Recess

On the work of Tiong Ang

by Marilu Knode

In his crime mystery novel The Black Book, written without an apparent victim other than the narrator himself, trapped by circumstance, Orhan Pamuk asks "When are we fully who we are?"¹ The author suggests it is the very moment when we are sitting reading those words; when, for a brief moment, beyond the demands of the outside world, we are fully in possession of our bodies and our minds. And it works - a moment of soaring presentness takes over, only to be disturbed as the reader moves on to the next feeling evoked by the book.

Oddly, given his recent focus on a series of 'travelogues' and scripted collaborations where the artist plays an alter ego of himself, Tiong Ang is also seeking that moment when he (or we) can be fully ourselves. He does not refer to a stationary pause, nor to stepping away from the scene. Ang's moment of taking possession of himself comes from a deliberate, self-induced and relentless displacement, one that floats between the privilege of the artist flâneur (responding to an exhibition invitation or thanks to the largesse of a foundation) and the refugee (fleeing due to political discrimination and economic disaster).

Although all art work could properly be said to be a search for identity - in contemporary art primarily of the artist, and next, of the artist's time - Ang's situations and installations carry with them both the moment of displacement and that of discovery. Ang shifted from a largely studio-based practice of painting and installation in 1995 into the world of time-based media as a way to confront the media apparatus that streamlines individual identity into a series of received positions. How do we create a manageable self-identity against pressures that range between the static impositions of cultural boundaries versus the inevitable, and unavoidable, changes of contemporary life? In Modernism we find a constant drive for breaking and re-forming character in 'innovative self-destruction'; how do we find some sense of connection if sense of self constantly changes?²

"You are a socially isolated individual who desperately wants to communicate with a substantive imaginary world."³ This statement, from Jonathan Franzen's collection of essays How To Be Alone, describes the dilemma faced by writers and artists. For Ang, a self-declared nomad, communication is the goal, and his point of contact with the flow of human history is through his images.

Ang functions as the distanced outsider while remaining engaged through the act of looking.⁴ His straight-forward 'observational' images, taken during the artist's peripatetic travels around the world, are moved from the realm of documentary portraiture of the Other to that of a dream-like self-portrait through the creation of unlikely pairings and by the way his editing mediates their relationships. The images are transformed into otherworldly scenes through the lens of a colored filter, for example; they are slowed down or sped up to highlight particular moments (in the way that the vagaries of our memory retain certain experiences); and they are made palpable through Ang's sensitive arrangement in his very physical installations.

There is also a persistent, if varied, underlying sense of political engagement in the works, for dreams are not disconnected from the world they resemble. Ang's questioning of identity is more properly the questioning of the social processes that form or twist us. These processes include qualities external to the self: race, nationality, class, gender. Are we truly free to invent ourselves, or are the barriers (both hidden and manifest) too great for us to maintain this fiction?

In his current installation, Ang combines seemingly disparate images, yet their underlying connection -the various forms of social constraint - slowly emerges. Walking along a rural road in China we see a dozen men in close grouping. Although each is distinct - in their well-worn clothing, objects they are carrying (a basket, a flag), and facial expression - their compact formation is not the pattern of laborer friends walking back from the fields at the end of the day. And in their midst, surprisingly, is an armed guard.

The somber bluish-gray filter steals color from the scene, although it cannot suppress the expression of individual existence in the men's figures. Ang slows the men down for us to take in all the details that emerge, the most striking being that the guard is an integrated part of the group, not set apart from it; indeed, he is as trapped in his place as are his charges. The buoyant body language of the prisoners - one mocking angrily at Ang and his camera, another shielding his face with a gloved hand - describes a social order far from all of our images of prisoners in cages.

Set alongside Prisoners is Wounded (Ang's titles are descriptive, leaving metaphor for the images), which consists of three intercut shots. The base image is a close-up of an animal's thin legs, shot through a zoo fence. A sense of uneasiness arises, not only because of the unnatural orange cast of the filter, but because of the open wound, covered in flies, on the animal's knee. When another pair of legs passes by we guess they are camels, an ancient beast of burden upon which some human economies still depend. The camel image cuts to footage of a man, his head swathed in bandages, riding in a shaking, ramshackle bus. We hear the groans and belches of the bus as it struggles to move through space.

The third image is of two Chinese women, Mosuo farmers, watching television (the only one in their village) in their primitive farmhouse. The younger of the two women makes eye contact with the camera. Ang accelerates the intercutting of the two images of humans to create a sense of urgency, of a need for exchange.

The final piece of this grouping is Three Men, a long slow motion shot of three South African farmers walking together over the crest of a hill and into Ang's frame. As they approach, the narrowing field of vision focuses on one of the men who walks a bicycle, some type of stick (or is it a thin weapon?) slung on his back. He is wrapped in a blanket decorated with what appear to be free-floating commas. In present day South Africa, the presence of these men in the post-Apartheid, anti-township landscape is liberating; the greenish-yellow air through which they swim is fecund with hope.

The combination of these three works recalls Yann Martel's novel Life of Pi, about a young boy sailing with his family to Canada to escape the political strife in their home country India. The ship sinks, stranding the boy in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger and a hyena. The sense of disaster and doom is constant. From the slow-moving beginning, where Pi (who re-names himself Pi after his real name, Piscine - French for swimming pool - causes him trouble at school) expects rescue, then hopes for a quick death at the hand of his two predators; he finally resigns himself to the daily tasks of survival against terrible odds. In the end, after he is rescued, two representatives of the Japanese company that owned the sunken ship interview Pi and find his story incredible - not credible. Pi makes up an equally incredible story, which they do believe, the boy understanding that his experience challenged the men's ability to stretch their conception of the world.⁵

Tiong Ang too seeks to create a more broadly elastic understanding of our world. The Mosuo women are members of one of the last matriarchal societies in the world, a social economy that, by its very existence, refuses the normalizing, totalizing discourse of patriarchy. Other questions arise from these images: how do species cope with their captivity, and do they (we) even know they are captive? How do Ang's various subjects dwell within their external restraints? How is human free will affected by imprisonment, or does Ang suggest we all, prisoners of the state or not, are in the same position as the wounded camel?

Out of the bleakness of these images, in the pause Ang creates for us in our hectic world, we sense an up-ending of the assumed positions of the historical narrative that plays in our heads.

Through a series of video works shot in different classrooms around the world (in India, China and Indonesia), Ang touches upon many of these same issues. The classroom in particular is a suggestive, metaphoric space. As children we are bound by the school's rules of socialization and enculturation and by its limitations formed of history and time. By focusing his interrogations in this supposed innocent space, Ang asks various questions: How can we, as adults, invent ourselves beyond identity imposed on us in school? Are group responses (for the record, the Indonesian children are raucous, one child flips Tiong off; the Indian children are shy, glancing sweetly at the camera; the Chinese children are calm, unsmiling, dutifully pursuing their coursework) representative at all of a 'national character'?

Yet these works also suggest a path out of the restraints inherent in standardized education. As Ang travels the world, he is searching for what is to be learned beyond what has been learned. It is what lies beyond the horizon - of the social, cultural or physical landscape - where the artist's own dreams take shape.

Another part of Ang's on-going artistic experiment, whose rules are made up as he works, calls for other people to represent the artist. Whereas the script of these 'plays' may be minimal, the stand-in both acts (which requires the masking of identity) and improvises (which suggests creative invention).

This blurred line between acting and improvisation is particularly significant in Mockery (Projections) from 2002, featuring Ang's friend Atone Niane from Senegal. We hear only and see Atone (the loud African) in the foreground speaking, the quiet (Chinese) Ang pacing back and forth behind him. Where Atone begins to narrate Ang's experience, adressing the audience for the artist's first exhibition in China (Ang's mother grew up in Shanghai), he becomes more animated, grafting his own experiences as an African emigré onto Ang's story, turning another's identity into his own.

Although this confounding of acting and improvisation is most apparent in Ang's collaborative installations, every subject in front of his camera, no matter their culture, knows what character they want to project (consider the children in their classrooms). External, unavoidable signifiers such as race, nationality and class are filtered through the combined lens of Ang and his willing, and sometimes unwitting, collaborators.

In an extensive installation from 2001, TimeLine Underworld, located inside an unused coal transportation tunnel, Ang created a full-length travelogue that literalized the rhythm of dreams.⁶ Walking over uneven ground covered in sand, the audience encountered floating screens with images as disparate as kids selling colored powder for bindi, a hyena caught in the headlights of a jeep on a nighttime road, Muslim girls surrounded by Hindu women, two actors (a man and a woman) repeatedly striking an old man, screaming kids in a South African township, and burning ping pong balls. The twenty-four tracks (spaced out between twenty projectors and six monitors) suggested that the timeline or history being described was that of the unconscious. Although the darkened and unfamiliar space and Ang's tight pacing imply that Ang controls his audience through precise orchestration of the images, in fact it would be difficult to control the way in which our individual filters create unique memories from our particular, and peculiar, place in time.

It is this operatic project that embodies most visibly Ang's wish to connect to an imaginary world, undermining the various grids of pre-organized news and information that come to us on a daily basis. In each project Ang suggests the types of spaces and images that can help undo the strict associations implanted by society, but in TimeLine Underworld Ang's stagecraft extends the theatricality of images beyond representation into abstraction. Ang confuses fact and fiction in much the same proportion that we conduct our own internal dialogue in inconsistent and contradictory ways.

Throughout Ang's work, there is a continual evaluation of how feasible it is for the individual to fight against a dominant system, to escape the grid of civilizing influences (whether the over-bearing artistic presence of Piet Mondriaan's grids in Dutch art, or the boundaries against which artists must literally and metaphorically stand). One thing that emerges as a constant throughout Ang's travels, and is a constant puzzle in a collaborative series of works made for GRID, a project in Indonesia in 2002, is the oppression of one distinct group by another. But a counter text arises in the works produced for GRID and in the magazine accompanying the project.⁷ Collective identity was staged through playful re-invention, not through nationality, race or gender. Is nationality also enforced through artistic practice, although art is ostensibly about individual freedom (hence the nervous reference to Mondriaan)? The grid also refers to the rigidity of urban development and of the static coordinates of Dutch social structures (consider the way in which the Dutch language has been slowly erased from Indonesia although the remnants of colonial attitude remain).

Triggering the opportunity to collaborate with others allows Ang to cede authorship without ceding responsibility for the flow of ideas or for the outcome. The grid here allowed for a collaborative self-examination of individual goals, while providing the artists a foil against which they created a series of playful works with socially-resistant implications.

It is the cumulative effect of these works, and how they shift in relationship to each other as work is completed, and screened, and commented upon, that allows us to know something about Ang and about ourselves. Ang does not ascribe to the notion that each diasporic artist be obliged to represent their relationship to their natal or ancestral homeland. Rather, he sets up a forum for a common expression of loss and displacement, whereby the collective experience allows for the comfort in sharing rather than the loss of personal identity.

Ang's persistent themes continually spiral around and about the changing social and political circumstances in which the work is produced. And yet there is also a sense of play that runs through Ang's lyrical, and sometimes sober, work. He allows himself a spiritual break, a recess to re-organize his reactions and thoughts, to recoup his emotional equilibrium, and to evaluate his position within the social sphere in which he finds himself.

NOTES:

1. Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1996. Transl. Güneli Gün)

2. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, "On Alternative Modernities" from Alternative Modernities. Ed. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar. (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 3. Gaonkar summarizes the other essays in the volume by outlining the roots of Modernism and its elastic resistance to official social life. This mini-refresher on the roots of Modernism reminds us how all-encompassing and self-generative Modernism allows us to be.

3. Jonathan Franzen, "Why Bother?" from How to be Alone (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), pp. 74 - 77. In this essay Franzen describes his distress in understanding the position of the writer in contemporary society. He quotes from a conversation with MacArthur Fellow Shirley Brice Heath, a linguistic anthropologist who studied readers and writers who are either "heavily modeled" or the "social isolate". Although these poles may properly describe anyone, it is the writer and artist's need to communicate (and connect) creatively to an audience that makes them distinct.

4. From an unpublished artist's statement, 2002.

5. Yann Martel, Life of Pi (Orlando, Fl: Harcourt Brace & Company, 2003)

6. TimeLine Underworld was an installation in the Coal Wall Tunnel at the Europapark, Groningen and was part of the manifestation "Blue Moon-The Unprecedented City", September 2001. The installation was developed in collaboration with Space Group Architects, Oslo.

7. GRID, a collaborative project, exhibition and publication by Tiong Ang, Fendry Ekel, Mella Jaarsma and Remy Jungerman in Indonesia. (Cemeti Art House, Yogyakarta, 2002 / Erasmushuis, Dutch Cultural Centre, Jakarta, Indonesia, 2003)