Since the 1990s, contemporary Pacific and Maori artists such as Michael Parekowhai, Lisa Reihana, Niki Hastings-McFall and others have offered an image of Aotearoa New Zealand as variously and simultaneously a site of diaspora, transition, and migration, as well as the homeland for the indigenous Maori and European and other settlers. As Karen Stevenson has noted in relation to Bottled Ocean: Contemporary Polynesian Artists (1994-95), “Artists draw upon a cultural knowledge of ideas and materials to re-present the myth and the cliché. … these artists are creating traditions that bridge the world of their ancestors and their global urban reality, which reinforces the social and political agendas of their work” (Stevenson 2004: 32). This image of Aotearoa New Zealand, whilst malleable and contested, is useful for the way it allows the identification of regionally specific ideas and practices to emerge from particular cultural contexts; and for locating a shared experience of the flows, fluidities and homogenising pressures of an increasingly transcultural world which might be common to postcolonial and post-imperial nations. Hence, in this essay, I am going to focus on the work of New Zealand artist Shigeyuki Kihara, and the photographs of Japanese artist Shoichi Aoki, in order to engage their astute visual investigations into the utopian and dystopian flows of globalisation, and to map the intriguing ways in which they generate important critical dialogues around these disjunctions and the consumer landscapes which surround them.

Shown at the Dowse Museum as part of the 2004 New Zealand International Arts Festival, the exhibition FRUiTS: Tokyo Street Style, brought together a collection of photographs by Japanese artist Shoichi Aoki. Taken throughout the late 1990s, these smallish, glossy photographs were originally produced for inclusion within FRUiTS magazine (published by Aoki since 1997). Shown on the walls of the Dowse, the source location and function appears to be writ large throughout the images, and balancing a similarity in design and context across the exhibition with demands for close inspection and intimacy, the images suggest the paradoxical characteristic of magazines - that must communicate meaning effectively to readers who rapidly scan over the images, as well as to those who seek a more detailed engagement. Taken to document a particular, transient moment in Harajuku, Aoki’s photographs represent the playful manipulations of fashion and identity that emerged when groups of teenagers regularly dressed up to congregate in the Hokoten (‘pedestrian paradise’) that occurred on weekends when car traffic was banned from a public square. Aoki notes that one of the extraordinary features of the street style associated with the Harajuku spectacle was the combination of traditional dress such as kimono, obi sashes and geta sandals, with designer fashion and alternative street-wear (Barrell 2003). In any one example, we are presented with montaged effects that have been built out of punk, cyber, gothic, new funk, wire accessories, human anatomy, children’s toys, and various school, nurse, or Victorian maid uniforms. In response to the photograph of “Princess”, who is obsessed with “body organs”, Raymond, a 43-year old German visitor, says, “It reminds me of punk but more interesting.” “What does it mean?” he asks (Sarti 2003).

The avant-garde movement embodied by the young people represented in these images indicates the creation of a situation where Western (predominantly American) cultural imperialism is both asserted and subverted by the paradoxical incorporation of traditional garments such as the kimono, and this contributes to the generation of renewed attention to contemporary Japanese cultural identity (Aoki 2001: 4). This practice of performative dress-up provides a hyperreal form of what the Japanese call ‘cosplay’ (or ‘costume-play’), as well as a point of nexus between the old, the new, and various connected ideas about identity in relation to culture, gender, and youth (Kinsella 1995: 247-8). Emerging over a number of years at Harajuku, these activities challenged the certainty and singularity of terms such as ‘authenticity’, and engendered debate over the dominant dualistic understanding of culture as referring either to the aestheticised pursuit of a higher sensibility or to the objectification associated with an anthropological intention and outlook. At once both playfully incorporating and resisting elements of mainstream culture and associated conceptions of ‘taste’, ‘distinction’ and ‘cultural capital’, the teenagers photographed by Aoki expose these criteria of high culture to be artificially produced rather than natural in any way. As such, and despite their outward dedication to expressly superficial manifestations of collective fun, the complexity intrinsic to these criteria is actually heightened by the images taken by Aoki. The posturings, performances and styles originated, followed and critiqued by the Harajuku youth may be accounted for by the contention made by Rupert Weinzierl and David Muggleton, that:

The important implication that arises from this is that subcultural capital is valuable by virtue of its exclusivity; hence as new subcultural sounds and styles emerge they must be prevented from being continually coveted and appropriated by the ‘mass’…. This attempt at demonstrating ‘distinction’ occurs through the construction of a commercialised subcultural or mainstream ‘Other’ as a symbolic marker against which to define one’s own tastes as ‘authentic’ (2003: 10).

In Aoki’s images, the performance of a defining but deeply derivative cutting-edge youth style (with its attendant, subcultural ‘authenticity’) in Harajuku provides a microcosm of the way that identity in Japan and elsewhere can be seen more generally as constituted by a hybrid and manifold practice that embodies the frivolous and potentially disjunctive practices of consumerism as enthusiastically as it embraces or draws from the more thorough intentionality of history and tradition (Iida 2000: 427 and Cazdyn 2000: 905-7). The week-to-week process of redefinition and redressing that occurred at Harajuku throughout this period illustrates subcultural capital as a crucial element in the continued realization of cutting-edge style. It also shows, however, the terms of appropriation, debate and critique as always being present by implication, which means that the questions of distinction, differentiation and the economies and scales of status associated with these become evident as highly complicated, deeply layered, and ever shifting processes within the photographs. Just as punk integrated signifiers of mainstream fashion out of an attempt to manifest subversion through a rendering awkward of the dominant terms and ideologies, participants in the Harajuku scene integrated the culture that they also sought to critique. This process was further complicated by the ambivalent nature of their critique, however, as they both challenged and embraced consumerism. Through the representational vocabulary and sphere created both by its participants and by Aoki, historical ritual can be seen as jutting up against the more disposable, contemporary practices of commodity culture (Sumitomo 2004: 32-33). Demonstrating identity and subjectivity to be constructed concepts, Aoki also portrays these to be commonly experienced and enjoyed through the frameworks of play, leisure, and entertainment.

Undoubtedly connected to Yasumasa Morimura’s provocation that art is a form of entertainment, Aoki draws art and life together to depict identity as subject to constant change and play; something that is made apparent by the young people represented within his photographs. In one image, sixteen year-old “Snowflake” cites her current obsession as “looking at the sky and crying.” Further to the idea that fashion can be used to create new and enjoyable assemblages of key cultural images and coordinates, Aoki suggests that “fashion is an important form of communication” (FRUiTS 2003). As such, Aoki’s photographs illustrate the popular contention amongst cultural studies theorists that fashion is a system of signification that functions like a language. However, Aoki’s interest is in the transgressive ways that people express themselves through the interactive process of dressing, rather than the individual garments they wear. He is interested in the overall meaning that emerges from engagement with the complete experience of dress, performance and context (rather than just with the individual ‘words’ used). This signifying system is evidenced further by Aoki’s practice of recording the subject’s name and age, a description of their outfit in their own words, their current obsessions, as well as their main “point of fashion” or motivations for their style on the day they have been photographed. It is notable that in most cases, the language they speak is used to adorn their image. Rather than seeking to clarify or legitimate their choices, the integration of verbal language further decorates the image and style projected.

Also committed to the idea that fashion provides a form of communication, Shigeyuki Kihara received attention in 2000 for a series of 28 culture-jammed T-shirts exhibited at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, called ‘Teu Anoa’i: Adorn to Excess’. Living and working in Auckland, Kihara’s background is Samoan / Japanese and she is a fa’fafine, whose work foregrounds issues of race and gender. Using fashion and the body as her primary tools of expression, Kihara works across a variety of mediums and with a variety of subject matters. These include a critical engagement with exoticised historical and anthropological images of Pacific peoples, and the objectifying practices embodied by the ‘Dusky Maiden’ genre of velvet painting made famous by New Zealand artists like Charles McPhee throughout the 1950s and 60s (Pearson 2002: 187-8). Key to her strategies and sphere of representation is the issue of personal agency, and in locating herself and the figures she depicts as contained by or framed within the stereotypes and images of the Pacific that have proliferated throughout popular and high culture, Kihara demonstrates her subjects as either resisting or directly confronting the colonial or voyeuristic gaze. In relation to her 2004 ‘Vavau—Tales from Ancient Samoa’ exhibition, she explains, “What I do is re-occupy that [colonial] gaze … I come from the point of view of the insider” (Hanson 2004). In describing Kihara’s identification as a fa’fafine or transgender person, and in accounting for the cultural significance of this, Jim Vivieaere explains:

Shigeyuki Kihara was born to defy categorisation. Her very existence blurs and challenges the organisation of mainstream thought and practise. What is special about her however is her successful negotiation of the interstices that could otherwise have rendered her incredible. She has stood uncompromisingly in her own marginalised space, fully intending the world to come to her (Vivieaere 2003: 33).

Kihara occupies a transgressive and liminal space both in relation to her everyday life and to her art practice, and in the Vavau series, she seduces the viewer by representing herself according to the colonial fantasies produced to effect by McPhee and others. In addition to deconstructing the field of symbolic references, these photographs are designed as a respectful and evocative homage to her Samoan heritage. They reconstruct central episodes from specific Samoan folktales or fagono according to traditional narrative models and modes of telling, and in ‘Fue Tagata—Ghostly Bodies’, 2004, we see the photographic subject—who simultaneously is and is not Kihara—embodying a flight from the fixity associated with categorical, labelled, stereotypical, or dualistically bound forms of identity. Aiming to parody the practice and Western representational schemata that contributed to the popular allure of McPhee’s paintings and the institutionalisation of the genre, Kihara also challenges the contemporary ‘ironic’ taste for these paintings as much-desired commodities prized by the fashionable retro chic of collectibles and interior design.

Through reappropriating the genre and subject matter of the ‘original’ Dusky Maiden velvet paintings, Kihara’s photographs employ a strategy of mimesis. Rather than simply imitating the stereotype or providing a direct reversal of the model, Kihara integrates a more reflective style of re-interpretation, as well as the intention to generate new forms and viewpoints. Her practice of re-inscribing and re-making original motifs contributes to produce what identity-theorist Judith Butler refers to in Gender Trouble as a ‘de-masking’ of the original (Butler 1990). Through these strategies, Kihara threatens to subvert the apparent stability and ‘naturalness’ of gender and sexual identities as clearly and unproblematically differentiated categories. Informed by Butler’s argument that identity is constructed according to cultural conditions so that it may even exist as a symptom of historical and cultural conditioning, Kihara’s figures gain subjective agency according to notions of productive, performative practice, and the context or location that this happens within. She explains that, “I’m trying to find a sense of place, of meaning, for where I am now. By doing so, I also seek what’s in store for me in the future. There’s that saying: you won’t know where you’re going unless you know where you’re from. Know the past to see the future.” (Watt 2003) Rather than depicting gender as a fundamental characteristic of one’s identity that motivates our actions, Kihara shows it to be constituted according to a continual process or enactment that produces precisely that which it names (Butler 1990: 6). As such, Kihara demonstrates gender as being a fundamentally unstable product, in contrast to identity, which appears to be more crucially connected to the ways that we choose to perform certain versions of our self. These productive performances of self also, importantly, contribute mannerisms and behaviours to a system of communication that is equivalent to the constitution of fashion as a language.

The garments and styling used for Adorn to Excess proposed a successful and exacting parody of the consumer culture that promotes the fetishisation of iconic logos and the economy of brand names (such as Polynesian Airlines, The Warehouse, and KFC), and the glamorisation of ‘the Pacific’ by the media, fashion and advertising industries. The exhibition also initiated a public form of criticism against transnational corporations that use this mode of advertising and that employ Pacific Islanders as low-paid workers (Corbett 2001). What made the condemnation of these practices especially biting, however, was Kihara’s methodology; her appropriation of language vernacular to various Pacific Islands functioned as a kind of foil to the stereotypes often invoked by such language when it is used in a derogatory way. In replacing the cute ‘Barbie’ logo and fair-skinned blonde haired figure with the (equally) deceptively cute ‘Fobie’ logo and dark-skinned, dark-haired baby doll, Kihara demanded that visitors to the exhibition consider the way that cultural stereotypes come to have sustained currency within contemporary culture; ‘Fobie’ refers to the term ‘FOB’, or ‘fresh off the boat’ and is an offensive term used to denote Pacific migrants (particularly in the 1970s). As with Aoki, Kihara invokes fashion as offering a signifying system that can be used to critique the language that literally marks it; as well as the body wearing it. Also interweaving art, entertainment, life, humour and commodity culture, Kihara’s work has been constructed out of a more clearly subversive and directly critical agenda, so that she not only engages with fashion as a form of communication, but with broader ideas about the commodification and consumption of cultural stereotypes.

As with the cute but menacing Japanese characters used in manga and anime cartoons, the logos, captions and figures on Kihara’s T-shirts may be seen to indicate dystopian despair at the all-encompassing and hegemonic domination of the interests of transnational corporations that threaten to diminish the political efficacy of regional specificity and pride by reducing the signs of local practice to the stuff of generalising and pejorative caricature. However, Kihara’s practice works to subvert the definitive authority of any primarily dystopian image. The stereotypes she battles against are both gender-based and cultural, and Adorn to Excess reminded the viewer that such images and terms continue to be lived and experienced as well as actively manifested by ideological practices - something which was reinforced by the threat of legal action that was made by several large brand corporations against Te Papa if it continued exhibiting the work (Devereux 2001; Chapple 2003).

Critical engagement with versions of costume-play can be seen widely in contemporary artworks that aim to focus on identity and subjectivity issues, in Japan and elsewhere (Brunt 2004: 229-30; Papastergiardis 2005: 4-5). Indeed, as illustrated by the trend dominant in Harajuku today for more ‘off the shelf’ images, and the associated standardisation of figures like ‘Elegant Gothic Lolita’, ‘Victorian Maiden’ and ‘Ganguro Girls’ available from shops such as Baby the Stars Shine Bright, this practice may itself have been recuperated back into the consumer culture which it once aimed to challenge as well as champion. Despite this, however, the practice continues as a popular and effective strategy used by artists including Hiroyuki Matsukage and Gorgerous, Tomoko Sawada, and Noboru Tsubaki, all of whom contributed to the Mediarena: Contemporary Art from Japan show exhibited at the Govett-Brewster Gallery in 2004. The figurative photographs by Sawada in particular, resonate with the cultural struggles embodied by the performative approaches also used by New Zealand artists such as Lisa Reihana, in Native Portraits n. 19897 (1997), and Michael Parekowhai’s installations Poorman, Beggarman, Thief (1996) and Portrait of Para (2003). Also exhibited in 2004, these works contributed to the Paradise Now? Contemporary Art from the Pacific exhibition held at the Asia Society Museum in New York (Myers 2005: 273). Commonly linked back to the work of international and globally successful artists such as Cindy Sherman, Yasumasa Morimura and Mariko Mori, who position themselves as the object of their own, authorial gaze in order to subvert the dominant order whereby the model is rendered submissive both to the artist and viewer (Pothecary), each of these artists (including Kihara and Aoki) privilege an active interplay between the subjects represented and the audience. They do so by employing generally understood and culturally acute models, which are then presented according to a locally accented analysis of cultural stereotyping and cliché, and an analytical exploration of issues related to gender and sexuality. It may also be argued that this self-reflective attention to fashion as a language and to the performativity of the self is connected to cultural anxieties over the relationship between globalisation and regionalism (where local identity is already unresolved). Describing the contradictions of this situation in contemporary Japan, Fumio Nanjo writes:

This passage suggests that a kind of baroque sensibility has taken root in Japan, where art is perceived by cultural commentators as turning necessarily to the tools and methodologies of small-scale subversion; to parody, appropriation and ambivalence (Osaka 2004: 15). Such domestic, internalising discourses work to refocus our attention back onto the body and identity of the artist, so that the question of individual subjectivity becomes a stage upon which the greater dramas associated with the politics of cultural identity can be performed; indeed, it is here that questions of authorship, control and institutional pressure are often asked (Iida 2000: 434). In this scenario, personal and public spheres are presented as becoming intimately entwined (despite the continued privileging of the public over the private), and in a clever move, this inter-implication itself often becomes the subject of public display and discussion. Showing not only that cultural hierarchies exist and how they function, this approach demonstrates how inter-personal boundaries are also established and maintained as part of this process.

One example of this is Tomoko Sawada’s OMIAI __ (wall version) (2001), in which the artist represents herself as both the generic Japanese girl (cute, happy, playful: adorable), and as an individualised subject trying to explore if not challenge the set of meanings categorised by this neutral model. However, the ‘cute’ in consumer practices is far from simplistic and superficial, and as Sharon Kinsella argues, its meaning is instead imbricated together by the contradictions, resistances and ironies produced by and experienced within contemporary culture (Kinsella 1995: 247-8). In this series, Sawada presents herself as embodying thirty different types of personality (or styles of femininity) in photographs of the type used by Japanese families to initiate arranged marriages. Functioning according to a kind of swap-card economy, potential brides are dressed in various outfits (including formal attire), and are photographed at a professional portrait studio. “The parents subsequently exchange and distribute cards featuring the photos to other families and relatives in hope of finding a suitable husband for their daughter. Seen together the images expose and thereby deconstruct a Japanese language of male desire involving the objectification of women.” (Burke 2004: 24) Instead of choosing to directly critique the way that teenage girls express themselves in fashion and make-up, Sawada challenges the idea that individual girls should aspire to the logo or label used to categorise them; a point also made by Aoki’s photographs of the Harajuku scene. Sawada’s work shows that in Japan, as elsewhere, clothing has always functioned as an important system of signification, inter-personal communication, and self-expression, so that in addition to depicting the beauty and versatility of the girl displayed by these syntagmatic photos, they also, and possibly more importantly, illustrate the families’ means to furnish or dress the needs of their future son-in-law (and his family). Motivated by a desire to reveal the fundamental and constitutive role that political structures play in the construction of individual identity, a deeper layer of critique exists within Sawada’s series, so that she may rupture the cultural practice and institutional frameworks that have led to and provided the conditions necessary for the continued consumption and currency of this image of femininity. Illustrating what a tenuous (and relative) commodity identity can be, her photographs present a dialogue that is at once useful and obscuring; that simultaneously draws our attention to the small details available only on close inspection, and to the transparency of the overarching politics that work to determine the broader cultural landscape.

The practice of re-appropriating cultural signifiers and stereotypes in order to critique the political framework supporting them is itself widely employed beyond Kihara’s reconstruction of labels and typologies. In fact, this is increasingly recognised as an effective methodology by artists seeking to regain control over the images and language often used to pigeonhole cultural practice (and draw attention away from the imperial practices of the speaking subject), and Nikos Papastergiardis explains that, “The juxtaposition of different signs and the contrast of alternative perspectives is not only a recurring feature in the composition of artworks but also a strategy that artists utilise in order to provoke new forms of cross-cultural communication” (2005: 5). New Zealand artists deploying this strategy include Michael Parekowhai, who has reappropriated the term ‘Hori’, as both a common Maori name meaning ‘George’ and as a term that refers disparagingly to groups of Maori. In ‘Poorman, Beggarman, Thief’ (1996), Parekowhai presented a life-size, over-dressed mannequin wearing the nametag “Hello, My Name is Hori” in the gallery space. In a move that is effective due to the discomforting ambivalence produced by the combination of tuxedo and ill-fitting hairpiece, the installation may be regarded as deeply personal: Or alternately, the intimacy evoked by the additional story (Parekowhai suggests the figure was modelled on his father) may be a defiant ploy motivating viewers to question the authenticity or naturalness of the connection between signifier and signified. Following on from this, Melissa Chiu suggests: “The pejorative meaning of the nametag, along with the titles of the works, contrasts with the figure’s spiffy dress and presence in an art gallery. By parachuting an ugly cultural stereotype into the gallery, dressed as an urban sophisticate, Parekowhai is playfully turning assumptions about Maori on their head. Hori might mean George, but that does not mean George is a Hori” (Chiu 2004:17).

Also invoking this desire to rupture any naturalness in the connection between object and image, or person and label, Lisa Reihana has invoked dominant ideologies and signifying systems to provide a kind of applied or clearly demonstrated form of critique in her work Native Portraits n. 19897 (1997), a video installation that occupies the gallery space in a heightened, protective (Smith 2004: 37), and strangely visceral way given the technicality of the monitors. Reihana made this work when commissioned by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa to develop a new way of re-presenting the Museum’s collection of nineteenth-century photographic portraits of Maori. Providing a bridge between Aoki’s photographs and Kihara’s ‘Black Sunday’ series (2001), Reihana’s installation of re-framed and re-posed photographs animate the stereotypes that, despite being historicized, continue to resonate for many present-day Maori (Rauer 2004). The anthropological or ethnocentric gaze is subverted by this work, and in reconstructing historical scenes, Reihana has employed a change in the direction of the mise-en-scene. The original portraits have been replaced by images of her Maori friends dressed-up in combinations of historical costume and contemporary clothing (including official uniforms as well as the equally prescribed outfits worn by various white and blue-collar workers). Native Portraits n. 19897 exposes the ‘source’ material as having been produced by an artist who was no less authorial than Reihana, and posed by a group of people who are being photographed according to no less performative models. These characterisations are no less true than those contained by the originals. Animated by video, however, these thoroughly renewed subjects return the viewer’s exploring gaze, with a direct and critical look of their own.

Unlike these works which centralise the relationship between body and the performance of identity, it is interesting to note the absence of the body from Kihara’s Adorn to Excess. By separating the body from the works on display, Kihara draws attention to the way that these systems of meaning production function. This makes it evident that a syntagmatic system is constructed by the logos themselves, which ‘speak’ to each other according to the self-referential language used (in a context where the trend for logo-enhanced T-shirts also denotes something for its wearer). In removing the body from this equation, Kihara’s work illustrates how deeply fashion functions as a system of communication, and suggests that it is inevitable that the dual articulations offered by the wearing of logoed T-shirts and by the meaning offered by the logos shows identity as being constructed in part at least by the clothing that we wear. In removing the body from the display, the ideological processes whereby certain meanings appear naturalised (by being included within popular spheres of commodity and youth culture) come to appear less innate or natural and more ideologically mediated (revealing, therefore, the ways in which ideology itself gains a transparency).

Viewers of cultural and gender stereotypes, regardless of whether they are located in museum or gallery spaces, on television, cinema, print media or elsewhere, are often encouraged (or conditioned) to adopt the gaze of the tourist, traveller, or anthropologist. In writing about the historical precedence for this, Caroline Vercoe explains that, “Like many indigenous peoples, Pacific Islanders have been the subjects of innumerable photographic studies, ranging from medical to anthropological to touristic. To cater to the booming nineteenth-century postcard industry, a plethora of exoticised images were constructed and photographed.” (Vercoe 2004: 43) In ‘Black Sunday’ (2001), Kihara reappropriates and reinscribes the colonial convention for Western photographers to represent Pacific peoples. Within this series, the relationship of the body as explicitly marked or acculturated - regardless of its apparent naturalness or nakedness - becomes a point of dialogue. Sourced from museum archives, the subjects who populate these images have been reconstructed to present a kind of historical inversion (if not a caution) to Aoki’s project - and to the possibility of any claims it may make for political neutrality. In one image, entitled ‘Gossip Sessions’ (2001), Kihara remakes the native bodies by actively posturing and parodying the Western representational tradition and taste for ethnographic and exotic images of Pacific peoples. Whereas in the original archival photographs, women have been depicted topless and submissive to the objectifying gaze of the photographer, in Kihara’s reinscription, they have ironically been covered up by brightly coloured T-shirts and presented as refusing to meet the voyeuristic gaze. Describing this image, Vercoe explains, “the obvious artifice of their re-dressing highlights and counters the stereotyped conventions of the sexualised maiden and savage. They also parody the various missionary attempts to cover the natives’ bodies in order to promote modesty and discretion.” (2004: 45) What is most significant about Kihara’s revision of these archival images is the way that they re-centralise the procedures implicit in the production of cultural knowledge.

The veracity of mythology as an ideologically informed process is, as such, frequently challenged by Kihara’s culturally sophisticated work. Through engaging with the methodologies used in the production of the images referenced (McPhee’s Dusky Maiden paintings or the source photographs of the ‘Black Sunday’ series), Kihara’s work challenges the status and role of myth itself. It may even translate into visual form the argument put forth by Roland Barthes; that we each, individually and collectively, generate and use mythologies as a basic and constructive strategy for understanding and combating existing inequalities in specific places and situations, and for coming to terms with the more general things about our lives that we have difficulty rationalising (Barthes 1973: 109-15). Kihara’s work is sympathetic to this project, which was designed to demonstrate how and why we produce the images and illusions that constitute our reality and that we accept, therefore, as being ‘true’, and her work shows that, like other aspects of our everyday life, this is both a cognitive and non-cognitive process. Instead of continuing to take these mythologies for granted as unquestionable statements of fact, Kihara’s images ask us to look at the relationship between the end product or meaning and the processes that are involved in its ‘becoming-truth’; they encourage viewers to interact literally with cultural stereotypes and the mediums of expression according to their semiotic constituents. As such, Kihara suggests that we actively ‘read’ the logo-ed T-shirts in Adorn to Excess as sites that promote dialogue and debate about meaning, rather than as simply perceiving them as proposing a counter-authoritative position. Her work asks the viewer to move away from the idea of the authentic body, and in the Dusky Maiden style images, in particular, we can see her desire to question the processes and procedures that have been involved in the naturalisation of such stereotypes. Kihara’s work may be understood, therefore, as motivated to reappropriate clichés associated with Pacific culture; a purpose that Stevenson attributes to many contemporary Pacific artists for whom, the cliché of ‘the Pacific’ has itself been repositioned as the artist’s muse (2004: 30).

Cultural identity is frequently portrayed in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand as the result of a hybrid and inclusive, polymorphous and multiple perspectivism that is seen to result in a “patchwork that binds together the stereotypes and myths, the authentic and traditional, the eclectic and eccentric, island and urban” (Stevenson 2004: 23). The main problem with this kind of interpretation is its ideological promotion of a version of contemporary culture that is all-inclusive and that “threatens no one”, where fashion, popular culture, entertainment, and issues of style are all inherently apolitical. This forced depoliticisation can be apparent even in progressively democratic attempts to redraw national identity according to a model that avoids traditional boundaries and stereotypes, as expressed in a special “Pacifica” edition of the lifestyle magazine More:

Well, it’s coming. … A Pacific sort of feeling is starting to bubble through art, music, leisure, sport, lifestyle. … It takes time for a nation to develop its personality. …. We’re pulling together all the influences that make us a modern Pacific nation and creating something anew. Pacifica is a little bit Maori. A little bit European. Add a spice of Asia. A vibrant splash of Polynesia. An injection of California. … It’s not born of one culture. It’s an expression of many. Therefore it threatens no one. It’s a mood, a style, a feeling. This is Pacifica. The New Zealand of the new decade (Stevenson 2004: 23).

Granted this statement was made in 1990. However, it draws a recognisable profile that continues to be used in some contexts today. Critiqued at all levels throughout Kihara’s work, this kind of approach has also, strangely, been expressed by Aoki—at least superficially. Produced as playful postcard-like images (in scale and appearance) that appear to objectify the teenagers portrayed, Aoki’s images represent subjects to be consumed both by a Japanese audience who may have already seen the images in the FRUiTS magazine, and overseas viewers according to a distinctly touristic gaze. He claims the images perform a deep ambivalence to political agency, and asserts that they are positioned as being just about leisure and play. However, perhaps we can understand Aoki’s representation of the apolitical as offering a kind of provocation that is actually employed to illustrate the argument that there can be no such thing as political neutrality, and the corresponding idea that political neutrality is always already as equally ideologically informed as more overtly politicised statements. This would mean that when Aoki asserts, “People don’t really choose their fashion with a deeper meaningful message and that’s what I’m looking for as well, not some sort of deeper message, just something that looks good—just what they like. Just look for what looks good - no deeper message” (Barrell 2003), we might interpret this as illustrating a relationship with Morimura’s correlation of art and entertainment. However, we might also understand it as a form of posturing that encourages the viewer to consider the politics of the consumer landscape more critically; especially given his disjunctive follow-up comment that the subversive style of the Harajuku movement was brought to an end by the re-opening to cars of the streets surrounding the public square that had functioned as ‘a young people’s haven’ on Sunday afternoons. Explaining how “the momentary avant-garde and creative fashion … mostly disappeared” (FRUiTS 2003), Aoki explains that, “About three years ago the streets were opened again to vehicle traffic so there is no longer really anywhere for young people to get together, so that movement has kind of stopped and is going back to the commercial base with the designers feeding style to young people” (Barrell 2003).

Rather than being used to achieve a kind of politically ineffective cultural unification or homogenisation, difference and rupture may therefore be identified as significant characteristics of contemporary global culture, especially in relation to the way it is actually lived, experienced and made real. This means that in adopting a DIY approach to fashion, the subjects in Aoki’s photographs also publicly embody the possibility that dress and image is directly connected to identity. The cosmopolitan, mix-and-match style of the fashions appropriated (where recycled traditional Japanese garments are worn alongside Western fashion—often in disruptive or shocking arrangements) illustrate clothing to be an expression of creativity. However, this also shows the impossibility of political neutrality in this highly commodified environment, where debates of local and global identity come to inscribe and define the body so literally. In addition to depicting identity (cultural, gendered, collective, individual) to be produced rather than ‘natural’, the moments of rupture and disjuncture within these works are crucial for the way that they demonstrate how ideological meanings come to be naturalised.

While politics can therefore be seen to dominate the interpretation of these images, the dialogue with urban youth audiences and the practices of consumption and fun—as equally political constituents—should not be overlooked. Contributing to the critical environment contextualising Aoki’s photographs and Kihara’s work, the projects by Sawada, Reihana and Parekowhai also contribute to an exploration of the institutional and regulative formation of cultural hegemony. Through Reihana’s appropriation of museum costumes and Parekowhai’s representation of security guards (‘Portrait of Para’, 2003) and hosts, these artists are particularly successful in showing cultural meaning as being inscribed through constant manifestation in everyday life and cultural institutions, so that the exhibition space of the museum or gallery can be understood as implicated within the production of cultural meaning. While for Reihana, Parekowhai, and Sawada, class and the distinctions between high and low culture are significant, they tend to be less centralised by Aoki and Kihara’s respective projects. In fact, these issues appear almost immaterial to the mode of address and meaning employed by these artists, and even when shown in galleries, the institutional nature of these spaces does not tend to succeed in overpowering the work - much the opposite in fact, so that the work appears instead to regenerate the space, and to deflect any kind of institutional pressure that may be applied. This is basically because these artists are working primarily within a space of popular, consumer culture that cannot be simply contrasted with or distinguished from high cultural spaces like the museum and gallery. Infiltrating all aspects of contemporary life, the space of popular culture becomes an ideal site for various identities to be tried out, explored, disposed of or maintained.

Both Aoki and Kihara draw on historical references to, and forms of, cultural representation, and in so doing, they link the ‘authentic’ traditions of history to practices of consumption. This intersection provides an important nexus for Kihara, who not only works commercially as a freelance fashion stylist for magazines including Pulp, Staple and Pavement (Watt), but who frequently re-presents traditional performance and costume in a contemporary context in her gallery-based work (see Fale Aitu, House of Spirits, 2003). For Kihara, the interweaving between contemporary popular culture and historical tradition facilitates an extension of the sense of contingency available to her work, so that it may be understood as having a relevance beyond the space of historical categorisation. She explains, “Although my concepts stem from a cultural platform, a lot of the issues that I speak about in my work, I believe to be universal.” (Watt 2003) Whereas consumption is critically linked to Westernisation and an imperial effect in Kihara, Reihana, and Parekowhai’s work, for Aoki it is both liberating and heterogenous, and homogenous. Aoki explains that Western fashion has been incorporated into Japan in a couple of ways; as a homogenising influence that provides a kind of uniform for salary men and women, and as material to be sampled by the Japanese youth he photographs. Contextualised within popular culture, this sphere of commodification offers a site of empowerment and subversion both for Aoki and Kihara through the interplay of various semiotic frameworks that are simultaneously specific to their particular national contexts, and eerily non-specific or universal in their referencing of generic kinds of ‘popular culture’ signifiers. Both Kihara and Aoki present fashion as centrally occupying a vital space of contradiction and possibility. In the sense that it can be either deeply traditional or frivolous (terms which themselves evade dichotomous distinction or categorisation), fashion always, according to its very nature, occupies this space of incongruity, however, for these artists, clothing becomes even more significant for the way that it offers a kind of language and dialogue. Accordingly, Aoki contends, “Here, ‘fashion’ is more about the art of ‘putting things on’ rather than about the art of making clothes” (FRUiTS 2003). This attention to performativity and the privileging of how a garment is worn and how a ‘look’ is articulated, becomes even more significant when looked at against Kihara’s dedication to presenting identity as being constituted largely by performance.

The approach of parody, humour, and the appropriation of the strategies and materials of consumer and pop culture is a cultural practice that has unfolded in an area of interactive tension between globalisation and localisation. It has also emerged as an especially relevant signifying practice for youth culture, and practices such as the production and consumption of music and fashion have helped prise open sites of tension that exist between the globalised production of images (such as the ‘Barbie’ logo) and the local adaptation of images (such as the ‘Fobie’ logo) (Zemke-White 2004: 212-16). Both Kihara and Aoki have engaged directly with the context and tools of popular culture, and the Harajuku youth may, in particular, be seen to effectively embody and evidence the contention that pop as culture has always been connected with alternative ways of experiencing and understanding the world. Because it has always had fluid boundaries, pop has generally avoided becoming associated with a static ideology, and as Gabrielle Klein argues, “Pop is always transformation, dynamic movement. Cultural material and its social environments permanently re-shape each other in new forms while crossing fixed borders” (Klein 2003: 42).

The relationship between commodity culture, consumption, and pop highlights this further, if for no other reason than the disposability of the trends and fashions associated with pop culture ensure a constant and continual turn-over (Gottlieb and McLelland 2003). And whereas subcultures have traditionally been privileged by cultural commentators for the way that they have offered a rebellious and ritualistic resistance to capitalist structures, commodity-oriented subcultures (such as the Harajuku scene) have been living out consumerist ambitions since their very beginning—and in a manner that is fundamental to the production of their identity. Because consumption facilitates or enables the production of selfhood as multiplicitous and changing, subcultures have become complicit in the niche marketing of their own identities (Kinsella 1995: 226). Indeed, in the case of the Harajuku youth, “subcultures may serve a useful function for capitalism by making stylistic innovations that can then become vehicles for new sales” (Weinzierl and Muggleton 2003: 8). From this, we can also understand that instead of stifling difference, globalised culture may contribute to the production of difference on the basis that consumers continue to have different everyday life contexts and experiences; they are not unavoidably defined by their shopping or the logos they wear. Rather than simply being considered according to a dichotomous and value-laden relationship, the points of intersection between globalisation and localisation have to be taken into account when describing the circulation of pop cultural products, as well as the networks (and artworks) that propose a critique of this complex scenario.

This may contribute to developing a greater understanding of the relationship between homogenisation, difference, and hybridity. By adopting global elements, artists engaged in representing local practices may be able to find crucial points of critical juncture with the semiotic structures that are ultimately responsible for the reproduction of traditional, industrial and centrally circulating images of cultural typology and myth. At the same time as they do this, their work may also become different and resistant to stereotypes of globalisation because of the many local contexts of adaptation. This also grants greater agency to the viewers of the works who are also consumers of pop and commodity culture; a point which echoes Klein’s argument that:

The imitation of pop cultural images by consumers cannot simply be understood as an adoption of cultural industrial products at the cost of the authentic self. Globalised images can, rather, unfold their effectiveness by being duplicated mimetically and re-interpreted in a performative act of new construction by the consumers. If the performative negotiation of images succeeds, field-specific norms are extended in the process of mimetic identification. Popcultural practice can therefore not be described as a local representation of a global culture industry, but as a performative cultural practice (Klein 2003: 48).

This is especially important to Kihara’s project, which seeks to publicly enact dialogues about the relationship between representation, typecasting, and lived experience. Fundamental to achieving this is the representation of identity as non-constant and itself subject to a myriad of forces and changes. The subjectivities performed by Kihara as part of her role in the Pacifika Divas performance group (curated by Lisa Taouma, and toured to the 4th Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at the Queensland Art Gallery, 2002, the 2003 In Transit Festival in Berlin, and the 2004 AsiaPacific Festival in Barcelona, Spain) and other works are, importantly, always immanent, and even the possibility of an ‘authentic self’ is questioned. Indeed, transnational flows and the issues of a fluid identity that may be elemental to these are further highlighted by recognition that “The fascination with the ‘Other’ can cut both ways”, so that just as Aoki’s subjects adorn aspects of “Western dress, costuming, and manners”, Kihara’s work makes it clear that these - existing also as an historical currency of exchange - “were also often copied by Pacific Islanders.” (Vercoe 2004: 45)

Both Kihara’s and Aoki’s work achieves political agency through the artists’ astute engagement with pop culture in general, but with aspects of youth culture in particular. The Adorn to Excess T-shirts effectively reference the passionate appropriation of Hip-Hop and other music styles initially associated with local American subcultural forms of expression (Zemke-White 2004: 209-10), and the performances of the Pacifika Divas and the styles embraced by the teenagers photographed by Aoki demonstrate an active repurposing and reterritorialisation of global diasporic Black and Asian cultures through their styles, music and representations, in a distinctively (if not unproblematically) postcolonial era. As such, the Harajuku youth exist as intimately localised (so that identity remains closely connected to style and the place of performance) as well as offering a convincing image for an increasingly transnational and desirable form of identity. The transient stylistic avant-garde moment of the Harajuku scene evidences how “youth, their ideas and commodities move easily across national boundaries, shaping and being shaped by all kinds of structures and meanings” (Weinzierl and Muggleton 2003: 17), but also shows how this comes to happen, as noted by commentator Tony Barrell. Interested in Aoki’s depiction of people, and the recognition that individuals get from the magazine, he explains to Aoki, “It’s like a kind of dialogue you set up, they see themselves in the magazine and then they feel that their style and their posture is legitimated by the magazine and so on and it creates a kind of community” (Barrell 2003). These processes are also acknowledged as important by Kihara for the way that this practice and the various manifestations of experience and identity that result from it demonstrate how the weakening of national boundaries can also result in the emergence of strange and previously unknown transnational, ethnically encoded forms of cultural hybridity, and for the ways that the individual bodies are marked, labelled, or differentiated by using fashion as a way to imitate the larger narratives of globalisation and personal subjectivity. As such, both Kihara’s and Aoki’s work function as sites for historical and contemporary, local and global, Asian, European, Pacific and African influences to intersect and produce new and hybrid products, processes and experiences.

Throughout this essay, I have been concerned to show how these characteristics and processes can be evoked to explore the representation and performance of global and local, transcultural identity within the context of popular culture. Kihara’s work provides an especially interesting example of how complex the field of cultural identity is in Aotearoa New Zealand, and by looking also at the subjects and styles represented by Aoki’s photographs, we can see how fashion and the practices of consumption, leisure and fun contribute to maintaining the always-shifting conceptions of self that can work to challenge or maintain dominant images of cultural identity. Aoki and Kihara both attempt to demonstrate the always interactive and changing relationship between the representation and reality of culture and identity, and they also offer alternate methodologies for the retheorisation and reconceptualisation of youth (sub)cultural phenomena. Although their artworks may be seen to offer a political critique that is structured according to the light-hearted and often enjoyable vehicles offered by popular culture, each artist does this in order to demonstrate how global mainstreams and local substreams can be rearticulated and restructured in complex and uneven ways to produce new, hybrid cultural constellations for individuals to both embrace and challenge. As such, they each express a clearly framed ambivalence toward fixity and mobility in contemporary culture itself. They are concerned, in other words, to construct an effect which may encourage us to work through the zones of interaction, exchange and formation that are at once geopolitical, historically contingent, and symbolic.

Note: I am grateful to the Australian Research Council which supported research towards this article through the Discovery Project, “Four South Pacific Museums: New Museums and Public Culture” on which I worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in 2004 in the Department of English with Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne.

New Zealand’s Indian community has established itself as a culturally vibrant group. It has grown into an integral part of New Zealand society, becoming the second largest Asian ethnicity after the Chinese, and the country’s third largest minority. Many traditions that were brought to New Zealand from South Asia and its diaspora have been maintained since the first settlement in the nineteenth century, especially within community organisations. Such groups have provided the space and place to help create and reproduce cultural identity through the performance of traditional cultural activities such as music and dance. It is activities such as these that are important and particularly striking aspects of the festival called Diwali (Festival of Lights) in its transformed and public New Zealand context.

In New Zealand, Diwali has now moved from the relatively private sphere of ritual and performance within the Indian community to a public display and outward celebration. The festival has been held annually in distinct public spaces since 2002, with tens of thousands of people attending the event in Auckland and Wellington each year. Diwali maintains support not only from various Indian community groups, but is now a major public festival receiving generous assistance from a partly government-funded organisation, two city councils, and from corporate, community and private sponsors. Diwali in New Zealand has been transformed from a local religious and cultural festival celebrated by one broad community, to an event that has become a mainstream public expression of Indian or South Asian identity.

This paper examines the recontextualisation and transformation of Diwali in New Zealand with particular emphasis on performance. The study explores the role that various organisations have had in establishing this transformation, and the ways in which performances at Diwali events are expressions of self-identity and part of a process of place-making. Identity and place are constructed for and across different spheres of participation and involvement: for performers and audience and for Indian and non-Indian. It shows how traditions are transformed over time and place; how the intervention of organisations can help in a recontextualisation of a sacred event; and how migrants, old and new, perform culture to an Indian and non-Indian community as a result of such transformations.

The Indian Diwali festival (Festival of Lights) is celebrated among Indian communities the world over. With recognised Hindu roots in India, where it has slightly various forms depending on its context in this huge multicultural nation, the festival is now particularly visible among diaspora Indian (or South Asian) communities (either established or new). Here it is often a spectacle of display or a contact zone (Clifford 1997: 218) based around the celebration of cultural tradition and the meeting of cultures. For diaspora Indian communities the festival occupies a sometimes ambiguous or contentious place in terms of its dialectical positioning within or between public and private spheres. Both a distinct absence or overtly public display can say much about the context under study, especially relating to ideas of the quality of culture and equality of life for members of minority communities.

In its diaspora context, Diwali occupies a somewhat ambivalent position. India as a homeland is frequently foregrounded and situated within a culturally performed setting that is simultaneously based around a celebration of cultural identity and a negotiation between sacred and secular, Indian and non-Indian, traditional and contemporary (or old and new), public and private, classical and popular, and even between intra-Indian subcultures. Such communities, or at least people who identify with an identity based around this cultural heritage or ethnicity – so often referred to as minorities, subaltern or diaspora – provide a recontextualised setting for Diwali that creates and celebrates culture and identity in the diaspora context.

New Zealand today pays particular attention to its postcolonial cultural makeup. In recent years, especially with increased Asian migration, New Zealand has depicted itself as an immigrant nation (a nation made up of immigrants and still welcoming immigrants). In terms of multicultural New Zealand, government departments such as the Office of Ethnic Affairs do much to place the ethnicity of New Zealand’s mainly non-Māori and non-Pakeha in a public sphere of identity construction and negotiation. The Office deals mainly with migrants, refugees, long-term settlers and descendants of early settlers; ethnic communities; government agencies and local authorities; voluntary and community organisations and service providers; multicultural centres; and migrant and refugee centres. With a ministerial portfolio for ethnic affairs created by the government in December 1999, the Office of Ethnic Affairs was launched in May 2001. In this cultural milieu, Asia, to use a broad, culturally identifying definition of the term, is political. Asia is part of New Zealand.

This paper explores and problematises the recontextualization and transformation of the Indian Diwali festival in the New Zealand context (figs. 1-4). The research investigates the significance of a religious festival as a cultural performance and its place today as a public event that is consumed by a wider New Zealand public. The study looks at the role that the various organisations have had in establishing this transformation, and explores performance within the festival as part of identity construction and place-making. The article draws from several sources in its theoretical orientation. The study of media among the South Asian diaspora has been particularly influential. For example, Ray’s work on Bollywood among Fijian Indians in Australia helps in understanding the disjunctures within migrant communities. Likewise, Mishra’s work on Bombay cinema and diasporic desire (Mishra 2002) reiterates the importance of looking at Bollywood on a global level within its diasporic contexts. Focussing mainly on explaining the performance aspects associated with Diwali in its New Zealand context, the research herein was initiated as a music ethnography or musical anthropology (Seeger 1992) that links music performance with ideas of place and identity (Stokes 1994). Of particular importance in this field is the connection between music performance and place-making. As Solomon points out, “musical performance as a practice for constructing identity is now an ethnomusicological commonplace. That it can also be a practice for constructing place may not seem so obvious at first” (2000: 257-58). Concepts of place and space have long been a focus of human geography, and this paper looks at ways in which cultural performance at Diwali events in multicultural New Zealand embody a sense of identity and place-making. Identity and place are constructed for and across different spheres of participation and involvement: for performers and audience, and for Indian and non-Indian. While there are many micromusics in New Zealand, this paper has particular significance in the study of contemporary culture in that it helps show how traditions are transformed over time and place; how the intervention of organisations can help in a recontextualisation of a sacred event; and how migrants, old and new, perform culture to an Indian and non-Indian community as a result of such transformations.

Following an outline of the history of the Indian diaspora in New Zealand, the main part of this study investigates the Diwali festival, in particular its contemporary place in New Zealand as a public event in the cities of Auckland and Wellington. The discussion divides into three sections: (re)contextualising tradition; transforming tradition; and performing South Asia. In order to understand Diwali in broader terms it is important to see how the festival is perceived in India as well as in New Zealand today. In connection with its transformation in the New Zealand context, the study looks at the festival’s wider impact, especially in terms of creating culture and constructing cultural identity. The Indian diaspora has a place that is both constructed and contested in historical and contemporary New Zealand, and festivals such as Diwali help migrants – old and new – facilitate their own cultural imagination. The festival also has a wider purpose as an event that helps cultural understanding and celebration.

It was about a decade ago that Leckie stated that “South Asian communities in New Zealand rarely attract much attention from the media” (Leckie 1995: 133). By 2002, however, and primarily with the promotion of public Diwali festivals in Auckland and Wellington with the help of the Asia 2000 Foundation of New Zealand (Asia 2000), the situation had noticeably changed. While attitudes towards New Zealand’s Indian or South Asian diaspora have certainly changed over time, the Indian community has now established itself as one of the most outwardly recognisable and vibrant migrant groups. In New Zealand, the Indian diaspora dates from the nineteenth century, and since that time has grown into an integral part of New Zealand society, becoming the second largest ethnicity within the Asian community after the Chinese, and the country’s third largest minority. The national census of 2001 showed that the Indian population was 61,803 (around double the 1991 figure), with 17,550 being born in New Zealand. While Indian migration to New Zealand has a history from the nineteenth century, with the relaxing of the immigration laws since 1987 a wave of new Indian and South Asian migrants have made New Zealand their home. Of those resident in New Zealand who identified themselves as Asian, and who account for 6.6 percent of the total population (or 237,459 people), 26 percent of those belonged to the Indian community (Statistics New Zealand). Indian New Zealanders also had the highest level of involvement in the labour force out of all the Asian groups sampled in the census – 77 percent. These statistics help illustrate the Indian community as a well-established part of New Zealand society.

In an attempt to promote Indian cultural identity, the 1950s saw the establishment of several centres for social and cultural activities. For example, in Auckland, a community centre that served as the main meeting place for all the Auckland Indian Association activities was built in 1955. Named after Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948), the Gandhi Hall was the site for language classes, religious ceremonies, weddings and traditional festivals until new Hindu temples were built in Auckland from the 1980s. In Wellington, the Bharat Bhavan (Indian Hall) was built in 1956 and has been the site for such activities for the Wellington Indian community. The Sikh community in New Zealand has always been closely associated with the Indian Central Association, providing the majority of the membership of the Country Section of the Association through their involvement in dairy farming, but they also operate their own New Zealand Sikh Society. While Sikhs form a co-operative group within the larger Indian community, they are a strong and distinctive cultural group within New Zealand.

Derived from the Sanskrit word deepawali (‘row of lights’), Diwali, or the Hindu New Year, is one of the most widely practised festivals in the Hindu calendar. Diwali is not only celebrated by the majority Hindu population in India, but also by many other South Asians and its diaspora the world over. The festival, which has slight variations across South Asia according to cultural background, is based around the lunar cycle, which means the festival falls on a different date every year (either October or November). The festival is celebrated in the latter half of the lunar month, from the full moon until the appearance of the new moon, and marks the end of the year and the beginning of the Hindu New Year.

The main purpose of the Hindu festival is to honour the god Vishnu and his wife, the goddess Lakshmi, who is the goddess of light, good fortune and prosperity. The major theme that runs throughout the traditional five-day festival, as it is typically held in India, is the celebration of good over evil and the wish for prosperity in the coming year. Hindus believe that Vishnu preserves and protects the world with his goodness, and symbolizes the pure thoughts and deeds that all Hindus should aim for. The different days of the festival are associated with different stories and legends showing these attributes. The first day sees the lighting of a single lamp in front of homes or businesses. This is an offering to the Hindu god of death, Yama, to remind everyone that death is a part of life and also to welcome Lakshmi. The lighting of multiple lamps and the hanging of bright street lights continues throughout the festival to provide a festive atmosphere and to symbolize the power of good over evil.

The various associations of South Asian communities throughout New Zealand form a social network and organizational framework that promotes a perceived cultural unity or identity within and across each group. An important part of this theme is the celebration of cultural traditions. While the Indian Association is officially a secular group, its members and some Indian community organisations around the country actively celebrate Diwali. Key informants from such organisations have mentioned their involvement in putting on Diwali functions for the local Indian community for many years, and one of the more recent influences noted at accompanying performances was Bollywood (Indian cinema) dancing. Religious and cultural events (traditional and contemporary) that are celebrated in India and have been transplanted to New Zealand are used as the focus for the celebration of cultural or broader Indian identity. In 2003, for example, major Indian festivals celebrated in Wellington from September to mid-November by the Wellington Hindu Association were:

Nadesar Abishekam 9 September Puraddasi Sani (Start) 20 September Navarathiri Viratham (Start) 26 September Saraswathi Pooja 4 October Vijaya Thasami /Maanambu 5 October Nadesar Abishekam 8 October Puraddathi Sani 11 October Deepavali (Diwali) 24 October Kanda Sashti Viratham (Start) 26 October Sooran Por 30 October Thirukkalyanam 31 October Soama Varam 17 November

(New Zealand Hindu Association 2003.)

South Asian community groups provide both the space and place to help create and reproduce cultural identity through the performance of traditional cultural activities such as music, song and dance. It is activities such as these that are usually important parts of Diwali for the community groups.

As well as the obvious geographic differences between northern and southern hemispheres in terms of the time of year that Diwali is held, in the New Zealand context the festival has distinct meanings for those who celebrate it in its recontextualised setting. Many members of the South Asian community take part in Diwali, while some religious festivals that are important to particular groups are celebrated only within those communities. Within these groups, Diwali in its New Zealand setting usually lasts for one night instead of the traditional five. In private homes, however, families might still follow the five days of celebration, but the public functions (outside the home and involving members of the community) usually consist of celebrations that include cultural performances by local amateur performers (Kasanji 1980: 233).

Before 2002, Diwali was still beginning to make more of a public appearance in New Zealand. For example, Anderson provided a preview of the event in a local Wellington community newspaper, Cook Strait News. Here, it was noted that the Wellington Indian Association would hold a bazaar on 13 October 2001, which would include an array of stalls. The bazaar was part of the lead up to two major celebrations, Navratri and Diwali, which would be celebrated on 17 October and 10 November respectively. The latter event included a concert. Data collected from South Asian community groups from various parts of New Zealand confirm the importance of the performing arts in not only Diwali, but also for many other celebrations that such groups help promote for its members. From traditional music and dance to the more recent influences of Bollywood and bhangra (that is, pan-Indian popular music), which are now especially influential among younger members of the community, the context of Diwali, or at least its recontextualised setting in New Zealand, provides a location that celebrates tradition, creates culture and reinforces a sense of identity and place within and across local, regional and national boundaries for those present.

In 2002, Diwali in New Zealand was transformed into two large public events. From this time two events have included the involvement of Asia 2000 and the city councils of Auckland and Wellington. After the successes of the Chinese Lantern Festival held in Auckland since 1999, Asia 2000 decided to organize Diwali festivals in both Auckland and Wellington. In October 2002, many New Zealanders attended the two celebrations, which included performers from the local Indian communities participating in both traditional and contemporary Indian music and dance, as well as a group of traditional dancers brought especially to New Zealand from India (Asia 2000: 12). The Diwali celebrations in 2003 and 2004 followed a similar pattern of local and international performers.

In 2002, Asia 2000 held events in Wellington beginning on 19 October and finishing in Auckland on 26 October. An estimated 70,000 people attended the festivals (Barton). For these inaugural events, Asia 2000 received sponsorship locally and from overseas: decorations were provided by the Hindu Endowment Board in Singapore, and the Indian Council for Cultural Relations in Delhi provided the Nagaland Performing Group and a rod-and-string puppet troupe from Karnataka. Asia 2000 sponsored a rangoli maker from Gujarat, Abhay Gadkari, to come to the festival. Workshops were held at Te Papa in Wellington and at the Auckland War Memorial Museum, with a project for schools a major part of the event. The now annual event is well advertised and reported in local and community media. There is mass advertising, posters, fliers, banners and website information.

The festival as a large-scale public event has an array of attractions, including ritual and entertainment. It is interesting to note several of the aims of the festival: establishing an annual festival that will be visually exciting, culturally authentic and a leading event for Auckland and Wellington; raising public awareness of traditional Indian culture, of the contribution made by the Indian communities, and of their long history in New Zealand; engaging children and families across the two cities in all aspects of the Festival; establishing a firm positioning for all Festival partners and sponsors as supportive of diverse communities. and working closely with all partners to maximise exposure for the event and benefits to sponsors.

In 2003, a souvenir brochure of the Diwali events was published by Asia 2000 and Auckland City. The brochure included a colourful collection of images to accompany the events, providing letters of support from key figures, background information on the festival, travel details to India, acknowledgement of sponsors, as well as a list of recipes. The cover image depicts the goddess of light, good fortune and prosperity, Lakshmi, in the centre; Sarasvati to the left, who is the goddess of wisdom, the arts and knowledge (she is shown playing the vina, or lute); and Ganesha, who has an elephant’s head and large human body (as a god of wisdom he is often shown at the beginning of books). Letters of support for the festival are shown on full A4 pages from Dame Silvia Cartwright (Governor-General), Bal Anand (High Commissioner of India), Helen Clark (Prime Minister), Anand Satyanand (Deputy Chairman, Asia 2000 Foundation), John Banks (Mayor, Auckland City), Prithipal Singh (President, New Zealand Central Indian Association), Christopher Butler (Executive Director, Asia 2000 Foundation), Pansy Wong (MP), and Ashraf Choudhary (MP).

In 2003, Asia 2000’s Diwali celebrations were held in Auckland at the Auckland Indian Association’s Mahatma Gandhi Centre, and the following weekend in Wellington. About 50,000 people attended the Auckland celebrations and around 35,000 the Wellington event. The latter was held on a Saturday afternoon and spread around three main venues: the main Town Hall stage, the outside Civic Square stage and a smaller concert hall off the Town Hall. Arranged throughout the venues were stalls operated by various community groups and private traders selling food and drink, Indian music and movies, fabric and other Indian arts and crafts. The community groups present included the Indian Association, the Hindu Association, sports groups and other community groups such as the Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil and Sri Lankan groups. These groups used the event to raise funds for their respective organizations. There were also stalls from the Indian Tourism department and private travel companies promoting India as a travel destination. The event was opened by Dame Silva Cartwright in the Town Hall, who lit a traditional diva lamp, accompanied by speeches from community leaders such as the chairman of the Central Indian Association as well as politicians. The opening ceremony was mainly attended by members of the Indian community, although within a couple of hours the crowd consisted mostly of non-Indians.

Festivals such as Diwali have now moved from the relatively private sphere of ritual, sacred performance within the Indian community to a public and mostly secular display in its New Zealand context. With tens of thousands of people attending the festivities each year in Auckland and Wellington, Diwali in New Zealand has been transformed from a small religious festival to a mainstream expression of South Asian (mainly Indian) culture. The festival has been transformed in its diasporic context and might be viewed as creating culture and a new type of tradition in New Zealand. As a site of cultural meaning, Diwali in its public context now has significance for many New Zealanders, Asian and non-Asian alike.

Performance is often an integral part to many public Indian cultural events such as Diwali. An ethnography of performance in Diwali on an initial descriptive level shows that the transformed tradition is one that deviates significantly from local community and private celebrations. Seeger provides a useful way of proceeding with a “do-it-yourself ethnography” of performance with “who” “where” “when” “what” “how,” and “why” questions for helping to understand such an event. The Asia 2000 Diwali events in Auckland and Wellington differ considerably from local community events in terms of who performs. Unlike local celebrations that showcase the talents of amateur community performers, the public events include two broad categories of performers: those from overseas and those from within New Zealand. The performers at these events come from diverse South Asian backgrounds; they have different levels of ability; and they are of mixed ages and gender.

Diwali in New Zealand is performed in several ways, but in the performing arts it is music, dance and theatre that especially stand out. The public Diwali events in Auckland and Wellington include a mix of amateur community artists (that is, local) and professional performance acts (mainly overseas, but including some local). The celebrations consist almost entirely of performances by Indian or South Asian artists ranging from traditional South and North Indian classical music and dance to contemporary Bollywood and Indo/Euro fusion groups (Table 1). The variety of performers is quite striking: from beginners to advanced; from young to old; from amateur to professional; from local to national; and from national to international.

Table 1: Table of Events (Wellington 2003) Town Hall Stage Civic Square Stage Illot Concert Chamber Civic Suite Town Hall Foyer 2.45 Mudra Dance Company VIP prayer ceremony 3.00 Opening Ceremony Town Hall Auditorium 3.30 Folk n Funky (Bhangra) Moksha 3.45 Panchnaad 4.30 Wellington Telegu Association Capital City Ramayan Mandali Rangoli competition 4.45 Coal Artam Wellington Malaysian Cultural Group 5.00 Tawa Twirlers Pushp Chand 5.15 Capital City Ramayan Mandali Hindu Association Classical Rangoli judging 5.30 5.45 Panchnaad (repeat) Wellington Telegu Association Winners announced 6.00 Tawa Twirlers 6.15 Wellington Hindi School 6.30 Fashion Show Baalvikas and Shakti Vrund 6.45 Sri Lankan Dance Academy 7.00 Rattan Singh 7.15 Bollywood Competition Shagufta Zia 7.30 Bharat Samaj Prasanta Bhanja 8.15 Sri Lankan Dance Academy DJ Woody 8.30 Bollywood winners announced Tu-faan Express DJ/s 8.45 Break Break 9.00 Bollywood Firedancers & Pyrotechnic display 9.15 Panchnaad (repeat) 10.00 Bollywood reprise 10.15 Closing and Thanks 10.30 After party - Big Bada Boom at Indigo MCs MCs 3.00 - 7.15 Shashi Jokhan Raj Varma & Rina Patel 7.15 - close Priya Singh

The programme for the 2004 Wellington event, for example, mostly indicates genres rather than community or music styles. The programme mentions community acts, classical music demonstrations and lectures, DJs, henna painting, herbal remedies, Bollywood dancing competition and workshop, international bhangra group, animal puppets of India, storytelling, mask making, rangoli competition, and a fashion show. This latest event attracted about 35,000 people. The programme for the 2004 Auckland event, which was held at the Auckland Town Hall and outside on Queen Street, shows full details of performers and their allotted times. About 60,000 people attended this event.

The transformed and public events take place in the capital, Wellington, and in New Zealand’s most populous city, Auckland. The events are about one week apart in order to use some of the same performers within each. While private celebrations would normally follow the lunar calendar, community and public events tend to be held at weekends around the time of Diwali in order to try to attract as many people as possible. The public events sponsored by Asia 2000 even span several weeks in order to showcase the main international performers and some local artists firstly in one city, then in the other.

The Wellington event in 2003, for example, began early in the afternoon and lasted until late in the evening. As shown in Table 1, it was held across five contexts, which consisted of three main stages: Town Hall Stage, Civic Square Stage and the Illot Concert Chamber. While the Civic Suite was reserved for rangoli, the Town Hall Foyer was used for the official yet semi-private blessing (or puja – prayer) before the opening ceremony. This context appears to have been strategically placed before the main public event and included VIPs.

The transformed tradition in its public context includes a range of performance genres and styles, reflecting the diversity of cultural backgrounds of the performers and the communities they represent. One of the main non-New Zealand groups in 2003 was the five member classical and folk ensemble Panchnaad from Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, in north India. The ensemble, which includes sarod (lute), tabla (drums), harmonium, vocals, and kathak dancing, was established in 1982 by sarod player Vikash Maharaj. The group plays a mixture of classical and folk music and have performed widely on the international circuit in folk and world music festivals:

The eclectic makeup of Panchnaad’s performance act would perhaps make them more accessible to a wider audience, something that would be particularly important for those members of the audience who are unfamiliar with Indian music. Many local performers from the Wellington South Asian communities participated in the events, which seemed to act as a showcase for local talent from a vast number of community and cultural groups.

One of the most noticeable characteristics of the Wellington and Auckland performance events is the period of time allowed for the performers. In 2003, for example, while the international acts, including Panchnaad and Prasanta Bhanja, had a time slot of around forty-five minutes to one hour, which is particularly short for Indian music, the local performers were generally restrained to brief performances from between five and thirty minutes. In the public Diwali events, the international artists are presented as top-class acts for a New Zealand audience. The media hype that accompanies the festival does much to support the notion of professionalism. The international artists are brought to New Zealand to showcase top-quality aspects of Indian culture. The brevity of time allocated for many of the local acts reflects the amateur nature of most of these performers. Each performer presented themselves as an emblem of a part of South Asian culture or its diaspora, and of South Asian culture in general, their performances being celebrated in a context of cultural celebration and consumption.

In terms of New Zealand as an immigrant nation, Roscoe comments that “through song and dance these [immigrant] communities, quite literally, are able to perform their cultural identity” (Roscoe 1999: 120). Performance in the Diwali context is a complex web of significance where members of the Indian and South Asian communities have a sense of cultural empowerment and participation. A powerful element of performance is that it can so often be linked to ideas of place and space. At the public Diwali events a number of different styles or genres form part of the soundscape that helps create a sense of place for performers and audience alike. As Stokes notes, "the musical event, from collective dances to the act of putting a cassette or CD into a machine, evokes and organises collective memories and present experiences of place with an intensity, power and simplicity unmatched by any other social activity" (Stokes 1994: 3). The events seem to portray a kind of pan-South Asian identity expressed simply as India through the medium of the festival, while at the same time expressing and celebrating cultural difference with an emphasis on social harmony in the New Zealand context. In terms of India as a real or imaged homeland, as Gupta and Ferguson comment, "remembered places have often served as symbolic anchors of community for dispersed people" (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 11). In New Zealand’s multicultural context, identities are formed within and across cultural and national borders. In this context, migrant communities are able "to consistently generate powerful symbols of social alliance, tradition, heritage, place, love, hate, nationalism, and a host of other emotions" (Lornell and Rasmussen 1997: 19). What the recontextualised, transformed and public Diwali represents, however, is a complex picture where communities are embedded in a politics of difference.

For the festival goers, they might gaze like tourists at an event and consume culture as yet another contemporary product that is the result of global flows. While referring to the world music scene, which overlaps with the music typically found in the public Diwali event, Mitchell talks of a "synthetic sonic experience of surface impacts" (Mitchell 1996: 85) and Mitsui of "domestic exoticism." That is, the music is something that might be exoticised by the non-Indian or non-informed audience within an Orientalist framework and put on display for cultural and multicultural consumption. Of course, travel in the contemporary world does not necessarily mean leaving home, and one can consume a cultural or ethnic "other" at home and abroad, especially in a world that increasingly exoticises and commercialises the culture of many “others”. As MacCannell (2001: 389) asks, why leave home at all? But a contemporary ethnoscape in which tourism and/or travel are located draws attention to such public displays of culture consumption as found in Diwali, and one could view the event as a type of ethnic tourism that “is marketed to the public in terms of the ‘quaint’ customs of indigenous and often exotic peoples” (Smith 1989: 4). Whether or not the audience (South Asian or not) understood the performances from an insider’s perspective, one of the main differences between the overtly public events and those of local organisations is that while each is part of a different process of community building the former is staged for mass culture consumption and the latter is presented for local community celebration.

Diwali is present the world over in many nations and cultural contexts. In New Zealand Diwali has emerged over the past three years in Auckland and Wellington as a media event with several functions specific to its local context, including the celebration of difference and the consumption of ethnicity. Such spectacles might be likened to what Hall refers to as a "cultural supermarket" (Hall 1992: 303), a place where one is "confronted by a range of different identities" (1992: 303) which are celebrated and even consumed like many other products. A study of Diwali in New Zealand helps portray culture creation and the construction of place, identity and community for many New Zealanders. The public festival with its emblems of Indian culture and tradition provides a means to attempt to understand how and why some communities give prominence to a real and sometimes imagined cultural home. Diwali in New Zealand is increasingly moving from the private to the public, from the sacred to the secular, and is currently engaged in a type of core-periphery binary discourse between minority groups and centres of political power. It creates contexts with articulations of contestation and negotiation within and between different communities in New Zealand’s newfound multicultural political milieu. The idea of place as a powerful emblem and as a nostalgic identity marker is evident on several spheres: community, region, national and transnational. Those celebrating Diwali in New Zealand, where it is perhaps detached from the mother country and therefore exaggerated in its presentation, contribute to the complexities of identity formation for not only themselves, but also for the people with whom they have chosen to share their culture.

This study of Diwali has surveyed its place in New Zealand today. The festival in its transformed public context, particularly with the help of national and local organisations, does much to support multicultural understanding through the celebration of culture and cultural difference. It also helps in place-making and the portrayal of diaspora communities living in perceived social harmony. But the South Asian community is large enough to be outwardly visible, unlike some smaller minorities who are perhaps inward-oriented with no public voice in broader New Zealand culture. Helping to create culture and keep the spirit of Diwali alive, the various divisions identified within the festival in its New Zealand public context, including classical/popular, public/private, sacred/secular, South Indian/North Indian, Indian/Indian diaspora, established New Zealander/recent New Zealander, and Asian/non-Asian, are each aspects that contribute to Diwali’s unique place in contemporary New Zealand culture.

This article offers reflections on two artworks shown in exhibitions of ‘Asian’ art in New Zealand galleries in 2004, Yin Xiuzhen’s “Portable Cities” (2001-2004), seen in the Concrete Horizons exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery, and exonemo’s “FragMental Storm” (2002), from the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery’s Mediarena: Contemporary Art from Japan. I write ‘Asian’, because there seems little sense in labelling these as works of Asian art, except in the rather obvious sense that the artists were born and work in Asian countries (Yin is Chinese and exonemo a collaboration between Japanese artists Yae Akaiwa and Kensuke Sembo). Like many of the other pieces seen in these exhibitions, there is a noticeable absence of anything that might be thought of as stereotypically ‘Asian’ about these works. This is not to say that the artists ignore or deny the local, just that any exclusive focus – which might limit or tie the work to a particular context – is avoided. The risks of fetishising or pigeonholing art from particular Asian countries were recognised by one Japanese critic who participated in Mediarena. Kentaro Ichihara suggested that the fascination with Japanese art overseas could signal a new exoticism in contemporary art. The risk of being so fixed or exoticised mean that I prefer to investigate frames for thinking about and responding to these works which go beyond their origins, hopefully also broadening the possible receptions of these works. Another reason is that these artists attend to interfaces between the local and the global, something which already imbues their work with a wide – though not universal – relevance. Of interest are the specific conditions created when contemporary technologies order the lives of human subjects, from international transportation routes to the internet (Heidegger 1977: 17). Yin Xiuzhen attends to complex relations to place in the face of global movements, while exonemo address the experience of linked information on the world wide web.

In this article I address the performance or articulation by these artists of issues pertinent to what might be termed a contemporary “networked condition”, common across those highly-technologized societies that are closely tied into global networks and systems of exchange. I reflect on Yin’s work and the figures it offers for thinking about the points of contact between local and the global, and the place of memory and sensation in processes of cultural transmission. I borrow the figure of edge from a third, local example, NZ Edge, exploring and extending it and asking what it is to be at an edge.

One of my aims is to reconsider the ways in which cultural exchange and contact is conceptualised in a networked twenty-first century world, the ways in which the strangeness that is (literally) embodied in travel, for instance, inflects experience and memory. Another related aim is to review the ways in which classic modernist techniques of collage and juxtaposition, reworked through code in exonemo’s “FragMental Storm”, are again capable of producing encounters with strangeness, in the now relatively domesticated context of the world wide web. Both exonemo’s and Yin’s investigations into the still emergent possibilities and logics of global networks provides a much needed incitement to think and appraise the contemporary (post)human condition, in its specificity, rather than accepting those pervasive and largely pessimistic analyses which perceive only technology’s alienating effects. These artists manage to crystallise aspects of the wider cultural and media sphere in their work. Contemporary networks do order and shape subjectivity in highly specific ways, but the potential for differential orderings – new edges – is also part of the logic, the veritable glitches in the code that make it possible to think, and be, otherwise.

Yin Xiuzhen is a Beijing artist whose installation “Portable Cities” was exhibited in Wellington from February 2004. Her ‘suitcase cities’ are constructed from found and donated objects and clothes, which are sewn together to produce three-dimensional miniature sculptures of cities, standing in otherwise ordinary suitcases. For the Concrete Horizons exhibition, Yin made three new cities: Wellington, Guangzhou, and San Francisco. The iconic landmarks of San Francisco (the Golden Gate bridge) and Wellington (the Beehive, the windmill) are immediately recognisable, with the blue and white striped Harbour of the latter even sporting miniature boats. As well as marvelling at the meticulous work involved, the materials also evoke delight, most particularly perhaps the socks that, stitched together, serve as the flyovers on the Guangzhou freeways. Viewers’ attention is directed down ‘funnels’ – made from the gusset of a pair of tights, or the stretched neck of a skivvy – to the bottom of the cases where maps of the cities are positioned. At the Adam Art Gallery, the suitcase cities sat beneath threads spanning points on an improvised map of the world, hand drawn on the gallery wall. Collected sounds from the streets of these cities provided a background soundtrack for the installation.

Part tourist kitsch, “Portable Cities” reproduces the symbols for which these cities are famous, made portable in tourist commodities. On the one hand, they resemble naïve creations, their colour and softness reminiscent of stuffed toys. Beyond the simulacral, however, they gesture toward another level or way of knowing, perhaps represented by the lower level inside the suitcases themselves. As often happens when ‘real’ cities are traversed, the monuments recede from centre-stage, as attention is refocused on the everyday interactions and encounters that take place on the streets. There’s a strong sense that the cities modelled in this work have not just been chosen at whim, but are ones that have been known by virtue of having been traversed, lingered or lived in, perhaps returned to repeatedly. The rendering of their landmarks in soft, ‘domestic’ materials communicates a powerful sense of attachment and affective investment, themes Yin depicts with elegance and economy. As sculptural objects, they entice us to draw near, their familiar materials speaking to our emotions; somehow they seem comforting.

That a city should be appealing in its “familiarity” and “softness” might sound odd, as they’re not qualities usually identified with cities, particularly not in contemporary China. The current wave of urban development in China provided a good part of the impetus for the Concrete Horizons show, with the curator, Sophie McIntyre, noting the influence that China’s rapid urbanisation has had on the artists exhibited. Of Beijing, she notes that as the city continues to expand, vertically and horizontally, urban-rural boundaries are re-drawn as agricultural villages are transformed into housing blocks and suburbs grow into new satellite cities. In this city, ‘place’ as a point of reference and as a site of belonging, is essentially devoid of meaning” (4). This is a clear reference to some of the other artworks in Concrete Horizons, most obviously perhaps Wang Wei’s “Temporary Space” (2003). This work consists of a series of photographs in which labourers build a room inside another (gallery?) space, bricking up four walls until the builders themselves are enclosed within the walls, only to demolish the walls again. The photos chart their (futile) progress, and an adjacent video work tells of the actual market in recycled bricks in booming Chinese cities: that some men and women eke out a back-breaking living by cleaning (that is, chipping the mortar off salvaged bricks, by hand), carting and then re-selling bricks to new building projects.

Tensions between place as a site of belonging and dis/connection are being explored here. In this vein, the notion that some spaces are non-places has become popular in recent years (Auge, Morse). Laura Marks is one of a number of critical media theorists to argue, however, that it is a subject’s sense memories that help to create specific places. Marks contends that this is possible even in the midst of non-places (245). I don’t think it is a coincidence that Marks makes this claim in a chapter entitled “The Portable Sensorium”: one of the reasons that cities may be ‘portable’ is aesthetic, that is, the traces they leave on their inhabitants are sensory. Yin’s cities seem thoroughly connected to the places they represent and their meanings, aware of the affective investments made in particular places. A comment by McIntyre that, “As an artist who regularly exhibits overseas, the suitcase has become a symbol of [Yin’s] ‘home’” (McIntyre 2004: 6), is revealing here. Though only three of Yin’s suitcase cities were shown in the installation at the Adam, she has made others, and the webs of string stretching between other unrepresented cities gave the work the feel of a personal world-trajectory. Yin’s suitcase cities get me thinking about connections to place and emplacement in an era that we are used to thinking of as one of ubiquitous displacement. “Portable Cities”, then, speaks beyond “disorientation and displacement” (McIntyre 2004: 5) to a wider, contemporary condition of movement, in which practices of shifting and settling, and shifting again, have become commonplace, an assumed part of many peoples’ professional and personal lives.

The types of movement of which I am thinking differ from that of forced migration or exile. Scholars in migration studies have noted how fraught the “where are you from?” question can be for new arrivals – particularly when the welcome they receive in a new country is less than warm – but knowledge workers whose skills are in demand can be in quite a different position. These workers’ movements are more likely to be motivated by career advancement or economic considerations; others simply need to travel as job descriptions and the locus of work become increasingly globalised. For people in such situations, the destinations they move to may not be ‘home’, in either the traditional unitary or enduring senses of the term (Badani).

Home has long been a mobile concept for some, those for whom making a living requires travel. As James Clifford puts it, “Everyone’s on the move, and has been for centuries” (2). To the purposeful wandering of nomads and herders can be added the cohort of professional entertainers, musicians, politicians, airline attendants and sailors, as well as an array of seasonal workers – fishers, shearers, circus folk and ‘showies’. Even those in professions where travel hasn’t been a part of the job may increasingly be finding that there’s an imperative to travel, as labour is expected to follow capital’s mobility. For some, piecing together a full time income can entail long commutes or regular international travel. One of the realities of mobile labour is that people find themselves living across different towns or even straddling countries, a “dwelling-in-travel” (Clifford, 2) that shapes lives. On a recent visit to Germany, I met three ‘mobile’ individuals in as many days: the Swiss theatrical set designer, who, owing to a downturn in production budgets, must travel further afield in Europe to serve his clients; the mapmaker and artist, also resident in Berlin, who, returned from a period living in Sydney, now teaches intensively for blocks each semester at a London University; and the intellectual worker who, unable to secure a permanent university post, travels from one side of the country to the other for several days part-time work a week, maintaining rooms in both cities. While this is not common, it is no longer as rare as it once was. It raises questions not only about moving and the strangeness that moves introduce into one’s life, but also about what it is to move from a singular concept of ‘home’ to plural ‘homes’. Furthermore, how do such mobile subjects accommodate or negotiate the different experiences (the rhythms, habits, cultural influences, practices, assumptions around locality, etc) to which they are and have been exposed, and how might we conceive of this? What traces do multiple places and moves leave? It’s these questions I now turn to consider, reflecting both on Yin’s art, as well as local New Zealand articulations of some of these issues.

Some people hate leaving home. Moving (house, countries, or just moving on) is for them a profoundly disturbing experience, no doubt because of the disruption it brings, but also – I suspect – because of the need to re-establish in a new space/place. This is the part I find exciting, if not the physical act of moving; there are real pleasures in discovering and responding to the rhythms of new places. In terms of estrangement, nothing beats it. It’s a chance to confront habits formed in particular circumstances that may not work in new ones, to cut through sedimentations, and rid oneself of that which has become rusted on. However, as much as the unfamiliar and the strange can be lovely, it’s clear that shedding all of one’s habits and past is also, in part, a modernist dream. It’s much messier when you actually try. The threads of Yin’s installation that seem to beckon to new opportunities – stretching out like an airline route map, full of possibility – are also the ties that bind, or, alternately, the trails of stuff left in various places lived in. Elsewheres so encountered are not simply forgotten when they are no longer experienced: memories, particularly keenly felt sense memories, are portable and continue to inflect and shape subjectivity, reaching across geography and through time. Even when they no longer exist in material form, destroyed cities are remembered: pre-war Berlins or Dresdens continue to exist, subjectively, for many.

As a country that’s literally antipodal to many major international centres, and a decent plane trip from its largest neighbour, the movement imperative is not unfamiliar to New Zealanders. If we think, however, about how relations between the ‘here’ of New Zealand and the ‘there’ of everywhere else are figured, it’s often a cocktail that combines the tyranny of distance with a good shot of cultural cringe: leaving home is still (seen as) necessary to ‘make it’, with “OE” (overseas experience) enshrining the importance of escaping. For many younger educated Kiwis, the binary bases of this narrative are reinforced by economic necessity – the burden of their tertiary student loan is something they definitely don’t want to come back to. This binary rendering – either you stay or you go – constructs a particular kind of boundary between the here and the there, in which crossing the threshold and not looking back is naturalised. It’s the lack of this idea and the continuity of those threads of connection that I find compelling in Yin’s installation. The element of thirdness (three suitcases) helps to destabilise the binary thinking that still informs thinking about ‘homes’: that is, that if you move, there is an ‘old’ one you leave in order to settle into the ‘new’ one. While this might have been the rhetoric of immigration (or escape) once upon a time, it is seldom so simple.

Brian Sweeney and Kevin Roberts, founders of the NZ Edge website, have adopted ‘edge’ as a new metaphor for New Zealanders, and it is from their website that I initially borrowed the figure. To give a very brief account of their project, the NZ Edge website is intended to appeal to and inspire New Zealanders everywhere (but particularly expatriates) giving them an alternate, slightly quirky cultural identity and encouraging them to develop or rekindle a newly passionate regard for their homeland. It’s clearly a response on some level to the view of New Zealand as a place that one must leave, and to highlight that not all exciting innovations occur at the ‘centre’. The website’s “edge proposal” is wide ranging, applied to landscape, location (New Zealand’s place at the edge of the world, sometimes so edgy it gets left off maps), attitude (having an edge; inspiring an attitude of “radical optimism”), history (New Zealand’s international achievers who’ve developed “world-changing ideas”), Maori and Pacific cultures (about which little is said), character, and fringe innovation (the legendary resourcefulness). While the concept of the NZ Edge initially seems quite ‘edgy’, I wonder if it really does “[offer] a new way of thinking about our identity, people, stories, achievements and place in the world,” “introduce metaphors and contemporary frameworks for NZers to articulate who we are”, or internationalise New Zealanders’ views of themselves, as its creators claim? Reading the messageboards, one could be forgiven for thinking it’s just a handy way to activate patriotism and expat’s homesickness. The message still seems to be one of an essential New Zealandness. It reminds me of a roadsign I passed heading North out of Wellington which entreats motorists to “hold onto the feel of the real New Zealand”. Has the kitsch Kiwiana simply been replaced with more tasteful photographs of windswept vistas?

NZ Edge attempts to (re)kindle particular sorts of relation and attachment to place. The complexity of the migrant’s or expat’s attachments, however, are not simply that of recrossing a border (something that, in fairness, the site does seem to acknowledge). What sort of edge is it that people cross who move to a place with no expectation of staying permanently? This is not the same as migration and may be better thought of as a nomad condition, with its own relation to place. As Deleuze and Guattari write, “The nomads have a specificity that is too hastily reduced to its consequences, by including them in the empires or counting them among the migrants, assimilating them to one or the other…” (495-6).

My own experience of changing cities in the last year scuppered any exclusive or binary notions of home. Wellington is now home, but so is Sydney, and there are places internationally also where I feel very much ‘at home’. When I was back in Sydney last year, I happened to pick up the catalogue for the 2004 Sydney Biennale, in which Yin’s “Portable Cities” were also shown, along with another sewn work, “International Flight” (2001-2004). This time, the cities of Paris, Lisbon and Sydney were added. It seemed fitting that the artist’s listing was organised so as to give two or more locations for each, that is, “(Artist’s name), b. (year) (place). Lives and works in (place)”. Ironically, given her subject matter, Yin’s entry reads:

YIN XIUZHEN b. 1963 Beijing, China Lives and works in Beijing

In some ways edge does seem like an apt figure for describing these experiences of travel and translocation, with the ideas of threshold and limit (standing on the edge of something new) and the geographical borders that are literally crossed (the marked out edge of territory). However, as migration scholars have long observed, integration, assimilation and cultural transmission are complex processes. This is especially true when confronting serial movement. If edge were to be a useful figure for thinking about these practices then this would not be edge as a barrier, but as a membrane or filter, one that facilitates movement in more than one direction. This sort of edge is a figure that approaches Clifford’s notion of “contact zones”. In his attempt to unpack some of the “complexities of travel and encounter”, he borrows this term from Mary Louise Pratt, who has used it in writing of colonial encounters. For Pratt, a contact perspective foregrounds “the interactive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters so easily ignored or suppressed by diffusionist accounts of conquest and domination. A ‘contact’ perspective…[stresses] copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power” (cited in Clifford, 192). A contact perspective is useful for thinking about contemporary movement and translocation, which similarly generate zones of contact, where different perspectives and practices collide or are brought into tension. For individual subjects, the aesthetic and affective resonances of these might be internal and largely invisible to others, but the notion could also be used to articulate contact zones within and across societies. The edge here is permeable, allowing for intermingling and seepage in the process of contact, the contamination of the new with what is continuous, brought from elsewhere. The membrane-edge facilitates resonances and mixing between the old and new, between presence and memories of how it was, the latter perhaps coloured by the addition of more or less nostalgia, as the edge permits. Now, then, here and there may bleed into each other, as individual subjects work through those very personal local/local/…etc negotiations. “Portable Cities” gestures in positive terms towards what it is to have multiple points of reference, of the effects which many places exercise and how our memories and subjectivities might be shaped by multiple zones.

I move now to consider a more recognisable example of media art: “FragMental Storm” is a work of interactive net.art, consisting of a programme which itself acts as a medium or filter of sorts through which html code is passed, bringing users into contact with weird and wonderful visual displays. The work is based on that most familiar of functions, the web search. Visitors enter a word via a keyboard and this begins a search function. The programme then proceeds to display an edited version of the top ten or so sites harvested from the search results, turning these into a self-generating collage of images and text. By sampling from many webpages, the work goes beyond a desire to simply mess with the content or presentation of any one webpage (I had fun using exonemo’s “Discoder” (1999) to do this to my bank’s homepage, a harmless (and temporary) hack.) Instead of displaying sites as per normal, “FragMental Storm” ‘deconstructs’ the code so as to “display the data disjointedly”, as exonemo’s website puts it. Because the results depend on the search terms used and what the programme actually does to the html code, they vary, but the interventions generally seem to produce screens with abstracted images, often with lines of planar and spinning graphics moving toward the user in kaleidoscopic patterns. While images of much of their work can be seen at their website (www.exonemo.com), seeing “FragMental Storm” installed in a gallery is far preferable to viewing it on PC: a data projector enables you to sit back and marvel at the unfolding images at a larger size and in a communal setting.

To me, “exonemo” sort of rhymes with “Geronimo” (at least in English), the call that people supposedly yell as they’re doing a parachute jump. Leaving aside its paratrooper origins, as a call “Geronimo” is also understood to reference metaphorical leaps into the unknown, which is precisely what this work invites audiences to take. “FragMental Storm” uses the linked results generated by a search engine in a completely unorthodox way, presenting an emerging collage of the sites returned. The lovely thing about this is that there is usually no connection apparent between the search term/s and what is displayed, making for a fascinating demonstration of semiotic rupture: signification is thrown into disarray as the chains linking signifiers with signifieds – one of language’s most basic sense-giving properties – are broken. The work invites users to sit back and enjoy the unfolding show. However, once the simplicity of the piece is discovered – utilising the internet’s links to question taken-for-granted links between word and thing – it also becomes something that you want to play with: a machine for un-making sense/making nonsense between word and image.

But which word to enter? Recalling a story that the most frequent search term on Google was ‘cricket’ in the aftermath of a locust plague, my first (slightly disappointing) search brought up the spinning green image of a cricket pitch, amongst lots of match results. Attempting something a little more obscure, ‘Uluru’ generated a pleasing sequence of the ubiquitous sunset photos of the famous rock, as out of place – in a Japanese media art work showing in a New Zealand regional gallery – as I felt at that time. A colleague told me that she entered her name, and sat back to enjoy the warping of the university webpages’ references to her, a very personal estrangement. ‘Blue’ brought back a screen with several delightful quirks, including the Blue Mountain car company, and something that asked whether I wasn’t “tired of being treated like a criminal for sharing music online?” Given its ability, however, for destabilising the self-evident (‘blue’), the most interesting use of this toy, I decided, would come from words whose meanings I was hazy on. ‘Chthonic’ was my final search term. The collaged images and text suggested a number of associations – with monsters, the occult and rock music – that weren’t exactly antithetical to the word’s meaning, and which made a kind of sense. It is this quality of the work that I find most interesting: that it takes users to the edge of understanding, showing up the limits of their existing apprehensions and encouraging them to new, less orthodox ones. Because the visuals displayed from the search are so disjointedly displayed, they frustrate attempts to immediately recognise the connections between word and images. In the absence of ‘logical’ connection, however, users may go on to perceive connections that are less direct, strange.

That this should come from a search engine is refreshing. How often do we find something surprising when we search the web? Extrapolating from my own usage, I would guess that many people search to confirm what they already know or at least suspect, the prototypical “navigator” who steers the technology. By contrast, “FragMental Storm” gives users a freed-up sense of what searching can be, beyond instrumentally finding a site that is already known, or that is urgently desired, with no surprises (for instance, the hotel with affordable accommodation for that conference trip). The work defunctionalises the web search, and invites users to take pleasure in the temporal unfolding of the results. Word/image connections are sensed, perceived aesthetically, rather than known in advance and simply recognised. No longer needing to be in control, users can enjoy the buffeting of this semiotic storm, in on the joke of the associative play. It reminds that the act of searching need not be reduced to a function, that searching remains an act that is pregnant with possibility, which can go past the edge and open onto something else, something strange.

The obliqueness of the connections in “FragMental Storm” between the word input and the images the search engine returns contrast nicely with more pedestrian uses of automated searching online. Recently, I have been fascinated by the advertising on newspaper sites, specifically the Google ads on smh.com.au, the online version of The Sydney Morning Herald. It is not the ads themselves, so much as the literality of the machine approach to searching the article text, which in turn generates the advertisements, which is peculiar. An agent apparently runs through the content of an article, in an attempt to provide some targeting of advertising for the reader. Results are then returned in small boxes at the top and somewhere in the middle of the webpage, so they are difficult to avoid. A recent article told of a by-election candidate who took a cocktail of drugs for a headache and had to be rushed to hospital, two days prior to the election (AAP). The story was accompanied by no less than six ads for drug and alcohol abuse and rehabilitation services, including “Secrets To Stop Addiction New Breakthrough Stops Addiction In 7 Days Or Less. Plus It’s Fun!”. I read of the ex-Guantanamo Bay detainee, Mamdouh Habib, who was held without charge by the U.S. for more than two years, addressing an anti- Iraq war rally (Marriner). Incredibly, above his photograph was an ad for: “Hotel Guantanamo. Find Hotels, Compare Rates, Read Reviews & More. Try TripAdvisor!” Finally, a report on the political scandal in which the West Australian Senator Ross Lightfoot was said to have smuggled money to Kurdish groups on behalf of Woodside Petroleum, had generated multiple ads for companies bearing the name that the Senator would no doubt prefer people forgot, at least in relation to him (Brown). While the results returned by “FragMental Storm” are charming because there is no human understanding informing their selection, these google ads are hilarious for precisely the same reason. In this case, however, these results are so perverse that they expose an underside to the news stories which they purport to accompany, so that it becomes impossible to read these as anything but farce.

exonemo seem fascinated by the possibilities and significance of the search engine in contemporary network societies (they recently sold a large painting of a google screen, to Google.) Beyond the apparent futility of painting huge canvases of digitally generated search screens, and showing up the arbitrariness of signification, “FragMental Storm” (and alternate browsers like it) also helps users see the arbitrariness of the display of the web. An agent running a processing task in the background unmakes the known (the easy, ‘intuitive’ display of the Graphical User Interface), the habitual form of the web that most of us are thoroughly familiar with (through browsers such as Explorer and Netscape). Arie Altena, in an article “The Browser is Dead”, points to the commercial and design imperatives that governed the development of standardised browsers, and discusses the range of browser options which provide quite different experiences of ‘the’ web, from out of date browsers, to text only, to image generators similar to “FragMental Storm”. Altena explains that as the Net is only a stream of data, it can be made visible, legible, and navigable in various ways. Of alternative browsers, Altena writes:

Webstalker and Lynx are browsers for protestant text lovers, code-eaters who, fed by code, make images in their own heads. Ambulator is the browser for people who make up stories and wish to be fed by images without being disturbed by text. For the Lynx user the Web is what it always was: a library, an architecture of text and links – without GUI – and a hypertext in optima forma. For the Webstalker user the Web is an empty universe where star systems appear. And for those who use Ambulator, it is an accumulation of unrelated images, a reason to start imagining.

“FragMental Storm” demands that audiences sense “things as they are perceived” rather than as they are already known, which the Russian Formalist critic Victor Schlovsky pronounced to be the purpose of art (12). By highlighting the arbitrariness of how code is made perceptible, the work enables visitors to see and experience first hand how different the experience can be, and perhaps to realise how quickly the expectations of a new technology become fixed, its uses habitual.

“Portable Cities” and “FragMental Storm” are very different artworks, though the elegance and conceptual force of each derives from the artists’ attention to the instabilities of meaning around their respective themes. I have tried to draw out how each offers new ways of thinking contemporary practices of movement/translocation and internet searching, both common in technologised, highly networked societies. I introduced the notion of edge into the discussion in part because, having discovered the NZ Edge website while I was reflecting on these artists’ work, I wanted to identify what it was that I found ‘edgy’ in each, as well as to question whether edge really does offer a new metaphor for New Zealanders, as the NZ Edge project claims. Coming up with any detailed response to the latter is well beyond the scope of this article. I will, however, offer some concluding thoughts on the productivity of edge as a figure, as I have developed it in this discussion.

The complexity of contemporary global movements is an under-theorised area. So while “Portable Cities” initially evoked for me notions of estrangement and of being caught in-between two cultures, the binary basis this seems to presume is in the end not adequate for theorising more complex life itineraries. This subject is both analogous to the work of cultural studies of migration yet also distinct; the nomads belong neither to the empires nor amongst the migrants, as Deleuze and Guattari observe. Where do the contact zones lie in contemporary New Zealand? Does biculturalism constitute a contact zone in the sense expounded by Clifford and Pratt? Where do the ongoing encounters with difference, amongst various others, occur today? In the public sphere it is interesting to note how limited debate on immigration remains. Those vocal in these debates, for instance, show little interest in the working nomads currently in this country. The debate typically revolves around a few painfully simple narratives: that of the ‘brain drain/gain’; whether expats will return home; the ‘good’ migrant (new taxpayers with desired skills); and the unpopularity of immigration with some sectors of the population. Perhaps because of the bureaucratic difficulties of gaining visas and work permits, the number of nomads living and working in New Zealand is not as large as in the European Union, for instance, but the ease with which Australians can enter and work in New Zealand means there are quite a few of us.

Stemming from this figure of nomadic movement, the notion of edge has theoretical efficacy as well as practical descriptive power. Edge, figured as a membrane, a contact zone, might offer an alternative figure for describing processes of cultural transmission and identity construction, supplanting or complexifying terms currently in use, such as ‘hybridity’. It may facilitate a non-determined discussion about contact that is respecting of difference, without some of the problematic resonances that hybridity carries, primarily the concern with origins (Haraway, 192-3).

By contrast, the edges which interest me about “FragMental Storm” are the edges of understanding it shows up and gestures beyond. Taking apart the word-image connections that are so naturalised opens a zone of virtuality, in which other imaginings can be had, meanings made. Consonant with an understanding that it is one of art’s roles to offer audiences new understandings, the recognition of it as codework adds extra dimensions to exonemo’s edginess. It orders the network differently. Appropriated for artistic ends, the technology is no longer productivity tool and the user is able to play around and sense how things might be otherwise. The technical media here mediate code, the computer language, for visitors, but in a different way to what they normally do. In the process, visitors are brought into contact and given a chance to get creative with code, more intimate with – and less insulated from – it than the ordinary computer user. The typical user knows next to nothing about what goes on behind the colourful ‘windows’ of a display. As Dylan Evans asks: “…would you know what to do if all those pretty little icons in your browser disappeared and, instead of Windows, you were left staring at lines of letters and numbers of HTML, the language in which web pages are written?” “FragMental Storm” mediates code for users, highlighting the arbitrariness of its display and making it perceptible in another way. While it does defamiliarise display conventions, in one sense making these strange, paradoxically this is also a making accessible of the otherwise inaccessible. It’s an encounter that makes visitors more aware of how computers think. The installation creates a zone where they make contact with animated computer code, and, though this is not quite on the computer’s terms, nor is it entirely on the users’.

Recent developments in Japanese art have often been exemplified internationally by a narrow range of work characterised as neo-pop, particularly work that draws on sub-cultural references to manga (cartoons) and anime (animation). Mediarena: contemporary art from Japan seeks to present a broader range of work in order to develop a layered analysis of contemporary Japanese art. The project reflects important and exciting developments in Japanese contemporary art, with a particular emphasis on art being made now in Tokyo and Osaka. It features artists working across a wide range of media including painting, sculpture, installation, photography, sound art and video and has a special focus on the high level of digital animation and interactive work being produced in Japan today.

Taking the practice of senior Japanese artists Yayoi Kusama, Tatsuo Miyajima, and Noboru Tsubaki as its starting point, Mediarena explores the increasing relevance of their work for a new generation of Japanese artists. By linking work by three generations of artists, the exhibition places the work in an art historical framework rather than simply interpreting work against recent changes in Asian pop culture and technology. This approach also reflects the ease with which the younger artists in the exhibition shift between modes of practice and changes of medium; artists who produce work that slips effortlessly between hi-end technology, pop-cultural and futuristic forms, traditional motif, and strategies common to performance art and video making from the 1960s.

This tendency in contemporary practice in Japan gives the exhibition its title Mediarena, a title intended to indicate the multiplying set of images, media and genre that are now ubiquitous in the 21st Century, particularly in the metropolitan centres of Japan, and a title that indicates a sense of ‘between-ness’ explored by the artists; an unwillingness to locate an artistic practice in one single position. What follows is a consideration of some of the overlapping themes and tendencies revealed through the exhibition.

All of the artists in Mediarena are urban based living and working in the Kanto region (Tokyo) or in the Kansai region (Osaka, Kobe, and Kyoto). Each is a tight but sprawling and multi-layered metropolitan centre, sharing many similarities and some differences. Kansai culture generally tends to be louder and more commercially oriented, whereas Kanto with its links to government is often thought to be more monochrome and simple in its tastes. Osaka was also the setting for the World Expo 1970, perhaps the last utopian moment of any scale in Japan.

There is evidence to suggest differences in orientation between the art scenes in Kansai and Kanto. In Mediarena the differences are subtle. The Gutai movement of the 1950’s was born in Ashiya, near Osaka and, with their multi-media disposition manifest in their attention to site and their attention to the multidimensionality of material including action and sound, they are a reference for many artists. One can trace their legacy in the 1990s Osaka- based multimedia group Dumb Type and more recently the multimedia Osaka based cabaret group Kyupi Kyupi included in Mediarena. However the Gutai legacy can also be felt in the work of Tatsuo Miyajima, based in Tokyo. Many of the more complex animation installations in the exhibition have been produced by artists from the Kansai region including Miwa Yanagi, Tabaimo and Tadasu Takamine and in previous works Noboru Tsubaki has featured robotics, and banks of computer terminals. This is not to say that Kansai art is more technologically based for the most cutting edge work in this area is arguably produced by exonomo with their live internet installations. exonomo’s work however is characterised by simplicity and directness.

More than difference, a common concern with the density and artificiality of urban space can be detected with many of the artists. Naoya Hatakeyama has, since the mid-1980s, developed a large number of photo series showing landscapes and places that are marked by industrialisation and globalisation. He does not restrict himself to Tokyo or even Japan. Indeed one of his more memorable recent images, exhibited at the Venice Biennale 2001, is of a sports stadium in Osaka that enclosed a residential block and parking lot within its arena. His images depict the effects of humanity on the landscape, yet ironically humanity itself is usually absent, leading to a ghostly quality like the one present in the River series. These images of underground waterways in Tokyo are symbolic of his methods, showing an uninhabited beautiful world that, nevertheless, is also a deeply human, man-made world. We see the towers of Tokyo, themselves monuments to technology, artifice and globalisation, set against the often hidden sewers that carry away the natural and unnatural effluent and discharge of those same towers. He lines up the division between sewer and tower in all the images as if intimating an artificial horizon. Architecture and nature appear both remote and close, bewitchingly beautiful backdrops in a strangely unreal world.

Dense and strangely claustrophobic spaces are either depicted or conjured by many of the other artists. We feel them in the intricate details of Akira Yamaguchi’s paintings of Tokyo or the enclosed and at times looped and artificial spaces explored by Motohiko Odani, Yanagi, Tabaimo, Hiroyuki Matsukage and Saki Satom, who frequently performs in and documents public spaces such as underground stations, retail and office buildings, fast-food outlets and airports. Her works explore the intersection between public and private space by creating situations that allow her to interact with the public in ways that unexpectedly expose patterns of behaviour and cast them in a fresh light. A tension between extremely tight physical space and the seemingly unlimited virtual space offered by the digital screen was effected in A space of one’s own, a work commissioned for a group show, AkihabaraTV, held in a unique area of Tokyo called Electric City where shops selling electronic equipment are concentrated. Satom usually documents actions in public space for exhibition in a gallery. This time she did the opposite, displaying a private space and action in a public space on many screens. Another of her works From B to H explores the idea of public and private space interacting, by focusing on a special sound-erasing soundtrack in a lift. In Tokyo, background soundtracks are frequently used to eliminate personal noise in public spaces such as toilets and lifts. We see the video as if through a video surveillance camera. The protagonist dances to the soundtrack when there is no one with her, but conforms to expected patterns of behaviour when someone enters the lift.

Explorations of notions of time and the infinite have persisted in Japanese contemporary art from at least the 1950s with the performances and experiments of the Gutai group of artists. The most consistent and persistent consideration of such notions is found in the work of Tatsuo Miyajima. He made his international debut at the Venice Biennale in 1988 with the acclaimed work Sea of time but as a student he experimented with performance works that interrogated the nature of existence. The focus on time allows him to attend to the immaterial and even metaphysical nature of existence. Reinforced by his readings of Buddhist philosophy he has proposed three tenets that inform his work: keep changing, connect with everything, and continue forever. For 20 years Miyajima has manifest this focus through sculptures and installations that involve light-emitting electronic counting devices. For Mediarena he introduced a new form, being works from his Counter me on series, diptychs of computerised counting devices featuring different coloured neon tubes.

Ideas of continuance have also long informed the work of Yayoi Kusama. From childhood Kusama has experienced hallucinations of repeating dots and flowers and her work is in a sense an attempt to come to terms with and order her perceptions. By implication her repetitions of dots, flowers and mirror balls could potentially extend infinitely, a fact she emphasises through the use of devices such as mirrors, lights and the wall-papering of patterns. Significantly, in the mid 1960’s she organised performances, “happenings” and body-painting festivals. Having recorded many of these actions on film, she continues to make performances for camera.

Miyajima and Kusama may make work that seems to evoke the mystical and the fantastical respectively, but both are also interested in the repetitions of the everyday, an interest that is manifest in diverse ways by many of the artists in Mediarena. The work by Takamine, God Bless America, is a pertinent example, a work that relies on two overlapping readings of time. It documents an 18 day performance by Takamine and his assistant and compresses the performance into a video projection lasting less than an hour. The two performers spend their work time manipulating a large mound of clay, but also documented is their down time, resting, sleeping, eating and making out. The alternate time frame is provided by the clay, which is moulded to form an animated head, which moves and sings in real ‘claymation’ time. To add a further sense of displacement to the sensation of time, both the action of the clay head and the action of the performers appear incessant due to the looping of the projection.

This temporal effect of the video loop is exploited by many artists in the exhibition including Noboru Tsubaki, Makoto Aida, Miya Yanagi, Motohiko Odani, Tabaimo, Kyupi Kyupi and Satom, one of the youngest Mediarena artists. M. station run is one of a number of manipulated video works she has shot at rush hour. In this case Satom walks through a subway with a sign that says “no overtaking,” but people ignore her because of their haste. Although it looks like the rush for the trains is constant, it is exaggerated due to the video being looped. The surging crowds are configured as never-ending waves.

Slippage between different moments occurs in a number of other works in the exhibition; with Akira Yamaguchi and Tabaimo, who both simultaneously reference a pre-modern and post-modern Japan in their work, and by Yanagi, who, in her projected video work Kagome kagome morphs different characters, places and moments into one time frame. Duration is also an essence of Mika Kato’s paintings, which take an extraordinarily long time to paint, given that they first involve the artist making the doll she later paints, combined with the subsequent painstaking detail she achieves in the painting. exonomo’s work FragMental storm involves a ‘live’ feed off the internet, while photo artist Hatakeyama is not only a master of the use of light, he can also capture the instant of an explosion, as shown in the series Blast, to bring time to a standstill. His involvement and interest in temporality is accentuated by his determination to present his work in series, as suspended moments both temporally and conceptually linked.

The most disquieting investigations of duration in the exhibition explore the finality of death. The duration of human life is always implicit in Miyajima’s work and at times is made more explicit, as in the major installation Megadeath, which he presented at the Venice Biennale in 1999; however, more socially explicit references to death and suicide are overt in the work of Aida, Kusama and Tabaimo.

It has been frequently noted in international publications that much contemporary Japanese art employs leading-edge technology in keeping with Japan’s reputation as a new technology pacesetter. This tendency can be identified in Mediarena, with its high proportion of projected video and animation, not withstanding the fact that projection installations are now commonplace in major international exhibitions around the globe. Nevertheless, while many museums and artists have only recently come to terms with the shift from videotape to video disc, many Japanese artists have abandoned the video disc altogether in favour of the high-end computer, which allows for greater manipulation and resolution of the image, exonomo, Miyajima, Tabaimo and Takamine, being pertinent examples in Mediarena.

However, to classify the work in Mediarena as simply hi-tech would be to deny the re-emergence of more traditional media and the general resistance of many of the artists to being defined in relation to medium or technology. Take for example Aida, who moves between traditional Japanese painting formats, to posters and comic books albeit with strong manga (cartoon) references, to video and performance, through to photography, sculpture and installation. Another example is Noboru Tsubaki, who followed his project UN Boy at Art Tower, Mito, 2003 which used computers and robotics, with Radikal Dialogue for Mediarena, which used a pre-modern technology in the form of numerous underground kilns to produce charcoal that he later incorporated into Radikal aqua, a working model for an inexpensive and easily sustainable water filtration unit which could be used in impoverished countries with water contamination problems.

We have hybrid groups such as Gorgerous, who are musicians and image- makers, whose performances and imagery borrow from the rock-star posturing of American pop culture and who play and perform with sculptures they call Love arms, hybrid instruments built by Gorgerous member Munetero Ujino that key into the combined histories of avant-garde music, conceptual art, science fiction and the disco hall. Kyupi Kyupi is another example, being a multimedia collective of artists, designers, performers, musicians and programmers who principally produce video installations, television shows and live cabaret performances. Unabashed in their desire to entertain, the collective excels in epitomising a post-modern hybridity in popular culture by combining references to urban popular culture, cyber culture, manga, and soft porn with the more traditional performance practices of cabaret and theatre.

The appearance of painting in Mediarena could be taken as a reassertion of traditional art media, but frequently the artists’ use of painting appears out of character in some way. Kato appears at first to be engaging established painting concerns, however her process involves sculpting and photography, while a close inspection of the surface of her paintings reveals that they are covered with minute multi-coloured dots, reminding the viewer of pixels, the building blocks of the digital imagery that abounds in Japan. Aida’s Dog series of paintings might be read as a homage to the tradition of nihonga, a traditional painting style that privileged beautiful subject matter, yet such a possibility of respect is undercut by the savagery of the content, which depicts cute naked girls who have been hacked to make them look like dogs.

The sense of a deflated nostalgia in Aida’s work is also apparent in Tabaimo’s installation Japanese interior. Ironically, even though Tabaimo uses a purpose-built powerful computer to drive this interactive installation, the animation itself is not produced through a computer programme. Each cell is hand-drawn and painted in a style reminiscent of ukiyo-e woodblock printing. Any sense of the sentimental is however subverted by the sardonic and at times violent character of the subject matter.

Despite its dark undercurrents Tabaimo’s Japanese interior also engages a sense of fantasy and play, a characteristic we can also track through much of the work in the exhibition. In some ways Japanese interior functions like a video game, by challenging the viewer to discover and move through its different levels, and like a video game or anime (animation) the work also engages the fantastic; within its depiction of a traditional Japanese domestic setting we see a salary man incarcerated in a refrigerator, a ukiyo-e print come to life and one sumo wrestler suck the life out of another as if he were a balloon. There is a sense of playfulness in the dress-up scenarios presented by Sawada, while Kato’s images seem to relate to children’s toys, childhood memories and hybrid fantasies.

Despite its other readings Takamine’s work also evokes a sense of whimsy and childlike playfulness, while Odani presents a fantastic world in the animated works Rompers and Caterpillar, which seem to blend genres of children’s stories with science fiction. The scene in Rompers is innocent at first glance but includes sinister surprise elements. One soon realises that the girl and her environment, which includes mutant animals, display all the hallmarks of genetic modification. Darker in mood, Caterpillar depicts an even more surreal sinister scene reminiscent of science fiction, horror films, or a child’s nightmare. The works play with fantasy future-scapes that appear in both Japanese manga and anime films and Hollywood movies, keying into fantasies and fears of an emerging artificial or post-human world.

The playful acting out of make-believe is also central to the photo installation Star by Matsukage. He often explores issues of performance in his work: the way in which people perform for a camera, the tendency of photography to produce clichéd characters, public desire for celebrity, and willingness to act like one’s celebrity heroes. As much as Star refers to celebrity-adulation and the popularity of karaoke in Japan, it also attempts to convey the actual feeling of being a star to the viewer, a feeling Matsukage experiences himself with his other artistic persona as the lead singer and guitarist in Gorgerous. The viewer speaks/sings/yells into the microphone and a photographic sea of young girls scream and cheer in adulation accordingly. The viewer becomes a player.

Not least among the many attributes of Kusama’s work is its abundant sense of playfulness. She uses childlike devices such as body-painting and balloons, and paints her room using Technicolor dots. Ultimately she envisions polka dots and flowers, fantasises about them, and then enacts her visions and fantasies. It is this enacting that evokes the fantastical sensibility of the child. It may in part reflect her struggle against the odds that has characterized her life, but more importantly it is perhaps the most tangible way that she can achieve her goal to remove the separation between art and life, given that no contradiction exists for Kusama between herself and her art.

The notion of play and fantasy is intrinsic to Japanese pop culture, not least in the image of the young girl, often depicted as cute. The “girl” image proliferates in the commercial and pop-cultural side of latter day Japan, even into adult life. It is not surprising then to find it appearing in different forms in Mediarena. Rather than reinforcing stereotypes that are transmitted through the “girl” image the artists it image to explore the complex identity of women in Japanese society, as with the paintings of Kato, whose subjects, with their cuteness and larger-than-life eyes, bear some similarity to the girl-hero characters found in Japanese manga. But Kato also chooses the doll subject as a point of difference from manga characters. An acute attention to detail, combined with the fact that the dolls are moulded from clay that Kato has costumed and furnished with glass eyes and human hair, unnerves any easy reading of cuteness and femininity.

Tomoko Sawada is another young artist addressing issues of identity. Since 1998 she has been making photographs that explore her identity both as an artist and a Japanese woman. For the series Omiai, Sawada portrays herself as 30 different personalities in photographs of the type used to initiate arranged marriages. In this long Japanese tradition, potential brides dress in formal attire and have their pictures taken at a professional portrait studio. The parents subsequently exchange and distribute cards featuring the photos to other families and relatives in hope of finding a suitable husband for their daughter. Seen together the images expose and thereby deconstruct a Japanese language of male desire involving the objectification of women.

Similar territory is explored by Yanagi, well known internationally for her 1997 series Elevator girls, which depicted multiple versions of the beautifully groomed young women in tailored suits that can be found at the entrances to Japanese department stores, on their escalators and in elevators. Tailored and uniformed women also appear in the video installation Kagome kagome, where they move down a long, deep corridor. Through the duration of the video the girls subtly morph from lift girls, to nurses, to hotel staff, and into air hostesses. Despite the modernity of the settings and the women’s uniforms, the mannerisms of the women themselves subtly reveal the long tradition of female subservience in Japanese society.

The most contentious and bitingly satirical deployment of the “girl” image in the exhibition is by Aida, whose hybrid images comment on the often violent undercurrents of manga and its constant stereotyping of the image of young girls. He complicates such depictions by rendering them in a venerated form such as nihonga or by mixing them with references to real life as with the work Hara-kiri school girls. This depicts kogals committing hara-kiri samurai style, kogal being a term used for young Japanese girls who are often seen in school uniforms, mini skirts and loose socks, but who also wear expensive brand-name clothes, accessories and make-up. While Aida’s work wryly comments on the effects of manga it also refers to codes of ritualised and stereotyped behaviour that underpin traditional Japanese social and sexual attitudes.

Within Mediarena we can discern an interest in the psychology of devotional and obsessional behaviour, Kusama’s obsession with dots and flowers perhaps being the most obvious. There is also an obsessional aspect to Sawada’s, Yanagi’s and Kato’s explorations of identity and with Takamine’s and Matsukage’s synthetic devotional or shrine-like spaces. In many cases however, this quality is exploited as a means of social critique.

Take for example Aida’s Suicide machine. The artist presents us with the ultimate in obsession, with all its contradictions. The machine appears as the last word in accessories for the man who has everything. The hanging device comes replete with pouches containing cigarettes and lighter, a mobile phone and a flask of sake. On the video screen we see our protagonist have his last smoke and drink, call his girlfriend and then attempt suicide, only to fail and start over repeatedly. Here Aida is poking fun at his country’s traditions as well as commenting on the emptiness of consumer desire, as does the work Edible artificial girls, which neatly comments not only on the Japanese obsession with girly imagery but also that of packaging and consumerism. Aida debunks obsessional behaviour as a means of effecting social critique.

Such strategies also prevail in Tabaimo’s Japanese interior, a work that implicitly but nevertheless strongly critiques the customs and infatuations it portrays, while a debunking of the workaholic and conformist Japanese worker is implicit in the work of Satom. Yanagi is equally critical of Japanese customs, while Takamine also reflects a current anxiety in Japan over the intentions of the United States and the fact that Japanese troops have been sent into a combat zone for the first time since World War II. Again we can look to Kusama as a precursor with her anti-Vietnam War “happenings”.

The sense of darkness and social critique that surfaces at points in Mediarena reflects an emergent characteristic in Japanese art and in that sense it is a distinguishing feature of the show, which separates it from surveys focusing on lightness and neo-Pop tendencies. We see then a younger generation of artists increasingly prepared to examine Japan’s own history and customs and one also prepared to address social issues both at home and in the West.