Here's Your Future

I miss Hong Kong...

(cue sad music)

Nayways I was reading about the whole Wu Xiao Kang photography hoax and I thought that public perception varies as much as the ebb and flow of the tide. Without trying sound too modernist, (or rather, postmodernist), I thought the pieces were a rather clever take on conceptual art, since the ideas presented took precedence over the aesthetic quality of the photographs. In other words, we are not shown a bunch of pretty pictures, but instead, a story and a message to bring home.

There's an online walkthrough here.

There's an intrisic poignancy about the piece (since we need to view the photographs collectively as there is a sense of continuation throughout the series) which causes the viewer to reflect about plight and illness. His method of catharsis causes us to pause and think of Xiao Kang as an ever more 'real' person, with the photographs progressing from slide to slide, invoking some interest in his messages through the inferences of his rather disturbed captions. Yet, Xiao Kang is only fictatious in the end, and there is a sudden longing to understand and interpret his photographs.

On a deeper level, I feel that labelling it as a hoax may have been the societal manifestations of backlash due to a sense of selfishness in upholding the pride that we're perceived to be upholding the pride of other people. The accusations of it exploiting schizophrenia could have been uncalled for, since who are we to be judging what should be a 'good' perception and what's a 'bad' depiction? What is their absolute, definite yardstick for something that is 'good', if not, 'accurate'?

At the end of the day, the group's attempt on conceptual art could just well be said to be something of a success, since the controversy it has provoked is on the lines of conceptual art. After all, René Magritte's The Treachery of Images and Damien Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death In The Mind Of Someone Living has been something of an icon in conceptual arts' hall of fame, and most have not existed without the company of societal backlash.

Laurence Weiner, conceptual artist, once remarked that "Once you know about a work of mine you own it. There's no way I can climb inside somebody's head and remove it." Which is something that I find to be so true. And I guess this is why I love art so much.