Manga Ormolu – Hybrid cultures in a globalized world

Manga Ormolu is one of Brendan Lee Satish Tang’s ceramic series, which amalgamates Ming Dynasty style porcelain with figures from Japanese anime and manga. The set is inspired by French ormolu, where Chinese ceramics were gilded with gold or bronze. Here Ming-style vases are usurped by futuristic robotic prosthetics, representing the ongoing process of globalization (as known as colonialism, nationalism, and capitalism) and of cultural appropriation. Tang criticizes the rate and extent of which globalization is increasing as we pass through various technological revolutions from agricultural, industrial, to now digital. The boundaries which define one’s identity are subjected to constant change, but now at an even faster pace.

Manga Ormolu version 4.0-c by Brendan Tang

The message of traditions taken over by technology and globalization and of cultures hybridizing and merging together reflects his personal history. Tang is born in Ireland to Trinidadian parents – father of Chinese decent and mother of Indian decent and now lives in Canada. Being ethnically-mixed and culturally diverse, he claims that he is used to a hybridized identity. Through Manga Ormolu, he wishes to address the issue of transformations in culture and identity in an amusing and not so serious fashion, while motivating viewers to become aware of globalization and to reflect on the realities of their world. 

By Athena Wong

Related Reviews: Global Art Database,Visual Art, Exhibition, Vancouver Art Gallery

How Soon Is Now

“How Soon Is Now” is an exhibition that is happening now until May 3^rd, 2009 at the Vancouver Art Gallery. The exhibition introduces selected artists from the province of British Columbia whose work utilizes range of forms such as sculpture, painting, video, audio installation work and more.

In one part of the gallery, a series of works that are bizarre yet at the same time eye pleasing, is Brendan Lee Saish Tang’s Manga Ormolu. Tang, born in Dublin and raised in Nanaimo BC, links his interest in hybridity to his family background, which includes a number of generations of ethnic intermarriage and intercontinental migration across India, China, Trinidad, Ireland and Canada.

 

Brendan Tang (in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery)

Manga Ormolu version 3.0-b

Manga Ormolu enters the dialogue on contemporary culture, technology, and globalization through the relationship between ceramic tradition (using the form of Chinese Ming dynasty vessels) and techno-Pop Art. The futuristic update of the Ming vessels recalls the 18th century French gilded ormolu, where historic Chinese vessels were transformed into curiosity pieces for aristocrats. But here, robotic prosthetics inspired by anime (Japanese animation) and manga (the beloved comics and picture novels of Japan) subvert elitism with the accessibility of popular culture (Brendan Tang—Artist’s Website).

The title “How Soon Is Now” evokes one characteristic of the work in the exhibition: a sense of immediacy that speaks to the present moment (19^th issue of Glance, news and event of the Vancouver Art Gallery). Through developed technology, it is un-questionable that the world is coming closer. Hence, Tang’s work flawlessly fits with the title of the exhibition and just like his background he has created work that mirrors the hybridization as a cultural effect of globalization.

 

Raymond Boisjoly—Expanding Fields. Christmas lights and wooden construction.

Wood and lights compose Raymond Boisjoly’s Beginnings and Latecomers, a unique hybrid of cultural ideas.  Made of yellow cedar, the sculpture is adorned by Christmas lights of different colours.  The lights form to outline figures similar to those found on totem poles.  This mixture of West Coast Native symbolism with Christian-based tradition evokes a strange juxtaposition, creating an odd, desecrated version of a totem pole.  

Boisjoly offers a unique translation of local Aboriginal tradition and culture. His representation of a totem pole, bright lights and all, is one for the modern, market-oriented world.  Today, artists are expected to go beyond their local art communities and serve and appeal to a more global market.  I see Boisjoly’s work as a critique of this idea, bringing to the viewer’s attention how Native culture has become a cheap commodity.  Aboriginal icons and beliefs have been appropriated time and again in order to make money in the name of celebrating local art tradition.  This is at the expense of true Native culture, however, as traditions are boxed up into packaged products for the mass consumer.

 

Noah Becker in the studio. Photo Big Tiny Smalls

Noah Becker’s piece entitled, Dysfunctional Landscape, is currently being featured at the “How Soon Is Now”.  This artist’s work is labelled as “commenting on contemporary culture.”  Becker’s, Dysfunctional Landscape, consists of a mountain structure broken down with levels of several tiers, containing both objects and human figures.  This frame provides the piece with a downward motion, containing an end when the bottom of the work is reached.  In the depiction, objects appear to be passed and shared.  Some are left on the floor, while others are in use.  These individual abstract fragments include a person with a marionette puppet and the act of building in progress.  While all these individual identities are presented in the piece, so are segregated entities. 

The notion of globalization is here evident.  Individuals choose to partake as consumers in the shared concepts and notions of cultures outside of their own, even if they are not aware of their involvement.  Together people are building a universal point of recognition; however humans are still members of their personal culture.  The scattered objects represent the notion that there is no infinite answer to the implications of globalization.  Cultural overlap exists, however no one is quite sure how to encompass identity into a single definition.  In other words, the lack of certainty of the meaning and repercussions of globalization is represented.

Other Artists in the exhibition:

Jackson 2bears, Abbas Akhavan, Sonny Assu, Cedric, Nathan and Jim Bomford, Aaron Carpenter, Hadley+Maxwell, Antonia Hirsch, Allison Hrabluik, Instant Coffee, Christian Kliegel, Germaine Koh, Laiwan, Kristi Malakoff, Kyla Mallett, Luanne Martineau, Damian Moppett, The Music Appreciation Society, Lucy Pullen, Marina Roy, Samuel Roy-Bois, Carol Sawyer, Kevin Schmidt, Kathy Slade, Ken Singer, Mark Soo, Erica Stocking, Dan Starling, Kara Uzelman, Holly Ward, Paul Wong, Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky.

 

Next Talk: Pleased To Meet You: Socialibility and Art Thursday, March 26, 7pm In the Gallery Panelists: Abbas Akhavan, Instant Coffee, Laiwan and Holly Ward; Moderator: Lorna Brown With: PDA for your PDA (Public Display of Affection for your Personal Digital Assistant) Laiwan will present this participatory event as a complement to the panel. Bring your PDA. 

Jen Lee, Matthew Sy and Melissa Assalone

Related Reviews: Society, Global Art Database,Visual Art, Exhibition, Vancouver Art Gallery

The babel jungle

Walt Disney was a firm believer in utopias.  In all of his animated movies he strived to create lands that were full of harmony, acceptance and love.  One classic example is The Jungle Book (1967), a movie about a boy who is raised by wolves.  Both he and all the animals can talk to one another and more or less get along.  But what’s more significant than the utopian plots of Disney movies is their attempt at reaching global audiences.  Among many other movies, The Jungle Book was translated into twenty-four languages and distributed across the world. 

Thirty-five years after this movie was released, Pierre Bismuth (a French contemporary artist) decided to investigate Disney’s so-called ‘universality’ further.  Bismuth examined every translation of The Jungle Book and decided which character would best fit with each language.  For example, he decided that the patrolling elephants would speak German.  Except for the elephant general’s wife who would speak French, alluding to when France and Germany worked together in WWII.  He also purposely put Latin languages next to Semite languages in reference to issues in Palestine. 

In this video-installation for Manifesta 4 entitled The Jungle Book Project (2002, video on plasma screen), Bismuth transformed this childhood tale into a tower of Babel.  When God made everyone speak a different language, they could no longer understand one another enough to finish building their tower to heaven.  And when Bismuth made each of the nineteen characters speak nineteen different languages, he achieved a similar effect.  Nobody can understand one another within the movie, nor can those watching.  Both the viewer and the characters in the movie become isolated by which languages they speak.  “By mixing the languages in only one film,” says Bismuth in an interview, “you transform something that should be understandable by each of us into something that is incomprehensible to everybody.” 

Bismuth is pointing out that although we live in a globalized world, we are far from being in a utopia.  Movie companies like Disney may try and push their ideals onto other countries, but we are still divided and isolated by our languages and cultures. 

Kathryn Schmidt 

Related Reviews: Animation, Video, Global Art Database

MS Paint Adventures

MS Paint Adventures is a web comic that mimics early 1980’s text-command based video games. The comic’s story is driven by a fan based suggestions of what the characters will do next, even if at times the suggestions are beyond logical. 

As mentioned, retro-games traditionally worked on a text based command system. The user would have to type in simple commands in a verb noun fashion, such as get keys or go into cave. The system of these games tended to be fairly small, leaving the computer to not able to understand many of the inputs users placed in, and leaving the user typically frustrated in finding the right words to advance the game. This ‘game’ however has a man behind the machine, Andrew Hussie, who tends to draw three to four pages every other day. Each ‘turn’ in the game is drawn in the aesthetics of Microsoft’s first pixilated paint program, and the story takes twists from a list generated by the fan base.  This has ended up with a hilariously metaphysical comic that plays with the intertextuality of games and web forums. 

Riley Maruyama

Related entries: Anime, Cinema, Cyberspace, Screen Culture Database

Serial Experiments Lain: A vision of digital realities

Serial Experiments Lain is an animated television show that tells the story of a junior high school-girl named Lain who gets an email from a dead student saying that she has left her physical body and now exists on the Wired (the show’s version of the Internet), claiming that God lives there as well. Lain begins experiencing strange phenomena including dislocations of space and time, visions of other people’s experiences, and as she becomes more familiar with the Wired discovers another version of herself existing independently in the real and virtual worlds. Eventually, Lain and her doppelganger turn out to be an omniscient being generated by the Wired, which government agents are attempting to control – her cold, uncaring family is a set of actors and the “reality” that she knows is entirely fake. 

The series focuses on the collapsing of distinctions between the Internet and the real world, the Internet as a catalyst for coming-of-age, fragmentation of identity, and the disjointed social networks that emphasize technologically enhanced connection but never truly achieve it. Relationships are mediated and interrupted by screens, or, like Lain’s classmate, people attempt to bypass the screen to achieve total unity on the Wired, which the series ultimately rejects as a futile solution. True integration of worlds is achievable only by the digital god Lain, at the cost of her real-world identity and meaningful human relationships. While the show is intermedial in that the animation portrays digital effects (like the “snowy” screen), it is more interesting in the way it engages the ubiquity of screens and interrogates our relationships and obsessions with them.

Amelia Pitt-Brooke