Fluid Identity

I have been haunted by Zhuang Zhou’s idea of ‘doing nothing’ as the ultimate approach to unite with ‘Tao’. In his book ‘Zhuang Zi’, he writes that nature is the manifestation of ‘Tao’, but nature is doing ‘nothing’ and being ‘natural’. Therefore, for a cultured person to unite with ‘Tao’, he/she should follow the example of nature by ‘doing nothing’. The real life execution of this for Chinese people is to become hermits, who are free from politics, social issues, family ties, and so on. There is another saying that ‘a wise hermit retreats to the mountains, a wiser hermit retreats in the cities.’ This indicates that nature itself is not ‘Tao’, ‘Tao’ is everywhere, in mountains and in cities. However in cities, the challenge is bigger because there is more distraction on the way to find ‘Tao’. 

So I decided to ‘do nothing’ -in a meditation form-for the residency, and to see if this could be a ‘friendly’ approach to life. With my life I have been constantly doing ‘time management’ and ‘multi-tasking’, with my art I have been trying really hard to generate ‘meaning’. This time I could let all these go, and let intuitions take charge for 3 days. 

But ‘doing nothing’ was not easy. Time went very slowly at the beginning. I could hardly concentrate and questioned myself while all my colleagues were doing things that were obviously more ‘life friendly’. Gradually though, I got into the zone. I became much calmer; time lost its liner appearance and became more like a solid mass. I begun to believe that there was real value in this mode of ‘life’ or ‘art’. Even if it is just another way to experience time.

I thought about recording the time during the meditation by writing a Chinese character ‘正’. The character has five strokes, and is commonly used in China as a way of counting. Time is my life. While time is invisible, I thought I could make it into a solid mass by leaving marks on the paper. The residency coincided with my reading of the book ‘Xu Bing: Contemporary Chinese Art’ (Suny Press, 2011), which discusses the position of Chinese art in the western context. This helped me to question my own act: I was writing a Chinese character, which most of my audiences in the context would not recognise; I was using Chinese rice paper, in Chinese Arts Centre. Am I self-exoticising? So in the third day of the mediation, I decided to count time by writing done the  English mark ‘IIII’. Immediately something---although my audiences would recognise this mark more readily, it was unfamiliar to me. I felt I was ‘compromising’ myself for an imagined audiences response. Slowly I started experimenting ways to transform the English mark into the Chinese one. It turned out that after eight steps, one mark is changed into the other. Eight steps’ distance, the two marks are not that faraway after all. 

I then had a conversation with Agata, questioned her whether I appeared to be excluding my audiences and to be self-exoticising.  Agata’s comments cleared my doubts away, and her understanding of a ‘fluid identity’ was the most interesting. A ‘fluid identity’ means that our identities are not fixed, instead, they are in constant flux and changes. For example: in one week, I was a PhD student, an artist, a rock climber, a house wife, a Chinese and a British. The fact I live outside of China does not mean that I can not use my Chinese cultural references. Similarly, the fact I am Chinese should not stop me from using western methodologies to make art.  Our cultural identities are part of us, but not all of us. The brilliant Brazil artist Ernesto Neto said ‘nature unifies, culture separates.’ There ought to be some truth in this. Despite the strict boundaries between countries, our shared humanity is much more fundamental. Contemporary ‘Chinese’ art has become a brand within the international art market, but I need to remind myself that ‘good’ art has nothing to do with ‘Chinese’, or ‘Spanish’, or ‘Brazilian’ art. The reading of art seriously depends on its context and audiences. Specific cultural references might be difficult for some audiences to grasp at the first sight. As an artist who rides on different cultures, it is my responsibly to produce art that is true to my heart, but also accessible to my audiences. How to achieve that? I believe it is a serious task that I need to take on. 

So my ‘doing nothing’ session has become quite ‘fruitful’. How did this happen? I need to do more ‘nothing’ to find out. But the truth is, I am no longer haunted by the idea of ‘doing thing’. We are always doing something. The ultimate ‘doing nothing’ can only happen with death, perhaps. To slow down and to use the minimum materials and techniques for making art, are something that can be explored much further. I believe this is a very ‘life friendly’ way.