Diary of A Dead Artist - lee wen 李文
Diary Of A Dead Artist
The Phantom of Confronting Individuality in Society Today
This summer, in Xi-an, China and Croatia and I started a new series of performances picking up from a series of songs recorded in the private studio or home without rehearsal and responding to the increasing self conscious and uncomfortable position I had been thrust upon. It was a position that was increasingly perplexed to be given official recognition as a recipient of an award conferred by the state. At the beginning, I did not take it seriously to reactions that should had alerted me such as one especially coming from a National Arts Council administration manager who blatantly said: "that is the death of an artist!" when I told him how I had accepted the award.
The internal dialogue I had made me realize that his remark was more than a cursory cliché in the contexts of where I stand. For a good ten years just before that having to work under the penalized or ostracization by default whereby performance art had been seen in negative perspective due to a ban on funding by the National Arts Council. The award given to me after ten years of denial gave confused signals that often led to misunderstanding or even suspicious where I stood as an artist. Added to how ours is a one party government that centralizes most decisions in close direct relationships to the state institutions and statutory boards including those that made policies on art and culture.
These performances not only highlight the need for autonomy of cultural institutions but also question the contradictions in the management and decision making of cultural and social directions in a country that proclaims to democratic processes and yet desperately hold on to uneven authoritarian methods of engineering consent and social conformity of cultural development.
In the first two performances of this series I had made various actions while playing the songs pre-recorded as well as live interventions improvised music. These were done as if the recorded songs served an archival documentation of the spirit made flesh. I become a ghost singing out lamentations knowingly all too well that none of it could actually be heard in the real world that was still alive.
This summer, in Xi-an, China and Croatia and I started a new series of performances picking up from a series of songs recorded in the private studio or home without rehearsal and responding to the increasing self conscious and uncomfortable position I had been thrust upon. It was a position that was increasingly perplexed to be given official recognition as a recipient of an award conferred by the state. At the beginning, I did not take it seriously to reactions that should had alerted me such as one especially coming from a National Arts Council administration manager who blatantly said: "that is the death of an artist!" when I told him how I had accepted the award.
The internal dialogue I had made me realize that his remark was more than a cursory cliché in the contexts of where I stand. For a good ten years just before that having to work under the penalized or ostracization by default whereby performance art had been seen in negative perspective due to a ban on funding by the National Arts Council. The award given to me after ten years of denial gave confused signals that often led to misunderstanding or even suspicious where I stood as an artist. Added to how ours is a one party government that centralizes most decisions in close direct relationships to the state institutions and statutory boards including those that made policies on art and culture.
These performances not only highlight the need for autonomy of cultural institutions but also question the contradictions in the management and decision making of cultural and social directions in a country that proclaims to democratic processes and yet desperately hold on to uneven authoritarian methods of engineering consent and social conformity of cultural development.
In the first two performances of this series I had made various actions while playing the songs pre-recorded as well as live interventions improvised music. These were done as if the recorded songs served an archival documentation of the spirit made flesh. I become a ghost singing out lamentations knowingly all too well that none of it could actually be heard in the real world that was still alive.