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C.J.W.-L. Wee 19 1. INTRODUCTION For if we content ourselves with the ideal of ‘European culture’ we shall still be unable to fix any definite frontiers: and you cannot build Chinese walls The notion of a purely self-contained European culture would be as fatal as the notion of a self-contained national culture […] We are therefore pressed to maintain the ideal of a world culture, while admitting that it is something we cannot imagine.1 In recent years, there has been an increasing amount of culturalist and other criticism looking at the “world” or “global” cities through which the flows of globally circulating capital are facilitated. At the same time, “globalization” itself is seen to be the process which accelerates some forms of urbanization. The achievements (or otherwise) of East Asian states trying to create global cities that can compete with the Western metropole (and indeed with each other) have a specific place in the artistic curatorial practices that have helped imagine into existence an artistic-cultural entity now recognized as “contemporary Asian art.” An interest in showcasing what might be called “New Asian Cities” and their urban cultures, in contrast to the Euro-American West’s more established metropolitan centers, is manifested notably in the 1997–1999 touring exhibition called Chapter 2 Cities on the Move: East Asian Cities and a Critical Neo-Modernity C.J.W.-L. Wee CITIES ON THE MOVE 20 “Cities on the Move: Urban Chaos and Global Change, East Asian Art, Architecture and Films Now,” co-curated by the independent curators Hou Hanru and Hans-Ulrich Obrist. The exhibition’s full title — used for the 1999 London version — speaks for itself: the ambitious attempt to capture a spread of urban-cultural practices in the intense and dynamic present of the region. The curators claimed a distinct difference amidst the commonalities shared with the West for the emergent metropolitan Asian modern. Hou, an independent, formerly Paris-based, mainland Chinese curator,2 in particular, is linked with the contention that the new urban conditions of East Asia are generative sites of contemporary Asian art-making. In 2003, he wrote: “In different parts of the world, especially in “non-western” regions like the Asia Pacific, new understanding and models of modernity, or different modernities, are being experimented with and provide the most active platform of creativity.”3 And with this, arises the claim that East Asia should now be regarded as a world region with a significant alternative modernurban culture (or sets of cultures). “Cities on the Move,” it has been argued, and Hou’s individual work, one may add, represent the post-exotic turn in contemporary art [exhibitions] in Asia […] in search not so much of an aesthetic paradigm as of a context in which a complicated conjuncture of modernity and that which it has repressed under the auspices of colonialism and imperialism, on the one hand, and that which it has unleashed like nationalism, democracy, and other forms of enfranchisements, on the other [hand], is contemplated.4 It could said that “East Asia” as a conceptual site — because of the rapid economic development experienced during the so-called “miracle” decades of the 1980s–1990s — had become ready for reinscription, and “Cities on the Move” was part of the process of the re-imag(in)ing of a region, which in historicist thinking drawn from German Idealism, was traditional, despotic, agrarian, and lacked nation-states, even if it was the starting point of world history.5 I primarily argue that the exhibitionary imaginary of “Cities on the Move” can be understood both as an overdetermined and yet at some points hesitant mapping and a counter-articulation of new urbanisms and a multiculture emerging from the contemporary moment of East Asia — — accompanied by the inevitable attendant danger of reification, and also of unintended collusion with ideological and suspect claims for a “new Asian hemisphere.”6 The context of the “contemporary” “Cities on the Move” tried to set forth is a critical (or postcolonial) neo-modernity that embraces notions of multiculturalism, decenteredness and the heterogeneous for re-imag(in)ing Asia — but one which does not gain self-sufficient autonomy because it is hard to dislodge the concept of modernity from its Euro-American dimensions.7 The exhibition displays a reflexivity posed as a modernity facilitated by the contradictory cultural valences contained in capitalist entrenchment in the semiperiphery. However, Hou and Obrist announce the latest version of the New, now available in East Asia...

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