Authorization or Authenticity

I would like to start telling a story of my own in this essay:

I, Meredith, a Chinese female student in America. For the first time in my life, being in New York, and feeling embraced by the multicultural metropolitan. It was an opportune time to be an Asian student in the American academy since academic fields of globalism, multiculturalism, ethnic studies, and postcolonialism has developed for few decades, and were very open to other culture at the time. Being in the academy, I felt lucky that I can freely speak of my own experience and was immersed in an extremely free and open atmosphere. Actually, I never think of myself as a Third World woman until one day in Professor A's Global Observatory of the Visual Arts class. It is in the midst of our discussion of the transnational reception of the visual arts that Azza and I as the only students in the classroom who came from the Third World were asked to give some insights for the discussion. “Tell us Meredith, you are from postcolonial and peripheral culture, tell us something about China’s situation in this globalization trend,” professor A said. It is for the first time that I realized I AM a Third World woman. And because of that, I and Azza were given a lot of privilege to speak out in the class, and our voices are usually deemed as “the voice from the peripheral culture” which is listened with respect in the class. But then I realized the problematic thing of being treated as “a delegate” of a Third World nation. On the one hand, whether I can represent the China or Asian society should be doubted. Even if all I said is real and authentic, the opinion still bears personal judgment and level of perception. On the other hand I felt later in the year that my voice was more or less settled in a predefined space, a space with expectation of an Eastern image, which somehow preempted my words and maybe also determined what I could say. Thus, the little stress I am experiencing comes from two resources, the “preoccupations” in the dual sense of “concern” and “pregiven locations”[i] and an assigned responsibility to represent the national identity in large.

Actually, the form of narrative I used in the beginning of the story is borrowed from the testimonio such as the controversial text I, Rigoberta Menchú. The form of narrative creates a seemingly authentic voice on individual level but was doubted in its authenticity on a larger cultural level because of the limitations of the “authentic insider” position. And this dilemma is also what I am questioning. My personal experience makes me to reflect my encounter and situation in the Western context. Then I realized that I cannot only be myself. Not only do I have to consider my mediator or mediated position when I lived in the Western value, but the construction of my personal identity’s tension with my national identity as well. There exits a dilemma between authorization and authentic.

As Wright Mills said, no man stands along directly confronting a world of solid fact, no such world is available. We are aware of much more than we have personally experienced and the experience is always indirect. The knowledge and history we have is borrowed and thus intertwined with other people’s interpretation, judgment, and favor, together with ourselves misunderstanding toward the interpretation. Mills’s word hits my long-term confusion about the “fact” of the society which we are encountering and experiencing, and my understanding of self, the self-consciousness is usually seems unreliable as well as the interaction between the “self” and the “other”. Following this consideration, I can't help wonder how can we defined an authentic cultural belonging?

My consideration of authenticity developed into the “Knowledge as Barrier” project, by using books in the Bobst Library to pile roadblocks in the physical space, I am actually targeting the subconscious level of barrier which is formed in time when one was unexaminly absorbing the dominant discourse termed as “knowledge”. It is a work questioning whether the seemingly neutral knowledge that we have about either the East or the West is selected by stereotyped meanings and shaped by ready-made interpretations. These received and manipulated interpretations decisively influence our consciousness. They provide the clues to what we see, to how we respond to it, to how we feel about it, and to how we respond to these feelings. [ii] Therefore, they demonstrate how we arrive the identity. On what extent does the Western knowledge of East helped us to understand the reality of the geopolitical region? Or, does this knowledge hinder further understanding between East and West?

As Bruce Yonemoto describer the reception of his national identity in the West，even he was born, raised and educated in United States, he is still been view as a Japanese artist, and been positioned into the predetermined expectation for Japanese culture in his artworks. This assigned stress of cultural identity forces him to go back to Japan to study his “own” culture. A pre-occupied explanation of his work exits even before he makes the work. It is the power of authorization toward the geo-political structure.

The story I wrote in the beginning of this essay also raise another reflection about the role of being a Third World women in the post-colonial First World context. What identity is constructed in this circumstance? Many Asian female artists I visited in the last few months are facing the similar embarrassment that the tension they felt is not only from the identity as an Asian in the West, but also from their relation with the global feminist discourse. The later tension sometime even comes stronger. For these Asian female artists, their works are not usually evidence of decentering hegemonic histories and subjectivities; however, they are generally misinterpreted as victims of the fatherhood oppression in their society or resistance to the power. Many works were subjected to the appropriation and re-inscription into the dominant feminist discourse. Amal Amiren observes this situation quite well: “The result of this Western domination of global feminism is not only the prioritizing of certain issues and the obscuring of others, but also the colonization and homogenization of Third World women’s experiences.”[iii] A very good example is Xiao Lu，the female artist shoot her work in the first avant-garde exhibition in China National Art Gallery and was arrested. After the shocking event, Xiao has never explained the vanguard action publicly, but she was interpreted in following decade by Western dominant discourse as a feminist hero who stands up and fights for the female rights under the authoritarian oppression. However, fifteen years later, she finally nerved herself to stand out and declaring the events that it was only an adolescent rebellion, and admit that she was scared away after the moment. The reason she decide to declare it after fifteen years is to be honest to herself rather than living under the shadow of the dominant discourse. In this case, the division of authorization and authenticity is clear. Whether subjected to the hegemonic discourse to get the authorization of being a part of the mainstream history, or being authentic and staying peripheral.

The dislocation of the culture and its role in Western context constructs a stereotype of “what Asian and Asian culture is about” in the entire range of process by which it was translated, predetermined, merchandized, delineated, and distributed. Certain paradigms determined the way it should be looked at. These artists’ national identity is no more an officially defined identity, but as an outcome of constantly struggle and dialogue within transexperience gained in different social realities. Stuart Hall issues this situation: “ Perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a ‘production’ which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation. This view problematized the very authority and authenticity to which the term ‘cultural identity’ lays claim.”[iv] The formation of this kind of artistic style is not only artist’s self choice which mediated by the Western inclusion and exclusion politics, but is also a consequence of the hails of a multicultural stance in the global exhibition system, which tend to emphasize the difference and creates a politics of location. As Amel Amireh and Lisa Suharir Majaj observes, “A politics of location may serve to encourage a celebration of difference and cultural relativism that mystifies rather than sheds light on power relations.”[v] The crux of the problem is not only located on whether the artistic motivation is about authorization or authenticity, what should also be taken into consideration is on what extent the authentic expression of individual artists and their dislocated cultural identity can represent the entire community of Asian people and the diverse and extremely complex Eastern culture?

When the Asian art and culture was promoted in the western view, and was been gazed and interpreted in the western context, it was further othernessed. And this otherness is as Stuart said, “Not only, in Said’s ‘Orientalist’ sense, were we constructed as different and other within the categories of knowledge of the West by those regimes. They had the power to make us see and experience ourselves as ‘other’.” In many case, I might have to say that the Asian contemporary art is somehow a “feminized other” consumed by the western power of gaze and narrative.

Even at the time artists did not see themselves in circumstance of decentering hegemonic histories. “It is the way in which they are read, understood, and located institutionally which is of paramount importance.”[vi] The fact is Third World artist’s work has usually been hailed as stand up from the oppression for the perpetual truth of democracy and freedom. Beside the stereotype way of looking at artists from Asia, the changing of artists’ cultural identity happened when these artists traveled across the nation and cultural boundaries is also worth to be taken into account. Sometimes, the dialogue between geographies and histories are much more complex than the simplified description of crossing the rigid boundaries of the nation-state, and the fixed nationalist ideology. For instance, the artist Cai Guoqiang was born in China in 1957 but has lived and worked outside the country since 1986. He stated in Japan for nine years before moved to United States since 1995. Cai work is based on the old far eastern art of fortune telling, the traditional Chinese medicine and the philosophies of Dao and Chan. By bringing ancient Chinese ideas of the universe back to contemporary life, he tries to make western spectators aware of disorientation and impersonal manner of the new global universal language. The question of whether Cai is a global artist first and a Chinese artist second, or vice versa, has generated considerable confusion among art critics after he established his name internationally. And himself has consistently challenged this binary. By complicating, dodging, and deftly deflating the facile categorization of his work, Cai has contributed to this question’s waning critical relevance in contemporary global art and cultural discourse. When considering Cai’s twenty years of diaspora experience, the national identity was even less significant than cultural identity – that is, East Asia – as defined by a spectrum of “Asian” aesthetics and philosophical sources.[vii] And this cultural identity is collaboratively achieved by a group of diasporic Asian artists, and the scholars in Western Universities’ Eastern Asia Department play a fairly important role too. They function together to draw on post-structuralism to posit the legitimacy of non-Western modernism and argue for alternative referents for contemporary Asian artistic expression. The conflicts experienced by these diaspora artists brought up a thorough reflection of the identity they shared in terms of refuting westernization and articulating an autonomous vision of future. The fear of loosing one’s identity in the West keep forcing these artist to resist the West’s objectification of itself and to willfully pursue global equality before being subsumed by Western homogeneity. And the resistant effort is actually creating a new “cultural identity” based on the transnational experience. This new identity can be deemed as the second kind of “cultural identity” described by Stuart Hall, who separate the definition of cultural identity as a shared history and ancestry hold in common with others, and as a difference experience encountered by individual. He observes, “as well as the many points of similarity, there are also critical points of deep and significant difference which constitute ‘what we really are’; or rather- since history has intervened- ‘what we have become’…in this second sense, is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’.”[viii] It should not be underestimated that it is the new identity as “Asian in the Western context” formed by the dislocation of cultural identity that was represented in the West as a common identity of Asian culture. Thus, the authenticity of it in representing the universal Asia culture is questionable.

Taking these concerns into account, I think the questions should be asked in the futhur transnational understanding are Is there an “in-between” space for transnational reception between assimilation and alterity? And how can we look at images without appropriating it into preexisted responses?

[i] Uma Narayan, Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism, Routledge, 1997
[ii] C. Wright Mills, “The Cultural Apparatus,” in Power, Politics and People: The Collective Essays of C. Wright Mills, ed. Irving Louis Horowitz （London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1967）
[iii] Amal Amireh & Lisa Suhair Majaj, Going Global, (Garland, 2000), pp 11
[iv] Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Nicholas Mirzoeff, ed. Diaspora and Visual Culture (Routledge, 2000) pp 21.
[v] Amal Amireh & Lisa Suhair Majaj, “Introduction”, Going Global, (Garland, 2000), pp 11.
[vi] Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, “Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics of Experience.” Copyright 1 (Fall 1987), pp 34
[vii] Thomas Krens & Alexandra Munroe: Cai Guo Qiang: I Want to Believe, Guggenheim Museum, 2007
[viii] Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Nicholas Mirzoeff, ed. Diaspora and Visual Culture (Routledge, 2000) pp 23.