Third Text
Issues
Volume 36, 2022
Issue 1
Number 174, January 2022
Chen Zhen, Transcultural Dialogues under Construction: Critical Reception of His First Exhibition in Spain 1–17
Laia Manonelles Moner
Chen Zhen (1955 Shanghai−2000 Paris) emigrated to France in 1986. His work engages with the notion of ‘cultural homelessness’ and transcends the boundaries between the physical and the psychic. This idea of being in movement between different cultures links directly with the term ‘Transexperience’, coined by Chen Zhen, which refers to a new way of considering the emotions and experiences that emerge from the experience of the immigrant as he/she makes new cultural connections. He uses art as a form of cultural resistance, that is, an instrument to generate debate and critical thinking. This article explores the exhibition discourse of his first show in Spain, ‘Chen Zhen: In-Between’ (2014−2015), and its impact on the media. It examines the artist’s reception and draws on the notion of transculturalism to analyse recurrent post-Orientalist clichés.
Night Vision, Ghosts and Data Proxies: Paintings by War Artist Jon Cattapan 19–39
Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox
In 2008 visual artist Jon Cattapan was deployed to Timor-Leste as an official Australian war artist. The fact that the Australian soldiers were conducting peacekeeping activities in Timor-Leste meant Cattapan could accompany them on patrols outside military bases. While on night patrols Cattapan, like the soldiers, wore a night vision monocle. This article addresses how, in subsequent paintings, Cattapan’s saturation of night vision green paint speaks to broader issues of accelerating developments in contemporary militarised technology. Particular attention is paid to militarised technologies designed to augment or replace the capabilities of human vision. Jean Baudrillard’s ideas of the ‘violence of the global’ are used to interrogate how Cattapan’s paintings ‘Night Patrols (Around Maliana)’ (2009) and ‘Night Figures (Gleno)’ (2009) pose questions about current and future ramifications of perpetual war fought in physical and virtual spaces. This interrogation is conducted through close visual analyses of the two paintings.
Nostalgia for Futures Past: The 1970s Global Left in Naeem Mohaiemen’s ‘Afsan’s Long Day (The Young Man Was, Part II’) 41–55
Kristin Plys
This article investigates the intellectual and political legacies of Maoist and other left Third Worldist thought of the 1970s through an analysis of Naeem Mohaiemen’s 2020 film, ‘Afsan’s Long Day, The Young Man Was’. The film presents a narrative of the history of the 1970s anti-imperialist left, and, in Brechtian fashion, compels the viewer to take an emotionally distanced assessment of the left’s chaotic trajectory through a unique engagement with themes of time, history and repetition. In the article, I explore several aspects of the film − its relationship to the ‘essay film’ as a genre, the historical context of the global 1970s as depicted in the film, and then conclude with a discussion of the theoretical concept, hauntology, in order to interrogate the political praxis of the film. The 1970s Global left represents a future that never came to be but yet continues to animate contemporary left thought.
On Mask-Ocracy 56–64
Paul O'Kane
Titled ‘On Mask-Ocracy’ this article follows-on from two shorter pieces (“The Carnival of Popularity” and “The Carnival of Popularity Part II: Towards a ‘mask-ocracy’”) that were recently published in Third Text Online. This new, longer article draws on a wide range of references, from carnival and the carnivalesque to recent protests in Hong Kong, from Australian wildfires to the worldwide pandemic, all on the way to speculating that the growing prevalence of masks in contemporary society brings new (and renewed) attention to, and implications for, our current, modern understanding of identity, political representation and democracy. ‘Mask-Ocracy’ is a neologism introduced as an intellectual gambit that this writing seeks to justify and render useful to current and emerging political and social debates.
After the Fall: The Cold War Optics of Korean National Division on View in Japan 65–82
Douglas Gabriel
In the early 1990s, a pair of Korean reunification-themed art exhibitions in Japan took up the question of art’s capacity to contribute to national reconciliation, an issue that appeared crucial in light of the contemporaneous surge of rhetoric celebrating the end of the Cold War. The first of these events, which opened in 1992, brought together Minjung (literally ‘People’s’) artists from South Korea and artists with official ties to North Korea living in Japan. The second exhibition, which took place the following year, featured Minjung artists and North Korean artists. In failing to congeal as expressions of national homogeneity, the works on view prompted audiences to question what an aesthetics of reunification would or should look like. In contrast to spectacles of national unity, as state-sponsored reunification events often strive to project, these exhibitions suggested that engaging an aesthetics of reunification would entail vexatious encounters with artworks forged from within an enduring Cold War impasse.
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