Eastern Art Report Online: A Number Six please, by Diana Yeh

Whilst the Chinese and the Chinese diaspora have already made a much celebrated entrance into the international contemporary art scene, the artistic activity of the British Chinese is only just beginning to gain recognition in the UK. And what a moment in which to emerge. In an atmosphere suffused with the celebratory rhetoric of cultural diversity, Britain enters a new millennium bearing an armful of ‘multicultural’ programmes and policies encouraging ‘exotic’ work by ‘culturally diverse’ artists. With Chris Ofili and Steve McQueen as the winners of the last two years’ Turner prize and Mona Hatoum’s current exhibition inaugurating the new Tate Britain, it appears that the British art world has finally opened its doors to the ‘Other’.

It is in this climate that artists of Chinese descent are finally joining the bands of ‘new ethnicities’ jostling for exhibitionary space on Britain’s multicultural wagon. Though the driving ethos here is one of ‘inclusion’, this is a divisive place where artists are segregated according to their ethnicity into ever more fragmentary units of identification. As in the case of ‘Black British’ and ‘British Asian’ artists before them, artists of Chinese descent have been given the ticket to ride but it is stamped ‘British Chinese’. Needless to say, with the birth of yet another classificatory term, Pandora’s box is burst open again, re-releasing a host of questions surrounding art and ethnicity, cultural identity, and representation. Does the term ‘British Chinese’ simply refer to artists of Chinese descent practising in Britain? If so, why are some still identified as just ‘Chinese’? Perhaps the label reflects the emergence of a specific identity or a distinctly ‘British-Chinese’ art? Does the duality, in this case, suggest a synthesised hybridity or merely the meeting of two cultures? Or is the term better understood as a category organising a set of common political concerns as in the case of the signifier /black/?

Well, rather than lose ourselves in an endless web of abstract conjectures, let us turn to the works of the artists Anthony Key, Susan Lok, Yeu Lai Mo, Erika Tan, Mayling To and Tony Ward. These artists have made a significant (though by no means representative) contribution to the inchoate debates surrounding ‘British-Chineseness’. In early 1998, they organised a ‘so-called British Chinese’ exhibition, the number six show, in response to the way in which the term was being used in curatorial practice. Just a year before, the 1997 Hong Kong handover had suddenly generated a surge of interest in Chinese arts in Britain after years of impartiality. The two ensuing major British Chinese exhibitions were Far From the Shore (Pitshanger Manor and Galleries) and Another Province: New Art from the Chinese Diaspora (Watermans Art Centre). Unfortunately, both shows revived many of the criticisms that had previously been directed at early black and Asian art exhibitions. Works by several artists were displayed side-by-side regardless of artistic and political concerns, belying a continuing tendency to conflate significant differences within the given group.

The number six show was an attempt to stage an exhibition that, though based on the shared ethnicity of its participants, would successfully avoid the pitfalls of such essentialist approaches to exhibitions. According to Erika Tan, the project’s initiator, the show also marked ‘the first time a group of young Chinese artists got together with an understanding of the different sorts of shows there had been with the idea of trying to reconfigure the questions.’ The final decision was, as the press release stated, ‘to explore the commonalities and contradiction of so-called ‘British-Chinese’ culture, and make visible its impact on the immigrant diasporean landscape.’

In Free Delivery, Anthony Key literally maps out this alternative cartography, making visible the otherwise ‘invisible, silent way the Chinese have seeped in almost unnoticed’ into even the remotest areas of the country due to the demand for ‘ethnic cuisine’ in the 1960s. Britain is taken over by takeaways spreading ‘like a virus, a cancer invading the mother body, almost like an alien.’ Real and imaginative geographies collide, as nightmares of being swamped by the Yellow Peril finally come true. Red flags blown from the East mark the triumphant reversal of the empire, the recently migrated reconquering the land of former colonisers. Bearing the names of real restaurants, the flags suggest both the real routes travelled by the Chinese into the farthest reaches of Britain, and the differing psychic stages in journeys of the mind. In the Outer Hebrides, Chineseness effaces itself as the indistinct and essentially meaningless ‘International’, whilst in northern parts of Scotland, tradition imprints itself as the ‘Bamboo Inn’ or ‘The Great Wall’. Further inland, however, in the utterly polluted cosmopolitan areas of Manchester, Liverpool and London, one arrives at the absurd ‘Wok around the Clock’. The most regionally dispersed ethnic minority in Britain, notions of communal solidarity are restricted to only a few areas with concentrated Chinese populations. Free Delivery however, reveals the beginnings of ‘the second generation taking over language, empowering themselves by using humour.’

Indeed, this is the approach to be found in the works of Yeu Lai Mo and Mayling To who deal with the experience of working in takeaway, where for women, the act of serving a predominantly male clientele easily becomes sexualised. Any possibility of analogies drawn between the services of the Chinese girl at the takeaway counter and those of her ubiquitous stereotype Suzy Wong are preempted in To’s early ceramics stamped with the Warning: Waitress not included (1995). In the installation Yeu Lai’s House (1997) Mo recreates a takeaway caricaturing the relations between Chinese caterer and British customer. A life-size cut-out of the artist ‘100% happy, 100% service’ stands in front of a lightbox menu of ‘rice, chips, curry sauce, sweet and sour sauce and noodles – the food the late night drinkers want’. A television screen runs a video Service, Kissing and Licking (1997), in which Mo parodies the deferential and sycophantic nature she must assume in one of the only intercultural transactions between the host and immigrant community. Unequal power relations are enacted as she is forced to ‘serve, kiss, and lick’ the takeaway counter – the barrier that keeps the Chinese separate from, and subordinate to the British.

Such representations of British Chinese experience seem to point to a shared political struggle of rejecting stereotypical constructions whilst unearthing the otherwise hidden stories of the Chinese in Britain. The notion of a communal ‘British Chinese’ identity proves, however, to be a more slippery customer. In the works of the number six artists, one discovers a diversity of subject positions differing not only in terms of gender and sexuality but in stages towards the resolution of questions of identity. For artists Mayling To and Tony Ward, the two sides of the story, British and Chinese, rest uneasily side by side – there is no fusion or synthesised hybridity, only an uneasy duality. In Identity Parade (1995/1996), for example, Ward literally pieces together his cultural and sexual identity. A series of diptychs bearing images of traditional Chinese and British gay culture are arranged ‘like a dominoes set.’ The ‘V’ of the Village Bar Soho collides with the ‘V’ of victorious Maoist propaganda, ‘hardcore gay club’ Trade confronts classical Chinese watercolour painting and I-Ching casts a lubricant future of ‘elbow grease.’ A ‘dirty old man looking for a submissive ‘Oriental’ boy’ meets the preciousness of a eunuch’s genitalia in the high courts of the Ming Dynasty, a ‘BBC’ (British born Chinese) is caught and displayed in today’s equivalent of an ethnographers’ collection of rare and exotic species.

For Mayling To, the complexity of the notion ‘British Chinese’ is distilled into the single iconic image of Hong Kong Phooey, the cartoon character who has an already multiple ‘identity of mixed and confused messages of orientalism.’ A dog/janitor void of ‘ethnicity’ by day, he is, to use Edward Said’s phrase, ‘made Oriental’ by night with his secret identity of kung-fu fighter. Rebuilding a character that she ‘loved and hated’ throughout childhood, To projects her identity onto Phooey, simultaneously reclaiming and re-enacting the violence of the internalisation of the self-as-other. In A Cute Puncture (1998), a title already suggesting ambivalence, a soft-sculpture of Phooey lies flat out on a plinth, covered with pins. The fate of the toy is undecided. Is he being healed back to life by Chinese acupuncture, or has he been already been tortured to death?

Whilst the works of To and Ward suggest that the meeting of British and Chinese culture is one of confrontation, for Anthony Key, the possibility of hybridity is, to adopt the artist’s predilection for metaphors of food, something to be tried and tested, consumed and then egested. His ‘self-portrait’ of a crossbred Soy /Ketchup (1996) bottle stands as ‘the icon of what it means to be British-Chinese ... I look Chinese but in essence, I’m very Western.’ An ambiguity pervades – is it a ‘foreign thing in this foreign vessel’ or ‘an integrated body’? A little known fact is that ‘ketchup’ is an Anglicised approximation of a Cantonese word for thick tomato sauce. Notions of authenticity dissolve as a veil is lifted revealing the dominant pillaging the Other, appropriating its culture and transforming it into the ultimate symbol of contemporary Western consumerism. The use of supermarket merchandise suggests the commodification of Chinese culture – 5000 years of civilisation reduced to a few synecdochic culinary delights. Continuing the theme in Bread/Noodles (1996), a Safeways’ bread bag filled with ‘slices’ of dried noodles, Key explains the idea of ‘taking the basic ingredients of both cultures, and then wrapping them in the other’s clothing.’ Rather than neatly packaged by their signifiers, however, the hybrid Chopsticks/Knife Fork (1996) are strangely deformed, expressing ‘how you have to learn to grow and mutate so you become this dual thing.’

For artists Susan Lok and Erika Tan, identity seems less a matter of defining ‘what I am’ than asserting ‘what I am not’. They reject essentialist views of identity, revealing the impossibility of retracing a single origin or essence. Lok’s Unravelling (1994) for example, investigates ‘how it is that we reconstruct a sense of our own identity and histories.’ A large block of wood is fragmented into nine cubes, some blank, others bearing images of Lok’s family. Suggesting a search for origins, the photographs of childhood and her parents’ wedding day ‘all point ... to some sort of beginning’. Rather than offering a continuous narrative of her family history however, the boxes are different sizes and ‘so the images never really fitted properly in any one, so in fact [the work] is about not fitting.’ The scattered boxes and the disjointed photographs deny the possibility of ever returning to the original whole or recreating unity in the narrative of the self. As Lok says, ‘they were like playing blocks, but you weren’t allowed to play with them, so you are prevented ... from piecing things together.’ Identity is dispersed and fractured across space and time. ‘There is no real me to return to.’

The impossibility of returning to the origins of oneself becomes, in collective terms, the irretrievability of the essence of a race, a nation, or culture. Tan’s Sites of Construction (1996), a series of rubix cubes, suggests the game-like attempt of the anthropologist to figure out the puzzle of the ‘Other.’ The aim of playing with the rubix cube is to return to the ‘perfect picture’ of one side, one colour, but in this case, the six coloured sides have been replaced by anthropological photographs. The images disrupt the uniformity of the surfaces, rendering redundant the formula that guarantees a return to the source. In breaking the rules of the game, Tan disallows the recovery of the original image in favour of the heterogeneity of free play. Fears of being contained within rigid categories and reduced to a static knowable object, are further explored in Chintz (1998). Entering a dark room suffused with the ‘English’ fragrance of lavender, the viewer feels and hears the crunch of rice underfoot. At the back of the room a shadow darts and dives haphazardly, knocking into a screen. A bird is caught and its panic to escape its man-made confines chills the viewer with helplessness.

Such fears of being trapped in a closed space can be seen as an apt metaphor for the position in which the number six artists find themselves in Britain today. Celebrated as yet another ‘Other’, the artists understandably shy away from the potentially ghettoising label ‘British Chinese’ circulating in multicultural discourses. As we have seen, whilst the notion ‘British Chinese’ can be useful in organising a set of communal political concerns, to remain relevant to changing needs and circumstances, it must be kept open enough to encompass a diversity of fluid interests and identities. As Anthony Key concedes, ‘sometimes you have to define a group if only to then dismantle it – people like things packaged and when things are collectively packaged and the time is right, then people take notice and you use that time to break away.’ Indeed, many of the artists are moving away from direct explorations of so-called ‘British Chinese’ issues that permeated their earlier works. Perhaps one day, we will reach the stage when, as in the case of ‘black’ artists, multi-cultural labels such as ‘British Chinese’ will have so little relevance to the art to which it refers, that they finally shed the loaded essentialising implications that burden artists today.

Diana Yeh

A number six, please

Notes

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