Return Migration and Identity: A Global Phenomenon, A Hong Kong Case

2 - Sojourner adjustment and adaptation to new cultures

Sojourner adjustment and adaptation to new cultures: Art, literature, and the social science perspective on identity 2 Humans are a peripatetic species, traveling widely for food and territory. Recent biological anthropology research indicates that 3,500 years ago, residents of coastal China migrated eastward across the Pacific Ocean, populating hundreds of islands that make up Micronesia and Polynesia.1 No doubt, early clans and tribes experienced problems in maintaining rigid boundaries and separate identities from neighboring groups. Early documents reveal in some instances the struggle to assimilate into other societies, while in other situations the admonitions by community leaders were to avoid such integration. Individual internal struggles to blend cultural identities introduced through proximity and enculturation, political change and geographic transition have been revealed in art, both visual and textual, as well as through social scientific analysis. Art and cultural adaptation Artists have been among the most frequent culture travelers, their movements pulled by their muses or pushed by government censorship, or initiated through artistic training, increasingly global exhibitions, or the transnational business of art. Irrespective of the catalyst, the consequences have been artistic renderings that mirror either the personal anguish of or their effortless adaptation to their cultural displacement. These artists focus on combining home and host country images, symbols echoing the psychological experience of overlapping, hybrid, or replaced identities that result from the need to adapt to life away from their homeland. Several artists provide vivid examples of cultural transition and identity art. 38 Return Migration and Identity Masami Teraoka, a painter born in Japan, moved to Los Angeles at the age of 25 and then settled in Hawaii, itself a location of mixed cultures and identities. After the artist’s more than 40 years of artistic work in America, his paintings focus on many universal themes, including power, popular culture, the degradation of women, and worldwide health epidemics. But the themes of his early work echoed his personal cultural journey in both style and content. He was struck by the sharp differences in values between Japan and the United States, especially those of respect for tradition, familial responsibility, and discretion on the one hand and freedom, individual liberty, and materialism on the other.2 He embarked on a series of watercolors that resembled the traditional Edo-period woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) filled with kabuki actors and ninja, with a humorous but clear reference to American symbols and values. The series, McDonald’s Hamburgers Invading Japan, completed in the 1970s, portrays kimono-clad geishas stepping with their wooden geta on half-eaten hamburgers and their wrappers (Figure 2.1); a traditional Japanese broom sweeping away McDonald detritus (Figure 2.2); and a Western woman, wearing a slightly disheveled kimono, attempting to use chopsticks to dine on slippery noodle soup while a hamburger-eating geisha appears in the background (Figure 2.3). In his Hawaiian Snorkel Series/View from Here to Eternity, Teraoka utilizes the style of the famous ukiyo-e artists Hiroshige and Hokusai but inserts Western icons such as snorkeling equipment.3 Contemporary Chinese artists, who began to exhibit internationally in the late 1980s, also incorporated cultural transitions and blendings into their works, as travel and study outside China became more available to and the urge to depict cultural struggles and identity became compelling for these artists. Hung Wu suggests that “instead of taking the global and local as two external frames … we should consider them as internal experiences and perspectives. The key to understanding these artists and their works is to discover how such experiences and perspectives were negotiated through specific art forms.”4 One example is the work by Zhu Jinshi entitled Impermanence (1996). Using 50,000 pieces of xuan paper, the material used for traditional calligraphy paintings, he built a fortresslike structure, first in Beijing and then in Berlin. Zhu had emigrated to Berlin several years prior to creating this piece and within it he combined elements of his dual cultural experience and identity. The works of the artists Zhou Chunya and Ai Weiwei also mixed traditional Chinese icons with modern or Western ones. The paintings of the German-trained Zhou present the Chinese concept of scholars’ rocks in a German Expressionist 39 Sojourner adjustment and adaptation to new cultures Figure 2.1 Masami Teraoka, McDonald’s Hamburgers Invading Japan/Chochin-me (1982). Courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, CA. Figure 2.2 Masami Teraoka, McDonald’s Hamburgers...