Translators' Notes1

Abstract

Together, my installation Notes On Return and essay Translator's Notes represent a single research output in visual culture. It arises from my interests in postcolonial discourse and the specificities of Anglo-Chinese diaspora. Translator's Notes (Journal of Visual Culture - citation below), engages with the politics and poetics of the conflation of linguistic competence with cultural authenticity in 'pidgin' cultures. Begun as a review in Third Text, it is published as part of a themed issue of the Journal of Visual Culture. It was presented at the conference, Contemporary Chinese Art in the International Arena (British Museum, 2002), and also arises from PIDGIN, a collaboration with artist Erika Tan The piece connects to my essay ‘A-Y (Entries for an Inventionry of Dented ‘I's)', Boyce, S. (ed.), Shades of Black: (London: inIVA, 2005); previously published in Third Text (62, 2004). Notes On Return is an installation work commissioned for ‘The Translator's Notes', Cafe Gallery Projects, London (2003). This also pursues questions of language and translation in terms of how pidgins form across ‘standard' and ‘broken' Englishes or ‘Chinglish', and might elude preconceptions of diasporic identity. In revised forms, the work exhibited in the exhibition Reassurance, SPACETriangle, London (2005) and Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester (2005), and for the exhibition Cruel/Loving Bodies, curated by Sasha Su-Ling Welland at Shanghai Duolun MoMA, Beijing 798 Space (2004) and Hong Kong Arts Centre (2006). Related publications to this piece include my untitled essay in Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, 2(3), 2003; and conference papers given at A Free State, British Museum (2004) and Artist as Researcher, Goldsmiths College (2003). These investigations provided the theoretical framework for my edited issue of the Journal of Visual Culture on Hong Kong (November 2007).