Jason Wee ponders art, cruising and our changing lexicon of space
I was asked, recently, why I continue to think about cruising while I’m making art. Cruising as a way of thinking about hope of both the sexual and the social kind can seem both a little retro – a furtive pleasure camouflaged from oppressive constraints – and a little retrofuturist – a utopian desire borne out of our present despair and cynicism with meeting others, on- or offline. Crucially, cruising has long since exited my own repertoire of intimacies and pleasures. One reason is my fascination with how we know of each other through a kind of echolocation in places either ignorant of, agnostic or even downright hostile to the concept of ‘us’: that is, the ways in which we might belong to each other, even if only for a little while. What does it mean to people a place, when ‘the people’ relinquish any identitarian categorisations that are locked to genealogies of identity or as a basis for legitimatising sovereignty and amassing power: when ‘the people’ no longer designates a collective noun but a verb, an acting-upon, a motion?
To reconsider ‘the people’ as an act of peopling requires walking a path through our language for describing forms of coming together. The English language offers a number of possibilities for people as action, and the differences are necessary to parse. I have in mind ‘the people’ distinct from the crowd, whether open or closed as the writer Elias Canetti, in his study Crowds and Power (1960), has described to degrees of organisation and growth; or from the pack and the mob, with the implications of violence attached to each. To people runs in the other direction, away from those associations with power. Instead, it offers me an opportunity to think about a gathering of those who are divested of or denied power, where those who occupy the opposite pole of our social hierarchies nonetheless find an occasion to take their sometimes very public places. In this way, people is distinguishable from populate where the latter is a matter of census and accounting. The tallying-up of any given population by governing authorities is so often useful in enclosing domiciles and establishing the frontiers of said authorities’ influence by quantification. To populate suggests a thinking based on capacity and Malthusian density; to people is to ask about the hows and whens of occupying space. Rather than ask how many are here or are necessary in order to count (that is, to matter), I want to ask about the people as a movement in the minor key: how spaces are queered by someone like a younger me walking into a mall or a carpark where my ‘belonging’ is tenuous and contingent on my conformity to a sequence of expectations – window shop, make a purchase, locate my vehicle – and arriving at any moment at the sensation of having found my people even when I am for the moment alone. That is to say that I found something to do, and someone to do it with. That we made a space to belong to, for now.
How places bind and unbind belonging stayed on my mind when I was invited earlier this year to take part in the Changwon Sculpture Biennale in South Korea. The curator Seewon Hyun and I had worked together on different projects, including my solo presentation at Audio Visual Pavilion, the exhibition space that she founded and runs in Seoul. But she surprised me when she skipped past more familiar activities and premised her invitation on a much earlier work on queer navigations that I had presented at H Project Space in Bangkok, and asked if I would consider developing a new installation from those ideas that are grounded in my use and thinking of queer desire paths. For a long while, I wasn’t sure about the proposal. I recognised in her choice of exhibition sites an emphatic refiguring of the relationship between people and place, such that the vertical hierarchies of who claims belonging, when and where might be upturned. One of the biennale sites, for example, is the Seongsan Shell Mound, an archaeological site that comprises meters-deep stacks of shells discarded after their soft parts have been consumed. Over a thousand years old, its Iron Age history and food-waste landscape shift my impressions of contemporary Changwon as a highly planned urban system onto a much longer timeline. No surprise it’s a place unvisited by and unfamiliar to Changwon residents. I’ve walked Bangkok and am familiar with it in ways that I cannot come close to in Changwon. Are there queered spaces in Changwon? I asked a bar owner in Busan who knows both cities. Yes: his finger circles a small block between two streets on the map on his bright phone-screen in his darkened bar lit in red and magenta. But it’s not easy, he says. I took that to mean both my finding them and the making and maintaining of these spaces.
At some point I lost my cool, seeing Seewon’s request as a constraint – a well-intentioned misunderstanding of queering rather than an opportunity. I eventually got my chill back, and settled on six stands of fabric scattered in the auxiliary spaces of one exhibition site. Like six figures each waiting for the other, waiting for something to happen; figures that, pardon the obvious pun, stood eyeing the permanent installation of 93 monitors by Nam June Paik, titled The Spring of Changwon (2000), which dominates the main entrance with all its vertiginous masculine bulbousness, while letting its pink tail show. They stood on the stairs, and under it, in the edges of the forum outside of the exhibition galleries; never quite in, and yet not entirely out of place either. For better or worse, they were taking up space.
After a long day of installing my works, getting the panels to the right height and adjusting their posture and face, I followed the bar owner’s directions to the area we had discussed. Bright signs on each side of the streets lit up the night like polished crowns in a dentist’s wet dream. I walked in and peered down the throats of the side streets and alleys, but I couldn’t see what or who I was looking for. Do I even know what I was looking for? For a few minutes I stood in one place, and looked around, looked harder. At some point I was self-conscious, of being seen.
ArtReview is partnering with Asymmetry to publish a series of cultural reflections by the foundation’s fellows