Personal reflection from Liverpool Fact Centre’s exhibition: “My garden, my sanctuary.” Sian Fan (UK) and Yaloo (South Korea), curated by Carrie Chan.
“Asian identity through the lens of digital media”.
The Glitch
I already witnessed the glitch on my journey to the exhibition. This is a concept that is beyond the common limits dictated by the definition of “culture” and “identity”. It’s one step ahead. The step you take in Bold Street, and you can pop from India to Italy, from England to East Asia just by walking. All shops, restaurants, music, arts, people, languages. Well, if you have walked in that street, literally or metaphorically, I am sorry ‘not sorry’ to say that you have a glitch in your identity too.
A glitch dwells in all of us, being part of this melting pot
A glitch dwells in all of us just by being part of this melting pot. That’s why we need to dialogue with other cultures and, even before this will happen, they are already part of us.
People tattooing a carp (without having seen one before), eating ramen without even knowing what this is made of, dancing to a song that you don’t know what the lyrics is about but for you all have personal meaning, taste, perspective. It’s just wonderful, they are no longer attached to their own culture. Neither the object neither you. Both are a hybrid. This is going to be part of you. You are going to be a new you with these little pieces that you collected along the way you walked. Made you and your journey unique. That’s why diversity should be embraced and celebrated, any kind of it.
I am an average Italian with all-over-the-worlds’ friends going to a Chinese restaurant under the so-loved English weather before a Reggaeton night doing my best speaking English among scousers.
Surely globalisation has dark sides but let’s look at the bright side, you can travel the world: just opening your eyes, and most importantly, opening your mind.
The Exhibition
A series of large-scale animated installations and interactive gaming environments, using commodified symbols of East-Asian culture that have become commonplace globally. These symbols include K-pop dance routine, the use of seaweed in food and beauty products, hypersexualised female avatars, and spiritual icons stripped of their religious significance. The artists take these symbols and remix them to build playful worlds where identities are more fluid.
Yaloo Seaweed Garden, photoby Sarah Kim
Yaloo presents a mystical underwater garden of seaweed: an immersive journey through ancient beliefs and family history. Above the water’s surface, Sian Fan’s world takes shape as a lotus flower-filled sanctuary.
Together the artists’ works create a space for discovery and dialogue.
For them, the blossoming of new, fluid identities begin by exploring our roots and history. This passage to self-realisation can be hard, and at times painful, but ultimately enlightening and joyful.
Why they did so?
Sian Fan: “I am compelled to create – it’s a compulsion rather than a motivation. I am British but am half British / half Chinese. Much of work is me thinking through issues, in particular my own identity. My works from the show, Lotus Root and Deity consider how growing up disconnected from my Asian heritage I often looked to representation in popular culture, in particular anime and video games. At the time I found their imagery completely seductive and beautiful but as I got older, I began to comprehend the discomfort in the way they objectified Asian femininity. I use these works to counter the hyper aestheticization of Asiatic female bodies and to highlight the violent nature of their underlying objectification.
disconnected from my Asian heritage I looked to representation in popular culture
Sian Fan Phantom
“Within my work I seek to think about and understand complex issues. I never try to find a polarising or simple answer, and rather aim to explore the nuance around a question or state. I feel a project is successful if the result is complex and multi-layered, and if it feels challenging. As I say I don’t try to find any answers with my work, so I don’t try to solve societal issues. Instead, I hope my work highlights the complex nature of our reality and in doing so encourages people to think in an open-ended way.”
Carrie Chan: “Media shapes our culture and identity but sometimes this creates misrepresentation. The gaming element is there because you can speak about identity and media.
“The dualism of what is real and what is not, all the stages that we go through as humans, all the stereotypes that we use to orientate ourselves in this world when we look at something that is not familiar. In a city as Liverpool where there is a strong presence of Asian food, markets, shops, studies and a strong interest for Korean fashion and K-pop dance/music, this exhibition was a dialogue between the people and the products that they are enjoying and that are incorporate in their own identity, sometimes, without even noticing it. That’s why the main element in the exhibition is water, it symbolises the fluidity in our identity, of our existence.”
This avatar glitches. As you, your person, your life can’t be really represented in a whole, in a shape. Everyone has an identity and, at least, one social media. Sadly, sometimes we have more the second than the first. And so, here we are, thinking about that through the tool of digital itself. The light that creates shadows of our own life-experience, the sounds that overlap like voices in our head, the games and digital images that create this duality between what is real and what is not.
Doesn’t really matter if you changed the country, the partner, the diet, the way you looked at your culture. What it was, it is no longer. For all the people that struggle to find their own identity, for all the people that change perspectives on subjects. The world has changed for you. This is where you can glimpse it, the glitch.