Text: Wang Zheng
Artist He Gong and Dr. Sophia Kidd invited me to join this exhibition, Geographies of Feeling in the spring of 2023, a period the world is just emerging out of the lingering Pandemic, and a unique moment for rebirth and recollection.
I finished the publication of my first artist poetry album Mountain Rock and was living alone in Singapore to complete the first year of my Ph.D. in Art, Design, and Media with a newly acquired specialization in Chinese media art and body politics.
It was a new phase for me and I realized also, a new phase for Chinese art to be recounted with alternative methods and feelings.
Although I was immediately intrigued by the title of the exhibition ‘Geographies of Feeling,’ I have never seriously considered myself part of the great edifice of Chinese contemporary art. Having been a diasporic individual to China, to my ethnic group of the Mien, and now to the West (in Singapore), I see myself more as an ‘outsider’ in the sense of Meursault to his world in The Stranger.
Being an outsider, however, does not equate to the absolute release from all geographical coordinates. In the work Imaginary Homelands by Salman Rushdie, diaspora is to find the self through a shattered mirror. In this sense, I and my works are still tethered to the ‘Geographies of Feeling,’ almost as destined as it seems today.
As Dr. Kidd remarks, ‘creative geography’ suggests that ‘works of art articulate various aspects of human spatiality’ and accordingly, she adopts this geographical approach to this exhibition to illustrate to interpret the artworks in this exhibition.
Similarly, I adopted a geographical approach to writing Mountain Rock as a perceptive journal of my diasporic journey since my birth and other visual works including those, I created during an art residency I participated in in Chongqing during the subtropical summer of 2021. The title feels only too personal.
The three geographical dimensions speak to my cultural identity as a Diasporic artist. Born into an ethnic minority family of Mien people (who ironically have an epic tradition of telling stories of migration), I spent my childhood in Guilin and then moved to Wuhan for middle and high school. I then relocated to Houston, Texas, for college and to Los Angeles, California for graduate school.
After that, I went to Singapore for my doctorate degree and have been commuting between Singapore and San Francisco ever since. Although I have never lived extensively in the Chuanyu region, I have participated in an art residency at Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, which marked a threshold moment in my practice, and curated multiple exhibitions in Chengdu and Chongqing.
In 2021, my first curatorial journey in China, a touring exhibition entitled Photo+Synthesis was launched in Chengdu and was well received by the local audience. Serendipitously enough, I enjoyed conversing with the Chuanyu audience with my Wuhan dialect, which clearly is a relative to the Chengdu and Chongqing dialect, all belonging to the Southwestern Mandarin family. This surprise was unique.
In retrospect, it is not a singular time or space, but a plural spatiality that can account for my cultural identity, which is crucial to my art practice.
The physical geography of mountains and cities, the cultural geography of language, knowledge, and education, and the affective geography of a changing self, all come to form my affective field of being and inform my practice in turn.
As the British scholar Stuart Hall indicates, the diasporic self is always in a state of ‘becoming,’ and is a product of interactions. My latest work, Mountain Rock soon to be presented in the exhibition showcases the mechanism of these interactions and how each of the geographical dimensions unfolds and transforms the discrete trails of affect into a reflective network of experiences.
I sincerely hope that my work will act as a roadmap for audiences to navigate complexities in their lives and hereby find a sense of strength and freedom in reconnecting with the post-pandemic world.
-Zheng (Moham) Wang, Fremont 2023
