In and Out is a remarkable exhibition. The curator, Binghui Huangfu, has brought together the artworks of Chinese artists living in Beijing, China, and Sidney, Australia. The artists are all cognizant of the trends in international contemporary art and seek to locate their work in this international context. Like Binghui Huangfu herself, the Sydney artists included here came to Australia in the late 1980s, having trained and practiced 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 their relationship to the comparative thematic context - are informed by Binghui Huangfu'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 Binghui Hunagfu 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 have left and could not return to." [1]
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The notion of cultural insterstices, so directly applicable to the experience of Chinese-Australian artists, is applicable to the experience of many contemporary artists' works in Beijing. From the late 1990s artists have participated in an international art world and their work employs the modes of expression (such as installation and performance) that 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 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]
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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 artists living in China that is the critical fulcrum. Again, Huangfu Bingui has been guided by her own experience and by 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 tracks 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, then 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 diaspora in terms of 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.
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One further notion - that of "translation" - underpins the curatorship of In and Out. Binghui Huangfu's own practice as a translator and interpreter between Chinese/Mandarin and English informs her perception of the incommensurability of meaning that enriches the negotiations of Chinese identities and prevents their collapse into a unified fabrication. The issue of translatability emerges in the charged political art reassessment of modernity. At the 1996 Asian-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at the 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.
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[1] Binghui Huangfu, "In between," The Journal of the Asian Art Society of Australia, February 1995, p. 13.
[3] Binghui Huangfu, "In between," p. 13.
[4] James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 246.
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Sue Rowley. The Space "in-between": Curatorial Strategies for Chinese Contemporary Art. 2001
