Beyond the eurocentric view ( de )
The Asia Pacific Times. A monthly newspaper from Germany, 2008-04
The festival RE ASIA in the House of World Cultures in Berlin shows Asia as a creative place of art, film, dance and literature
What images come to mind when we hear “Asia”? No, the exhibition and the supporting multimedia program of the Berlin festival RE-IMAGINING ASIA (RE ASIA) don’t reinforce them: the West’s visions of vacations and terrorism. What is Asia? A woman whose face we can only envision, a book with an unknown title, floating in the water? It certainly is a landscape that changes us when we cross it.
The House of World Cultures in Berlin on a rainy day in March – after the hoopla of the opening and before the weekend onslaught appears deserted despite its recently finished renovation. From the outside, the postwar building is charged with history – built as America’s contribution to the INTERBAU 1957 – and the narrow, gray-pink festival poster is a hesitant, welcoming gesture. But the visitor to the RE ASIA then gets an abrupt surge of adrenaline as he enters the rotund foyer. Parents should take their children by the hand, adults have to resist the knee-jerk urge to do what the kids want to do as well: to touch the displayed conglomeration of the installation Waste not. For two weeks, the Beijing artist Song Dong and his mother Zhao Xiangyuan sorted box-by-box now-obsolete Chinese possessions like plastic bowls and bags, articles of clothing, toys, dishes and so on and arranged them into a still life of the “everyday life of yesteryears.” The scenario visualizes the most recent past of China, the Cultural Revolution, as a traumatizing experience of older Chinese people. “I remember that my mother used to bring scraps of fabric home to sew pieces of clothing out of them,” said Song Dong. “Later, she started collecting the fabric and all sorts of other things out of fear of a possible new shortage of goods.” When the family’s traditional farmhouse fell victim to modernization, the accumulated things became a burden. To the son, the now-touring performance seems a dignified manner of dealing with the ideationally charged inheritance. The visitors reverently wind their way around islands of shoes, plates, flowerpots and mountains of prescription drugs. It does exist, the aura of things.
With RE ASIA, Shaheen Merali and Wu Hung have created a self-confident show that is emboldened and devoid of the exotic. The visitor is not lectured to, shocked or inundated with information. There are moments of encounters with art that are simply delightful. For example, the works from South Korea. Kibong Rhee’s book that floats in an aquarium resembles a poetic gesture. A water pump assures that we can only read a few lines of the page that is flipped open for brief moments. “A Cloud of Philosophy Condensed into a Drop of Water” reads the title of a chapter – and the page already turns again. The title page remains hidden permanently. A few steps further, Kim Jongku invites the visitor to enter a landscape made of black steel powder on a white ground. A camera projects the silhouette of the visitor as an integrated part of hills and Korean characters onto the wall of the White Cube. Here, the piece becomes an imaginary voyage.
RE ASIA raises the pulse with the Techno-beats of Japanese artist Ujino Muneteru. It shames with the sunken, dying elephant of Indian artist Bharti Kher. It irritates with the banal ping-pong game by the lotus blossom pool of Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco. It turns a Kuwaiti stock exchange into a photogenic surface imagined by Andreas Gursky of Germany, a torture scene into a flip book created by Parastou Forouhar of Iran and has the copy of a Buddha bust from Berlin’s Ostasiatisches Museum (The Museum of Asian Art) projecting its own likeness, a work by Michael Joo of the U.S.
RE ASIA becomes political when we stand before Zhang Dali’s newspaper photo from China’s Cultural Revolution that has been outed as a forgery. It lets us shudder when faced with the militarily dauntingly potent underworld of the Forbidden City – imagined by Shen Shaomin. And then there are the playful to tacky Manga girls of young Japanese artist Chiho Aoshima! What is Asia?
How can one think differently of Asian art production beyond a Eurocentric view of it. This question was what guided the curators on this exhibition. For the opening, they invited renowned guests, where, among others, the cultural theorist and philologist Homi K. Bhabha spoke. With his concept of hybridity, Bhabha makes a key contribution to post-colonial theory. In April, a film program started that presents the Asian cultural landscape on an equally high level. Inspired by the Indian Epos Ramayana and employing German and Indian artists, the director and choreographer Joachim Schlömer develops the multi-media dance performance The Abduction of Sita. And then there is still the literary festival lead by the writer Ilija Trojanow. It is hardly possible to sum up the concentrated charge of Asian creativity better than in the subheading of Trojanow and Ranjit Hoskoté’s recently published book, Kampfabsage (Rejection of conflict): “Cultures don’t fight one another – they flow into each other.” RE ASIA makes it possible to experience that this does not necessarily lead to a loss of a national profile but can be a process that is stimulating and can sharpen the perception of what is specific to a culture.
Festival information Re-Imagining Asia
Artnet-Homepage of Andreas Schmid
First published: Asia Pacific Times
