Many issues of modernity remain significant even in contemporary East-West dialogue. But the high rate of technological advancement and globalization have encouraged young artists to take a different approach to binary cultural issues as compared to previous generations. Chu’s Journey to the West integrates the artist’s desire to identify with the subject and his experiences of buying Eastern antiques in Western flea markets into a work which reveals paradoxical Western interpretation and imagination of Eastern culture. Chu has described his process: “I intended to create the scenography of an ‘Oriental’ study from which the owner is absent and only his intricate collection may offer indication of his person …. The whole collecting process is very important; it represents the personal journey of rescuing my own Chinese cultural identity from Western perception.” Accumulated in London, these Chinese antiques are neither authentic, nor in fact from the East. The “knock-offs” signify Western mistranslation or even fetishization of Eastern culture; Chu’s selection and subsequent arrangement of these objects thus “literally represents my own messy confusion of my identity.” Every culture is exposed to numerous influences (and cultures also influence other cultures), dividing, shifting and merging together in time. While culture continues to develop and evolve, due to new technologies, it now also homogenizes at an unprecedented rate. This not only blurs cultural boundaries, but also makes it more complicated for young people to find their identity amidst mass culture globalized by the Western world.

Less Reading...