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Intellect Books - Lu Pan

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213 pages

English

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A photo-collage of past and present street visuals in Asia, Aestheticizing Public Space explores the domestic, regional, and global nexus of East Asian cities through their graffiti, street art, and other visual forms in public space. Attempting to unfold the complex positions of these images in the urban spatial politics of their respective regions, Lu Pan explores how graffiti in East Asia reflects the relationship between aesthetics and politics. The book situates itself in a contested dynamic relationship among human bodies, visual modernity, social or moral norms, styles, and historical experiences and narratives. On a broader level, this book aims to shed light on how aesthetics and politics are mobilized in different contested spaces and media forms, in which the producer and the spectator change and exchange their identities.

Part I: Carnival on the Street—Visual Order and its (Pseudo-)Reversion

Chapter 1: A Twisted Carnival: State-Sponsored Graffiti in China

Chapter 2: Writing at the End of History: Reflections on Two Cases of Graffiti in Hong Kong

Part II: Aura on (and beyond) the Street—Body, Community, and Media

Chapter 3: Trans-spatial Images: Traveling Graffiti (Art) and the Possibility of Resistance in Chinese Urban Space

Chapter 4: Eloquence of Silent Speech: JR in East Asia

Part III: Dissensus on the Street—Aesthetics, Politics, and Public Space

Chapter 5: The Spectacle of Democracy: Violence, Language, and Dissensus in the Case of Anti-war Graffiti in Tokyo

Chapter 6: The Nation’s Shame? Seoul’s Rat Graffiti Incident at the 2010 G-20 Summit

Part IV: Creativity on the Street—Visual Narratives of East Asian Creative Cities

Chapter 7: Art, Urban Space, and Governance: Street Mural and “Legal Wall” in Japan

Chapter 8: Marginality as Centrality: The “Seoul Urban Art Project” and AGIT in Busan

Special Chapter: Voices from the Street—Interviews with Street Visual Producers in East Asia

Interview with VERY

Interview with Garoo

Interview with Zyko (Beijing)

Interview with Ken Lee @Dirty Panda

Interview with Friendly @Invasian

Sujets

Criticism

Theory

Photography

Art

Informations

Publié par	Intellect Books
Date de parution	06 janvier 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781783204557
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,2200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2015 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2015 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2015 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Cover designer: Shin-E Chuah
Cover Image: Graffiti Avenue in Huangjueping, Chongqing, China. Courtesy of Yong Wang.
Production manager: Amy Rollason
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-453-3
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-454-0
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-455-7
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I: Carnival on the Street—Visual Order and its (Pseudo-)Reversion
Chapter 1: A Twisted Carnival: State-Sponsored Graffiti in China
Chapter 2: Writing at the End of History: Reflections on Two Cases of Graffiti in Hong Kong
Part II: Aura on (and beyond) the Street—Body, Community, and Media
Chapter 3: Trans-spatial Images: Traveling Graffiti (Art) and the Possibility of Resistance in Chinese Urban Space
Chapter 4: Eloquence of Silent Speech: JR in East Asia
Part III: Dissensus on the Street—Aesthetics, Politics, and Public Space
Chapter 5: The Spectacle of Democracy: Violence, Language, and Dissensus in the Case of Anti-war Graffiti in Tokyo
Chapter 6: The Nation’s Shame? Seoul’s Rat Graffiti Incident at the 2010 G-20 Summit
Part IV: Creativity on the Street—Visual Narratives of East Asian Creative Cities
Chapter 7: Art, Urban Space, and Governance: Street Mural and “Legal Wall” in Japan
Chapter 8: Marginality as Centrality: The “Seoul Urban Art Project” and AGIT in Busan
Special Chapter: Voices from the Street—Interviews with Street Visual Producers in East Asia
Interview with VERY
Interview with Garoo
Interview with Zyko (Beijing)
Interview with Ken Lee @Dirty Panda
Interview with Friendly @ Invasian
Conclusion
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to everyone who supported me throughout my research. I wish to thank all my dear colleagues I met during our visiting scholarship/fellowship at Harvard-Yenching Institute, where the first idea of writing on graffiti and street art occurred to me, between 2011 and 2012. Special thanks to Tang Hongfeng, Wu Xueshan, Cai Tao, Song Bin, Mariko Naito, Ryoko Kosugi, Wei Bingbing and many others for giving me valuable insights about the topic and for their (harsh) comments. I was also lucky to have the chance to talk with Caleb Neelon, introduced by Dr. Winnie Wong, about graffiti in the US.
Most of the part of the research was funded by HKU SPACE Community College Research Grant and I am highly indebted to my former College Principal Prof. Wong Tak Ming, who gave me detailed and constructive suggestions during the planning and development of this research proposal and supported me throughout.
During my field trips, I was greatly moved by the willingness of many people who spared their time so generously for my interviews. In Japan, VERY, KRESS, Mr. Sakaguchi Yoshiaki (Deputy Manager of Planning Division, City Brand Promotion Office), and Mr. Uchiyama Tetsuya (Deputy Manager of Department of Construction, Culture and Tourism Bureau) from City of Yokohama spared their precious time for my long interviews. In Korea, I was grateful for the sharing of Garoo, Junk House, KAY2, Sixcoin, Kun woo and Cheon Hyeonjin at AGIT about their views on graffiti, street art and independent cultural space. In Hong Kong, my research would not have been complete without the help of Ken Lee @Dirty Panda and Friendly @ Invasian . I would also like to thank Norbert Kirbach and Ye Shu (ABS Crew) @400 ml in Beijing.
I would also like to thank those who gave consent to me to include their wonderful images as part of this book: Yong Wang (Chongqing), Cally Yu (Hong Kong), VERY (Osaka), Bomee Song (Seoul), Junseok Seo (Seoul), TJ Choe (Seoul) and Garoo (Seoul).
Last but not least, I am particularly grateful for the assistance given by my two excellent research assistants, Mr. Gentaro Sasaki and Ms. Eunsoo Lee, who have done an excellent job in translation, interpretation and data collection during my research. This project could not have been completed without their help.
Introduction
Berlin—Boston—Hong Kong
Back in spring 2012, I visited Caleb Neelon, one of the authors of The History of American Graffiti , at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during my stay at the Harvard Yenching Institute. I was just beginning my article about Chinese street art, a topic that I decided to write about after conducting several years’ worth of research on urban space, memory, and modernity in Shanghai and Berlin. Before our conversation, I had no idea why I was attracted to this topic, which despite my passion for urban space, was entirely different from my previous works.
Neelon was inspired to become a graffitist at 13 years of age when his family visited Berlin in 1990, right after the 30-year division ended. Like other tourists, Neelon saw the Berlin Wall and was impressed by the graffiti, tags, and murals that vandalized the wall. He also recalled his amusing experience in Shenzhen (a southern city bordering Hong Kong), China, in which he was invited by the local government to participate in a mural project of a museum in Dafen Village, known as an international manufacturing center of exported commercial paintings. 1 After seeing mediocre imitations of western masterpieces, low-quality copies of best-selling Chinese artworks, and the streamlined, handcraft workshop-style painting process, Neelon called the village “the center of the world’s worst art”.
I must say I began to understand why I selected such a topic after our conversation. I have frequently explored the corners of Berlin and have seen the graffiti and murals around the city. Little did I know that these images would accumulate in my subconscious, waiting for the perfect moment at which to be awakened. The experience and perceptions of Neelon toward Dafen Village, and toward China as a whole, reflect the controversial status quo of the street art that I have been seeing, gradually nurturing my interest to explore such artworks because of their inconsistent, contradictory, and chaotic nature.
Issues on graffiti and street art in China recently began to spread throughout the country. In 2011, at least two graffiti images became the center of discussion in both Mainland China and Hong Kong. In April, the stencil graffiti of Ai Weiwei, the most famous dissenting artist in China, began to spread throughout Hong Kong after his arrest in April 2011. Graffiti of “Weiwei is not home yet” were painted overnight all over my own neighborhood on the eastern side of Kowloon. In July, after the high-speed train crash in southeast China shocked the nation, I spent most of my time reading news on Weibo, a popular Twitter-like social media website in China, and reposting a graffiti image of a blood-stained bullet-head train with the face of a skeleton. This was my reaction to the irresponsible post-accident actions of the government. I could not help but think about these graffiti that became widespread during social crises around me, which eventually inspired me to write my first article on graffiti in China.
My frequent travels around Asia also inspired my curiosity toward Asian graffiti and street art. I learned from my friends in Japan and Korea about the existence and history of Sakuragicho in Yokohama, the AGIT indie art space in Busan, and the “Urban Art Project” in Seoul. I also participated in the “Inside Out Project” by JR, a French street artist, when he took his photo booth concept to Hong Kong during his visit in 2012. All these events and the people I met encouraged me to expand my research beyond the Chinese and Hong Kong contexts and to embark on an adventure. This adventure led to the creation of this book, which explores the street visuals of selected cities from three East Asian countries, namely, China, Japan, and South Korea.
Unlike The History of American Graffiti , this book presents more than a purely historical rendition of street visuals in East Asia, which tends to repeat the clichés on the discourse of East Asianness or generalize street art as an outcome of East-West cultural interactions amidst the backdrop of globalization. This book does not only document the material existence, form or style, per se, of these visuals, but also tries to understand the domestic, regional, and global nexus of the selected East Asian cities through their street visuals. The book can be seen as a photo collage of past and present street visuals in East Asian cities, which may or may not affect street visuals in the future. I look for the temporal and spatial traces situated between the corridors of time—the traces that are not too close yet not too far—that may disappear from our daily lives but do not warrant preservation at the present time. This book presents such traces, which are neither regarded as “representable” nor “rememberable”.
Main Themes
My discussions on street visual culture are mainly framed by four themes, namely, “carnival”, “publicness”, “aura”, and “creative city”. This book attempts to unfold the complex positions of these visuals in the urban spatial politics of their respective regions. It does so by providing definitions of what a graffiti producer or spectator is, as well as by addressing what kind of public space visuals are engendered in East Asia. It also explores how graffiti in East Asia reflect the relationship between aesthetics and politics. The book situates itself in a contested dynamic