The Aesthetics of "Silence": Cultural Consciousness in Contemporary East Asian Art Exhibitions

Abstract

Exhibitions of Asian art in Japan experienced a turning point with the establishment of the Asian Art Museum in Fukuoka in 1999. Fukuoka serves as a gateway to continental Asia by way of its geographical location. The new museum was a response to a global tendency to overcome the supremacy of Western art systems; to represent our own and to dissolve the hierarchy between these two. To support the potentialities of Asian art ”now,” the museum systematically collects and exhibits only modern and contemporary Asian art. This is a totally new concept in the Asian region. Nevertheless, the concept of exhibitions of Asian art in Japan seems to have gradually departed from the politic of the West vs non-West dualism, and has gone beyond the simple schema of multiculturalism. The exhibition entitled The Elegance of Silence: Contemporary Art From East Asia, which was held at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo in 2005, is one such example. It seemed predominantly based on the ”art for art's sake” approach, in relation to the concept of traditional thought in East Asia. The assertion of this exhibition was that China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan have inherited the intellectual traditions of ancient China, especially the culture of writing, and other reciprocal cultural influences. Through these common aspects, the exhibition was to show the beauty of nature and landscapes, as well as silence, as the title of the exhibition suggests. Both old and new, tradition and modernity are taken up dialectically and within this oppositional structure. There is an assumption that a new dynamism in art is rising. Yet the cultural unity of East Asia was, and is, both uncertain and provisional. The cultural consciousness is not definitive either. So, in the case of this exhibition, we have to firstly question: is nature or a collective view of traditional East Asian Art--”silence,” ”non-presence,” ”vacuum”-- effective enough after modernization? Secondly, are these characteristics even indigenous to East Asian art? German Romanticism and Abstract Expressionism in the USA during the 19th and 20th centuries, for example, was also pursued with this mentality, especially that of ”silence.” This distinct awareness between difference and commonality might be necessary. The art historian Michael Baxandall, in the well-known book Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (1991), remarked that the principle of exhibitions is to recognize the cultural differences of the artist, the exhibitor and the viewer. This approach was very effective in the era of multiculturalism, which had a tendency to offend the identities of each. However, as trans-culturalism and a sense of crossing boundaries are more authentic in the current context, art exhibitions as cultural politics may latently carry the message of a reactionary cultural consciousness for oneness.