What kind of world do you want to be part of?
A conversation between Pauline J. Yao, Lead Curator of Visual Art at M+ (Hong Kong) and Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds, 2017 and Nick Thurston, Programme Director of undergraduate interdisciplinary Fine Art at the University of Leeds.
NT: With their Degree Show title, I guess this cohort of graduating Fine Art students are thinking about the kind of world and artworld they might inherit. And at their stage, the whole issue is a mystery. The local realities of being an artist are as mysterious as the global ones. You don’t necessarily have any idea how to do this thing, being an artist, or even how to work within the arts. There’s no proper training programme or qualificatory route to get there. Given your recent time in Leeds, how did their situation and the local early-career art scene compare to others you’ve engaged with around the world?
PY: Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to spend much time with the students’ work while I was in Leeds. But looking back, what I’ve said to myself is that I was happy to be in a place that felt like it had a centred-ness, an identity, outside of the magnetic, dominant centre of London. Large urban centres seem to resemble one another more and more, which is something I’m noticing the more I travel. Being in Leeds, I felt that there was a character to the place. But how that locality connects to the not-local or even the global is a question with no single answer.
NT: How does this compare to the parts of Asia that you’ve worked in before and work in now?
PY: Asia, like everywhere has witnessed the expansion of urban centers and cities that become sort of magnetic, pulling people’s attention away from other, smaller locales. But what’s interesting to notice is how, in some countries, due to the pace of development, there are also multiple centres or contexts: Tokyo is the obvious hub in Japan, but Kyoto has been growing a small and vital scene too. For China, Beijing is the traditional centre of the contemporary art world, and yet in the last two years Shanghai has been upping its game with a bevy of new private museums and galleries. Even in a place like Vietnam, the slightly more business-friendly southern city of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) tends to take all of the attention away from places like Hanoi, even though the north has a long history of producing prominent painters. Increasingly, I question how useful it is to still think in terms of nations dialoguing with one another; it’s more like major cities dialoguing with each other. Beijing is Beijing. It can speak for itself and need not stand-in for or represent the whole authoritarian state of China.
NT: Are young artists able to access those networks of movement and conversations across the region?
PY: To some degree they can, but it is still rather limited. In China for example, there are certain art schools that tend to be beacons. They have strong programmes with active faculty and their graduates tend to be able to circulate and engage more ambitiously. But what’s probably similar to Leeds and other non-global centres is that lots of ambitious graduates move to those big centres, the hubs, once they graduate. If they return to their home locale or even stay in the smaller cities it can be much harder to access international networks. This kind of migration is, of course, a double-edged sword. Choosing to reside in a centre like Beijing means you have more competition, it’s probably more expensive to live, and you pay for that with reduced time to actually hone and develop your craft or your thinking, to be in the studio. Standing out by being in a different place is a model with interesting potential. It can and has been done, but it’s definitely the exception and not the norm.
NT: Your current role with M+ has brought you into a major institution at an interesting stage, one that’s just beginning and so is building. Amongst all that flux and growth, how does your current role enable you to engage with emerging artists?
PY: My interactions are mostly via exhibitions and studio visits. Hong Kong is a pretty small scene so it’s not hard to meet people in that sense. But I must say that the interaction is slightly different than it used to be. Before coming to M+ I was living in Beijing and was running a very different, small, storefront artist-led space and working as an independent curator. Back then I was able to work with artists more directly as I had a space in which to potentially show their work or develop a project. But here in Hong Kong I am affiliated with one of the biggest institutions in town and we don’t yet have our building, so the interactions with artists are different and more open-ended or exploratory. HK has some great art schools and I usually try to visit those graduation shows to get a read on what the recent grads are doing or looking at.
NT: Do you still get to do studio visits?
PY: ‘Studio visits’ in HK can be something of a misnomer – real estate is so expensive that most artists can’t afford studio space, so many operate in tiny live-work spaces or share with friends. A ‘studio visit’ often means sitting in front of a computer and talking about the images you’re flicking through. It’s relatively rare to see the working process in the same way you do when visiting a dedicated making environment. Anyway, ‘studio visits’ have to be more targeted now. It’s something that happens further into a conversation with an artist than it did before. I don’t have the time, so we do more scoping and discussing remotely before deciding who or what projects we will follow up on.
NT: And access to material online has changed that filtering process, right?
PY: Yes, being able to access information online is important. Transferable material that I can engage with in my own time can be really useful. I do studio visits now where we don’t look at any work because it was all transferable media that I’ve watched in advance. In that case, the personal meet-up becomes a chance to get to know each other and to join up some of the dots between the practice, individual pieces and the artist. Online material is not a replacement for face-to-face contact – so much of the interaction is just about getting to know who an artist is and how they think. I am fascinated to learn and see how artists position their own practice and am always probing what it means to be an artist today. Time spent sitting in front of a screen does little to explain that.
NT: There’s a sitcom waiting to be made from bad studio visits, or the sheer awkwardness of not know wing what to do.
PY: Definitely!
NT: But it comes back to this fantasy that often haunts recent graduates: the idea that there’s a right way of doing being-an-artist, as if there’s a manual you could be taught.
PY: There’s definitely no right or wrong way! Though I must admit that I’ve been part of some pretty awkward and horrible encounters. Let’s say this, one thing that no one should do is answer questions with one-word responses! If it’s worth my being here, in person, then talk to me, tell me things that I can’t just find online. Beyond that, there isn’t a recipe. So much of it is common sense and experience with human interactions. If we’re sitting in front of a computer in a cafe or office it’s a very different experience from looking at objects. We’re not going to sit there squinting at a laptop and watch a 30-minute film together. You have to gauge how much material a guest can meaningfully get through in a short amount of time, like a snippet, or fast forward to some key parts and then send a link to the full version. Once a screen becomes involved people behave differently.
NT: That makes me think about another quandary that recent graduates often have: worrying about how much they’re expected to know about professional best practice when they begin a dialogue with an art gallery or institution for the first time. Is it OK to admit that you don’t know what you’re meant to be doing at every turn, especially around the logistics for a show, from shipping to PR texts? Do you think there’s a better or worse way for young artists to confidently admit that they don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing?
PY: Oh, I’ve got no problem with that. Honesty is usually the best policy. If artists are too polished and prepared it can also be a bit suspicious, but that’s just my opinion. I’ve always been someone studying art or art history and I never experienced what it’s like to make work and put it out into the world. I can imagine it’s an incredibly daunting process, not to mention all the other pressures that come with being a full-time artist. I’ve come across emerging artists at every point on the professionalisation spectrum in Asia, where the contemporary art markets and scenes are a little younger. Some are incredibly organized and planning their careers ambitiously while others are feeling their way one step at a time. An artist friend once asked me, after having her work included in Venice and numerous other international exhibitions, ‘an institution has asked me to provide an artist’s statement. What is that? Can you write it for me?’ I was so surprised because in most Western art educations writing an artist statement is a crucial part of the equation yet here was this artist who had never thought of it, who was blissfully unaware of the conventions. I found the question slightly endearing since it at least indicated that she was investing her energy in the most important thing: making the work. Being professional and networking does help accelerate a career, but there’s nothing wrong with artists who just make stuff and haven’t thought out what will happen to it.
NT: What about the differences and connections between your experiences in Asia and your earlier experiences in the US, in terms of how young artists transition into the local-global art worlds?
PY: I grew up in Chicago but went to college in California. I spent some time in New York then ended up in San Francisco in the late-1990s. For 6 years I worked at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, both with the more traditional collection and also trying to involve contemporary art in the programmes. At that time I was seeing a lot of shows, writing some reviews, teaching a bit at the California College of Arts, and was on the boards of various smaller artist-run spaces. There were a lot of opportunities for recent graduate artists, mainly because San Francisco has a long history of artist-founded initiatives and non-profit spaces and they serve a variety of different communities. However, I did notice that even these grads, after achieving a level of attention by exhibiting around all of these spaces would eventually leave for one of the big cities, either New York or Los Angeles, to really launch their career, which takes us back to the subject we discussed earlier.
NT: Was the latter bit, working with artist-run spaces, an influence on your work in China?
PY: Indeed. The model of an artist-run space, started by and for recent graduates or emerging artists living in the area, is a familiar one in Europe and the US. However, this model didn’t exist in China yet. So this was how Arrow Factory (the space I started with two other aritsts) got started. During my time in the US I saw how those spaces were a vital testing ground, with a supportive audience, away from the risks of the market. In China these kinds of spaces are now growing in number as people see the need to fill the gap between the commercial world and the big institutions.
NT: That gets us back to the question posed by this degree show’s title, ‘So what of the future?’ I guess there’s no escaping the pervasive sense of anxiety in the world right now, from the macro issues of post-truth and terrorism, to closer problems around student debt and shrinking arts funding. But I hope they’re asking this question hopefully, too, with some excitement about the world they want to help build. Incomes, studio space, etc, are all being squeezed at the entry-level in the arts, but there are lots of positive developments as well, in terms of connectivity and improving representation for artists who aren’t just white males for example. What do you see as the positive fronts or opportunities opening up in the near-future for young artists?
PY: Well, its hard for me to say anything concrete about the situation in the UK but there are some interesting aspects of the changing situation in Hong Kong which might resonate with other cities. The obvious and most tricky aspect to manage is the encroaching presence of the commercial art world. For example, Art Basel Hong Kong gets a lot of stick because it isn’t seen to be directly nourishing the local arts community, but in a backhanded kind of way the outside attention and capital it brings in does bring certain benefits. For a start, it can help to promote the general idea that being an artist or working in the arts is a viable career choice. In a finance-/business-minded centre like Hong Kong, this is very valuable. It turns people’s attention towards culture and encourages ways of thinking that are not strictly monetary or results driven
NT: It’s hard to take yourself seriously as an artist if the wider world you’re part of won’t take the general idea of being artist seriously – if being an artist is treated like an illegitimate social role. That problem of cultural recognition is probably true for lots of odd life choices – other jobs that no one asks you to do – but I don’t know anything much about doing anything else, so staying with art maybe we can wrap up by pushing this point further.
PY: It’s easy to demonise the art market or dismiss it as something distinct and different from the so-called ‘real art world’, but that’s also a fallacy. We all participate in, and are complicit to some degree with, both the creative and monetised aspects of the art world, and there’s almost no space that’s outside the market, per se. Having said that, too much attention upon the commercial sector drives the criteria by which we judge success, and when one looks closer at the things that gain currency it becomes clear that it all operates within a very narrow trade circuit. That narrowness is what become problematic because it precludes a lot of different kinds of art practice, not least those that aim to resist being brought inside the commercial world of commodity exchange. What’s really exciting about the future of art is that these old borders between disciplines, art forms, public-private spaces and trans-national communities are diffusing. We talk about the ‘art world’ as if it’s a singular, known quantity. But the more time you spend inside it, the bigger, more diverse, more multiplied you realise its many worlds to be. One can only inhabit one space at a time. It’s like the myth of the global artist, those whose resumes indicate ‘based in New York, London and Taipei’: A person can only live in one place at any given moment; and at the end of the day, it’s only in one of those places that they pay their bills, have a phone number and have an ID card.
NT: Maybe that’s a nice way of concluding, back where we started. Precisely because there are artworlds (plural) and they’re multi-tiered, they can always be re-imagined by new artists, and the job (the future) each generation inherits is exactly that.
PY: For sure. If there’s one piece of advice I’d offer to the group at Leeds it would be to not waste your time trying to think about how you fit into the world as it is, but instead to think about what kind of world you want to be part of and to set about trying to make that happen.
May 2017