The relatively recent development of an East Asian artistic community in Berlin is the result of a marriage between institutional content and the city space. Since the nineties, the role of institutions like the Haus der Kulturen der Welt has been to show a continued openness and accessibility, while at the same time casting such institutions within an urban frame where alterity is deliberately foregrounded. To be Other in Berlin is to be truly a self-generated hybrid, for, unlike London and Paris, there is no enduring sense of historical connection by which Berlin and Berliners might sustain an engagement with the East Asian diaspora.
The millennium exhibition Heimat Kunst at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt is a case in point, for here we immediately find a two-fold problematic and ambivalence in relation to many of these East Asian artists. On the one hand their Otherness is highlighted with all the evident dangers of a falsely ‘extrapolated’ exoticism.
Conversely, there is a desire for
inclusiveness leading to a mapping of the ongoing diversity at work in the
city. A subtitle for one essay in the exhibition catalogue was mobile heimat
(mobile home). This text simultaneously explored the uncanny and paradoxical
feelings of cultural displacement alongside those of an easily assumed and
sometimes frantically embraced xenophilia.
Yet the celebration of cultural difference for its own sake is no less
problematic than the enforced ghettoisation prevalent in other large Western
cities. East Asian artists (be they Chinese, Japanese or Korean) feel
confronted with the need to define and re-articulate themselves in
accordance with the specific character and anxieties of the place in which
they work. One pronounced strength of Berlin – what, together with the vital
part played by institutions like the DAAD and the Künstlerhaus Bethanien,
has seemingly attracted so many of these artists – is its ‘open space’,
creating the conditions for a large degree of personal inscription. For East
Asian artists in particular, Berlin is a less inhibiting city, in many
respects free of the legacy of overtly imperial associations found in London
and Paris.
That said, there is a broadly definable character for much of the work that these artists have produced here. Although much is driven by popular life and performance (particularly music-based), the work often draws upon the phenomenal and frangible materials typical of a set of discernible cultural origins. And in a way it could hardly be otherwise.
To single out just a few of these artists is to give a mere snapshot of what in reality is a diverse range of artistic production, much of which has been extensively shown across Europe and America. The Japanese artist Hanayo is a case in point. Her work fits in very well with the cultural face and multifunctional aspects of Berlin. Trained as a junior geisha in Japan, her art embraces pop music, experimental theatre, performance, photography, and book production, and incorporates an entrée into some of the more intimate aspects of her life. Resident in Berlin for much of the last decade, hers is a post-feminist position, whereby the provocative geisha role of pleasure-giver can just as easily be counterpointed by her having been a fashion model with Jean Paul Gaultier. Through a plurality of idioms, including traditional wrappings, photographs of her daughter dressed in geisha outfit, and fronting up pop bands, Hanayo presents us with a project that meshes the fabric of the city with the conditions of a life lived within it. This up-for-it, ‘on the hoof’ existence arises from a fusing together of that which is already known (her origins in Japan) and, for her, the increasingly knowable day-to-day life of Berlin.
In contrasing Hanayo’s work to that of Chiharu Shiota, a former student of Marina Abramovic and Rebecca Horn, we might at first note certain formal similarities; however, these are directed towards quite different ends. She too makes numerous allusions to the tradition of embroideries and tissue-like wrappings, but with the intention of achieving an elemental or phenomenologically-based outcome. In works such as Dream Time or Memory of Skin there is a deliberate engagement with installation and performance as if this were a deeply psychological participation. In Dream Time she installed 30 beds in an abandoned U-Bahn station, sleeping in a different one each night. The beds, which are seemingly the site of everyday familiarity, become a sequence of dream spaces, not just in terms of the more obvious transitional nature of installation, but also as a mirror of mental and emotional displacement. This in part picks up on the apparent sense of mobility found within the conditions of displacement. Her earth dresses, as in Memory of Skin, also stress elemental references through associative material means, while exploring the relationship between sleep and the life cycle of pupa, chrysalis, and consequently emerging forms of consciousness. This is what gives her work a sense of the Bachelardian uncanny, whereby the psychological and environmental are made manifest in the commonplace. By using strings or skeins of wool to create mesh or web-like installations, Shiota is able to measure the emotional realities of her existence in the city where she has lived for the last three years. In a certain respect Hanayo and Shiota retain two shared but divergent aesthetics: the contemporary popular culture and the natural and environmental traditions in which so much Japanese art operates.
The characteristics of mobility and nomadism are just as evident in the work of Chinese artist Yuan Shun, who has been in Berlin for the last eight years. Trained in Shanghai at the Chinese Academy, Shun works with photography, video, installation, and performance-based art, exploring the role of chance within a conceptual framework. Using the kind of digitalised lamps designed for the rear of bicycles, he has deconstructed the pictograms of the I Ching, setting them against conditions of power and hollowness by mapping out the architectural layout of the Forbidden City (a frequent concern in his work). Using the ambivalent status of the pictogram as signifier, as in his recent video work Trinity, Shun has taken the swastika – formerly an Asian decorative motif – presenting it to the viewer as a confrontational performance, with all potency this reference still retains in the context of Berlin.
Shun’s photographic works suggest, however, the immediacy of chance and what comes to hand, as for example in a current series dealing with elemental metaphors like water and the sea. While on a Berliner Artist Scholarship to Istanbul in 2002, the artist came across a ship being tossed against a harbour wall. Entitled Water Fall: Marmara Sea and Bosphorus, the resulting photographic triptych touches upon the ambivalence of the relationship between the power of nature and the symbolic, since he has superimposed on the central image of crashing waves the calming certainty of the I Ching sign for water.
In the Chinese artist Ling Jian, born in Shandong Province and resident in both Berlin and Beijing since 1996, we find a painter who confronts directly the hybrid status of living between two worlds. Classically trained at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, his photo-realist paintings carry a strong emphasis on portraiture in which the sitters present themselves as if being the Other. These stereotypes of the imagination – the Westerner stretching their eyes into a parody of the Chinese almond shape or conversely the Chinese sitter posing as a physiognomic Westerner – drives this artist’s concerns with the hybridity of the in-between. The same idea is also extended into presentation when using the tondo – a fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance innovation – to generate a sense of Eastern-Western ambiguity. Jian’s work reflects upon intention and contradiction, on a classical vocabulary of means, and on a postmodern eclecticism.
The Korean artist Jinram Kim studied at the Seoul National University before going to Winchester School of Art, England, and thereafter moving to Berlin in 1994. Working with the connection between life and memory, Kim describes her work in terms of confronting Otherness in the life space, and of the fantasy of the child trapped in the adult world. Most often taking the form of sculptural installations, her work deals with such intimacies as washing with soap and the mundane conditions of the domestic space. We also find frequent allusions to Buddhist shrines and statuary, and their ambiguous place within and in relation to the home environment.
Beyond the working practice of these five artists, what is really at issue here is the question of why these, and many other East Asian artists, have chosen to live and work in Berlin. Why is it that they favour this strangely mobile environment where there are no clearly defined Chinese, Japanese or Korean communities; none of the extended ethnic infrastructures that might more readily surround them in London, Paris or New York? The answer, quite simply, is that many were drawn by Berlin’s institutional infrastructure, for much the same reasons that many European artists have also gravitated to the city. Still others came because of personal relationships. But the answer to why they have stayed lies in the nature of Berlin as a creative environment, a city which presents itself as capacious and open, affording a rich and vibrant context in which to work. Berlin offers a blank canvas on which to inscribe themselves, and it is both this openness and mobility that would seem to favour the increasingly hybrid conditions of artistic self-development.
Mark Gisbourne is the Interviews Editor for contemporary. Anne Maier is a freelance critic and curator. Both live in Berlin