On-Site in the City: Comparative Urban Aesthetics in Asia at the turn of the 21st Century

Compelled by dramatic urban transformations in cities across Asia that have been ongoing since the late 20th and into the 21st century, artists in this region have engaged the built environment in innovative new ways. These artists have moved beyond simply depicting the city using earlier photojournalist, documentary, or modernist approaches, to instead incorporate the effects of the specific sites they investigate into their modes and processes, and often even into their artistic materials. Emerging from local and interregional contexts within Asia, these creative approaches are in dialogue with Western urban aesthetic forms and traditions, yet they also depart from these traditions by incorporating fragments and palimpsests from their own fraught historical formations. This has resulted in modes of calligraphic, photographic, moving-image, and installation-based practices that are affectively reflexive. In these works, the present is disturbed and unsettled by palpable memories of arrested projects and by waylaid cultural manifestations from earlier eras, or it instead continues to be inhabited by the discrepant subjectivities and memories of extreme violence, poverty, and migration that have characterized much of Asia throughout the 20th century. Asia's runaway and accelerated urbanization consequently has created psychic, imaginative, and social remainders. As represented in this special issue of ARTMargins, an influential facet of contemporary art practice is notating these remainders through suggestive experimental practices.

This special issue, “On-Site in the City: Comparative Urban Aesthetics in Asia at the Turn of the 21st Century,” brings urban artistic practices from across Asia into a comparative register, highlighting artists and works from regions in South, Southeast, and East Asia, many of which include underrepresented and marginal spaces and “minor” subjectivities.¹ The four articles collected here reveal unexpected intersections across different local contexts and show how art in Asia has responded to shared experiences centered around rapid urbanization and its aftermath. They examine the ways that art practices are deeply embedded within global neoliberal systems yet continue to negotiate spaces of critical subjectivity and to advance new sociopolitical agencies. By invoking the term urban aesthetics, this special issue highlights the politics of aesthetics explored in each of these contributions, to insist upon art's radical potential to question the dominant urban socioeconomic status quo and offer a searching examination of the reigning ideologies that undergird it.

The literature on the 20th-century city and urban space is vast. From Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau's analysis of everyday life and the social production of space to David Harvey, Edward Soja, Neil Smith, and Fredric Jameson's diagnoses of postmodern American cities, canonical texts in sociology, cultural geography, and modern/postmodern theory have primarily focused on metropolitan centers and their experience of modernity and postwar urban reconstruction. Influenced by this spatial turn, a generation of art historians have examined the relationship between art and urban space, largely focusing on Europe and North America. These include what might now be considered classic texts by T.

J. Clark that have examined how modern art expressed urban change and class-based social tensions in Paris in the 19th century.^{1 2} Focusing on more contemporary art practices in New York within the context of capitalist urban redevelopment during the 1980s and 1990s, Rosalind Deutsche has outlined what she sees as the “urban-aesthetic” field, an interdisciplinary relation between art, space, and politics. For Deutsche, radical art and critical practice aim to expose and deconstruct a late-capitalist production of urban space that is deeply complicit in fostering material, spatial, and aesthetic inequality and gentrification. As Deutsche notes, “Social space is produced and structured by conflicts. With this recognition, a democratic spatial politics begins.”³ A critical art practice is consequently one that challenges this late-capitalist production of space, subjectivity, and imagination through innovative interventions. An emphasis on activism as a key component of urban spatial practice since the 1980s and 1990s has given rise to socially engaged art practice— including more socially ameliorative forms—and to its discursive analysis, a subject to which many scholars have turned their attention.⁴ The popularity of urban social practice, however, has overshadowed the broader range of art practices that engage the city through media such as painting, calligraphy, photography, the moving image, and installation.

When we turn to Asia, a growing body of work in anthropology, sociology, area studies, architecture, and urban planning has begun to examine urban social and cultural practices, particularly in response to the phenomenon of rapid urbanization in the region since the 1990s.⁵ In critiques of the implicit parochialism of area studies, scholars have argued for a methodological rethinking of Asia's place in global discourses as a way to decenter Eurocentric epistemologies and frameworks.⁶ Yet art historical approaches have lagged behind, in terms of both methodological development and the examination of emergent artistic practices that address urbanized Asia. While scholars including Jisha Menon, Meiqin Wang, and Pamela N. Corey have made significant contributions to the analysis of urban art in India, China, and Vietnam/Cambodia, respectively, more attention is needed to carefully parse the complex relays between urbanization and contemporary artistic practice in a continent that includes over 50 percent of the world's population and that is characterized by immense and uneven diversity of social and economic conditions.⁷ This ARTMargins special issue contributes to the emerging scholarship that aims to redress this lacuna and that analyzes contemporary art as it unfolds in differentiated modes across distinct urban contexts.

We understand urban aesthetics to be an ensemble of visual and experiential practices informed by the urban condition. This framework draws upon Robin Visser's definition of urban aesthetics, which includes how the city is envisioned, experienced, and assessed by art and how aesthetics is constituted through a reciprocal relationship between the city and its contemporary subjects. As Visser observes, “the aesthetics of the urban environment shape the emotions and behavior of individuals and cultures, and … individual and collective images of and practices in the city, whether consciously organized or not, produce urban aesthetics.”⁸ Our understanding of urban aesthetics also adheres closely to what Corey has called “urban forms,” or specific visual and material aspects of the city—signs, buildings, streets, movements—that are vital to creating new artistic forms. Corey notes that “urban form is sourced as a site of representation and a place in which to enact a creative social intervention.”⁹ This attention to form, she argues, “denotes an analytical approach that draws from a distilled focus on the physical aspects of the image,” which, in the discipline of art history, can also be apprehended through “formalism.”¹⁰ Yet, for both Deutsche and Corey, this close engagement with form does not eschew art's social and political dimensions. As Deutsche has argued, urban aesthetics is deeply enmeshed in spatial politics and the rights to the city. Distinct from what can be seen in the EuroNorth American context, however, urban aesthetic practices in Asia are not necessarily always direct acts of political protest, nor do they always fit comfortably within the framework of either the critique or the embrace of neoliberal capitalism. Instead, these practices have responded to the specific political arrangements and the dramatic historical processes and upheavals that have unfolded across multiple Asian regions.

While acknowledging the cultural and historical differences between South, Southeast, and East Asia, we contend that countries in these regions nevertheless share a set of common experiences in the second half of the 20th and the early years of the 21st century. These experiences include economic liberalization and the integration of national economies with the global economy; rapid urbanization as an explicit state strategy for nation-building and industrialization, to “catch up” with the metropolitan centers of Europe and North America; large-scale state- and developer-led urban redevelopment programs; rural-to-urban migration; mixed economies that combine private enterprises and state-controlled industries; legacies of authoritarian states (whether socialist, colonial, or military); rapid economic growth in the 1990s; and contemporary societies that have emerged in the aftermath of extreme violence from the mid to the late 20th century.

South Korea developed in the postwar era, after the Japanese occupation and the Korean War, as an “Asian Tiger” economy beginning in the mid-1960s. This economy was marked by rapid, export-led industrialization that accelerated under authoritarian military rule during the 1960s and 1970s. While 1987 saw the first direct presidential election, large-scale urban redevelopment programs had commenced in the 1970s and continued into the 2000s. Urbanism in South Korea reflects the country's extraordinary economic development, technological transformation, and social change. At the same time, the repeated episodic destruction of the existing urban fabric to make way for new developments has been another key aspect of South Korean urbanism.

After decades of a largely state-planned economic system, India's liberalization in 1991 led to a momentous transformation characterized by a shift toward privatization and globalization. These reforms aimed to open up the Indian economy to foreign investment and to promote private-sector participation, especially in the service- and information-technology-based industries. Economic growth has, however, been highly uneven across communities and regions. The rise of Hindu fundamentalism and political authoritarianism also accompanied these decades, and the demolition of the Babri Masjid [Mosque] in Ayodhya in 1992 marks a significant early milestone in this regard. In urban centers, the growing acceptance of new queer subjectivities among sections of the public has been paradoxically accompanied by acts of violence by other publics against minority communities, fueled by the massive expansion of a media and social media ecology.

In China and Vietnam, the legacies of socialism continue to inform the built environment, systems of governance, and social practices. Since 1978, China's policy of “opening up and reform” has transformed the country into a socialist market economy led by coastal cities in the South that have been designated as special economic zones for exportbased free-market experimentation. State- and developer-led urbanization financed by foreign investments has resulted in widespread destruction and displacement. At the same time, the economic transition has also resulted in the decline of northern industrial cities whose economies are based on an earlier socialist model of production.

Despite the pervasive rise of a capitalist consumer culture, socialist systems and structures continue to govern urban policies and processes, engendering what Visser has described as a “psychic lacuna, an aporia resulting from the coupling of socialist monumentality rhetoric with the quotidian methods of consumer culture.”¹¹

In the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the country's reunification, Vietnam's Renovation period since 1986 has been characterized by market and trade liberalization that corresponded to China's socialistoriented market economy. Vietnam also saw rapid economic growth following the lifting of the American trade embargo in 1994 and the country's integration into the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 1995. As a result, contemporary urban landscapes have become an uncanny juxtaposition of socialist propaganda posters alongside advertisements for luxury goods. In both China and Vietnam, loosened restrictions on artistic production beyond Socialist Realism have contributed to the rise of experimental art practices. However, state surveillance and regulation of the use of public spaces have heightened the stakes of urban artistic interventions and cultural expression.

Each of these historical contexts gave rise to new urban art practices. Broadly speaking, since 1989, art practice in Asia has been characterized by artistic experimentation as opposed to radical politics, as well as by the deployment of new digital media and the adoption of new formal and material languages. Nevertheless, the overarching narrative of the so-called “global turn” in contemporary art after 1989 must account for the transformations and chronologies that unfolded at specific contexts and sites.¹² This special issue includes four case studies that carefully attend to their specific contexts, even as they offer vital insights into contemporary art practice's larger formalist, relational, and social dimensions.

Focusing on the range of ways in which artists across different regions of Asia have worked on and in the city to enact a sustained engagement with specific urban sites, we explore how such artistic strategies reveal latent histories, affective dimensions, and new spatial approaches and practices to being in the city.

Pamela N. Corey and Boyoung Chang examine artists whose works transform visual elements of the cityscape. Their contributions uncover strategies of artistic abstraction that work against the dominant urban visual regimes in Vietnam and South Korea, respectively. For Corey, the cityscape is a site of competing forms of graphic practices that hinge on the urban environment with artistic practice. Focusing on a group of artists active in Hanoi in the 1990s who engaged in textual mark-making and writing practices, Corey contextualizes these calligraphic practices within and against the city's existing traditions of propaganda posters and folk and religious graphic practices, as well as in relation to the more recent commercial visual forms ushered in by capitalist globalization. Within the context of Vietnam's liberalization policies, urban calligraphic practices operated in an urban graphic environment marked by two seemingly opposed ideological textual systems—state-initiated propaganda posters and capitalist commercial advertisements. Yet Corey argues that artists such as Vũ Dân Tân, Nguyễn Văn Cườrng, Trương Tân, and Nguyễn Quang Huy engaged in calligraphic practice to enact an alternative form of expressivity that stood in counter-relationship to the ideologically communicative means of this post-socialist urban graphic regime. As Corey argues, these calligraphic works signal the presence of the artist in urban space as well as new forms of urban authorship and selfhood within a rapidly transitional period in Vietnam that shows no signs of slowing down.

Boyoung Chang focuses on artists who refuse expressivity and instead mobilize digital processes to abstract the cityscape and induce a sense of visual estrangement. Chang examines photographic depictions of the city in the work of the South Korean photographers Park Chanmin and Keum Hyewŏn in the context of the country's urban redevelopment programs of the early 2000s. Chang situates their work within a longer history of urban photography in Korea after the end of the Korean War (1950-53). Whereas an earlier generation of photographers had sought to convey the speed and excitement of urban life through a documentary style, a second generation of photographers deliberately frustrate the viewer's desire to enter the urban pictorial space. Using digital postproduction tools and techniques, they flatten pictorial space and even eliminate the visual markers that identify buildings, figures, and textures. Through the concept of the “banal,” Chang reads these prosaic images as being a strategic form of documentary image-making. For Chang, abstraction makes the city “banal” in ways that actually reactivate viewers’ social awareness of their surroundings. Beyond capturing urban sites, such works seek to reconstruct them to address the condensed modernization and the capitalist energies dominating the country.

Ellen Larson and Lalitha Gopalan both examine artists who have used the moving-image format to defamiliarize specific urban spaces and generate new speculative spatio-temporalities. Such practices also partake in processes of abstraction by working against linear time. Larson focuses on contemporary multimedia artists and filmmakers from China who have employed the moving image to capture regional conditions and temporalities shaped by urban-industrial decline in the Northeast in the era of opening up and reform (1978 to present). Focusing on works by Wang Bing, Wang Mowen, and Cao Fei, Larson shows how each artist references “ghosts” of cultural memory through distinctive visual presentations of bygone monuments from China's mid-20th-century socialist past. In each of their works, the moving image is a site-based research method that incorporates on-site documentary aesthetics, archival research, found film footage, and the incorporation of urban forms from the country's socialist industrial past. The artists also intersperse these real spaces with virtual ones through digital techniques, staged performances, and fictional narratives, creating instances of fragmented, cyclical, and collapsed time that allow for a distinctly post-socialist “haunting.” Urban sites reveal multiple temporalities as figures and urban forms from the socialist past show up in the present. By grouping these artists together, Larson argues that northern China's social, historical, and geographical conditions have fostered a unique aesthetic characterized by a collective impulse to document the physical loss of the region's industrial spaces and reanimate the interpersonal relationships and memories attached to these sites.

Lalitha Gopalan turns to the speculative future in the work of Mumbai-based video artist Tejal Shah. Expanding the city's purview to include the ecological relationship between humans, animals, and nature, Gopalan analyzes Shah's five-channel video installation Between the Waves (2012). In the video, Shah and a dance troupe wander through Mumbai's mangrove stands collecting plastic detritus. Dressed in costumes made from urban trash with white, horn-like appendages on their heads, the “humanimals” stroke their horns, caress each other, and engage in unabashed queer sensuality across mangroves or atop urban landfills. For Gopalan, the juxtaposition of a real setting populated by non-naturalistic elements conveys a startling effect of dissonance and offers a vision of a speculative queer future where posthuman species thrive in a landscape of urban ecological ruin. These queer strategies of abstraction, illegibility, and temporal disjuncture challenge various forms of normativity, including representational figuration, and enact an activism of the imagination that invites viewers to contend with human-centered ecological crisis.

In her review article, Gabriella Nugent examines two recent books on political decolonization in francophone Africa. Attending to how intellectuals and cultural practitioners in this region have advanced a decolonial agenda to grapple with the legacies of colonialism, the books address issues of modernity's multiple temporalities, the persistence of Eurocentric frameworks that have shaped understandings of African art, and the discrepancies between decolonization and decoloniality. Considered alongside the articles in this special issue, these books provide a comparative context for situating regional practices and temporalities within a global framework and contribute to this issue's aims to shed light on cultural production from the global South.

In his artist project, titled My Beautiful Picture Book, the Colombo-based artist Abdul Halik Azeez investigates the social and aesthetic transformations enacted by the Instagramization of the tourist experience. By digitally combining text and images gathered from the internet into scenes of commercialized tourism, Azeez reduces Sri Lanka's rich landscape, people, culture, and society into colorful signifiers and exotic backgrounds for the conspicuous consumption of privileged travelers. As he notes, “Many tourists appear to travel solely ‘for the gram,’ and this means that the local industry (composed of state, corporate, SMEs, mom-and-pop outfits, enterprising individuals, animals, trees, landscapes, and others) also orients itself to cater to this basic need of generating envy-inducing photographs.” Traditional professions—even nature itself, long under pressure from mass tourism to become simulacral—become even more image-like, but now, in Azeez's work, the tourist assumes the position of the “native.” Azeez intends to print his work as a picture book to be distributed on buses and trains in Sri Lanka through existing networks of urban vendors.

One of the earliest independent documentary filmmakers in China and a seminal figure of the 1990s New Chinese Documentary Film Movement, Wu Wenguang sought to distinguish his work from the didactic style of state-directed film productions in the 1980s and to articulate a new visual language for filmmaking predicated on a sense of lived reality. Wu combined on-location shooting in the city, handheld camera footage, tracking shots, and long takes, centered on what he called “xianchang,” a capacious term that can roughly be translated as “on-site.” This special issue translates into English for the first time Wu's 1996 text that outlines his approach to working “on-site.” As Luke Robinson explains in his introduction to the text, Wu's concept of “onsite” was both a method and an aesthetic that captured the ethos of urban documentary filmmaking. This “on-site” approach serves as a conceptual departure point for the scholarly articles developed in this special issue.

The articles and the art project in this special issue investigate a range of practices, including painting, photography, video, performance, installation, and the artist book; they emphasize visual strategies that are inextricably linked to the specificities of the site but that also resonate across sites. In the artworks discussed by each author, the site is presented not as self-evident but as thoroughly mediated through its artistic representation, in which linear temporality and historicity are questioned by means of form, narrative, and affect. Together, these contributions illuminate a range of new aesthetic modes—from the calligraphic to the photographic, from the spectral to the speculative—that reflect 21st-century urban life within the postindustrial, post-socialist, and postcolonial conditions.