Issue 15: Spectacle East Asia (Fall 2010) Godfre Leung In the Fall of 2008, when our colleagues in the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester began formulating the theme of the “Spectacle East Asia: Publicity, Translocation, Counterpublics” Conference, from which this issue’s contents are drawn, most of us had the Beijing Summer Olympics closely in mind. Having just witnessed much discussion in both academia and the mainstream press about the “spectacular” nature of the Beijing Games, it seemed prudent to investigate what was meant by this newest version of our old cultural studies warhorse, the Spectacle. For example, David Barboza wrote of Zhang Yimou’s opening ceremonies in the New York Times: “Nearly two years in the making, [Zhang’s] spectacle is intended to present China’s new face to the world with stagecraft and pyrotechnics that organizers boast have no equal in the history of the Games.”1 China’s “new face to the world,” however, was not limited to its reputation abroad; its (self-) representation through the “spectacle” of the Games, according to …

Issue 15: Spectacle East Asia (Fall 2010) Sohl Lee is a Ph.D. student in the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, U.S.A. She is currently working on her dissertation, which investigates works by contemporary artists who practice sociopolitical interventions into national identity, urban development, ethics, and contemporaneity in South Korea. Her research interests include contemporary visual cultures in East Asia, discourses of modernities, institutional critique, and curatorial practices. Her work has appeared in such publications as Yishu: Journal for Contemporary Chinese Art. In Spring 2010, she was a visiting scholar at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, where she taught courses on modern and contemporary Asian visual art. Godfre Leung is a Ph.D. candidate in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. He has taught art history at the University of Rochester, Eastman School of Music, and the Ontario College of Art and Design. Currently, he is working on a dissertation entitled “The White Wall in Postwar Art: From the Death to Rebirth of Painting.” Caitlin Bruce is …

Issue 15: Spectacle East Asia (Fall 2010) Okwui Enwezor 21st CENTURY COSMOPOLITANISM As can be expected, organizing a large international exhibition with global ambition requires some proximity to various scenes of artistic production scattered in near and far-flung corners of the globe. An important requirement for the curator or researcher working to know these artistic scenes, entails being equally alert to the dark murmurings in the cultural and political scenarios that are adjacent to the spaces where the activities of art occur. For example, to reach artists working in Havana from New York necessitated passing through Toronto, thus exposing one such political scenario, namely that artists and curators living on each side of the dividing walls of the U.S./Cuba ideological separation must constantly negotiate. My several trips to Cuba for more than a decade have invariably involved the kind of triangulation that requires passing through way stations such as Montego Bay, Mexico City, the Bahamas, and Toronto. My recent visit was no different. In all these trips—from Havana to Caracas, Singapore to Berlin, Seoul to …

Issue 15: Spectacle East Asia (Fall 2010) Hyejong Yoo “The Republic of Korea is a democratic republic! All of the Republic of Korea’s powers are from its citizens!”1 These words come from “The Constitution Article One,” a song that, along with popular protest songs from the 1970s and ’80s democratization movements, was widely sung during the 2008 Candlelight Vigil protests. The reappearance of earlier protest songs reflects not only the citizens’ recurring memories of Korea’s previous democratization movements, but also their ongoing struggle for democracy. In this paper, I explore how the diverse group of Koreans who participated in the Candlelight Vigil protests attempted to re-make the Korean nation-state outside the framework of existing politics by integrating the notion of democratic civil society with their creative, cultural, and tactical dissent.2 Here, they aspired to re-envision their national community as a place where citizens directly intervene in the political decision-making process through everyday civil discourse, in opposition to the incommunicative government of Lee Myung-bak (2007-2012).3 In examining the Candlelight Vigil protest of June 10, 2008, held …

Issue 15: Spectacle East Asia (Fall 2010) Rika Iezumi Hiro WHAT IS PHOTOGRAPHY?: ABSENCE What is Photography?/Shashin to wa nanika? (hereafter, What Is Photography?)1 is a 1976 video performance made by Tokyo-based video artist and film animator Nakajima Kō and Video Earth, the video art collective co-founded by Nakajima in 1973 (fig. 1).2 Mimicking a commercial photo shoot with a nude female model, the work consists of a double-channel projection featuring a 26 minute black-and-white video of the performance on the left, and an approximately 21 minute “slide show” of black-and-white photographs of the model taken by the participating artists on the right. In its ideal presentation, a wall display of selected photographic prints should accompany the projection. The work was screened only once in Japan, without any photographic prints, as part of a self-curated video screening event at a “rental gallery”-cum-auditorium at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in the late 1970s.3 However, there was no “public,” so to speak, in this audience, which was wholly comprised of the group’s members and their close friends. Furthermore, the entrance was …

Issue 15: Spectacle East Asia (Fall 2010) Caitlin Bruce The Great Wall of China is an iconic and complex sign that has been used by both state officials and Chinese avant-garde artists since the end of the Cultural Revolution to make claims about and on behalf of Chinese society.1 This state/artist confrontation around a singular, fixed object contributes to an oppositional reading of China’s public sphere, a standoff between a monolithic state and a monolithic society around a singular symbol of antiquity. Graffiti in Beijing and Shanghai complicates this reading, and throws into sharp relief China’s status as a fraught territory trying to navigate the dual tides of globalization and cultural nationalism.2 Projects like Zhang Dali’s Dialogue/Duihua endeavor in Beijing and multiple graffiti interventions like those along Moganshan Road in Shanghai highlight the development of an emerging revision of Chinese public culture, with graffiti art acting as both evidence of and communicative infrastructure for often subtle but significant changes. Rather than mere embellishment, graffiti is a composition in traces: an enigmatic address by an author …

Issue 15: Spectacle East Asia (Fall 2010) Barbara London My fascination with contemporary art in Asia began in the early 1970s upon meeting Nam June Paik, the Korean-born, Japan and German educated artist living in New York. An avid reader (in at least four languages) of cutting edge information (in a range of disciplines including history, philosophy, economics, science, and art), he exuberantly exchanged ideas. With a mischievous smile and a twinkle in his eyes, Paik thrived on experimentation and surprise. While he shared John Cage‘s interest in chance operations, Paik’s concerns had more to do with discovering new possibilities. He relished the aleatory‘s correlations to modern software and hardware music composition tools, synthesizers, and effects processors with their “randomization” features, which became central to his creative processes in video. Recycling became a fundamental aspect of Paik‘s work for practical (economic) and aesthetic reasons, with the TV as a core building block. I took great delight in Paik‘s observation from a public lecture: “I believe in timing. Somehow, you have to be at a certain …