Negotiating Histories: through tradition and participation in contemporary East Asia

Abstract

The idea and the title for this special issue originally came from the symposium ‘Negotiating Histories: Traditions in Modern and Contemporary Asia-Pacific Art’ organized by the Tate Research Centre Asia-Pacific on 21 October 2013. The symposium's focus was on the ‘issues around traditions in modern and contemporary Asia-Pacific art, focusing on how art history is legitimised and/or negotiated in artistic practice and its discourse’. The four research papers by Hopfener, Kajiya, Kikuchi and Woo are revised from those presented at this symposium. Other contributions, including a research paper by Cheung, an intervention essay by Mōri, and visual essays by Mitsuyama-Wdowiak and Wu, have been incorporated in order to broaden the scope of this special issue, specifically to explore the idea that participatory art and activism can be another important catalyst for negotiating histories.

Keywords:

• participatory art
• Asia-Pacific art
• tradition

Introduction

The idea and the title for this special issue originally came from the symposium ‘Negotiating Histories: Traditions in Modern and Contemporary Asia-Pacific Art’ organized by the Tate Research Centre Asia-Pacific on 21 October 2013. The symposium's focus was on the ‘issues around traditions in modern and contemporary Asia-Pacific art, focusing on how art history is legitimized and/or negotiated in artistic practice and its discourse’.¹ The four research papers by Hopfener, Kajiya, Kikuchi and Woo are revised from those presented at this symposium. Other contributions, including a research paper by Cheung, an intervention essay by Mōri, and visual essays by Mitsuyama-Wdowiak and Wu, have been incorporated in order to broaden the scope of this special issue, specifically to explore the idea that participatory art and activism can be another important catalyst for negotiating histories.

Postcolonial (re)writing of histories

By extending the original focus, this volume presents the important issue of ‘history’ and the negotiating and (re)writing of histories – or indeed, as Wu Mali suggests below, ‘her-stories’, as one of the most visible features of recent visual art activity in East Asia. This special issue also highlights the East Asian specificities of negotiating histories in a larger critical context by linking with the histories of Asia packed with vexed postcolonial questions on East and West, tradition and modernity, and the past and the present (Nandy 1994: 1). Echoing what has transpired in other parts of the non–Euroamerican world, East Asia has been going through intensified decolonization and reflexive negotiation of the turbulent histories that had been interwoven with Euroamerican imperialism, civil wars, Japanese colonization, the Cold War and China's new order. As the cultural studies scholar Chen Kuan-Hsing (2010: 212) describes, political decolonization has given way to cultural ‘de-imperialisation’, ‘de-colonisation’ and ‘de-Cold War', all of which ‘have become mutually entangled structures [and] which have shaped and conditioned both intellectual and popular knowledge production’. We are witnessing the ‘on-going process of unlearning and reconstructing’ at this historical juncture when East Asia has been empowered subjectively to explore possibilities for the future by problematizing the past, in particular, the modes of knowledge and cultural production in the formerly politically and culturally colonized regions that remain trapped in colonial epistemology (Ching 2010). The desire for liberation from this entrapment is overcoming the sense of anxiety and belatedness shared among East Asian countries towards Euroamerican modernization. Liberation has given rise to action through what Chen (2010) describes as very confident localism and inter-regionalism, and a productive way forward has been found by adopting ‘Asia as method’ (Chen 2010).

The current entangled form of ‘Asia’, including the dialectically constructed ‘Asia’ versus ‘Euroamerica’, is the aspect that intellectuals and artists in Asia currently self-reflexively criticize. Thus their engagement with microhistories at a regional level allows connections with other microhistories in neighbouring societies and so ideas that deal with similar problems are shared. This special issue aims to capture this ongoing activism in East Asia as a study of world art. The research papers and essays presented here offer concrete examples and case studies that illustrate this idea of ‘Asia as method’ in that they analyse materials, styles, values and ideas that are rooted locally, in a way that engages directly with open global dialogues. Thus, despite the contrasting case studies from different regions, they demonstrate how they can be equally productive in negotiating and (re)writing histories.

Theme 1: Tradition

The first five contributions feature the ideas and styles of ‘tradition’, demonstrating how they facilitate the negotiation of ‘history’ from different perspectives through case studies. This interest in ‘tradition’ in Asia has been described as a ‘nostalgia for the past’, ‘a self-reflexive, post-modern critique of identity’ or artists’ intention to ‘revel in the commodification of difference … [in order] to approach tradition as a starting point, and as an inspiration to be used and combined with more contemporary practices – altered, negotiated with and even deconstructed in any way they see fit’ (Chiu and Genocchio 2011: 36). On the other hand, promotion of tradition can be a reflection of top-down government-led ‘strategic essentialism' – such as that visible in China since the mid-1990s – in order to strengthen the Communist Party's neo-Confucian agenda for a ‘harmonious society’ (Gladson 2014).

Art historian Kenji Kajiya discusses Japan's discourse of ‘tradition’ in ‘Posthistorical Traditions in Art, Design, and Architecture in the 1950s Japan’ by focusing on Japan's postwar interest in reviving ‘tradition’, tracing its development from the late nineteenth century. Japan's modern consciousness of ‘tradition’ was awakened at the time of its adoption of the Euroamerican art system, which highlighted the process of identification of ‘Japanese-style painting’ (nihonga). The continuous obsession with the idea of ‘tradition’ uncritically developed the aesthetic discourse of ‘Japaneseness’ in art, craft and architectural design throughout the first half of the twentieth century. This saw convergence with imperial ideology during World War II, which continued, in fact, into the 1970s. Kajiya discusses the significance of a dialectical construction of ‘tradition’ under a Euroamerican gaze that was projected by Fenollosa, Taut, and Le Corbusier alongside modern ideas such as the French notion of ‘primitivism’. Artist Tarō Okamoto's encounter with these Western ideas enabled him to discover how prehistoric Jōmon pottery was part of Japanese tradition, and at the same time could define Japanese modernity in the 1950s. In architecture too, the 1950s interest in ‘tradition’ saw a reinterpretation of prehistoric ‘Jōmon’ culture from a modern perspective, and in providing an ahistorical and abstract idea of ‘tradition’, it became a platform for postmodern thinking. By taking this posthistorical approach, a whole history of Japanese visual culture has been rewritten repeatedly. Kajiya's examples show how this way of rewriting history has served as a strategy for artists to survive and overcome Euroamerican cultural imperialism.

Nevertheless, Kajiya's approach is objective and he remains ambivalent about the wider implications of the posthistorical invention of Japanese ‘tradition’ in Asia. After all, to return to Chen Kuan-Hsing (2010: 7), we are reminded that Japan's ‘de-imperialisation’ has been one-sided, focused on countering the constructed histories brought about by Euroamerica's colonial past, whereas a fuller picture requires consideration of the effect of Japan's role as a colonizer in Asia. This de-imperialization within Asia has been forgotten in the wake of the American occupation followed by Japan's protectorate status during the Cold War period.² This and Kajiya's concept of anachronism resonate with the theme of the 2014 Yokohama Biennale ‘Bōkyaku’ (amnesia), which also explored the double-edged state of Japanese visual culture (anachronism and amnesia) in re-reading and re-constructing ‘tradition’.

The strategy of using anachronism and selective appropriation of the past to construct ‘tradition’ and rewrite history accordingly can also be identified in contemporary Chinese art. Inspired by Jacques Rancière's (2003) article on the historicity of film, art historian Birgit Hopfener in her ‘Qiu Zhijie as Historian: Media Critique as a Mode of Critical Historical Research’ investigates the relation between the people's perception of and engagement with history and history writing, and the specificity of art media. Hopfener examines in some detail the strategy taken by Zhijie Qiu, an artist who critiques Chinese art through copying and rewriting history and problematizing historiography in China, where history writing is understood as a form of philosophy, quasi-religious dao and self-cultivation. She focuses on Qiu's Copying the Preface of the Gathering at the Orchid Pavilion a Thousand Times (1990–97), paying particular attention to Qiu's use of calligraphy in ink in which he engages mind and body to critique the Chinese canonical work Lanting Xu (Preface to the Poems Collected from the Orchid Pavilion) by Xizhi Wang (303–361 AD), who was known as ‘the sage of calligraphy’. In the process of copying the calligraphy of this work 1000 times, its originality – the supreme value on which the system of Chinese art history rests – is lost. As each character is layered on top of the previous, the whole becomes black and so the ‘writing becomes an act of erasure’ (Chiu and Genocchio 2011: 41). Hopfener discusses Qiu's critique of calligraphy as a critique of the Confucianism that is the backbone of both paternalism and the political structure of China. He observes that the process of calligraphy training and disciplinary method moulds the recipient's body and morality so that they ultimately support the imperial system of government and recruitment of officials. Hopfener's paper identifies the importance of ink for its materiality and bodily engagement, and its performative art that forms an integral element of self-critical (re)writing of history.

Furthermore, another of Qiu's works, the ‘Light-Calligraphy’ series (since 2005), is discussed as his strategy of displacing the intrinsic value of calligraphy by deliberate use of the non-traditional medium of photography. Hopfener, citing Chun-chieh Huan, sees this method of critique from inside out as a ‘pendulum movement’, whereby Chinese historical thinking moves back and forth like a pendulum in creating a dialectical and self-critical mediation between the past and the present. In this kind of self-referential art, which Qiu calls ‘total art’, Hopfener also identifies a productive aspect of rewriting history which drives away the inward-mobilizing, essentializing power and transposes the art into a transcultural form.

Art historian Jung-Ah Woo in her ‘Plastic Tradition: Jeong-hwa Choi's Artworks and the Work Ethic of Korea's Developmental Era’ studies Choi's strategic use of plastic – urban global non-local specific non-art material – in his work from the 1990s to the present, to facilitate the rewriting of a history. More specifically, Woo's article is an examination of revisited traditions of technique, process and the Korean spirituality that lies embedded within.

Corresponding with Japan as discussed by Kajiya, Korea's modern history saw the emergence of politico-cultural discourses of ‘tradition’ in art, which culminated in two major movements: Dansaekhwa and Minjung. While the late 1970s Dansaekhwa movement's dialectically formed stress on ‘Koreanness’ and ‘Korean spirituality’ conformed to the Park regime's nationalism, the Minjung (‘the people’) art movement flourished in the 1980s in opposition to the Park regime. The latter was a socially active non-elite art movement that engaged with the reality of Korea (Kee 2013: 278). However, Woo argues that although the Dansaekhwa and Minjung art movements embraced their respective versions of Korean tradition in popular art, such as woodcut prints, decorative crafts, folk paintings, and shamanistic artefacts, both notions of ‘tradition’ are androcentric. Woo criticizes the fact that their ideas of popular/folk traditions exclude the marginalized, under-educated, low-income factory workers who are predominantly women and who have been the real force behind Korea's miraculous economic growth.

Choi's work is different in this regard, as his focus is on these middle-aged Korean women (ajumma). While Choi's work can be read as in line with Minjung art, it expresses cynicism and irony through his use of plastic, which these movements despised as ‘female’, Westernised ‘popular culture’, kitschy and vulgar materials, contemporary products made in Korea. Plastic symbolizes democracy, sanitation and economic success; but could also refer to the vulgarity of contemporary consumer society, as suggested by plastic credit cards. The plastic pig's head is associated with shamanistic tradition and is a symbol of wealth, luxury and good fortune, but is equally associated with the ‘cynical consumerism’ or ‘snobbism’ of Korean society exposed by Choi. Choi's ironic use of plastic as a reference to Korea's real popular tradition is also a way of questioning ‘authenticity’ that presents ‘the inherent impossibility of an original and authentic tradition’. Plastic challenges ‘conventional distinctions between authentic and fake, natural and artificial, traditional and modern’. This contrasts with the bottari (cloth-wrapping bundles) artworks by Choi's contemporary Kimsooja in the 1990s.

These works redefined the authenticity of Korean tradition, although the underlying notion of women's labour is similar to that of Choi. Choi's work in the 1990s is as refreshing as it is liberated from the Dansaekhwa artists’ anxieties about ‘Koreanness’ in the 1970s, which either responded to the contemporary trends in Euroamerica with a feeling of ‘belatedness’ and a desire for recognition, or exhibited some form of anxiety complex in relation to a Japan that defined ‘Koreanness’ in the context of a colonial residue (Kee 2013: 233–59). Choi set a new benchmark for defining Korea's ‘tradition’ through his ironic use of plastic, and through this material his works successfully rewrote Korea's modern history.

Design historian Yuko Kikuchi, in her ‘The Craft Debate at the Crossroads of Global Visual Culture: Re-centring Craft in Postmodern and Postcolonial Histories', focuses on ‘craft’ as a site of postcolonial and postmodern negotiation of Japanese visual cultural history, and provides another example of a redefining moment of ‘tradition’ in the twenty-first century in relation to Japan's trajectory, as portrayed by Kajiya. She presents a comparative perspective on the recent craft debates in Anglo-America and Japan, which have both seen resurgence since the 1990s, and identifies how the two converge and diverge. Kikuchi argues that the key divergence emerges from Japan's interest in ‘craft’, which reflects the interest in rewriting Japan's own visual cultural history from a local perspective by redressing existing Japanese art history that is based on Euroamerican modernism. She analyses the recent research on craft – from the examination of the genealogies of the translated European terms ‘art’, ‘craft’, and ‘design’, to the neologism ‘craftical formation’, coined by craft historian Kaneko Kenji – and how Japan has successfully articulated the predicament created when Euroamerican ideas (such as the separation of art and craft) penetrated Japan's indigenous visual culture system.

Kōgei, the very term used to distinguish ‘craft’, is now increasingly used in non-Japanese texts when referring to Japanese objects, in order to replace the English term ‘craft’, seen as problematic due to its possible derogatory connotations (‘crafty’) and the more common problem of the power relations of art versus craft (Asahi Shimbun 2010).³ Kikuchi observes that issues of terminology and (un)translatability have encouraged the Japanese to take ownership of their visual cultural history, and these have become crucial factors in their revision of history and tradition. She discusses the Japanese craft debate, observing that Japanese notions of ‘skills’, ‘function’, ‘decoration’ and ‘avant-garde’ are diametrically different from the associated ideas that have been contentious within the craft debate in Anglo-America. In the wider context of visual arts, these notions have been detrimental for ‘craft’ in that they cannot escape from a kind of discrimination that sees them as supplemental and unimportant. Although Japan's postcolonial stance on recovering its ownership of craft may have some neo-nationalistic pitfalls, Kikuchi argues that it still provides us with food for thought because this only confirms that demand for the rewriting of craft-centred visual cultural history is coming from grassroots Japan – the regions – indicating that kōgei maintains a healthy and viable state in contemporary Japan.

Art historian and curator Kiyoko Mitsuyama-Wdowiak examines Shinro Ohtake's work in ‘Shinro Ohtake and Postwar Japanese Avant-garde Art’. By closely examining Ohtake's syncretic work from the 1980s up to the present in the context of its reception, Mitsuyama-Wdowiak identifies unsettling and fluctuating evaluations that constantly fail to locate Ohtake's proper place in the postwar art history of Japan. She argues that this is a result of misreading and the unsuitability of his work for scrutiny through the lenses of Euroamerican trends such as pop art and neo-expressionist art. Ohtake also intentionally dissociates himself from any discussion, conceptualization or theoretical consideration of his work. He also denies being associated with ‘pop art’, ‘Japanese art’, ‘recycled art’ or any other genre of art (‘fine art’, ‘design’ or ‘craft’); nor indeed will he accept any labels that have been proposed. In this subjective and untranslatable anarchism with a strong characteristic of anti-art, Mitsuyama-Wdowiak finds Ohtake's ultimate subjectivity in the way he rewrites art history. Echoing Hopfener's discussion of Qiu's work, Mitsuyama-Wdowiak analyses Ohtake's interest in performative action through his cutting, tearing, making holes and pasting to form collaged scrapbooks. The materiality and the particular processes of making are important factors in his relationship with everyday junk objects that surround him.

Ohtake's obsession presents similar traits to those found in Japanese craft artists who make ‘craftical formations', and it is clear that they too form part of the untranslatable space and set of values denoted by kōgei, as Kikuchi's discussion suggests. The bodily engagement in crafting involved in Ohtake's work, and his embracement of everyday matters of Japan's popular culture, indicate that his work also constitutes a unique type of socially engaged art. Moreover, Mitsuyama-Wdowiak's argument leads to a key question for art history – in particular, the concept of Japan's ‘avant-garde’, which has been discursively constructed in dialogue with global art-historical discourses. She problematizes the lack of art-critical discourse on the ‘avant-garde art’ of the 1980s, because the normative discourse of postwar Japan's avant-garde art has centred on 1950s Gutai, the 1960s Mono-ha and the 1990s Neo Pop Art, thus leaving a substantial uncritical gap in the 1980s that is referred to as simply ‘post-Monoha’. Ohtake's case presents another example of negotiation with history from a local and individual subjectivity, which is not easily translatable yet is grounded in the firm reality of Ohtake's life in Japan; but it also exemplifies the rewriting of the avant-garde art history of postwar Japan.

Theme 2: Participatory and socially engaged art

The last three papers – a research article, an intervention and a visual essay – feature participatory and socially engaged art, a current burgeoning field in East Asian art practice. However, this type of art, with its preoccupation with challenging preconceived ideas and orthodoxies, can also be identified as a catalyst for negotiating and (re)writing histories in a specifically East Asian context. Theories on participatory art and socially engaged art have been developed extensively in both French and (more recently) North American contexts, ranging from situationist Guy Debord's theory of spectacle (1994), Nicolas Bourriaud's ‘relational aesthetics’ (2002), and Jacques Rancière's ‘politics of aesthetics’ (2013) to the more recent historical overview of participatory art in Euroamerica by Claire Bishop (2012), to name just a few. In the later articles of this volume we can identify some overlap and some direct correspondence with Euroamerican counterparts, although there are local specificities that distinguish East Asian practice. Shingo Yamano, who curated the East and Southeast Asian Art section for the Yokohama Triennale in 2005, defined this type of art as ‘Asian project art’ which has similar features to participatory and socially engaged art in general. But he identified a particular characteristic of Asian art, arguing that it sustains a double role:

One is to make the modern and contemporary art imported as a system from the West function better in the local community or society, making art into something more meaningful. Another is to demonstrate that Asian art is seen as art in the gaze of the art system outside Asia. The basic premise of the former role is changing the concept of art, and that of the latter is confirming the previously existing concept of art. (Yamano 2005: 36–37)

This describes a key characteristic of participatory art in East Asia, which has rediscovered native sources and localness in a dialectical relation with participatory art in Euroamerican centres. This type of art taps into the familiar roots of Asian cultures in the relational ideas of indigenous animism, polytheism, Buddhism, Confucianism and the ubiquitous syncretism of Asia (Kataoka 2012). In Japan, it also immediately recalls postwar art such as Gutai in the 1950s (Tiampo 2011) and Neo-Dada and Hi-Red Center's art activism in the 1960s (Munroe 1994), as well as the numerous home-grown unrecorded examples of ‘performance art’ between the internationally known Gutai and Mono-ha. Many of these forgotten performances have recently been rediscovered (KuroDalaiJee 2010). Some regard these as continuing cyclical trends in contemporary Japanese art; for example, Hideki Nakazawa (2014) categorizes the current cycle as the fourth avant-garde art movement.

Art historian Midori Matsui (2007) also identifies shared quotidian and minor strategies adopted in this type of art, which she calls ‘micropop’. She finds that these trends have been increasingly visible since the 1990s, when the post-bubble society saw the emergence of young Japanese artists such as Kōki Tanaka, whose art featured in the Japan Pavilion at the Venezia Biennale in 2012. They use simple and inexpensive things available in everyday life, and restructure the system of things and knowledge according to their own subjectivities, thus quietly provoking radical thoughts. Within their minor artistic strategies, Matsui reads a radical political power in their inventive subjective use of the everyday, through her interpretation of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's exploration of ‘minor literature’ and Michel de Certeau's concept of ‘everyday tactics’ as the real power behind culture and the survival of the practices of everyday life (Matsui 2007: 29). ‘Everydayness’ in art is also associated with some repeatedly used terms, written with the same Chinese characters across the different languages, such as nichijō ⁴ in Japanese, ilsang in Korean⁵ and ruchang in Mandarin Chinese.⁶ These penetrate into the psyche and daily rituals of people in East Asia, although the idea of the ‘everyday’ has not been philosophically theorized in this context.

Art historian and curator Stephanie Wai Ting Cheung, in ‘Taking Part: Participatory Art and the Emerging Civil Society in Hong Kong’, focuses on Hong Kong's recent participatory art scene, and delves into some of its less publicized precursors. After the handover in 1997, Hong Kong's identity issues have become increasingly politicized, and tensions emerging from ‘one nation, two systems’ have intensified, resulting in the eruption of the ‘umbrella movement’ in 2014. Thus, one morning in September 2014, a worldwide TV audience woke up to witness a large number of students demonstrating in the streets of Hong Kong, protesting against a broken commitment by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China to widen candidate eligibility beyond those rubber-stamped by Beijing in forthcoming government elections. The umbrella movement, as it became known, which raised a peaceful but resonant voice demanding democracy on the basis of human rights, represented an unprecedented development in Hong Kong, which has historically seen a more politically passive approach, preferring to focus on economic success and consumption. Cheung's article discusses how an increasing awareness of the postcolonial/post-handover situation has been visible through participatory art that can be traced from 2009. This art provided a pretext for (but was less visible than) the umbrella movement.

Hong Kong's identity is complex and ambiguous, delicately balanced on a precipice. Cultural critic and scholar of comparative literature Ackbar Abbas described it as a ‘floating identity’ in a paradoxical ‘space of disappearance’. A postcolonial sentiment of disappearance lingers on, even though it has no pre-colonial history where subjectivity is derided by temporality because the colonial history is the only history, and the so-called ‘local’ culture or subjectivity is made up of ‘cultural translation’. Hong Kong's identity is best summarized as one of ‘hyphenation': neither A nor B, but in between – not, in a clichéd way, between East and West, but between Chinese and non-Chinese (Abbas 1997). This identity resists external definition: refusing to be identified as ‘Chinese’ as defined by the mainland and the West and rejecting Chinese nationalism, but embracing ‘hybridity’, which a Sinocentric concept of Chineseness would denigrate as ‘impure’ (Chan 2014). The intriguing examples that Cheung presents include the ‘Complaints Choir of Hong Kong’ (2009–11) organized by Pep, Stephanie Sin's ‘Super Warm’, Kacey Wong's ‘Instant Skyline’ and Meipo Yuen's ‘West 9 Dragon’ – part of the project ‘Let's Own It!’ curated by MaD@West Kowloon (2011–12) – Woofer Ten's ‘Few Few Prize, Many Many Praise’ (2010), and Fred Ma's ‘You Help Me Help Her’ (2013). They express resistance and protest through the participation of local communities which share particular elements of Hong Kong's complex culture, powerfully illustrating the delicate balance of their ‘floating identity’. Concern for the survival of the local community and the everyday life of the middle and lower classes – the ‘little people’ – informs a strong desire for Hong Kong's subjective autonomy and civil society. Cheung offers us an insight into the very moment in which Hong Kong's own history is being (re)written.

Complementing Cheung's article, Yoshitaka Mōri, a leading cultural studies scholar and activist, describes the emerging participatory art scene in Japan since the 1990s, which transformed after the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 into something increasingly politicized and visibly anarchic. In his intervention essay, ‘New Collectivism, Participation and Politics after the East Japan Great Earthquake’, Mōri's discussion develops Matsui's analysis of the ‘micropop’ trend, which itself gained speed after the nuclear accidents in Fukushima, and its politicization, reflecting the mood of increasing scepticism towards the government and general uncertainty in the face of the fundamental question of human survival. He examines the art activities of Kōki Tanaka, Project Fukushima, OLTA, Kyun-chome and A3BC as well as, intriguingly, a variety of alternative events taking place in Kitakyūshū. Historically this area has been on the marginal periphery of Japan on Kyūshū island, but has seen recent revitalization in the form of a renewed cultural identity that it shares with East and Southeast Asia. Kitakyūshū positions itself as an alternative to the more commonly accepted artistic centre of Japan – Tokyo. These types of art happen on the street or in specific sites, rather than in the white cubes that are the domain of museums and galleries. They have a temporary and transient nature, often with a DIY, punk spirit, and clear democratic political and social agendas – such as collaborative aid and survival in the face of disaster. They may be anti-nuclear, anti-globalization, or anti-the centre-periphery system, in which case Mōri's is symptomatic of ‘art in the (no) future’.

However, Mōri also sees the positive side of this art, too. His Hajimete no DIY (‘DIY for beginners’, 2008) promotes DIY as an ‘alternative politics’ as well as a mode of ‘ultimate bottom-up democracy’. It became a best-selling book in the youth market and was avidly read by university students. For the current young generation of artists, the DIY approach appears to be the most reliable and tangible tactic for survival in difficult times. Mōri also reminds us of the specificities of these types of art in Japan by connecting up the similarities with 1960s avant-garde art movements, such as Hi-Red Center, Zero Jigen and Dumb Type. This trajectory is very strong, and constitutes a source for the negotiation of histories: we can see that this has triggered a series of attempts by art historians and artists in Japan to rewrite postwar Japanese art history. These approaches have focused on performative non-museum art activities (KuroDalaiJee 2010; Nakazawa 2014). The recovery of neglected histories has revealed a different stream of contemporary art from that of Neo-Pop star artists such as Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara. These are the most refreshing revisionist art-historical projects happening in Japan. Interestingly, this work is also strongly endorsed by North American groups of academics and curators, a welcome development that means that the process of rewriting this history is underpinned by transnational US–Japan collaboration.⁷ Japan's recent take on participatory art has fed a global interest in this particular form of art and encouraged a reconsideration in Japan of the meaning of art in a global context.

In ‘Who’s listening to whose story?', local activist and artist Mali Wu introduces her ‘Treasure Island’ (Baodao Wuyu, or Formosa Stories) series including Stories of Women from Hsin-Chuang (1997), Epitaph (1997), Formosa Club (1998) and Birds Slide over the Sky (1998), all of which were made in the 1990s. Except for Birds Slide over the Sky, which is a history of displaced and forgotten men, the main focus of her project is the making and writing of the ‘herstory’ (as opposed to ‘his-tory’) of Taiwan by ‘transforming these unspoken individuals into subjects with voices’. Each work is part of an accumulating whole that makes a larger collective ‘herstory’. For example, Stories of Women from Hsin-Chuang (1997) is about the life stories of women who worked in the textile factories in Hsin-Chuang, and their testimonials are sewn into cloths and installed on three sides of the wall. Telling untold stories through the use of gendered media such as textiles, cloth and needlework is also a feature of her later work, Bed Sheets of Soul (2001). Comparative literature and cultural studies scholar Shu-mei Shih (2007: 177) describes this work as follows:

If history is the record of male heroes with all the power and means of representation in the printed page and other media, the medium that organically captures the experience of the female textile workers would be the cloth itself. They are thus recuperated as not merely producers of cloth garments, but producers of history, their work not merely existing for its exchange value, but for its gendered ideological and cultural value, implying larger symbolic meaning.

Similarly, Epitaph (1997) is a herstory of the 2/28 incident in 1947, when some 30,000 civilians were massacred by the Chinese nationalist regime (KMT), which had only just taken over Taiwan from its Japanese colonizers in 1945. This incident, together with the following 38 years of martial law under the KMT, became Taiwan's contemporary trauma and has also cast a shadow over current relations between China and Taiwan, justifying a major argument for Taiwan's independence. Wu challenges the commemoration and historicization of the 2/28 incident, which was actively reconstructed during the 1980s and 1990s in a way that rehabilitated male Taiwanese victims as national heroes and martyrs of Taiwan. Wu's work makes women's voices heard and makes visible their absence from such national, historical and cultural reconstruction and decolonization (Chen 2006).

Wu's criticism of the androcentric construction of Taiwan's national history sits alongside her interest in the issue of female sex workers. The Formosa Club (1998) is another installation work ‘that replicated a guesthouse, with the history of how this society of immigrants was held up by women written at the entrance, thus allowing the visual to echo the words’ (Wu's text). Shih points to the hypocrisy behind the story of the national and economic success of Taiwan by presenting Sun Yat-sen's Confucian, moralistic phrase ‘Tian xian wei gong’ (‘serving the public under heaven’). The phrase works as parody in this context, suggesting male nationalists’ calls for women to serve the public by serving men sexually (Shih 2007: 177). Like Choi's art, discussed in Jung-Ah Woo's paper, Wu ‘herstory’ reflects the global feminism that facilitated the writing of alternative histories. This artistic negotiation of histories poses a challenge to East Asia, where the Confucian patriarchal society has until now been a foundation and where its writing of patriarchal histories has been a firmly entrenched phenomenon.

Conclusion

This special issue thus aims to present the negotiation and (re)writing of his/herstories as a common aspect of contemporary art in East Asia. Each of the papers in this issue presents a microhistory of a particular region of East Asia, informing a current critical position that is on the one hand entangled in complex dialectical relations with Anglo-America, while on the other dealing with turbulent political discourses from within in the wider context of postcolonial legacies. Each microhistory reflects locally specific social issues, anxieties, tensions and urgent needs, yet equally they reflect a growing confidence among the people of each region. History is negotiated and rewritten through the revision of discursive and tangible ideas of ‘tradition’, and through democratic, participatory, ‘bottom-up’ interventions in everyday spaces. Past is present, as Maxwell Hearn (2007: 117) puts it with respect to ‘ink’ and ‘calligraphy’ in contemporary Chinese art, and contemporary art in East Asia is revitalizing itself through confident and creative acknowledgment of its past in building the present through its visions for a better future.

Notes

1. ‘Call for Papers: Tate Research Centre: Asia-Pacific’, circulated by Voon Bartlett on 19 April 2013.

2. According to cultural studies scholar Kuan-Hsing Chen, Japan missed its chance to deimperialize (given its pre-1945 history of colonization in Korea, Taiwan and its invasion of northeastern China) when it shifted from colonizer to colonized during the US occupation (1945–52). Its state of amnesia with respect to its role as colonizer extended into the period in which Japan, alongside Okinawa, South Korea and Taiwan, became part of a US protectorate in which the legacies of ‘the anticommunism-pro-Americanism structure in the capitalist zone of East Asia’ remain up until the present (Chen 2010: 7).

3. This move towards using the Japanese term ‘KOGEI’ is also an obvious part of the government's recent cultural policy which cultural critic Kōichi Iwabuchi calls the ‘branding of soft culture’, whereby Japan's uniqueness is marketed with a view towards increasing national income through consumption and tourism (Iwabuchi 2007). The use of Japanese terminologies in the global context can be seen in such examples as anime, manga and washoku. Washoku (Japanese cuisine) was designated as Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO in 2014 as a result of successful lobbying on the part of the Japanese government.

4. Rojō (street) is another key term related to nichijō, which Akasegawa Genpei (1937–2014), an influential artist of Hi-Red Center, used in rojō kansatsu (street investigation) in the late 1980s to describe his art activities.

5. According to Jung-ah Woo, Jeong-hwa Choi was one of the first to use the term ilsang in the 1990s. Progressive critics such as Chankyeong Park and Jisook Paik, who embraced postmodernism in their writings, also emphasized the everydayness in contemporary art.

6. Everydayness became a characteristic of conceptual art in 1990s China, referring to the associations with popular culture and artists’ use of locally ubiquitous materials. The art critic Hanru Hou referred to ‘urban guerrilla’ strategies with particular reference to the Big Tail Elephant Group, based in Guangzhou (http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/466-big-tail-elephants-liang-juhui-xu-tan-chen-shaoxiong-and-me). I am grateful to Martina Köppel-Yang, Birgit Hopfener and Dandan Liu for this information.

7. Alexandra Munroe's Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky (1994) and her curated exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art sparked this North America–Japan collaborative interest in excavating postwar Japanese avant-garde art in a global context. This was followed by a group of influential Japanese curators and art historians based in New York, such as Tomii Reiko and Tezuka Miwako, who founded PoNJA-Genkon (Post-1945 Japanese Art Discussion Group/Gendai Bijutsu Kondankai; see http://www.ponja-genkon.net/Become_A_Member.html) and facilitated many retrospective exhibitions and events, inviting old members of the 1960s movements to the USA. This enabled a reconstruction of history through excavating unknown archival materials and gathering the oral histories that informed Munroe's work. Some of the outputs are available on the site noted above. Ming Tiampo's book Gutai: Decentering Modernism (2011) also provided a critical account of Japanese avant-garde art in global context. For a broader contextualization of the art-historical construction of the idea of the ‘Japanese avant-garde’ since 1945, see Kiyoko, Mitsuyama, Umi o Wataru Nihon Gendai Bijutsu: Ōbei ni okeru Tenrankai Shi 1945–95 [Contemporary Japanese art goes overseas: the history of Japanese art exhibitions 1945–95], 2009.