Beyond the Future: Papers from the Third Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

SESSION 2 : BEYOND THE FUTURE FUTURE PASTS IMPERFECT, AN UNTITLED TALK Geremie R. Barme Being with Sang Ye in the Virtual section of the Triennial seems a more than appropriate niche, since I'm more of an academic and writer and very much a 'virtual' artist, if I may presume to claim a relationship with artistic pursuits. Sang Ye and I are responsible for those two pink/red exclamation marks at the entrance to the Gallery, the Hua Biao, those louche Chinoiserie decorated columns. I failed to give the Conference organ isers a title because not having been asked for one I was happy to present myself to you 'untitled'. But by way of an introduction to the Hua B iao and their place in a festival themed around going beyond the future, I thought I would try and say a few things about futures in the past, and perhaps pasts in the future. To that end I'll begin with a few observations about the 'China story' as it has evolved in the international mass media over recent decades. China is a story that in many ways is just waiting to happen . The headl ines have been written, the outcome pre-ordained . The only thing that's missing is copy from the front lines recounting the breaking media event, information that will provide some of the fine detail to a preordained outcome, add a touch of local colour here, a dab of poignancy there, not to mention a dimension of personal tragedy and a measure of bathos that makes any good story just that. China in the West doesn't have a chance. It barely even has a present. But it does have a future, and if you restrict your media consumption to sound bytes/bites and headline one­ liners, it's the future that is the past of the Soviet Union, as wel l as a swathe of East European nations. It's the future of all the defunct autocratic one-party pol ice states that held sway during the twentieth century. China's tomorrow is their yesterday. Or as the Russian philosopher Mikhail Epstein has put it, when considering the end of the Soviet empire, 'the Communist future had become a thing of the past, wh ile the feudal and bourgeois past approaches us from the direction where we had expected to meet the future.' Caught between the dire historical fate of European totalitarian isms and the impossible future of Chinese socialism and communism , the present itself disappears, or at best becomes a stop-gap diversion that keeps the grand narrative of h istory on hold . The headl ines from the front line are about a story waiting to be told. The philosopher Epstein calls this cond ition 'post-futurism', in so far as it is 'not the present that turns out to be behind us, but the future itself. 1 . But then perhaps the West, that is Euro-America, doesn't have much of a chance in Ch ina either. As the reduction ist story there goes the United States is the sole surviving global hegemony, the policeman of the planet, an evil empire in cahoots with NATO and the European Economic Union ; a monol ithic power that will go to any lengths to impose its will on others, especially those who would dare challenge its international droit de_seigneur. In the name of national security it succours a commercial empire that furthers the imperial domination pursued by its multi-national companies and regional m inions. Nor, accord ing to this popul ist story, does the US have a future either. It can only replicate the past of other doomed empires and colonial powers. According to this logic China is a beacon of anti­ colonial struggle, self-appointed head of a revenant Third World . With its vast human resources, massive economy, independent ideology and tradition of militant independence, the People's Republic of China celebrating its fiftieth year this year, is the greatest countervail ing force to the bullying North American superpower in the international arena . The Third World d ream of the dispossessed nations united under the leadership of a post-colonial anti-imperialist China will be real ised , according to this script, in the new millennium inaugurated by the Asia-Pacific century. But this is a confl ict of caricatures, and it is one that infiltrates and mediates the mainstream and streamlined China story at every turn . It is a mindset that generates a style of reporting 25