Art Reboot

105 kwan, Hong Hoi and Liu Dan, amongst others. Today I combine painting, calligraphy and poetry, albeit written in English with a Chinese brush and Chinese calligraphic intent. I would argue that as an artist I am more Chinese than Zao Wou-ki or many of the recent group of Chinese artists working in western media. In my earlier volume I raised the question of casting the opera Turandot , with its Chinese subject matter, entirely with ethnic Chinese trained in western opera. Would this transform it into Chinese opera? Obviously not. Conversely, Chinese opera is a distinct genre, and although traditionally performed entirely by ethnic Chinese, it could easily accommodate a cast of well- trained foreigners without altering its fundamental nature, its Chineseness. It would seem that, setting aside prejudice of any sort, ethnicity is not a critical factor in any cultural aesthetic tradition, in the same way that being female is not a prerequi- site for a contribution to feminism. If we are to believe that a westerner cannot step into the mainstream of Chinese painting, then surely the corollary should be the suspicion that Yo-Yo Ma can’t play Bach, which is patently false. Eventually all of these separate cultural mainstreams will converge into one mighty river of creativity fed by all past aes- thetic achievement across the world. In the meantime, we might profitably consider towhat extent the art, rather than the ethnicity of the artist, functions in one culture more than another, and whether the underlying meaning, the message, is more Chinese or more western, and to which still distinguishable tradition the art makes its contribution.