IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY ASIAN INSTALLATION ART

1.CONSTRUCTING A PERSONAL IDENTITY: WHO AM I?

Artists:
• Ghazel
• Persian Miniature Painting
• Vanessa Beecroft
• Kurt Schwitters

This case study is based on the work of a contemporary Iranian installation artist Ghazel who sets out to communicate to an audience her ideas and feelings about how her personal sense of identity has been constructed. She sees it as being shaped by her Islamic religion and Iranian culture but overlain and modified by a sense of cultural displacement. Born in Iran, she grew up and was educated in France but has only a temporary visa rather than French citizenship. She is subject to being deported to Iran at any time. Ghazel expresses her sense of a female identity caught between cultures through the use of the traditional garment worn by Islamic women, the hijab, but worn in circumstances that are more associated with western, European, materialistic culture. She makes herself the subject of her video installations wearing this garb as a potent symbol of her original culture within settings that are the antithesis. As a way of understanding Ghazel’s artmaking practice the work of other artists is studied. These include traditional Islamic artists, a Modernist installation, “Merzbau”, by Kurt Schwitters is looked at in terms of his use of very personal symbols to suggest personal identity, and a contemporary western artist, Vanessa Beecroft, whose concept of personal identity is also bound up in gender and western stereotypes of female beauty and the body. Artmaking practice, both ideas and actions, as well as the world, artworks and audience, are analysed using the Cultural Frame.

2.EXPRESSING A CULTURAL IDENTITY: I COME FROM YOU

Artists
• Cho Duck Hyun
• Chen Chieh-jen
• Traditional Chinese and Korean art
• Christian Boltanski
• Nikolaus Lang
• Richard Long

Both Cho Duck Hyun from Korea and Chen Chieh-jen from Taiwan are contemporary installation artists whose artworks grow out of their sense of Cultural identity. Cho Duck Hyun produces installations making use of images derived from Korea’s troubled distant and not so distant past. His role as an artist is to address the profound social, political and economic changes that the Korean people have experienced during the 20th Century. He investigates the disjunctions that he perceives in contemporary Korea, a nation that increasingly sheds tradition as it embraces progress. Chen Chieh-jen’s films and installations juxtapose different time and spaces and use soundless images to explore issues such as colonialism, globalisation and their impact on peripheral regions, such as his country Taiwan and on the Taiwanese people. This case study documents the conditions in both artist’s cultural backgrounds that have produced artworks expressing some aspect of cultural identity. This is done by looking at some of the traditional art from China and Korea, as well as the installation works of contemporary western artists, Nikolaus Lang, Christian Boltanski and Richard Long, who have also used installations to express a profound sense of the entwining of place and identity. The case study uses the Cultural and Postmodern frames to analyse artworks and artmaking practice, both ideas and actions, in relation to the theme of Cultural Identity, also looking at the world and the audience of the chosen artists.

3.CONSTRUCTING A SOCIAL IDENTITY: I AM DISSIDENT

Artists
• Dadang Christanto
• FX Harsono
• Navin Rawanchaikul
• Christian Boltanski

This case study looks at the work of three contemporary South East Asian artists who use installation as a way of negotiating the changes in social identity that have happened in both Indonesia and Thailand as they become more industrialised and open to influences from the west. Dadang Christanto’s artmaking practice grows out of experiences in his home in Indonesia and in Australia and it encompasses the deepest levels of human experience. Often his work is in response to the suffering of Indonesians persecuted for their political and religious beliefs or ethnicity and in his work his role becomes that of dissident. FX Harsono is a contemporary Indonesian artist of Chinese descent. He believes that a work of art should express social problems and he sees his role as an artist as a social and political activist. He addresses what he sees as the urban and environmental issues important in Indonesia today. From Chiang Mai in Thailand, Navin Rawanchaikul is a contemporary South-East Asian installation artist who sees his role as a social activist. He has an on-going interest in the daily lives of ordinary people in Thailand and so uses themes based on the changing identities of his local communities in the wake of westernisation, urbanisation and industrialisation. As a comparison the work of a contemporary western installation artist, Christian Boltanski, is also analysed in relation to his theme of social identity and his quiet, but persistent, expressions of dissidence against human repression. The recurring theme in Boltanski’s work is the transitory nature of human existence and the enigma of life and death, referring obliquely to the genocide of Jewish children by the Nazis in WW II. The artmaking practices of each artist and their works are analysed in terms of their context in the world and their intended audience using the Postmodern and Cultural frames.

4.DECONSTRUCTING HUMAN IDENTITY: MAN AND THE MACHINE

Artists
• Muneteru Ujino
• Japanese Woodblock Prints
• Stelarc
• Robert Smithson
• Kurt Schwitters

Ujino Munetero is a contemporary Tokyo-based Japanese artist whose artmaking is part of the urban post-industrial world, with its ideas derived from the popular cultures of both Japan and the west, so that his sense of national identity has undergone a subtle shift away from being strictly Japanese towards an international identity. His artworks take the form of assemblage sculpture, installation and performance as the artist constructs hand-held structures that seem to function as hybrid ‘machines’. He calls these the 'Love Arm' series and the machine is strapped tightly to Ujino's front with a harness system and has handlebars which act as a control panel for the instrument, and buttons that are pressed to make electronic noises and operate different coloured lights. The machine becomes an extension of the artist’s body and a reflection of the artist’s conception of his identity deconstructed to be part machine. To understand the genesis of such artmaking the case study compares Ujino’s work with that of the 19th c. Japanese woodblock prints of Utagawa Kuniyoshi depicting popular Japanese warriors. It also compares his ideas about the body and machines with contemporary Australian installation artist Stelarc who has a concept of the obsolete body and the machine as body extension. The debate is further extended with reference to the installations of Robert Smithson and Kurt Schwitters who both also had different conceptions of man and the machine.