FOCAL POINTS
By BARBARA LONDON
As a New York based curator and writer with an avid curiosity and broad outlook, I have always wanted to know what artists on the other side of the world are up to and work hard to ferret out information. From the get-go I understood that being airlifted and dropped into faraway environments has pitfalls, and knew that humility goes a long way. I have tried to be open-minded and ready to learn, carrying out research by looking, asking questions, and listening. I try to work under my own umbrella, without the imprimatur of an institution. Although language skills are not my forte, I make an effort. What I am able to offer is a context for what I’m seeing, gained after years of working firsthand with contemporary art. Nevertheless, I recognize my handicaps, in particular the entrenched western biases I grew up with.
When I started my curatorial career in the early 1970s, many of my colleagues were traveling to Europe to investigate new work, and naturally I did too. However, it has also been my good fortune to work in several Asian cities, and to live, albeit for a short time, in Tokyo. I have learned that cultural complexities evolve, sometimes fester and cause rifts, especially now as crises are erupting throughout the world. Meanwhile emerging technologies continue to develop and change how we live and work; however, what remains consistent is the fact that deciphering information is never as straightforward as one might expect. The big question always persists, whose point of view and politics are we responding to?
My interest in Asia, with its diverging languages and cultures, continues to build. Out of my long-standing commitment to visionaries—including artists, curators, writers, and archivists—I’m always eager to learn and expand my knowledge. For this reason, I readily accepted the invitation by Millennium Film Journal to serve as guest editor of Issue #76. In this role, my challenge was to commission articles to be written by persevering younger scholars working in various contexts within a few of Asia’s many societies and their diasporas. I solicited texts by three art historians and one versatile writer-musician-artist, all innovative thinkers engaged with the contemporary arts. They are champions of moving image art produced in a specific region—Singapore, Hong Kong, mainland China, and Japan, respectively. Each author’s connection to a particular area grew out of living there, right now or in the recent past. They are witnesses to political and social realities, as well as interweaving aesthetic traditions.
The authors’ knowledge was gained through hard work and diligence. It involved locating and reading texts, talking with colleagues, going on studio visits (actual and virtual), attending conferences, visiting exhibitions and screenings, and in some cases the study of a challenging foreign language. Despite the last two years of lockdown, as scholarship and research moved online, the five authors remained as persistent as ever, and managed to decipher the focal points of where the latest information was coming from. They stayed on track and continued to fine-tune their practices, as the world continued to change dramatically around them. They have grappled with how moving image art presentation has been shifting, with exhibitions now taking place through streaming directly onto the home computer screen, perhaps now more often than in the art gallery or black box theater.
The five authors’ insights featured in this issue are a precious offering, drawn from on-the-ground studies and hard-earned expertise. Their texts surpass any google search, which never seems to go that deep or look that far. What connects the following articles is the authors’ interests in how video and cinema are pliable and are used in innovative methods, not least by activists. In different ways, the media artworks discussed in this issue address the environment and community efforts and forms of communication that exceed documentation and complicate obvious political meanings.
I am delighted to introduce the Millennium Film Journal audience to artwork they might not otherwise discover on their own. My hope is that readers will build upon the knowledge that the authors of the texts on the following pages so generously share. After all, artists are the ones who imagine the future, driving contemporary culture forward.