Trouble in New Utopia

Exhibitions of contemporary art in Asia have proliferated in the major visual art centers of Europe, the United States, and Japan in the past ten years. Among the largest of these in terms of quantity of works and artists shown was the 1997 group exhibition "Cities on the Move," cocurated by the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist and independent curator Hou Hanru.¹ Its significance lay not so much in its size as in its optimistic conception of "Asia" summarized as New Utopia, a term borrowed from architect Arata Isozaki's invocation of a New Utopia from his Haishi/Mirage City proposal to construct an artificial island near the southern coast of Hangqin Island and Macao in southern China. In "Cities on the Move," New Utopia was built on works whose formal components or general physical appearance overly suggested physical movement and speed. The recurrence of such works implied a different and more specific definition of New Utopia than Isozaki's original proposal, which was based on the rejection of the authority of the "master" urban plan.² Rather, Obrist and Hou redefined the term as "a general disintegration of all established notions of boundary, nation, identity, [and] morality" stemming from "the staggering frequency of displacement, speed, [and] exchange."³

The construct of New Utopia directly challenged established and ongoing conceptions of particular national geographies as negatively unstable. These conceptions metonymically defined a particular territory as encumbered by myopic obsessions with economic development or sociopolitical agendas on the part of its governing regime. For example, critic Toshiya Ueno argued that the nation-state speculatively invests in anything conceived as a facilitator of progress without considering the nature of the investment it proposes to make.⁴ Others, especially those based in geopolitical sites crucially affected by colonial histories (e.g., Hong Kong, Korea, the Philippines), conceived these sites as discrete and unique in their perennial struggles against the invasive effects of the "West." Seoul-based critic and curator Lee Young Chul asserted that "modernity" is predicated on an understanding of progress that feigns to be inclusive and egalitarian in nature but that in truth is part of the hegemony of the West.⁵

The main issue at hand, however, is a question less of whether the works chosen as examples of New Utopia convincingly elide such negative conceptions of instability and more of the interpretative process and methodology involved in arriving at such an assessment. Consciously or not, most viewers embark on a process of interpretation that frames the images visible in a work as iconographies calibrated according to subjectively held perceptions of the artist's specific cultural, national, and racial backgrounds. This process is founded on the immediate verification of the images as metaphorical representations of the external, physical world inhabited by the viewer. The cost of this immediacy and, to some degree, interpretative clarity is the occlusion of significations derived via an assessment of how a work's formal components engage with each other to produce a virtual, imagined, and internal "world" separate from the nonvirtual, material, and physical one inhabited by the viewer. Although there is always tension between the two, little if no attention is paid to it.

On the Viewer/Artist Relationship, Briefly

A crucial reason for this occlusion lies in the nature of the relationship between the viewer and the artist. Here the viewer has seized the power to define the signification of the work from the artist. The relation of signification, to recall Erwin Panofsky's phrase, is underwritten by this triumph of the viewer and forces a gap between the intention of the artist and the means through which intent finds expression.⁶ Offering further assistance in clarifying this relationship is the argument made by Roland Barthes in The Death of the Author, in which he states that the multiple readings of a text invalidate the author's existence.⁷ On its face, an analogy can...