Thinking borders, oceanically.
On The Past is a Foreign Country by Michikazu Matsune and Jun Yang. [EXCERPT]
Some twenty years ago, the artists Michikazu Matsune and Jun Yang met through mutual friends in Vienna. “Becoming friends”, they tell me in a conversation, means “being yourself”. This ‘intimacy of friendship’, as Derrida writes, lies in the sensation of recognising oneself in the eyes of another. For Michikazu Matsune and Jun Yang, their most obvious commonalities are their sense of humour, as well as their transnational and inter-related living and working processes. Born in the port-city of Kobe in Japan, Matsune lives and works in Vienna since the 1990s as a performance artist and educator. For his stage-performances he often engages with historical anecdotes in his personal artistic style, as a method to examine cultural ascriptions and patterns of social identification. Yang was born in Qingtian in China, from where his family emigrated to Austria when he was four years old. His artistic practice that encompasses various mediums, including film, installation and performance, develops through continuously shifting cultural contexts, as Yang is based in three cities, Vienna, Taipei and Yokohama. While there are many artists that try to, fashionably, list multiple geographies to their practice, there are certainly not many who manage a transcontinental engagement with as much endurance as Jun Yang.
In their respective bodies of work, Matsune and Yang often engage with the conceptual fluidity of identity. Over the years of their friendship, their exchanges have reflected in each others pieces. In his 2015 performance Dance, if you want to enter my country!, Matsune investigated the profiling and surveillance mechanisms that apply to international travellers. For this purpose, he manipulated his biometric passport portrait by shaving off his eyebrows and glueing them onto his skin as a moustache. While Jun Yang contributed to the textual script for this performance, Matsune’s photo, in return, featured in Yang’s 2019 project The Artist, the Work and the Exhibition at the Kunsthaus Graz. The Past is A Foreign Country would, still, be the first time for both artists to conceptualise and perform an entire piece together, promoting them to thematise the risk of two friends putting themselves through the ‘lockdown’ of a shared creation process, and having to bear the responsibilities of such endeavour. Premiered at the 2018 Gwangju Biennale and later shown in Vienna and Taipei, it demonstrates for a collaboration in which both artists’ individual practices converge, as they engage the semantics of mobility to articulate a relational poetics. The adaption for Taipei Arts Festival had to especially find ways to respond to the circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic, as travel restrictions made it impossible for the performers to both be in Taiwan physically. It therefor comprises of two parts: a 45-min screening of the live-work, that is followed by a specially created annex, Dear Friend.
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” wrote L.P. Hartley in his 1953 novel The Go-Between. While the phrase may be well-known and audiences may even “come back loud and strong on their own with the second half”, very little people may actually be able to recall the book’s narrative, or even know the literary source. Their choice of title thus somewhat presupposes how Jun Yang and Michikazu Matsune understand the performance setting – as a horizontal assemblage of rhizomatic narratives, which engage historical and intercultural frameworks to elicit new connections. Seemingly comparing their own to other collaborative missions, they recall historic duet constellations, such as Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay climbing Mt. Everest, as well as Neil Armstrong’s and Buzz Aldrin’s arrival on the moon. The latter links in to the contemporary pandemic situation in a comical manner, since the crew of the spaceship, upon returning to earth had to quarantine in a metal tin for three weeks, to prevent the spread of any ‘alien contamination’.
The performance employs a mode of pictorial storytelling inspired by Kamishibai, a form of street theatre and storytelling from Japan. This oral storytelling form first emerged as street-performance in the 18th century and would later develop in diverse ways in the country’s different regions. For the Japanese context, Kamishibai is said to have been widely enjoyed during the Great depression of the 1930s and in the post-war period, until the advent of television during the mid-20th century. Kamishibai were performed by a narrator who travelled with sets of illustrated boards, which were then placed in a miniature stage-like device. Stories, sometimes unscripted, were told alongside the changing of images and accompanied by sounds that the artists made. Some outgrowths of the form would, for example, feature a stage to enhance the performer’s presence; while other forms would use the stage to have the storytellers “retreat behind” it. The art of the latter would be considered in creating “an effective oral ‘soundtrack’ to enhance the pictures without drawing undue attention to the performer.” As a performative past of Japan, one of the places that link together Matsune’s and Yang’s biographies, Kamishibai methodically informed the staging. The performance narrative is accompanied, guided, and sometimes also interrupted by photographic image boards. Performing alongside these images, in some moments the artists recall Kamishibai’s potential of hiding, gesturally concealing their identity with the photographs. Yet, in most parts, they present their narratives in a frontal, reportage-like manner, facing the audience. The photo-form then functions both as dramaturgic guidance and itinerant interruption. It holds the space to speak through images, show up through images, and even provides for images to communicate with each other, to approach each other.
border lands
The staged collaboration radiates from the artists’ East Asian backgrounds, and how, consequently, Matsune’s and Yang’s life-dynamics have been shaped by factors of interculturality and mobility. Their inter-Asian essay looks at and challenges the narrative framing of the region and its transnational, global relations. Most of the narrative fragments presented concern the experience of borders, both metaphorically and literally. As an ambiguous concept, the border holds space for positive and negative attributes, inclusion and exclusion, allowing for processes of identification, as much as for processes of distancing. Matsune’s and Yang’s presentation is involved in this complexity, as it includes reflections on borders as regions, everyday rituals as well as political events performed at borders; stories of individuals testing on their limits and humanity trying to overcome its planetary ‘embordedment’. Instead of regarding a border as a dividing line that separates two entities, whether they are state leaders, civilians or territories, their outlook focuses the performative foundation of borders, what can be called their “mediating moment”.
Among the historic junctions mentioned in the performance are the entering of the US Black Fleet into the harbour of Yokohama in 1853, which led to the re-opening of Japan, and its subsequent rise as a regional imperialist power. The narration further approaches the flag ceremony at India’s and Pakistan’s Wagah border, as a daily evening ritual “at the gates, which for a long time were the only way between areas that were once united as one country, and that are now two”, as Matsune recalls. Attempting to unravel the inherent performativity of state-official ‘border practices’, another narrative pitstop is made to review the historic April 2018 inter-Korean summit meeting between South Korean president Moon Jae-in and Supreme Leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un. The occasion of this summit, focused on the denuclearisation of the peninsula, was the first time since the end of the Korean War in 1953 that a North Korean leader entered the South's territory. The meeting started with the two politicians shaking hands over the demarcation line. Moon then accepted an invitation from Kim to briefly step over to the North's side of the line. With many elements expressly designed for symbolism, the event’s affective frontiers provide Jun Yang’s and Michikazu Matsune’s exploratory curiosity with fertile ground.
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