Cross-Border Shopping

And the idea of global art has spurred some artists to make work about the West’s determined search for the exotic, and about how artists themselves get caught up in it. Xu Bing, one of the most important art exports from China, is one such artist. (He now spends much of his time in New York. Like many other successful artists from the margins, the man and his art have both settled comfortably into the centre.) A recent body of work consists of an invented script called “Square Word Calligraphy,” in which English words are reworked to look like single Chinese characters. Thanks to Xu Bing, a Western audience can now have its exotic content and understand it, too.

Or there’s the Vancouver-based artist Brian Jungen, who in 2002 won the first $50,000 Sobey Art Award for best young Canadian artist. Jungen is half-native; his mother is from the Dunne-za Nation in the interior of British Columbia, a group once known as the Beaver Indians. But the artwork that first got him attention consisted of ritual masks in the red/white/black idiom of unrelated coastal tribes – masks that Jungen had sewn and glued together from disassembled Air Jordan running shoes. Jungen takes a stereotype of exotic identity – the kind a “native” artist is supposed to live up to – and lodges it squarely in mainstream commercial culture. Like Xu Bing’s Anglo-Chinese calligraphy, Jungen’s work as a cross-cultural cobbler depends on models of thinking and making peculiar to Western contemporary art – the world he has chosen to function in.

Each artist is playing the normal Western game. But their “foreign” roots may have given them a special handle on the fictions around which the global art world is built. And they have inspired both to make excellent, purely Western-style art about these structures. Global art gives us the same old same-old – only sometimes, better.