Note:
The slides and article "Facing South: an art practice towards regional consolidation" are made for the Talk (Collaborations with Communities) on August 27, 2014 in Georgetown, MY for Dayang Yraola's Transi(en)t Penang (originally titled "Project Glocal 2014: Transi(en)t Penang", co-hosted by DA+C collaborating with Georgetown Festival), co-curated by Suzy Sulaiman of DA+C. All content under Creative Commons Attribution, Share-Alike (CC BY-SA)
本篇講稿與相關投影片是作者為策展人雅洛拉 (Dayang Yraola) 策劃的Transi(en)t Penang (原標題為「Project Glocal 2014: Transi(en)t Penang」)於2014s年8月27日晚間在喬治城舉辦的座談 (Collaborations with Communities) 所設計的簡報內容；Transi(en)t Penang是由馬來西亞DA+C藝術節於喬治城藝術節合作舉辦，並由策展人蘇萊曼(Suzy Sulaiman)共同策展。所有圖文為CC創用 (CC BY-SA)。
INTRODUCTION
My name is Rikey Cheng, and I'm here on behalf of Digital Art Foundation. The title is "Collaborations with Communities", which deals with the idea of "community". Since it is important to know with whom and what community you're going to collaborate, I will start from my background, working as the editor of No Man's Land in Digital Art Foundation. However, it's pointless to you unless I stress the regional consolidation as the foreground. Which means, I see communities not only groups of people living in close geographic areas, but also neighboring art circles in our common context, Southeast Asia.
Do those active in the region really think that they share the same understanding of "community" with their neighbors? Many will question it, and, no, it's not a conclusion yet. However, since more and more interactions of art workers in the region are happening, they have brought us to a new level of "sense of belonging", at least among Taipei, Penang, Manila, or any other city in Project Glocal, eventually a frame of reference based on this identity of Southeast Asia instead of other regions can be expected.
To start over the topic, I've been fascinated by the idea of working with Southeast Asia artists back to 2010. That desire has become even clearer when two artist groups in Taiwan, Open-Contemporary Art Center (OCAC)[1] and Outsiders Factory (led by Takamori)[2] have developed their own curatorial strategies to connect Southeast Asia art scenes, and kind of "making their debuts" in Thailand and Vietnam respectively since 2012.
For a long time, we have been looking at the West. Now it's time to look back. Of course, there are many reasons to put us back into Asia, especially in Southeast Asia. But if we take the influences from culture study to political economy into consideration, in our society, everything happen in this decade with a hint of "turning southward" shouldn't be so surprising. I list some of the underlying factors for reference only; just want you to have a rough picture.
BACKGROUND
Here is the introduction of No Man's Land and its sponsor, Digital Art Foundation.
As the founder of No Man's Land (www.heath.tw), which is an online art-writing project sponsored by Digital Art Foundation in Taipei, I maintain the website and work with interesting art workers through the bi-monthly issues. The loosely structured DAF includes different parts like Digital Art Center (DAC), which is headquarter of DAF, the Fablab Dynamic, the café named Noise Kitchen. Among these, the Noise Kitchen is also served as performing venue.
I will specially mention the board members of DAF from ETAT. ETAT is an artist group that has existed since 1995, from its earliest experimenting web TV to the introduction of technology art by curating large digital art exhibitions after 2000. There are many independent creative projects funded by DAF with other institutions.
Some participants in Project Glocal Penang have heard of No Man's Land and been invited in previous issues, like Saubin Yap (in Issue November 2013: Twinning the Wastelands) and Dayang Yraola (in Issue January 2014: The Residency). We also look forward to collaborating with more friends here.
Briefly showing you the collaboration with curator Dayang Yraola in Glocal Taipei as my latest accomplishment as art exchange project. By hosting Project Glocal Taipei in March, No Man's Land has turned into a platform, when some of you had been there with us. I truly appreciate it, and it's also why I'm here. The difference is, Project Glocal Penang focuses more on community; the artist from Taipei is asked to work with local people, as Project Glocal Taipei focused on technology. (Will we learn from the wisdom of community?)
We started to prepare Project Glocal Taipei from last August when I was asked to submit a Southeast Asian Cultural Exchange Program to Ministry of Culture in Taiwan. The detail of the plan had been worked out no more than half month, because Dayang and I only had 3 weeks to decide all. It's a lot of communication. Let's take a look at the artist presentation in Taipei by Mannet Villariba with LEE Bo-ting, Fairuz Sulaiman with HUANG Chung-ying, and Duto Hardono with CHANG Yung-ta. (video here)
Five months after it, it's time to reflect on it, and ask myself what it means by doing an exchange project -- do we go for art exchange because of some guaranteed position, or we just enjoy it even without any media exposure? Why we want to do this, I mean, mentally and how to measure it?
ART EXCHANGE
To compare my experiences with others', I revisit some notes I'd written down after my last visit to OCAC Bangkok, in November 2012. Here you see the notes, and they show us how we see exchange as an art practice.
You see different motives and criterions, even more than what I listed here. As we know the process of forming a project is complex, it's impossible to conclude all here. Hopefully, if we see exchange as way to connect with other locations, then we can always find the right questions to ask.
I believe what important here is what derived from the word "location". The verb "locate" means twofold: the imagined and the physical. The true reason for people to choose one location always lies beyond the superficial questions. I make the distinction of two implications of "locate" due to an ambiguous mechanism. Sometimes we think ourselves on either side of exchange, but we've never been in the process. It's because more or less, we haven't really understood our needs to exchange until we are in the place and connected to it.
We need to realize our longing for certain places, to imagine the location itself, and make it possible through exchange. Then we can turn the imagined into real. But the process keeps changing. The more we exchange, the less we find we know it, so we have to re-locate ourselves in the right "reference point", and turn the imagined into real again.
This takes us from "exchange" in this dynamic picture to questions, like, where and how do we locate ourselves? With such understanding, I put myself back to the picture of Southeast Asia, with cases to share.
In 2012, both artist groups from Taiwan had set up their benchmarks with their exchange projects in the region. As I mentioned above, their destinations of exchanges are Vietnam and Thailand, particularly in Ho Chi Ming city and Bangkok areas. Using questions in my previous notes as the means of evaluation, you see basic facts about the two interesting projects.
We can see in two slides, both groups and their curators are ambitious. However, projects involving two countries became successful not because of the curator's credits or other big names, such as Bùi Công Khánh from Vietnam and Sakarin Krue-On from Thailand. Perhaps, in Taiwan, we had never seen projects to introduce Vietnamese or Thai artists systematically, nor has there been any exchange to be done profoundly on such a large scale. Though critics might wonder if they have reached same effects in Ho Chi Ming city or Bangkok.
Why I say this? We must realize different countries have complex situations and needs. To know one country through exchange has never been easy, it's even more difficult to been interested by them. How to become a "sexy object"? This is not a formal question but it is realistic. From the two cases above, at least one can think about the question of "how to turn an art exchange project into the provocateur to local art community".
SYNERGY
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| (A model of how people move via art exchange project of different media and from different locations. The sense of the [glocal] community is only possible after such process of interaction or any exchange project.) |
Although we're here for the celebration of Georgetown, I knew little about the heritage. The UNESCO's definition of "World Cultural Heritage City" offers nothing for us to know it unless we experience by ourselves. If we do share the sense of "community", we'll take more effort to make it happen. Then we have to know more about the legacy of it, as well as the legacy of people from other cities who come here for the project.
On one hand, the heritage has something to do with the locality -- not like the global implication of technology -- hence heritage has something to do with the formation of the sense of "belonging (to the community)". On another hand, it presented the culture from the past. It must be the community inhabitants that connect the locality with the heritage (culture).
CONSOLIDATION
Back to the role of No Man's Land in this map, I want to borrow words from two persons. First is artist HSU Chia-Wei. When he tried to film his artwork for Thaitai Project in BACC in 2012, he had to mobilize the local artist friends and some other inhabitants in the cause of making video. Meanwhile in negotiation with local organizations, He did lots of efforts more than "being an artist". Later he described it as a "self-organized temporary community" in a forum in Taipei. He used this notion to refer working with both people from Thailand and Taipei. [3]
So I can respond the idea of connecting Southeast Asia and my work as No Man's Land. It's the way of self-realization, self-organization or medialization with digital or new media; it's consolidation as the community. Here I use the term "consolidation" to replace "collaboration" in many phases. Of course, consolidation means something more active and concrete. Which in dictionary is: combining into a solid mass, or, the act of combining into an integral whole. It's our goal to achieve through the process of repeatedly self-organizations, also by never-ending art exchanges.
My presentation will end with the words of another person, professor CHEN, Kuan-hsing in his important work, "Towards De-Imperialization: Asia as Method"[4], after I try to understand the dynamics in the cases of Art Exchange in SEA from the perspective among our friends in Taipei. He suggested kind of "Asian Study in Asia; by the Asians" has inspired many people in Taiwan to turn our faces to Asia from others. So I will use these words as my summary for these three cases, of No Man's Land, OCAC, and Outsiders Factory. Here is what he said:
(原文：透過「亞洲」這個想像的停泊點，亞洲內部不同的社會能夠成為彼此之間的參考點，如此才可能改變原有對於自我的理解，在此基礎上向前推一步，亞洲的歷史經驗及實踐也才可能成為一種另類的視野，一種境界，一種方法，對世界史提出不同的理解與問題。)
Thank you!
1. 打開-當代藝術工作站。
2. 奧賽德工廠。
3. (春之當代夜)「轉移參考點」(2013/12/27)；鄭慧華主持，許家維，高森信男與談。
4. 陳光興，《去帝國—亞洲作為方法》。
2. 奧賽德工廠。
3. (春之當代夜)「轉移參考點」(2013/12/27)；鄭慧華主持，許家維，高森信男與談。
4. 陳光興，《去帝國—亞洲作為方法》。
