Techno-Orientalism: Shattering the Mirror of Itself
Maya K�vskaya
RE[]/Responsive Environment, SLOWMEDIA, a "Soft Architecture Project," 2005.
Techno-Orientalism is the theme animating the Beijing Tokyo Art Projects’ (BTAP) exhibition for the Dashanzi International Art Festival this May at Beijing 798 Art Factory. Curated by Takehiro Kaneshima and Snejana Krasteva, the pieces exhibited prove how art fused with technology can reconstitute identities, breakdown boundaries and recast relations of power and belonging.
Signs and discursive formations are not simply representations of independently existing underlying phenomena, rather, they are tools used to constitute objects and relations as such. Orientalism, according to theorist Edward Said, constitutes the ‘Orient’ by making authoritative claims about its nature, using those claims as grounds for and means of its subjugation. Orientalism is a set of cultural images in the Western mind not only about the Other, defined in this case as the ‘Orient’, but also a discourse that has served to constitute that Other out of disparate linguistic, religious, national, historical and geographic elements into a governable imaginary, and in doing so constitute the West as its opposite, accompanied by binary tropes of civilized/savage, developed/backward, etc.
As media critics Morley and Robins have noted, with the rise of Information Capitalism and Japan’s technological ascendancy, the functioning of Orientalism as a sign was altered by its combination with technology. Through the inversion of meanings attendant to Techno-Orientalism, Japan, and now the rapidly developing Greater Asia, has become a sign of the (technologically advanced?) future, rather than the (backward?) past, presaging a shift in power relations and alignment of new global communities. Toshiya Ueno argues that Techno-Orientalism functions as a "a semi-transparent or two-way mirror," through which ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ apprehend each other, forming invidious images of an Other against which a self is constituted. The pieces on display at BTAP creatively engage this discourse.
The Japanese art unit "flow," (Haruki Tanaka, Kohji Setoh, and Seinoshin Yamagashi), contribute the first installment of the Global Wind Chimes Project (Beijing Version). Confronting the realities of the post 9/11 world, flow installs wind chimes in cites across the world, creating harmony between sites of conflict. The wind chimes play different notes, and their sounds are gathered and mixed simultaneously via the internet. During the Dashanzi International Art Festival, "flow" connects China and Japan, (where virulent anti-Japanese demonstrations have been taking place recently), through sites of arts, letters and science, and technology. In the future, "flow" plans to connect New York, Baghdad and Tokyo.
Explaining his nine-meter photograph, Apollo in Transit, in which a naked man streaks in time sequence along a red wall, Chinese artist Chi Peng writes, "The carrier of desire runs from West to East/ Race towards the sun/ The real sun has already burned bright in the West/ But the fantasy sun is virile and manly for the East/ How can the antithesis of the red wall not be the epitome of us? / How can our pride be contented with the East/ Our eyes are fixed on the West/Lost and yet still dreaming/ Free and yet still grieving."
RE[ ] /Responsive Environment, SLOWMEDIA (Japan), is an interdisciplinary unit made up of members, Jin Hidaka, Toshiaki Tanada, and Hiroyuki Kamei. Their "Soft Architecture" projects (Garando, TG, SCANNED AIR), combine music, architecture, design and dance, to express the "mutability of space," creating an "open platform" for a "responsive environment" constituted through the use of screens, lighting, images, and landscape, urban and architectural design.
Animation maverick Hiroyuki Matsuura’s four acrylic on canvas paintings (DJ Fighter, White J, Dog, and Sweet Sugar Mushroom), feature graphic images of hip urban culture, violence and power plays. Most striking is Dog, in which a blonde white man with a dog collar and chain around his neck is leaping to catch a Frisbee in his teeth. Sony’s mechanical dogs, Q and AIBO, echo this image, invoking questions of automatization, servitude, submission, and power relations. Just who will be the "running dog" of Information Capitalism is not yet clear.
Transgressive Multimedia artist Cui Xiuwen contributes a video installation, Them, which explores the possibilities of understanding and communication in conditions of inequality, and the composite photograph, The Last Supper, which integrates Eastern and Western tropes of innocence and betrayal.
Perhaps the most telling element in this exhibition, indicative of the trajectory of Techno-Orientalism, is the participatory presence of American-born, long-term Beijing-based expatriate Virant. As co-founder of fm3, (see feature article in this issue) contributes its Buddha Machine, transcending the melodic and rhythmic predilections of East and West, Virant’s collaborative participation from within, rather than from outside of the discourse of Techno-Orientalism, is a metonym for one way in which globalization can be used to shatter the identity-constituting mirror between the ‘Occident’ and ‘Orient’, rendering the pernicious, invidious role of Other obsolete. In the corpus of fm3’s collaborative work, ‘Other’ becomes ‘Together’, ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ becomes ‘We’. In this light, Toshiya Ueno’s suggestion of Techno-Orientalist sub-culture as cultural hegemonic contender can now be recast as the rising subterranean counter-hegemony of cultural permutations that defy binaries altogether.
