A conversation between David Teh and Mi You

DT: David Teh
MY: Mi You

Art, History, and Globalization: A Dialogue on Gwangju’s Biennale

David Teh, an Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore and curator of the 12th Gwangju Biennale, and Mi You, a professor of Art and Economies at the University of Kassel, delve into critical themes surrounding art, history, globalization, and the future of cultural institutions like the Gwangju Biennale. Drawing on their extensive backgrounds in cultural theory, political science and Southeast Asian and East Asian modern and contemporary art, they explore the evolving roles of art in society and the challenges and opportunities facing contemporary cultural platform.

Engagement with Gwangju Biennale

MY: Please tell us about your engagement with the Gwangju Biennale (GB), its significance for you and what it meant for your personal and professional journey.

DT: I was asked to make a project that dealt with the archive of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation. I hadn’t been a frequent visitor to Gwangju as an independent curator when I first started working in Southeast Asia in the early 2000s. I didn’t really have the means to attend the Biennale for many years, but it was on my radar principally because it was on everyone’s radar since it was the biggest event in the regional landscape and everybody watched what was happening.

So why were people excited about it? That was a question I had straight away. It was obviously a big art spectacle and they were obviously spending lots of money. And in those days, in Southeast Asia, there was a big gap between the kind of spending that was happening in Gwangju and the everyday economics of being a contemporary artist. Most people I knew, who I considered the best contemporary artists in Bangkok where I was living, were able to support themselves by making art in those days.

When I finally got to visit Gwangju, I was, I guess, like everybody, sort of amazed by how such a city, which in all other respects is not really part of the global contemporary art world, could have become such an important node. The historical credentials of the city immediately answered that question for anybody who’s new to the place. I was susceptible to the seduction of Gwangju, which is, in a nutshell, that the democratic historical claims of that city had been allowed to infect the art brand of that platform in a very comprehensive way. But I also think that limits the platform at the same time.

I subsequently had the chance to work there as one of the curators of GB and was able to layer that view in various ways. I wanted to engage with the history of the Biennale. I should mention I was also pretty conscious of the work that Patrick Flores had done there—that was a very memorable and important addition to the Biennale. Some of his writings about curating were also significant contributions. As part of this project, there were studies of a number of Southeast Asian curators who could be seen as pioneering figures in Southeast Asia. They were represented in Patrick’s project in Gwangju not just as thinkers or curators, but also as artists. This was one of the important contributions that he made.

I would say until that point, I had never really introduced myself as a curator, even though I had been doing it for quite a long time. One reason for that is that I have an academic job at a university here in Singapore, and therefore I’ve never had to rely full-time on curatorial income. On the other side of that, I was also always skeptical of the curator’s stature. I had never really considered myself a full-time curator, and I didn’t want to be one. But curating was always something that I did, particularly when I had a problem that I couldn’t solve in other ways. It’s a good way for me to work something out or to find out about something that I don’t have other ways of doing. After doing Gwangju, I started to accept that that’s how I would be described, and since then I’ve been a bit more relaxed about it.

At GB, I was asked to engage with the archive. I found very quickly that what had been called an archive was, in fact, not an archive insofar as an archive implies navigability, some kind of formal organization. It wasn’t an archive; it was a big room full of stuff—interesting stuff, stuff that I knew I’d be interested in, but stuff that was very difficult for me to search and navigate. Partly because I don’t speak or read Korean, but also partly because I’m not an archivist. I don’t do archival research very much, although I had done an exhibition in Berlin called ‘Misfits: Pages from a Loose-Leaf Modernity’ in 2017, which looked a bit like an archival show. It dealt with three individual artists from different parts of Southeast Asia, but it had a lot of materials that you could say were not artworks. That gave some people the impression that I was someone who worked with art historical archives, which I’m really not. But the GB archive was too good a target to pass up.

Gwangju, it always seemed to me, was a very good place to ask the question of contemporaneity because it was a place where the globalization of art reached a really full-bodied expression. And I mean this in a kind of structural sense—meaning that the patronage powers and the sources of capital for making contemporaneity physically present in the form of an exhibition or artworks. This was one of the main sites where that corporate as well as public largesse had been brought together to articulate contemporaneity. In Asia, there are very few comparisons for the early editions of the Gwangju Biennale in terms of scale or in terms of, let’s say, ambition with which mapping a whole world of art was enacted. In an earnest and sometimes naïve, but in any case a kind of totalizing and universalist way: ‘We are going to make an exhibition of the whole world.’ And what makes that world cohere as a world is contemporaneity. So, for me, that made it an almost unique platform and definitely worth spending time among this room of stuff.

But I didn’t really know how I would be able to make sense of it. And then it proved impossible to make sense of because of my inability to really access the collection. Partly, I had a small child at that moment so I couldn’t travel for long stints. Also, I have an academic job, as I said, so I can’t be away for that long. I have to teach and so on. It was just really hard to fathom what would be a useful access for me.

So, when I figured out what I could do, I guess there were sort of two solutions. One was—don’t try to cover the whole history of the platform. So, I narrowed my interest to the first four editions, which means from 1995 to 2002. The second solution was to try to make it heuristic. That is, to not approach it with a thesis that I would then attempt to demonstrate or explicate, but rather to approach it more as an attempt to share discovery, to share the process of discovery. I thought, what I’ll do is I’ll spend six months discovering the archive, and then I’ll figure out what I can make. But it was impossible for me to discover the archives. So, I thought, well, what I should do instead is really bring other people with me in the discovery and try to present the discovery, and I think that is what I did.

Large biennales, in my experience, are very sure to be disappointing exercises as a curator. Not because you don’t get a lot out of it, because you do, but because it’s only really possible on these big platforms to get a kind of proof of concept—that is, to get a kind of mock-up of your idea. And there are many reasons why that’s the case in various places. Gwangju has its own set of reasons for why it’s a challenging place to work, but definitely that’s what I got. I got proof of concept. Biennales are typically very devoted to the present or to this idea that they can somehow articulate something about the present that is manifest in art but has not yet been articulated. This is the kind of promise of the Biennale, speaking in a very crude generalization. That devotion to the present, I think, is part of their special energy. Biennales are agile in comparison to other agencies that make large exhibitions like big museums. They don’t have a collection. They can respond to current affairs in a very lively way.

The way I think about it is that the biennales are beholden to the present at the expense of self-historicization. They have been allowed to put aside the facts of their own historical existence. And I started to think about the role of not just Gwangju, but of the Asian Biennale in the historicization of contemporary art in Asia. I started to think that it’s a pity that most biennales are so devoted to the present, because they are actually very important canonizing and historicizing organizations, despite this devotion to the present. And one of the reasons for that is that canonizing, collecting institutions were very slow or late to develop. If you like, belatedness is maybe not the vocabulary we want to invoke here, but certainly at that time, let’s say in the mid-1990s, there basically were no museums of contemporary art in most of Asia. There were very, very few organizations that were devoted to contemporary art. So, the idea that contemporary art itself had a history or that a history of contemporary art ought to be told wasn’t a given in those days.

So that’s another reason why the early editions were particularly interesting to me. They were made in the process of actually doing this kind of auto-canonization of Asian contemporary art, but without a kind of historical self-consciousness. Many of these platforms were better than others—some of them knew what they were about and started to archive from day one. Gwangju seemed to me to be a bit of a classic case. It had collected over the years a whole lot of materials about the making of those shows. It included, of course, many luminaries of contemporary art curatorship and many, many fine artists, leading artists of the day.

So, it’s a gold mine for any art historical researcher who’s interested in contemporary art, especially in Asia. I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting if Asian biennales were kind of consciously historicizing what they were doing? And why wouldn’t we start here in Gwangju in 1995, if we want to run that thought experiment? That was the premise.

I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting if these platforms had an institutional memory and how would that change the way we make shows? So, it was important for me to engage with that 2018 edition of the Biennale and the other curators making it. I did that in a number of ways. I worked with artists that other curators were also working with. I’ve worked with a number of the curators to insert things in their show through borrowing historical works. And I also was informed by my dialogues with the other curators as much as was possible.

In practice, the platform of GB is designed to put the curators in discrete silos where they can just get on with doing their thing. Of course, if you have one artistic director, then that’s a different shape. But when you have multiple curators, I think it’s very hard to have an intercontinental, multi-time zone curatorial dialogue over an extended period through Gwangju as the hub. I was foolish enough to think that I could try that and I found that it was not really feasible, except in a few cases where the curators were really interested in the conversation and then we ended up collaborating in some way.

The other thing I should mention is that commissioning was a key part of what I did. I wanted contemporary artists to show in the present edition of the Biennale, informed by the research dialogue. There were a number of commissions that we made in my exhibition in Gwangju that were basically led through the archive by a practicing artist. I think that a more contingent, maybe more spontaneous access to history was also really important. It articulated relationships to present practice that I wouldn’t have been able to do as a curator.

I found out a lot, and I learned a lot from those artists exploring the archive, and they had the same problem as me—they couldn’t spend a lot of time there. They had to do it remotely. We were relying not on professional archivists to help us find things and send us things and scan things. It was a very compromised kind of process. But I learned a lot from those artists in the ways that they accessed the history of the platform, and they did it differently than how I would. So, that was really enriching for me.

I had built a public program which originally was a very large part of my project, but due to budget changes could not be realized except in a smaller way. I hope that’s kind of a big picture introduction to what I did there.

Globalization and self-historicization

MY: It covers a lot of ground on your work at and your reflections on GB. I think it’s also important to note that nowadays, there is an increasing interest in archival research into exhibitions under the name of exhibition history going on these days, not to mention that we are both implicated in the afterall exhibition history project.

Sometimes this can feel like an eternal return of history, as in, the second time it happens, it happens as exhibition history. But a lot of times, I look at the materials generated in exhibition history and I feel, the researchers are simply compiling the materials and but are not guided by any lenses, such as the ones that you insightfully proposed. To ask the right questions on exhibition history seems to me the most crucial thing.

You were asking, wouldn’t it be interesting for Asian biennales to have this historical consciousness, to be able to self-historicize? I think at the same time, there’s too much of it on the other side of the equation. For example, Charles Escher said of Gwangju Biennale: “the first Asian Biennale to be contemporary or to be truly global.” There’s a certain complacency in this. And I think it’s only affordable for someone like Charles to say. Then you look at the sort of historical consciousness that could emerge from an Asian practitioner revisiting this Asian history. I think a lot of times that is the narrative of the Cold War. It is, perhaps, the narrative of originalism.

I feel there’s a horizon of universalism of what art can be and it happens under the times of globalization. Whereas our historical self-consciousness has always been about what has actually happened. Hence we are much more cautious and humble in reclaiming our history. Maybe this could serve as a segue to revisiting some of the themes.

DT: I wasn’t using the framework of the Cold War when I did that project. It’s something that I’ve gotten into more recently. I would say at that point what I was most interested in was the emergence of contemporaneity. And what I mean, as I often say, is not contemporary as a chronological category but contemporary as an ideological category, as a value judgment. Certain modern art starts to call itself or be referred to as contemporary art, and where that is inordinately advantageous to it.

And it seems to me that in most of Asia, that becomes the case in this kind of–what is loosely called—the globalization of art. But that doesn’t mean that this is the first art to be called contemporary in Asia. There was art being called contemporary art in Asia for a long time. What it means is that some kind of magical currency or value is unlocked by the new, the rapidity, the new intensity of exchange, the new rhythm and frequency of exchange. And there’s a number of aspects that, I think, are relevant to looking at an Asian Biennale.

One of them, indeed, is the fact that that value previously came from a collection. At this point, around 1995 that I was looking at, value started to be unleashed not by collection itself. The speculative and concrete material value of contemporary art in this ideological sense, I think, is furnished by its mobility and its legibility in very many different places almost at the same time. I think it’s a different sort of value, but it came to trump actually the value of the modern art collection insofar as even artists wanted both. It started to transform exhibitionary logics and exhibitionary expectations quite dramatically as well.

The curator you mentioned, Charles Escher, was part of one of the signal editions of these big international non-Western biennales in 2002, in Gwangju. This show rejected the kind of commodity logic that is at the center of art exchange. Instead, it very deliberately elevates relational, dialogical, communitarian values at the expense of commodity value.

That edition of GB was where I decided my project would end. It was called “Pause.” What came with this title was a connotation that you had the choice and sovereignty to hit pause and step aside from that burgeoning exchange of new value. I think in a very palpable sense, a lot of the artists would say that was possible. It was a break from their work, from daily survival struggles, where like-minded individuals from all sorts of different places who were engaged in somehow similar organizing could share their experience and share their strategies and frustrations maybe.

I do agree that the default historicization of that ends up being important, not because it marks a high watermark for the non-commercial or the show that’s not mediated by the gallery system and so on. I think that’s valuable, but what makes that memorable is the self-historicization. What made that edition important is making it legible and, in fact, making it available and accessible, via a sort of self-historicizing faculty.

Many of the groups who were lucky enough to go and present their activity in 2002, of course, subsequently became important gatekeepers and tastemakers and so on in their respective national locales. There’s probably no exception to that. But it was really important because it was one of those platforms that had the kind of critical mass and the stature to really confirm the importance of art as a kind of international outing that was also Asian. It had this kind of sexy, non-Western side to it. And it was a career-making opportunity for a lot of people. I felt that that edition was a marker insofar as it made the grassroots activity of all of these different Asian places meet. It wasn’t just Asia, of course, but for someone studying Asia, this was important. It made them self-conscious as ambassadors or representatives of a scene that they knew was larger than them. It gave them, in many cases, a little inkling of their historical responsibility. Those platforms were the bread and butter historiography of contemporary art in Asia. It’s their archives actually, in their respective cities, and the historicization of that activity in the ’90s that, in many respects, made up the corpus of this emergence of contemporary art that I talked about. And so, their self-consciousness, their realization that they were historical, was aided by the presentation on that platform.

Another interesting aspect is that I didn’t know until I started the research that even though the first three editions had been supported with substantial resources — a perfect storm of corporate and state entities, multiple levels of government, and big industrial conglomerates contributing and pushing in the same direction — that confluence of patronage had nevertheless produced three extremely chaotic exhibitions. I started to learn about this when I was able to interview people who were involved in the early editions, sometimes remotely, sometimes in person. Everything they said made it feel like an artist’s saga.

This is also interesting to me—it comes to one of your questions—that in formal terms, in organizational and structural terms, the distance between the largest corporate or public-private institutional vehicles on the landscape and the grassroots of contemporary art production is actually not very great when it comes to the spirit of making something. Everybody I talked to who was involved in the early editions said to me at some point: it was mayhem and sometimes it was every person for themselves, and sometimes it was everybody helping everybody. And of course, “Pause” in 2002 professed to make this the brand of their edition. It was very much that kind of experience—beg, borrow, steal to get materials or find someone with the skills to physically make something in the space. It was very much the same for me in 2018, I have to say. So there’s something about Gwangju not evolving as a platform. It was important for me to realize that Gwangju was very institutional from the beginning, but it somehow didn’t institutionalize straightforwardly along institutional lines in some ways. I thought this was interesting.

My argument has always been that if you want to understand what the crucible of contemporaneity is, how contemporaneity gets generated, you have to look at the artist-to-artist exchanges, the artist-to-artist relationships. This is where it happens. The institutions buy into it and they support it, and they’re important because they promote it, make it visible, eventually collect it, and so on. But really, if you want to find where that energy comes from, you have to look at the artist-to-artist level. What I carried into the GB research was a false assumption–that these two forms of activity are structurally distinct, foreign to one another. Actually, in this very big institutional organization, the practice of making contemporary art physically present might have been very similar to doing so in an artist-run environment. That’s part of the rationale for why 2002 became the book’s end.

MY: I totally share this rationale. It’s very telling that you went into the archives looking for this moment of self-historicization or self-historical consciousness and locating it in that moment around 2002. I notice that when there’s a lack of something, there is a larger sense of doing it. In hindsight, it was good that in 2002 there was this sense that the world was getting globalized and people were getting connected. Hence we were doing something larger than ourselves. But what does it mean now? Because now there’s an abundance of connections and alliances, and many practitioners are no longer cash-strapped, but some of these formats persist – we still witness this sort of informal artistic labor performed in places like documenta fifteen.

DT: The Malaysian art critic Lee Weng Choy named one of his essays “Why is it so annoying, this global-local dyad?” I think you could criticize it in the same way as you have. Is globalization over? That, I think, the jury’s out on. I think certainly the enthusiasm that I talked about, and the enthusiasm for globalization as this kind of happy convergence, or the possibility of doing things with everybody—to abuse an Indonesianism, you know—that enthusiasm has passed. I would agree with you that it’s become part of a kind of discursive toolkit that is often used—not necessarily cynically all the time, but strategically. Let’s say globalization, and maybe even the end of globalization, is part of this vocabulary and, like you say, some artist groups or individuals can perform and manifest grassrootsness without actually being it.

However, at the same time, I would say that the encompassment is not complete of non-hegemonic art scenes globally that was inaugurated at the end of the ’80s or the beginning of the ’90s. Is it easier for artists working in a kind of out of the way place to be plugged into that network? Yes, it’s quicker. Definitely, I think it’s very clear that one can maintain a practice in a non metropolitan and in the global south off the track of this kind of bigger institutional circulation, and yet be plugged into that institutional circulation much more readily than before. But I don’t think that that is the end of this process. I think that the encompassment continues and that it will continue to be that process as long as the power differential is so drastic—between those peripheries and the global centers. I might agree with you that the global centers have multiplied. And the multipolarity of the contemporary art world, I think, is also demonstrable. But I don’t think that that means that this machinery of encompassment has been retired—maybe it’s just become more efficient. It continues as long as decision making is still concentrated in a relatively small number of places. And, I think that that’s still the case. Are there more of those places in Asia than previously? Yes, I think so. I’ve also noted, with some interest, recent appointments in art institutions outside of Asia of curators who were trained in Asia. This is not something that I was looking for five years ago, and this was rather unthinkable 10 years ago. But now it’s possible to have studied in Asia and cut your teeth professionally working in and out of institutions in Asia — although sometime in the so called “West” is probably still mandatory — and then be employable at very high levels in Europe. The hierarchy we’re talking about is implicit in what I’ve just said.

I don’t think that globalization is over. I’m not really confident about that. I think some of the topics that I came up with for that project in 2018, in retrospect, seemed to me to anticipate something, and I definitely wouldn’t claim that this was conscious. The preoccupations about the identity in the 90s seem to be lost on the current generation. This sort of identitarian thing obviously made a comeback recently. Everybody saw that, and often it was pointed out that this is not the first time that contemporary art has dealt with these issues. I would say that in pointing to identity, one could very easily add the body and technology; one could add queer history. These are raging preoccupations of the 90s in art, in theory, in cultural studies, whatever. And it seems to me that younger artists, who are in many ways the kind of figureheads now of these topics, are in many cases almost totally ignorant of that. And this is something I find kind of amazing.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that in picking threads through those early editions of the Biennale, I was kind of looking for things that were present in contemporary art at the time. I was doing this research in 2017-2018. I was looking for the kind of materials in the early editions that would really speak to what artists were getting interested in at the present.

Tradition and modernity

DT: And it seems to me that it shows a real failure of art education. Actually, this is sadly the conclusion that I sort of took away from it: that it’s a sad indictment of art schools. Artists in their 20s and 30s at this point seem to have no connection whatsoever to a lot of important work that was being done only 20, 25 years ago—be it in galleries and artists’ studios, or in writing, theory, publishing, or programming in institutions. I find this ignorance shocking, and I can only blame art schools.

I think it’s amazing that the history of contemporary art is so poorly taught, that it’s possible for artists to be so oblivious to such recent advances in the topics that are interesting to them. There is a kind of narrowing and a shortening of the memory cycles that artists are trained to activate. That’s probably off-topic a bit, but I think this is another sort of discovery of the project. The topics I went for were not designed, as in ‘I’m going to look for this and this and this.’ It was really like, ‘What are the things that jump out at me when I look at the history of the platform? What are the things that jump out at me that were, for the present moment, kind of relevant and I thought were relevant to the current show the other curators are making?’

I found more than I expected making the show in 2018. And so things like the Diaspora show, for example, seemed to me to be of obvious relevance to the present. And yet, no one had ever told me about this show. None of the artists that I’ve talked to in the last 10 years who are interested in these kinds of histories had ever pointed out that there was a show on a large platform, reasonably well-funded, very well-researched, that was along exactly these lines.

MY: I’m also reminded of the example of the folk museum in Gwangju that your research surfaced, which staged contemporary artworks that connected to the indegenous cosmologies and practices, already back in the 90s. Meanwhile, we’ve seen a proliferation of traditional practices, indigenous espistomologies etc. at display in art exhibitions, both in the west and non-west, just in the past six years. Not only is there an amnesia in the contemporary art world of these early works, but also you pointed out excellently how tradition was claimed by, bureaucratized and standardized by the authoritarian regime during the Cold War after, and how local traditions, customary rules co-existed with modern state form. It seems we are experiencing some intellectual back-pedaling here. One can credit this trend to some kind of artistic currency or vogue a la ‘whatever the west thinks it’s not but should be, and the global south is’, but we lose sight of the structural embeddness, and the even deeper layer of collective unconsciousness that you call the ‘incomplete modernization’ of asian societies. I think I could locate this for example, in the question of the ‘community’, i.e. the distinction between premodern pre-individualist vs. postmodern post-individualist, through which I looked at the practice and claims made in documenta fifteen.

Cold War histories

MY: It was very interesting to learn through your GB research about the Kcho case at GB and to reflect on Gwangju and Havana biennales – both leading non-western platforms, embodiment of south-south ambitions, both countries in a way stuck in the Cold War frame. GB documented quite well the intellectual back-pedaling in Cuba in the initial Post Cold War years. I wonder how we can take the non-western, or south-south connections not too literally? The association by country does not necessarily translate into common causes or struggles at the people to people level. Your research resurfaced Cuban artist Beatriz Gonzeles’s work in GB, which also symbolizes this aspiration for connection, but it can end up being a one way street sometimes. Curatorial interventions can do a lot of heavy lifting here in establishing connections and amplifying common aspirations where they are not evident, but when is it too much?

What is for you the Cold war legacy today in the arts? If back in the 90s there’s an acute sense of a shared Cold War experience, by now it has become a very long hangover for these two parts of the world though geopolitics it is still there. As much as it is valuable to unearth historical (dis)connections conditioned by the Cold War, what do they tell us today?

DT: South Korea is kind of reckoning with its Cold War histories. The only other thing I would add, given that you mentioned that you sort of have a Cold War historical frame against this, is when I saw that edition of the Biennale curated by Massimiliano Gioni in 2013, the Cold War had basically evaporated in that shutter.I don’t consider myself an art critic, but when I left this edition of the Biennale in Venice, I kind of had the anger of an art critic, because in the conceit of a global survey, I felt it shouldn’t be possible to ignore the Cold War. And this seemed to me to be one of the ways in which Asia was being represented: with this goldfish memory, with this short memory, with this inadequate memory. In fact, in 2013, I would say that for Southeast Asian purposes, the thaw had only really just begun — the thaw in which Cold War histories started to become bread and butter for contemporary artists. I put the beginning of this in my book—I think in the early 2000s, some leading artists started to get into this declassified material, etc.

And for me, there’s this obvious thaw which happens with a certain generation. I’m thinking about people like Apicharpong, Ho Tzu Nyen, and so on, for whom Cold War-repressed histories suddenly become fair game. And it becomes important to perform them. And it mainly happens in moving image for reasons that are still beyond me. And it’s figurative, it’s not allegorical anymore. There’s a historiographic kind of groundswell. I think that happens.

So in 2013, to go to Venice and to see that it was possible to survey the whole world without mentioning 50, 60 years of very consequential violence was staggering to me. The histories that really kind of made Asia cohere—I mean not for art—but rather as a continent, the geopolitical existence of Asia as we know it, depends so heavily on that violence and for that to not be present at all. There were two or three artworks in the whole of that edition of the Biennale where you could point to the Cold War and have the license to do it. It would have been irresponsible for any Asian curator to do such a show, I think.

That’s also in the background here when I’m doing the Gwangju project. I’m also sort of thinking about how Asia probably requires different logics other than this universal surveying. I was looking for topics where it wasn’t just global contemporary art. I made this project for an Asian audience. It’s not supposed to be contributing to the biggest picture universalism of the platform that I feel is not mine. That’s not my contribution.

Post-globalization and the future of biennales

MY: That’s really interesting. I think it also hints at some of the questions about the post-global Biennale, or the future of the Biennale. When I say post-globalization, in terms of geopolitics and the political economy dimension of things. But, of course, what concerns us is really how does it change the precept of art. Increasingly, we are no longer able to shoulder this or to uphold this universalist image of same values or same aspirations anymore.

Nowadays, I have a multipolarity/post-globalization framework that, in a way, makes apparent the vanilla theory production of the time of globalization. In the artworld, many want to be able to renew some kind of anti-hegemonic, anti-imperialist struggle. But none of this has any purchase in the real world. Identification with something in the past does not equal political actions in today’s world. What’s going on in the real world is actually de-globalization. There’s a gap between the sort of art world aspirations of internationalism and what was actually going on with liberal internationalism—it’s something that I think only becomes clearer now.

DT: I think you’re right. Maybe what’s more urgent is to actually look in detail at liberalism. What’s already maybe on the record is the attempt by anti-globalization people to kind of separate the freedom of capital from human freedom. But I don’t think that has even begun to do the work that’s necessary when it comes to complicating liberalism and its legacies. You know, that we don’t actually understand what the “neo” is in neoliberalism a lot of the time.

MY: It’s also not just a question of philosophy, because we don’t understand the different strands of liberalism. I’ve been doing a lot of deep reckoning via Postliberalism as a more rigorous academic discipline. There’s a whole layer of conservative US media outlets that proclaim to be pluralist, but in reality, they’re very conservative and promote some kind of technocratic state. Within the liberal tradition, you can tease out some of these, but you can also have an update of liberalism toward tolerance and self-criticality. I’ve been going through this reckoning because, as you can probably imagine, there’s an upheaval regarding academic freedom and artistic freedom in Germany. It is a really perspicuous way to understand where the real problem lies. The way it escalates, such as in the Strike Germany campaign, is also not very constructive. The only line of defense is some kind of universalist notion of artistic freedom or academic freedom, which is a particular product of this era of globalization and 30 years of very peaceful liberal democracy.

DT: I had talked about Anselm Franke’s last show with Kerstin Stakemeier called Illiberal Art. I thought it was all about exactly this, and I thought it was very timely. Most people really hated this show. Not only did it really speak to what was happening in the institutional landscape in Germany at that time, especially in Berlin, but I think it spoke to this larger gap, which is that ‘we don’t understand the underbelly of the liberal tradition.’ We don’t understand liberalism in any detail, in any of its nuances when we use this term.

MY: I agree it was a highly timely show. I take a more latent geopolitical perspective at things these days. For me, post-liberalism is to look at what Saudi Arabia or what China is doing in terms of art and culture, not with preset judgements but trying to understand the logic of it.

DT: I mean, authoritarianism is civilization too. Another region that’s very dear to my heart is Central Asia. And you can really see very interesting totalitarian regimes that are undergoing liberalization, but it is not the Western kind.

MY 22:09: Indeed. It’s authoritarian, but it’s still trying to develop a civil society. There’s a burgeoning sense of civic life and art and culture are also playing a very positive role in that. So, it’s very different if you compare it to the sort of cynicism in art and culture critique in the West.

But I do feel the regional integration in Southeast Asia is still more open-minded and optimistic, whereas the regionalism in Europe right now is very navel-gazing. It’s becoming more conservative, which is probably part of the reconfiguration that is happening.

DT: I think on deglobalization, I approach with the same caution. Nowadays, you can actually read ‘decolonize museums’ in a job ad, in a curatorial job advertisement. Are you committed? Are you committed to demodernizing contemporary art? I don’t want to sound like a broken record player, but there were a lot of debates about the post in post-modern, and it seems to me that a lot of commentators of the present would benefit from actually schooling themselves in the debates around the post because I think what’s being done with the “De” is pretty much the same thing.

And then we need to qualify the root term in an ambivalent way. I’m not criticizing it, but I think that what comes with it is a greater demand for qualification in globalization. Yes, it’s changed. But, as I was saying before, I feel as though the kind of swallowing motion that it entails hasn’t slowed. In this respect, I think Sakai is quite a good guide.

To come to your question about the modern as well, you know, like the incomplete modernization, which, I think, was a fruitful kind of paradigm for a lot of people over a long period. To chart historically an unfinished program that one could hypothetically engage as a never-ending process, at the same time as a story of belatedness. So, there’s all sorts of temporal collisions going on in that term. I think that that’s quite a productive thing.

This incompleteness of the modernist has been productive. Where Sakai is interesting is that he’s trying to argue that actually something has come to an end. And what comes to an end is the underlying kind of ethnographic gathering that is guaranteed by the logic of West versus the rest. I think that is mainly kind of invoking at that time. It’s true that the Cold War needs to be historicized afresh, as with the Cold War as a history in art. But it’s also true that it needs to be brought to an end, as a kind of logic for analyzing and telling the story of art at the same time.

On the one hand, this idea of the incompleteness of modernity is less and less a condescending project or condescending projection of the West. It is more and more maintained only by the post-colonial subject. So, in this respect, Sakai is right that in order to overcome that one-sidedness of the belatedness histories—we’re always catching up.

What’s actually happened is that this is inverted. The historical positions have kind of inverted. It’s the West that is looking to Asia, and this is manifest in area studies and international relations, and so on. Asia’s the future. Everybody’s known for 25 years that Asia’s the future, right? And now we’re in the so-called Asian century as some of these kind of buzzwords that I was also hoping to kind of irritate in Gwangju. This is why it’s necessary to have our story straight—to figure out what has ended. I’m not sure that I would agree that globalization is a candidate there.

MY: I think the reversion is very crucial because I think, contrary to what people, especially people in postcolonial studies—what I see in Asia—there is actually no longer an appetite even in re-criminating the West.

DT: In Southeast Asia, that’s never been a strong element.

MY: Exactly. So, people are concerned with such topics as different development paths. And I feel actually, when asked the question on incomplete modernization, I think of it in both ways – in sort of pejorative sense, but also, I feel it’s very important to have our stories straight there.

But so much get lost on the way in between these complicated contexts. So when I looked at Documenta 15, from the reactions in the West, what I saw was people wanting to project an aspiration towards some kind of post-modern and post-individual society until places and practices that are sometimes actually pre-modern and pre-individual. So there are actually very concrete projects to be made in order to catch up, albeit not in the sense that you have to follow the Western pathway. But then maybe from another perspective, the West, having gone through this level of post-liberalism, that the current sort of renewal of the social contract has to be a kind of never-ending modernization for the West as well, and in that sense that’s where we can also look at each other in a more calm and sober way.

DT: I hope so. The way I would describe it is that the grounds of that dialectic have melted and evaporated somehow. The idea that contemporaneity is somehow the kind of God-given progressive component of the modern. “Contemporary” is the name we have for the more progressive side of the modern day. And every time you hear it in Southeast Asia, it’s the people who basically have a kind of concrete avowal of the Asian studies’ priority given to modernities and who are interested in and engaged in the contemporary but don’t want contemporaneity to feel like it has in any way transcended modernity. And so there’s a kind of gatekeeping that goes something like: you can only study by studying the model. You don’t learn anything about the contemporary in the contemporary. And then, if you really want to learn, it’s what Sakai calls “a form of civilizational transfer.”

There’s this part in the book ‘The End of Pax Americana’ by Naoki Sakai where he refers to art movements, which is again just staggering for me. What art movements is he following? It uses the example of art to explain the way that global contemporaneity, which he does accept is distinct as a kind of historical phenomenon, inescapably rests on what he calls the innately hierarchical projection—he’s comparing it to what he calls the theory of emanation discourse in anthropology. In archaeology, we call it diffusionism. This idea that it starts here and then it goes out there. And he says that you don’t have the conditions for contemporaneity. He’s talking specifically about contemporaneity that he has qualified as global. You can’t have this without that basis of the emanation model of modernity where the West sort of produces ideas and everybody else sort of receives.

His agenda is to demonstrate the racism of that emanation model of modernity. But he accepts that it is nevertheless still intrinsic to the moment of global contemporaneity. He uses art as an example. I still don’t understand why or how he does this, but he says Southeast Asia Art thinkers are looking to Southeast Asia for this contemporary. Basically, he’s kind of, without knowing it, parroting Charles Esche 15 years ago, right? And I find it really weird that an area studies person in 2022 has the same kind of superficial conception of where the new is coming from. I find it completely opaque, but really interesting that Southeast Asia could have this.

And maybe this comes back to where we started the conversation in a way, that the Asian Biennale. Even if you’re right that kind of globalization is finished and even if you’re right that in a multipolar global scenario, these kinds of graded or discrete ideological systems get entrenched—where liberalism gets turned inside out, I still think even in the present an Asian Biennale has a choice to make. And the choice could be framed in this way: either you continue in the manifestation of what you or someone else thinks is current, or you accept that you are part of a history-making engine. And you try to reveal that process as you do it, which isn’t necessarily incompatible with a devotion to the new, but which introduces a kind of baseline requirement of self-reflexivity.

And one way you could do that is to make it a norm that every Biennale is accompanied by some kind of historical or archival agenda or even topic. Or alternatively, like something that I was trying to do, which was a discovery. I know that GB is trying to do this, but I think it will struggle to do that insofar as the institutional form of the foundation continues, with its speed bumps admittedly.

I agree that the landscape globally has changed a lot since the mid-90s. It doesn’t make sense to do the Biennale on the same pretexts. Every big platform has this moment of reckoning: “how do we reinvent what we’re doing?” In my opinion, in order to get beyond this, GB would have to reckon with the currency of that political history of the city, as well as the failure of the platform to do justice to the martyrs of 1980. This is obviously unrealized, and the way they keep building institutions in Gwangju is proof that art is not going to enact that reconciliation effectively. It might perform it from time to time, but I don’t think contemporary art, as we know it, has the means to do what the platform set out to do.

What else should be done? I think Gwangju has missed a lot of opportunities because it was always too easy to fall back on that story. It is such a great story and so important in many places, but you can’t just keep telling it. I think that’s a big challenge for Gwangju.

I really hope that people present options for moving outside of that paradigm. However, I feel as though if it’s going to get there, it probably needs to make a concrete commitment to its own history. At the moment, I don’t think that’s the case. I think it makes gestures towards that, and I think my show was one of those gestures. I think this dialogue project is another gesture in that direction. But until the platform itself realizes a historical calling, I think it’s going to be very hard for the exhibition to move on from the given.

MY: That’s really like soul searching. I feel that it’s almost a social contract that Gwangju has made with art. Regarding how one can make concrete this commitment to history, it has to do with what is our understanding of a desired political form of a society and how we get there? The democracy movement and others have these historical credentials, but other movements elsewhere turned out differently. So, to have a sort of reckoning not just with your own history but to look at much broader movements in history and to think about where we are going might be my answer to this conundrum.

DT: You’re right that putting an end to globalization, even if only speculatively, is one way to do it. That might be a way to close the circle of Gwangju from 1995 to 2024 or whatever. But I just feel like there are so many other things that Gwangju could do. I don’t think the city itself has to be confined to that political history alone.

One of the ways it might do this is to accept the archive and acknowledge its history. There’s a chapter of the GB, and it looks like this: it is the Biennale of Globalization. It’s the biennale of the post-Cold War dilation of the arts system. It’s the biennale of making Cold War repression part and parcel of that articulation of the present — that contemporaneity. But I think this is valuable insofar as you can say, “That chapter has concluded, at least where this biennale is concerned. That history is past.”

MY: We have no answer to that. You formulated the question very well, and it might be best to end with that question, which points to another commitment to consider.