and separate the curators and the artists, the authors and the spectators. Under the training of the international exhibition system, every artist is well versed in multiculturalism, and in fact harbors a curator inside himself.

14. In today’s China, “international” is no longer the “international” of yore, it is no longer closely related to the revolutionary ideal of liberating all of mankind, but rather an idea and desire for development—from the “Window of the World” in Shenzhen, to the Small Commodities Market in Yiwu, from the landscape along the Bund in Shanghai (Puxi was the “international” landscape during colonial times, while Pudong was the declaration of “internationalization” in China’s contemporary urban development) to the Olympic theme “One World, One Dream” in Beijing. In the lives of contemporary Chinese people, “international” holds different meanings and exists in different versions.

15. Multiculturalism advocates a pluralistic and tolerant principle, similar to the Confucian principle: “Do not do to others what you do not want to be done to you.” However, this negative principle has no practical meaning, because if “you are not the fish, how do you know that the fish is happy?” That which you do not want may be just the thing others want. As in a game of chess, if both players were to follow the principle of “do not do to others what you do not want to be done to you,” and neither wanted to lose or win, the game would remain at a standstill.

16. This trip didn’t pass through existing boundaries defined by nations, what it traversed was time. The travelers entered the movement of global time and shuttled between different time zones, so time revealed its diversity and fragments.

17. Within a Chinese context, debate regarding post-colonial history would be most aptly applied to the case of Hong Kong. For the tenth anniversary of the Hong Kong handover in July 2007, we collaborated with Shanghai MoCA on the exhibition Reversing Horizons, Artist Reflections on the Hong Kong Handover 10th Anniversary. A topic of the exhibition was how Hong Kong artists adapt to a post-colonial identity and how they transcend a post-colonial context in art.

18. The persistence of cultural self-determination and self-expression by artists and critics during that time seems distant to me today. The problem is whether terms like “Eastern” or “China” are still applicable in the overall expression and consideration of things. As an anti-essentialist, tradition and source are unreliable, because tradition is in the course of being made, history is in the future, reality is ideology and source is theology.

19. According to Recording and Narrating the Peculiar by Ren Fang in Liang of the Nan Dynasty: Wang Zhi, who lived during the Jin Dynasty used to cut wood in Mountain Shishi in Xin’an County. One day, he came upon some children who were playing chess and singing songs, so he stopped to listen to their singing. After a while, a child said to him: “You have been here for a long time, why don’t you leave?” So Wang Zhi raised himself and looked around. He discovered his axe had rotted away. He returned home immediately, but hundreds of years had passed, and he alone was left.

20. This reminded me of the central station in the film The Matrix, which was the terminal from the real world to the virtual world.

21. Strangely, local artists are often attentive to the “international,” while internationally active artists pay greater attention to the local.

22. In Ulysses by James Joyce, the lost and the wandering place is the very place people desire to depart and return to. The labyrinth-like existence of everyday life itself is a return journey that can be retraced. The return journey is the lost way, another departure.

23. Odysseus is doomed never to return to his island of Ithaca, for his homeland has vanished since the moment he departed. The point of departure has long since changed between departure and return.