Present Encounters : Papers from the conference of the Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, 1996

and Ulay's Walk on the Great Wall (1 988) wh ich covers 2000 kilometres duri ng ninety days, is an excel lent example of such a 'seduction'. However, the love for the Other often leads to an exotic appreciation of the Other. According to Victor Segalen , the passionate defender of exoticism, an exotic regard should never go across the wall wh ich separates the self and the Other; otherwise, the beauty will be lost. The Chinese artist Xu Bing, who focuses his work on deconstruction of the traditional Chinese culture and more recently, deconstruction of the Eurocentric power in the relationship between Western and non-Western cultures, has also real ised works incorporating the image of the Great Wall. The 1 990 action The devils beating the wall is one of the most impressive deconstructive actions. The traces of the action have been exh ibited in h is exh ibitions touring th rough different American institutions. In those contexts, however, the work has often been represented and perceived as a kind of 'tourist souven i r' rather than as a critique of the trad itional culture's limit. Its original significances are emptied out and become a victim of the expectation, or the seduction of, agai n , the exotic rega rd , which is sometimes so powerful that it can rebuild a new wall where there should not be any. Then comes another example which makes use of the Great Wall as a context and pretext for cultural transcendence. Cai Guo Qiang realised an explosion performance at J iayu Guan , the western end of t he Great Wall. The performance, named Project for extraterrestrials no. 10 (1 993) , adds ten kilometres to the Great Wall by means of gunpowder explosion , and tries to communicate, or seduce, the 'extraterrestrials', with the terrestrial cultu ral creature. I n a way, it also remi nds us of Beuys's idea to add five centimetres to the Berlin Wall as an emancipating action. I n fact, we are confronted with the real ity of globalisation of late capitalisUneo-colonial economica l , political and cultural logic, as Fredric Jameson points out. This g lobal isation is giving birth to a new, invisible but irresistible wal l , as we analysed above. In the field of visual arts and culture, such a process is characterised by the fact that the discourses of the 'centre' are materialising and redefi ning the universal situation and, of course, the limit of creation. At the same time, the institutional system of the centre is also restructuri ng the un iversal system of representation . However, i t i s useless and impossible t o deny completely the contribution o f modernisation i n a large sense, even in 'non-Western', formerly colon ised regions. What we should consider as the real challenge today is how to re-i nscribe the post-colonial 'text' i n order to weave a new 'textuality'. Obviously, it is not a problem which can be resolved by simple-minded, romantic promotions of the historically repressed ' I ndigenous' cultures. On the contrary, i n such a kind o f promotion, apart from its positive possibility o f 'opening', i t is difficult t o avoid the risk of fall ing i nto 'political correctness' whose main concern is to build new walls. In a worse case, it is also a prey of the central power's 'postmodern' strategy of 'la mode retro' wh ich , rejecting 'les Grands Recits', turns everything into ephemeral fashions and hence cuts off the con nection with cultural engagements in real life. On the other hand, it is equally useless to envisage new visible walls, or censorship and filtering systems, as a strategy to confront the invasion and expansion of the i nvisi ble new walls, namely, mass media and I nformation Super H ighways and so on . What is now u rgent is to conceive effective and positive strategies. As a classic concl usion of the postmodem, Fredric Jameson reveals that one of the symptomatic phenomena in the global multinational capitalist era is the loss of the 'distance of criticism', or, in other words, the disappearance of the 'space of criticism'. Critique becomes impossible. However, it is the effort to do the impossible that becomes the only possible way to break the omnipresent but invisible walls. How to invent new critical strategies which are alternative to, on the one hand , the centre's discursive model and , on the other, 'politica l correctness' is the imminent challenge to all of us. Actually, some efforts of such an intervention have been and are being made in contemporary visual arts. These efforts are often concentrating on the deconstruction of the image of the wall itself. 1 39