ABSTRACT
Years ago in Beijing, I took my first lesson on cultural criticism with a noted American anthropologist. The topic was China’s Great Wall, and he had this to say: ‘It’s as crucial to see what gets walled in and what gets walled out as what gets in between’. The point took a while to sink in, but it did begin to infuse my thinking on cross-cultural understanding in ways so imperceptible that it would take nearly a decade to ferment and yield. One summer in the late 1990s, as I spent quiet and languid days editing some digitized images by contemporary Chinese artists on a New England college campus, that point came back to me loud and clear, and my mind started to home in on spectacles of walls—the Democracy Wall, the Berlin Wall, billboard icons of the Great Wall, performances on walls, installations with walls, ice walls, graffiti walls, ruined walls … Before long, I found my mind floating with fluid yet sober reminiscences of walls and reeling with a whirlwind of rushing thoughts about my personal life teaching in a Beijing college in the 1980s—all triggered off by wall spectacles. Admittedly, what I have just related is a flash of memory, a moment of the past captured by way of my own ineluctable sense of permanent estrangement and momentary belonging. And the occasion for my personal nostalgia was all but conjured up by the liminal ambience I lately found myself in having led a decade-long émigré’s life in the US, i.e. being both out of and on the way into some ‘walled-in’ existences. It was exactly that awareness of groping through some mercurial yet alluring nostalgia that brought these art images so near and dear to me.
