Mapping Contemporary

Asian Art

Cities on the Move

Cities on the Move. Edited by Hou Hanru and Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Ostfildern-Ruit: Hantje, 1997.

The urbanization and high speed construction in Asian cities are

also a process of international exchange of architectural and
urban planning ideas and practices between Asian and foreign
professionals. . Such spectacular transformations are also a
process of re-negotiation between the established social
structure and influences of foreign, especially Western, models
of social structure, values and ways of living.

A kind of mixture of liberal Capitalist market economy and

Asian, post-totalitarian social control is being established as a
new social order.

Culture, in such a context, is by nature hybrid, impure and

contradictory.

According to Koolhaas the new urban growth is bringing about a

kind of Cities of Exacerbated Difference (COED), which "is not
the methodical creation of the ideal, but the opportunistic
These new claims are pushing the social actors to
reconsider society's structure and order, especially in
urban spaces which are called "Global Cities" because of
their active roles in the global economy and relationship
between established economic, political forces and
emerging forces: The City is a locus of conflict.

The globalizing modernization as a form of social,

economic and cultural development involves processes
of "invasion" of international capitals and global
capitalism. It also unavoidably opens up a window
towards Western cultural modes and values promoted by
the late Capitalist media, especially electronic media.

These media have been considerably influenced by the

Western modes and turned towards a commodity
orientated mode of production and consumption. This is
obviously opposed to the established official ideology
and its implicit cultural values. Confrontations and
conflicts between the two camps have become a driving
force in Asian urban cultural life for the last decade.
There is a tension between modernisation and tradition
which is embodied by constant shifts of openness,
Perhaps virtual cities can only look like what Shanghai
today looks like, with old and new compressed together in
an apocalyptic now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgYdQUn-
cIk
Kan Xuan. b 1972

Kan Xuan. Kan Xuan! Ai ! Early 2000s

Shanghai
http://vimeo.com/6896014

Xu Zhen (b. 1978) Shouting 1999

Hong Kong
https://vimeo.com/65620112 (Hong Kong is Home - Javin Lau)
The urban flaneurs are now turned into city guerrillas or what Geert
Lovink calls "camcorder kamikazes" who are rebellious users of the
camera instead of passive consumers (see David d'Heilly or Ellen
Pau). The heroes of tactical media are all kinds of activists, nomadic
media warriors, pranxters, hackers, street rappers ...

Meiro Koizumi (Japan)

"Cities on the Move" is the first joint
presentation of art and architecture
from Asian Cities in Europe. The
exhibition endeavours to shed some
light on the incredibly dynamic
architecture and art scenes of these
cities which are mostly unknown in
Europe, and will try to introduce more
than one hundred different positions
and points of view to the European
audience. Recurrent themes are
Density, Growth, Complexity,
Connectivity, Speed, Traffic,
Dislocation, Migration, Homelessness
and Ecology. The different positions
make clear that there is no such thing
as an "Asian City" but that there are
manifold heterogeneous concepts of
the city.
In this sense, global cities
are different from the old
capitals of erstwhile empires
in that they are a function of
cross-border networks
rather than simply the most
powerful city of an empire.
There is, in my
conceptualization, no such
entity as a single global city
as there could be a single
capital of an empire; the
category global city only
makes sense as a component
of a global network of
strategic sites. The corporate
sub-sector which contains
the global control and
command functions is
partly embedded in this
network.

Saskia Sassen
Critical to my argument here is the link between the fabric of the works
and their
fabrication; it is my contention that the materiality of the suitcase
cityscapes, the
processes of their production and the locus of their consumption (as art
works
specifically designed to be seen in multiple, metropolitan sites), are
integrally connected.
This integral link establishes them firmly within the dynamics of globalised
world cities
networks, yet, at the same time, capable of effecting a critical dialogue
with and through
the local. Yins material focus on the fragile remnants of everyday lives,
lived
,Foundational
makes Portable Cities more than a monument to the memories of the
object
cities inhabitants. The clothes and cases provide the ground from which
plurilocal
Yin makes herself at home
everywhere; through manifold acts of domestic reclamation, we are invited
to imagine
and make our homes in the world anew.
Yin Xiuzhen. Portable cities Vivan Sundaram. Box 5
Chandra Mohanty: whats home got to do with it?

constructed on the tensions between two specific

modalities: being hoe and not being home. Being
home refers to the place where one lives within
familiar, safe, protected boundaries; not being home
is a matter of realizing that home was an illusion of
coherence and safety based on the exclusion of specific
histories of oppression and resistance, the repression of
differences even within oneself.
Kim Sooja
Despite the recent upheavals and electrifying renewal in her
South Korean homeland, tied bundles of cloth, as before, are
used like ordinary containers for the safe-keeping or
transportation of a family's worldly goods. They are not meant
for a family's valuables or heirlooms, but for the most
elementary household goods with which to make a start in
Space, Place, Landscape

Michel de Certeau
Place (lieu) stability, the law of the proper, specific,
definite location
Space (espace) practiced place (eg the street
geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed
into a space by walkers.
Operations vs objects; itineraries vs maps; parole vs
langue; transgression and law, action vs immobility.

David Harvey
The central dynamic of capital is the tension between
place-bound fixity and spatial mobility.

Henri Lefebvre
perceived conceived and lived space

Perceived space spatial practices

Conceived space planned, administered, constructed
Lived space representational space mediated by
images and symbols and addressed to the imagination
a new contract of citizenship.
Lefebvre

The new political contract I propose will be only a point of

departure for initiatives, ideas, even interpretations. This is
not a dogmatic text. What is important is that this idea of
contractual citizenship gives rise to a renewal of political life:
a movement that has historic roots, roots in revolution, in
Marxism, in production and productive labor. But the
movement must go beyond ideology so that new forces
enter into action, come together, and bear down on the
established order. This movement would accomplish
democratically a project that has been abandoned: the
dictatorship of the proletariat. It would lead, without
brutality, to the withering away of the state.

Lefebvre makes a clear distinction between the city and the

urban.
The contemporary city is the capitalist city, which for him
is not the urban at all, but merely an impoverished
So Lefebvre sees the right to the city as a struggle to de-
alienate urban space, to reintegrate it into the web of social
connections. He talks about this de-alienation in terms of
appropriation. His idea of the right to the city involves
inhabitants appropriating space in the city (1996, p. 174). To
appropriate something is to take it to oneself, to make it
ones own.12 In claiming a right to the city, inhabitants take
urban space as their own, they appropriate what is properly
theirs.

What he calls the urban, on the other hand, nurtures use

value and the needs of inhabitants (1996, pp. 6768). It is a
space for encounter,
connection, play, learning, difference, surprise, and novelty.
The urban involves inhabitants engaging each other in
meaningful interactions, interactions through which they
overcome their separation,
come to learn about each other, and deliberate together
about the meaning and future of the city.
These encounters make apparent to each inhabitant their