Curating the International(e) and the Local(e)

Post-colonialism, while introducing a powerful structure and system of critique that has altered the global landscape, and opening interpretative borders and fissures in the hegemonic discourse of the Western canon, has also become a tool of re-colonization, threatening to become a hegemonic discourse itself.  In China, this has taken the form of discursive binary positionings between China and the “West”, and between official and independent, neither of which are grounded in the actualities of the local, but which are resultant from the rupture between tradition and modernity, individual and collective, and theory and practice embedded within the experience of Chinese modernity.  New curatorial and artistic practices must be engaged not only in unfolding the clichés and conventions of both the Cold War and Post Cold War era, but also unfolding the canonization of post-colonialism.  One approach has been a renewed emphasis on creation and display connecting with the local context, and site specificity, articulated here as artistic production grounded in an understanding of local historical and geographical conditions, the altering of perceptions from within.  Taking a specific temporal and geographic framework as a metaphor, the Long March project is a movement to recreate context, revisiting the historical consciousness to reconstruct and retranslate through mutual inversion, turning the local international and the international local, and through the negotiation of practice and theory.  Projects such as “The Great Survey of Papercuttings in Yanchuan County”, a half year investigation, collection, and survey of visual culture through the examination of papercuttings of one Chinese county, are a documentation and performance of the relationship between public, tradition, and medium that connects with the consciousness and memory of individual economy.  The aesthetic evaluation produced is therefore related to social engagement and the construction of a new methodology responding to the confrontation between site and context. 

This tension between site and context induced by the globalization of migration and the experiences of dislocation exposes the inadequacies of the rubric of a “global inclusionism,” – the elision of difference with difference – which must not only account for the local, but the globalization of the local.  The project “Chinatown” is the international leg of the Long March that uses the process of re-arrival and return to conduct a powerful translation of history and culture through the “historization” of “Chineseness.”  Each Chinatown is an archeological and anthropological arena, as well as a site of visual economy, where “Chineseness” is performed as a process in negotiation between different spatial and temporal contexts.  The selection and exhibition of art works are based on issues of narrations of China and Chinatown, identity and boundary, tourism and globalization. The meaning and function of art will be examined through the metaphor of Chinatown as a ‘site’ where heterogeneous entities are juxtaposed through discursive formations.