Neither here nor there, neither East nor West, but somewhere in between: here lies the domain of the Third Space Artists, a group of expatriates that challenge cultural identities by traversing traditional boundaries. Neither rooted firmly in their own history and... [more]

Neither here nor there, neither East nor West, but somewhere in between: here lies the domain of the Third Space Artists, a group of expatriates that challenge cultural identities by traversing traditional boundaries. Neither rooted firmly in their own history and culture nor surrendered to an ambivalent internationalism, the artists of the Third Space practice an art of perpetual negotiation: they create cultural and aesthetic hybrids, disorienting assemblages that tangle together a vast array of national influences. They perform an art of oblique reference, at once gesturing toward formal and historical features of China, and defamiliarizing these same gestures by interlacing them with alien elements. Xu Bing, who now resides in New York, took up the traditional practice of calligraphy to create enormous scrolls patterned with what appear from a distance to be Chinese characters. But look closer: the characters are in fact utterly meaningless. They imitate the style of traditional writing, but distort the characters themselves beyond recognition. They have the appearance of a language, but resolve ultimately to nonsense. It is in this nonlanguage that Xu Bing forges an intra-cultural terrain: his characters are as senseless to Chinese speakers as they are to non-Chinese speakers; they draw native and foreigner alike into a space of defamiliarization. The Third Space is essentially a space of ambiguity, a space in which no one is at home. Its artists draw both local and foreign elements together in order to render both indiscernible. The artists create a language of misunderstanding, an unrecognizable and incomprehensible language that nevertheless forges a kind of fragile communication. As artist Wenda Gu says, "Misunderstanding is the essence of our knowledge of the material world. The sum of various misunderstandings is the confrontational truth of my work". In a world in which almost every locality is now permeated by countless unfamiliar, foreign elements, perhaps the only feasible form of truth is a tenuous truth based on an agglomeration of misunderstandings -- a form that stipulates its own shifting terms, constantly renewing and differentiating meaning from one moment to another. Transcending East and West, or rather incessantly intertwining them, the Third Space surrenders cultural authenticity in the interest of traversing various cultures at once. No longer fixed to a specific center, these artists are nomads, perpetually traveling and appropriating elements for their art. [show less]