Performance and the Body: The East
Yu Yeon Kim on the origins of the exhibition "Translated Acts"


Yuyeon Kim is the curator of "Translated Acts". She was born in Korea and lives in New York. In answering questions by Michael Thoss of the House of World Cultures she tells about the genesis of the exhibition "Translated Acts", the role of performance art in East Asia today and the cultural differences and misunderstandings between Asia and Europe.

The idea for "Translated Acts" germinated with the exhibition, "Flesh and Ciphers" which I curated at the "HERE" visual and performing arts space in New York in 1994. This exhibition investigated the tensions and manifestations of human existence in digital and physical spaces. For example, at one extreme it showed the work of Ron Athey, whose performances included extreme body piercing, tattooing, and blood prints taken from HIV positive participants, and at the other a digital video by Craig Kalpakjian in which an inferred but invisible body continuously traversed a virtual cordoned channel (like the ones found in bank queues). This exhibition was also the New York premier of Xu Bing's video, "A Study of Transference", a documentation of a Beijing installation featuring two pigs in coitus in a large pen of littered books. It also showed one of Wenda Gu's early "United Nations" human hair curtains.

I am continuously intrigued by the contrast and relationships of the physical and digital worlds that is shaping our regard of our societies and ourselves. Artists have also engaged these problems often by total (and exclusive) immersion in one or the other - embodiment in flesh and all its processes - or projection of an invented self into the detached ethereality of networked space. This also relates to other dichotomies I perceive and experience. One is the simultaneous sense of cultural alienation and immersion one has of being a foreigner living abroad. I am a Korean living in New York, though I make frequent trips to Asia and Europe as part of my curatorial work. New York itself is an unusual American city because it is built of so many diasporas of the world - from Asia, Africa, Europe, South America, etc. One has the sense of constantly transiting different planes of reality - even without going anywhere. One location is not the same place for all. When I curate any exhibition I always have to deal with the space as a contact zone of what is brought into it. Also the problem is compounded with being an Asian person curating international artists. Obviously there ensues a dynamic of relationships that have to be evaluated both in terms of their proximity as well as their political and cultural legacies. So in considering the transactional relationships of physical state versus "virtual" state, and place versus displacement I was naturally led to think about how Performance and Body artists expressed dilemma of culture and place in their work. In particular I became interested in East Asia. Despite the great cultural differences among their countries, there are fundamental threads connecting the development of their thinking in the form of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. Westerners have traditionally had a tendency to think of structure in terms of bureaucratic hierarchies, whether social or religious. The Eastern mind is also familiar with the feudal sense of order, as evidenced in Confucianism, but it gives more emphasis to a contradiction of relationships that are the same, as expressed in Taoism, and to a sense of all things having equal effect and consequence as in Buddhism. It is the Myth of Creation versus the Wheel of Life. One is finite ascension or descension, the other is continuous - no alpha and omega. Perhaps I might venture to also say that concepts like those of Non-Linear Dynamics and the Internet are much more readily embraced in the East and are evidence of a major shift in Western consciousness towards an Eastern approach to existence.

Furthermore I was also interested in the perspectives, relationships, the influences between Asia and the West, and the roles they have each played in determining contemporary culture. It seems to me that Western art history has failed terribly in the record of its relationship to non-European cultures and has a definite tendency to mistranslate, misinterpret and denigrate art that has come from Asia, Africa, the Middle East and South America. So in evaluating art from these "other" cultures certain perspectives have to be discarded and new ones formed that take into account the legacies of colonialism and imperialism. That being said, much of contemporary performance and body art from East Asia confounds expectations. It ranges from dramatic and intense political protest to the complexities of social and emotional alienation. In Japan, for example there are now so many overlays of physical and virtual performative action that it is almost impossible to separate commercial culture from popular culture. Japan has had a radical history of Performance Art since World War Two. Coinciding with their country's economic boom of the 1980's, Japanese artists explored and immersed themselves in the use of high technology translating its electronic mediums to express the schizmic nature of a culture that existed both on the planes of conformist reality and also of fantasised reality, as evidenced by the subcultures of Manga, Anime, and Otaku, with all their expressive ambiguities of identity, gender and sexuality.

The title "Translated Acts" was chosen to convey two issues - the first being the articulation of cultural identity, historical legacy, and inner expression into performative action - and the second the extension of the body and performative action into other mediums, such as photography, video and digital or networked space. The exhibition will focus on a fundamental shift among young artists in their use of these mediums from being the documentary evidence of performance to being the object of performance itself. In some cases this has been necessitated by political circumstances - as in China - where many performances and exhibitions during the 1980's (including the 1985 movements) and early 1990's were held in makeshift spaces, which sporadically appeared and disappeared in basements, abandoned buildings, and artists' apartments. On February 5, 1989, four months prior to the Tiananman Square massacre in 1989, the artist Xiao Lu fired gunshots into her work at the "China/Avantgarde" exhibition at the National Palace of Fine Arts, Beijing. Because of this unforgettable action, three hours after the opening, the whole exhibition, including the work of nearly two hundred artists, was forced to close to the public by government forces. Following this, artists had to look to alternative methods of performance and expression. In the "show and run" atmosphere of art performance and exhibition spaces in China during this period, video became a popular medium as it could be quickly installed and dismantled (given the availability of equipment at a location). In the early 1990's the East village group in Beijing, including Ma Liuming and Zhang Huan, created performances at abandoned sites, mountains or at their houses for secretly invited guests. Their performing body action became more radical and shocking eventually resulting in Ma Liuming's arrest for performing naked at his home.

As with mainland China, performative action in Taiwan has often been a medium of political protest. The artist Chieh-jen Chen, for instance created a performance in 1983, during a state of Martial Law, in the township of Xi Mun Ting in which five people whose heads and faces were covered in a black executioners cloth, their limbs bound together with bandages, struggled and bellowed as they attempted to walk through the town square until they were eventually arrested. Today, Chieh-jen Chen continues this metaphor of political torture and repression with cloned digitised images of amputated and reassembled figures in dramatic urban landscapes, such as his multiple self-portrait, "Revolt in Soul and Body".

In Korea performance art occurred in many different kinds of public spaces such as parks, studios, mountains - and often the area close to the Military Demarcation Zone. Though often a form of protest, Korean performance art draws on various strands of influence, not the least of which are the contradicting ideologies and belief systems that have evolved in the decades following the Japanese occupation and the subsequent turmoil of the Korean war that resulted in the division of the North from the South. Korea has been subjected to a steady import of Western culture, from America in particular, and more than 40% of the country is said to be Christian, rather than Buddhist. Yet there is a resilient core to the Korean mentality that redefines itself according to circumstance and remains definitively Korean. Perhaps this is true of all Asian cultures, and anyway, a "Western" import may just be a returned article, albeit transformed in transit. I refer to the borrowing and export of ideas to the West from Asia over the centuries and especially the reliance of Modernism on forms and concepts from China, Korea and Japan.
Overall, contemporary performance art in East Asia, whether as a form of political protest or an expression of social and spiritual anguish, has taken cultural practice far beyond the walls of museum and gallery and causes us to reassess the way we derive meaning from art, and in particular the way we evaluate non-European art.

Yuyeon Kim curated the exhibition "Exotica Incognita" with Latinamerican Artists for the 3rd Kwangju Biennale in 2000, the Asian-Pacific section in "Cinco Continentes y una Ciudad" in Mexico City in 1998, "In the Eye of the Tiger", a panorama of contemporary Korean art in New York and Seoul in 1998 and "Traversions" for the 2nd Biennale of Johannesburg, South Africa in 1997. She is also the co-founder of PLEXUS (www.plexus.org), an organization for internet art in New York.

It seems to me that Western art history has failed terribly in the record of its relationship to non-European cultures and has a definite tendency to mistranslate, misinterpret and denigrate art that has come from Asia, Africa, the Middle East and South America.

The exhibition will focus on a fundamental shift in the use of mediums such as video and digital space from being the documentary evidence of performance to being the object of performance itself.