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In 2002, Tiong Ang visited the land of his parents, the People’s Republic of China, for the first time. This marked the beginning of a new series of works in which China is both decor and subject matter. Here follows a portrait, occasioned by Tiong Ang’s exhibition at Lumen Travo Gallery in Amsterdam.Tiong Ang was born in 1961 in Surabaya, Indonesia. His parents are Chinese. During the political unrest of the 1960s, the family fled to the Netherlands. Ang ended up in Middelburg, where he grew up, learned Dutch and attended school. Slowly but surely, the image of Asia receded. More importantly, China and Indonesia were non-issues, and as Ang himself explains, he developed a strong antipathy towards everything Chinese (‘I look Chinese, but never wanted to be Chinese’). Despite his resistance, Ang’s different ethnicity is deeply rooted, and conditions his being, his thinking and his behaviour as an artist.

Autobiographical Elements

In the meantime, Ang can boast of an extensive and, most of all, diverse body of work. He works in different media, from painting to installations, and in different contexts, from biennial exhibitions to small art institutes. Themes or issues that connect his work include the dichotomy between the self and the other, the positions of insider or outsider that are externally imposed by culture and society, and the way in which that colours our perception. In what he refers to as his first ‘real’ work, these issues were already being investigated in a personal and poetic manner. In 1985, his installation Het grijze oog (The Grey Eye) consisted of a circular plateau with an opening in the middle. On the plateau, he had created a kind of panoramic miniature landscape that suggested not one specific place, but a ‘somewhere’. During the presentation, Ang put himself in the centre of the panorama and, from various standpoints, observed his self-constructed universe while the audience in turn observed him. Although the installation in the first instance was about the psychology of perception and referred to the universal fact that everyone’s worldview depends on the point of view he or she takes, the work also includes biographical elements, albeit implicit. One example is the symbolic detail that the plateau was at eye level for Ang, which meant that the viewers had to adjust to Ang’s height in order to access his world. In retrospect, the spectacle of Het grijze oog referred to elements that form important conceptual frameworks in Ang’s artistic practice. ‘It is an egocentric work in which I literally and figuratively stand in the middle. In this context, it symbolizes my investigative method of working, whereby my personal observations, my position, but most of all my relationship to the world are always the starting point. My ethnic identity and the age-old conflicts between my own experience and the labels that the outside world imposes on me seem to play an unavoidable role.’The paradox of being both subject and object at the same time, and the irreconcilability of these two perspectives, returns at a formal level in Ang’s combined use of normal and reverse shots. In one of his best-known works, School (1999), Ang juxtaposed a slow-motion shot of a class of Indian school children with a real-time shot of the teacher standing in front of the class. This confrontation of different types of footage not only has an aesthetic effect, but also offers a more metaphorical reference to the different positions within the work, notably the (power) relationship between the objects in front of the camera and the person behind it. Although Ang has always used his own observations and interpretations of reality as his starting point, over the years he has increasingly disappeared from the images themselves. Some critics have described this position as that of a distanced observer, but this is not entirely the case. Ang is more engaged, politically or otherwise, with his subject than the aesthetic of his work might at first lead us to suspect.

Fake Chinese

In one of his texts, Tiong Ang wrote, ‘With a background (as well as outward appearance and name) like mine, today I have very little choice about the category in which I place myself. It is an unavoidable and irreversible fact that everyone wants to see me as a “postcolonial subject”, an “immigrant artist” and a representative of “the other”. I have been given a uniform, whether I like it or not.’ Ang’s resistance to stereotyping and embodiment in a given discourse, system or model (and indirectly his quest for autonomy and personal sovereignty) is a theme that appears in many of his works. Perhaps it is most explicit in Mockery (Projections), where he confronted his own role of being a ‘fake Chinese’. The work is from 2002, the year that Ang, on the invitation of the Eastlink Gallery in Shanghai, visited China for the first time in his life. Ang has no memory of his ethnic roots. ‘Everything that I know about China, all my expectations, fears and fantasies are all reconstructions, from second-hand knowledge, images from somewhere else.’ For Ang, China was unknown and uncharted territory, and like any other foreign visitor, once there, he had to determine his own position. To introduce himself to the Chinese art audience, he produced the single-screen video work Mockery (Projections). In it, we see two men, one an African, the other with a Chinese appearance, both wearing sunglasses. The African man is the only one who speaks, and in his monologue, he makes no bones about asking the pressing question, ‘How can a Chinese man born outside China go back to his roots?’ He follows with the observation, ‘I don’t see a difference between you Chinese who were born and grew up overseas and the Chinese from Shanghai. You are pretty much the same.’ As the black man, close to the camera lens, elaborates on his own African diaspora and his experiences as an immigrant in the country where he now lives, his friend, the Chinese artist Tiong Ang, remains in the background. The work refers, not without a sense of humour, to the surprising situation in which Ang then found himself. With his Chinese looks, he is part of the ethnic majority for the first time in his life. But he does not speak the language and is once again, albeit in a reverse perspective, an outsider. ‘In China as well, based on my appearance, everyone expected me to speak Chinese, but I do not speak a word of Chinese.’ The title, Mockery (Projections), refers to his status as a ‘fake Chinese’ and is critical of cultural clichés, ethnic stereotypes and their associated patterns of expectation. As an illustration, the African demonstrates a scuffling Chinese walk familiarized by Hollywood films and Ang attempts to keep a ping-pong ball in the air. What exactly is the value of these labels that nonetheless primarily rely on superficial characteristics? This is what Mockery (Projections) seems to be asking. Aren’t they all projections? ‘I don’t see the difference between you and me,’ the African concludes. ‘We are both immigrants.’The decision to have his African friend and performer, Atone Niane, be the spokesperson is characteristic of how Ang deals with the theme of being different. It is always indirect, a circumscribing motion, never containing explicit statements. In Mockery (Projections), Ang’s own experiences and thoughts are communicated by way of an alter ego, another immigrant. This retiring role shows the degree to which Ang is increasingly focusing away from his own person and more towards others in the world around him. The artist becomes mediator, rather than focal point, and the work seems to be more generally about the relationships between people and their environment than something expressed in autobiographical terms.

Wounded

During his stay in China, Ang took a long journey through Yunnan Province, in the Chinese countryside. The films that he took during this trip were later used in his video installations Wounded (2004) and Cut Close-ups on Matriarchy (2005). The latter features an older and a younger woman from the Mosuo tribe, one of the last matriarchal societies in the world, a people who had until recently lived isolated from the outside world. Because of their lifestyle, in the rest of China the Mosuo women have the reputation of being sexually licentious. Nothing could be farther from the truth. With the arrival of a major highway, the area has been discovered by urban Chinese and tourists attracted by this misbegotten stereotype, which has led to a booming tourist industry with karaoke bars and brothels in which ‘normal’ girls in Mosuo costume attend their clients. In the presentation of this work, the images of the young girl and the older woman are projected on two screens that face one another. From this double perspective, a story line is created in which the two generations are, as it were, in dialogue. In Wounded, a third image sequence has been added, a close-up of a wound on the leg of an animal. These recent works demonstrate another important characteristic of Ang’s artistic practice: his refusal to take a political standpoint in his work. Nowhere does the artist give explicit indication of any conceivable political interpretation. Only the title, Wounded, might be read as a reference to Ang’s engagement with this misunderstood minority.

The Image of Refusal

Last year, on the invitation of the Shanghai Biennial, Tiong Ang developed and presented his installation Models for (the) People. It is a complex work that connects a variety of contexts at different levels: the old and the new histories of the city of Shanghai, its colonial past, the economic, political and social relationships in today’s China and the ideological context of the international biennial exhibition at this location. The installation has the appearance of a stand at a trade fair, with straight white pedestals on which various attributes are displayed, against a fluorescent yellow wall on which the slogan ‘Buy African Goods’ has been hung in two languages. From the speakers of a large, prominently placed plasma screen, we hear the seductive sounds of a song by The Carpenters. In this work, Ang focuses on the ‘ordinary people’ who flock to the biennial in huge numbers. He uses familiar cultural forms, such as karaoke and a slick film whose aesthetics are most reminiscent of a commercial video clip. ‘With this work, I have tried to take a laden political subject and depoliticize it, and at the same time create a “contradictory space” in which people are encouraged to investigate their own sensations of feeling at home or estranged in our globalized world.’ As was the case in Mockery (Projections), the African man again appears in this work as the archetypal ‘other’, this time in several different roles. In the video, we see him pass by as an African trader, a gangster, an African intellectual and as a sort of magicien de la terre who walks past a row of horses standing with their rumps facing us. Each of these figures is a stereotyped model that Ang presents in different scenes and settings. The location where the work is exhibited, the Shanghai Art Museum, was originally the luxurious hall of the British Jockey Club, built by British colonialists. The attributes in the installation refer to this history: a pair of riding boots, an African wood carving of a Caucasian horseman – probably a plantation owner – next to his horse and two veiled paintings of horse manure. ‘In Models for (the) People, all kinds of lines in my work come together: the ‘other’ who arrives in China, the historical relationship between China and Africa and countless current themes, such as multiculturalism, tourism, colonialism and the historic context of the location. The motif of the horse is an interesting point of connection in order to bring the different contexts together.’ The horse’s rump is also the ultimate depiction of refusal or rejection, a symbolic image for which the artist had been looking for some time.

Trapped

With this recent work, Ang seems to have set a new course in which the content and the biographical theme are even more sublimated, and in which he has stepped away from real-life footage and moved towards fiction, from editing images to spatial editing. ‘It is often a challenge to show very little, to tell as little as possible. The content is created because the viewers themselves, from their own perspectives, seek out connections and meaning.’ As in the work Wounded, Ang refuses to appear personally as either a spokesman for Chinese interests or a representative of the ‘other’. The position of the ‘other’ is always exchangeable, depending on someone’s perspective, something that proved very conspicuous when, during a visit to Seoul, Ang filmed the masses of people in a busy shopping street. His camera almost automatically zoomed in on ‘the person who stood out in the crowd’, in this case a Negro man who literally stood head and shoulders above the Asians. ‘It’s not only the other who sees me as “other”. I, too, am highly sensitive to everything that is different. Apparently I am so conditioned that I can no longer escape it. I am trapped!’Christel Vesters is an art historian and curator, AmsterdamWorks of Tiong Ang are shown at:- The Unforgotten, Lumen Travo Gallery, Amsterdam25 April – 23 May 2009- Models for (the) people, Art Amsterdamsolo exhibition at Lumen Travo Gallery13 – 17 mei 2009