Abstract

One of the main natural obstacles of Western-privileged globalization of cultures is the world’s systems of productivity in most fields that tend to follow, if not obey, the Western-origin categorizing forces. The many world networks of parallel yet intertwined ways of thinking and of producing knowledge - and in this case, making art - in its most diverse sense preserves a striking diversity. In this sense, when categorization becomes loosened, the boundary becomes blurred and rationality becomes flexibilized in a particular cultural background and a specific curating act. The fluidity of meanings in a Westernen-like perspective within the essence of organizational forces and lines thus offers a poetics that in turn (re-)defines art making, both art and making, in its very own right. Advocating for knowledge production decentralization, Yipei Lee, the co-curator of internet artist residency “Flaneur in the insular cities: island ecology” (漫遊島城——島嶼生態學), is very much the case of this poetics. Putting it in a less utopian wording, Lee’s co-curation offers a chance to funding entities, research-based artists and curators themselves to build a multifying dimension of co-centralities in art making. This poetics of playing with meanings in art making itself is marked by the project’s all-encompassing interrelations and interactions among curators and artists rhizome-like webs of ideas that have been materialized during the ongoing process of this online residency: Participating individuals are supposed to do flânerie as their own initiatives within and without some certain universality of insularity and its ecologicality as main themes of their artistic research. This essay aims at exploring, if not attempts to offer an insight on how the elasticity and flexibleness of to-be-reappropriated meanings in this particular case can serve as an alternative way of decentralization, while giving a very brief overview about the event.
While Lee as an independent curator offers necessary empirical evidence for the writing of this essay, Cheong Kin Man, as a visual anthropologist, tries to give third-party commentaries and observations on it.