LAOWAI, Allegorist - Antagonist

LAOWAI 老外 is a Chinese colloquial term for ‘foreigner’. For a culture that is overwhelmingly dominated by the Han Chinese ethnicity, laowai simply denotes those who are not Chinese, and is often employed by Chinese living overseas when speaking about locals. All of the works presented in this exhibition have been produced by laowai, or non-native-Chinese artists within the geographical territory and/or ideological framework of China.

Comprised mostly of video and photography works by internationally acclaimed artists this exhibition is held in tandem with a NYU symposium that “thinks through the space of Asian art within a global framework” and “the contextual framework of the Inter-Asian art worlds”. Some of these artists have visited China on a short-term basis; others have been longterm residents and are culturally fluent, yet all of the works engage in various aspects of China’s cultural specificity. The exhibition explores what exactly is Chinese about art produced in China. Can a laowai make Chinese art? Is Chinese-ness a shared condition, a visual language, a set of iconographic signifiers, a particular gamut of subject matter, or something more profound? In an age of unprecedented inter-connectedness and multi-culturalism what is left of territorial claims? How does the discourse of multi-culturalism or trans-culturalism pertain to the laowai artist in China?

The exhibition is divided into two types of work: allegorist- artworks that employ the tropes of China’s cultural landscape to write narratives that are poetic, personal or political; and antagonist- artworks that probe the condition of being an outsider in ways that are antagonistic, defensive and/or absurd.