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

Early in the 1 960s-70s, understanding perfectly the entropic destiny of cu lture, Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others, tried to propose innovative strategies of deconstruction . Smithson's redefin ition of art work as a dialectic between 'site and non-site' has suggested a transcendence of the established cultural wall. The photograph showing him climbi ng across a fence is a striking record of h is strategy, while Matta-Clark's wall cutting carries out the wall breaking even more directly. Today, many artists from different backgrounds are, again, informed by the image and symbolism of the wal l , inventing and developing more pertinent strategies to cope with a new reality i n which questions of institutional power, art and l ife in a multicultural [society] and national confrontations and negotiations etc. become the major issues on our agenda. The Chinese artist Lin Yilin, who considers h is work as a 'physica l process' of building brick walls, is practisi ng a kind of direct deconstruction of the wall itself. H is work, involving the paradoxica l , constantly self-denying process of bui lding/destroying the wal l , demonstrates the inevitable chaos in a cultural and social transitional period in China and Asia, in a strong and contradictory mixture of liberal market economy and 'post-authoritarian' pol itico-social system . In one of his latest works (1 996) , he deconstructs the political situation in Hong Kong through restructuring and displaci ng a brick wall on which the Hong Kong local political and economical organisations are written and 'unwritten'. This work is particularly i nteresting since , here, he puts forward such a demonstration to the most imminent reality in Hong Kong , the radical and chaotic restructuration of this 'post-colonial' society and cultu re when the histori cal change is occurri ng . The American I nd ian Jimmie Durham and the Brazilian Maria-Thereza Alves's project Le mur de Paris (the Paris wall) (1 995) is, in a Western context, another example of the wal l breaking strategies. The artists have imagined a Paris surrounded by a fictional wall o f 'La Ligne l mag i naeau' as an allusion , not without irony, to La Ligne Mag inot, a symbol of the defeat of the French resistance to the German invasion in the World War I I . It is also a mockery of the Eurocentric power's control over the Other, symbolised by borders or city walls. More i ronical is that the artists have 'materialised' such a fictional wal l by means of pseudo-archaeological researches and proofs. They take photos of walls and construction sites in Paris and show them side by side with 'scientific' analysis i n order to make them 'true'. The photos, texts and diagrams are put together on panels and then displayed i n shops in two commercial streets i n Paris. The Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping who has lived in Paris since 1 989 has also explored the wall as a metaphor of cultural confrontations and oppression . In the exhi bition 'Out of the Centre ' (1 994) in Pori , Finland which aims to propose a project to transcend the d ivision of centre and periphery in Chinese artists' works. The major part of h is work consists of a huge metal network in the end of the space . Eight big ropes are attached to the network and spread though the whole space and other works i n the exhibition. They are bound together above the entrance and go beyond the wal l through a specially dug hole. One could eventually d raw the ropes from outside in order to 'absorb' the whole exhi bition into the network and set it into a kind of exile or nomad . In this work, Huang Yong Ping has responded to the question raised by the project itself, how to go out of the centre? But his answer itself is, like the title of the work, a question : 'Out of the centre? What should we do after going out of the centre?' There is actually a paradox here . Such a paradox has also been revealed by the artists that we mentioned above: in Robert Smithson's and Gordon Matta-Clark's works, it is embodied i n the concept of entropy which makes us look at the other side of the world , the side hidden behi nd the wall of the rationalist and h istoricist vision of universal order and progress. In a more specific context Huang Yong Ping , i n the times when cultural globalisation makes the transcendence of confrontations between different cultures necessary and u rgent, proposes an alternative regard vis-a-vis reality and the future . Are we really progressing to a better world after breaking the wall? 1 40