Have You Eaten Yet? – A Window Into Asia
TSAI Chao-yi
(Curator of 2007Asian Art Biennial)
On the surface, the question “Have you eaten yet?”, a common salutation among various Asian populations, may seem a bit odd. However, in today’s parlance, it is similar to such phrases as “how are you?”, “what’s up?”, “good morning,” and “good day” as a greeting when initiating conversation, communication, and interaction.
In the pre-industrial agricultural era, frequent natural disasters and warfare only added to the hardship of most Asians’ lives. When three square meals a day were the exception and not the rule, a good meal and a warm bed were considerable blessings. Consequently, in an age of material scarcity, asking someone if they’d eaten was a projection of one’s own state of being and thus conveyed caring and good will, as if saying, “I hope you are not enduring hunger and have had a meal.”
So, “Have you eaten yet?”
When you hear people greet you in this way in Asia, they really are concerned if you’ve eaten. If you respond by saying, ‘No, I haven’t eaten,’ many gracious Asians will ask you to be their guest for a meal on the spot to have you enjoy the true satisfaction of a good meal. The colloquial Chinese phrase, “a person taking a meal is as untouchable as the emperor,” puts this respect for satisfying humanity’s need for survival into crystal clear focus in a colorful manner.
Rooted in a humanist perspective, “have you eaten yet?” further contains Asian values of pragmatism. Hunger signifies the need to eat, and many Asians, whose self-expression is restrained and subtle, are not afraid to exemplify the guiding principle of survival that “the people live for food” and to extend that concept into their daily lives as a customary phrase of communication. Thus the rhetorical question, “have you eaten yet?” represents an approach to communication that encompasses humanity’s physical instincts and Asians’ living conditions. Reflecting a "self-awareness" and thinking, at the same time it evokes a Golden Rule (putting oneself in the place of others) condition of sharing and communication values.
The pursuit of a full belly is an innate instinct, for when we have not eaten our fill we feel the hunger of being hollow inside. In turn, the instinctual reaction towards that empty, wanting feeling causes us to honestly face our real needs and look for ways to resolve the situation. The will to fill one’s belly motivates Asians to pursue a better life, and at the same time is an important force powering Asian change. In recent years the Asian economy has experienced rapid blossoming, becoming the engine of world economic growth. Nevertheless, “satiation” is subjective, not objective. Increasingly wealthy Asians now no longer need to worry about not filling their bellies, yet plenty of food at each meal still cannot be directly equated with satisfaction. Sweeping globalization and remarkable economic development continue to bring about change in Asia. External changes constantly tug at internal equilibrium. Thus the existential state of which an Asia undergoing transformation must continuously be made aware of and monitor is best stated by the phrase “have you eaten yet?” This state of existential flux reflects like a microcosm the philosophy of life Asians have adopted under today’s complex situation. At the same time, it is an awareness mechanism through which Asians may redefine themselves through active reflection of one’s state of being.
Today’s Asia is witnessing the rise of cities, a young and expanding population, and ever-growing capital and consumer markets. The picture of prosperity and dazzle, it exudes optimism and confidence in progress and development. Yet many contradictions are inherent in the mix; frugality and family-oriented moral concepts remain deeply ingrained, yet the rise of individualism has visited rapid changes upon the family and consumer values. Tradition and religion keep circulating quietly, but the cacophony of the mass media, Western values, and individualism has caused the community’s cultural identity to waver and become muddled in the midst of diversity. Scientific advancement has blurred and erased geographical borders, yet as the new generation has become accustomed to the goods and information of the virtual on-line community, interpersonal relationships have shifted from face-to-face emotional interaction towards on-line exchanges through the Internet. The global economy presents prospects for development, but tension between cities and towns and social divides has produced countless drifting souls. In today’s Asia, satisfying basic needs for food and shelter is still the most basic need and the root for maintaining social stability, but somewhere along the line the tone and connotations of the question “have you eaten yet?” have in essence been divided and formed multiple possibilities for interpretation.
Every individual seeks satiation in different ways, each of which is informed and colored by different cultural outlooks, approaches to life, value systems, and top-down global consumer culture. As a phrase of greeting, “have you eaten yet?” brings about different ways of understanding issues depending on the individual, generating disparate physical, psychological, linguistic, and attitudinal responses, while investing answers with all kinds of approximate, general, divergent, or conflicting possibilities. The richness, depth and nuance of the question “have you eaten yet?” lies in its relativity, as opposed to absolutism as a question and concept. As such, it gets right to the crux of the physical and psychological instincts of human existence – a constant thread spanning national boundaries and going beyond cultural differences – while at the same time also having the completely open-ended quality of a rhetorical question.
Although “have you eaten yet?” is only common as a greeting between people in certain Asian population groups and among ethnic Chinese, as an exhibition theme it has not been adopted in consideration of whether or not one’s belly actually feels full, but in order to compel us to reflect on the physical and mental state of “satiation,” and to lead us to an awareness of states of the physical, spiritual, psychological, and desire. The clashing and interplay between the self-reflection, self-awareness, communication, open response, and varying interpretations set off by the question “have you eaten yet?” both flip around and extend the connotations of the original context, offering Asians – whether posing or answering the question – a point from which to probe, observe, or analyze contemporary Asian phenomena from their own perspective. Asking the contemporary Asian question “Have you eaten yet?”, this exhibition presents the self-awareness of Asian societies undergoing rapid change in the global society, their differing interpretations of “satiation,” and uses the empathy and proactive nature of the question to illustrate the dynamic energy of today’s Asian communication and sharing.
Urban Dreamworks
The State of the World Population 2007 report from the United Nations Population Fund, under the sub-heading “Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth,” announced that more than half of the world’s population will be living in urban areas in 2008. These 3.3 billion people will reside in cities, and urban concentration of the population will continue to grow. The world’s urban population will climb to five billion by 2030, when 81 percent of Asia’s population will be concentrated into major towns and cities.[m1]
Rapid population movement tells of the changes transpiring within Asia. As international liquid capital is concentrated in Asia, cities have become the centers of Asian economic might, incorporated in the international division of labor and increasingly inseparable from the worldwide economic network. Pressured by global urban competition, Asian cities are scrambling to adjust and regulate modes and functionalities of space. New landscapes, buildings, transportation development, Internet infrastructure, urban renewal and expansion accompany the explosive pursuit of speed and development. While creating countless job opportunities at the same time these developments have triggered an astoundingly rapid migration from towns and villages to cities across Asia. As such, cities have become places where people envision, pursue, and carry out dreams of changing their status quo, seeking opportunities, struggling for survival, and chasing after a better life.
Asian society is undergoing rapid transformation with the massive influx of migrants from towns, villages, and across borders into its cities. Cities have become performance spaces pitting economics against society, accentuating complex social conditions, the best and worst, most innovative and conservative, most radical and traditionalist, most optimistic and most lost people, events, and things. Rapid population increases have caused traffic congestion, massive increases in rubbish output, air pollution, and crowded living spaces, yet as terminals of economic production cities provide myriad emerging industries with a geographic foundation for prosperous growth, bringing out people’s thirst for changes to the status quo in a relatively richer society and the drive to work hard to forge a vision of “new life.” This is where the rising middle class lays down its dreams, producing more new millionaires, multi-millionaires, and billionaires than can be counted. Yet at the same time, rising unemployment and crime rates continue to increase the gap between towns and cities and the rich and the poor, exacting an incalculable social cost on urban areas. This is where multinational industry and economic might come together, where in the rapid transition to “global economic cities” strongly local traditional values and the cultural universalism of globalism clash. The old and the new are coming together across Asian cities, and as momentum tips towards the pursuit of progress and development, in the globally networked society where capital, culture, and goods flow rapidly across borders, they search for their own local character and identity. This solidification in the pursuit of identity is itself a process of self-awareness, communication, and dialectics that is further manifested in the icons and images of the urban population’s lives in its midst.
In Vietnam one can observe the distinctive physical rhythm in the assiduous Asian work ethic of people and motorcycles. As the main mode of transportation for urban capital, sales, consumption, and activity the motorcycle plays an instrumental role in the Vietnamese working class’s lives and economic development. Dutch photographer Hans Kemp, a long-time resident of Asia, captures Vietnamese reliance on and innovative use of motorcycles in his Bikes of Burden series – a mode of transportation stretched to the extreme – and a Vietnam in transition. Here, pre-industrial, industrial, post-industrial, and globalization, fashionable goods or rural cultural products nearly all exist on overloaded motorcycles rushing around the streets. Prosperity of this sort marked by resilient vitality amidst bedlam seeps with youthful longing for the pursuit of progress and change. Over the course of the motorcycle’s progression in the urban environment, people look for existential meaning and ownership, and through its “super-human” capacity, exude a mounting self-compulsion and expectation.
“Modern” cities are proliferating throughout Asia. Rural villages are beginning to crumble as urban areas ascend rapidly, transforming the makeup of many towns and villages and turning Asian society towards one in which fields are disappearing, countryside memories are scarce, and only “the now” and competitive life remain. In the real world cities have replaced rural society’s acre upon acre of fields, as dolled-up tourism and recreation facilities penetrate deep into natural landscapes as the once-authentic rural vistas of memory are constantly replaced by a succession of the modern, scientific, informational moment.Have You Eaten Yet?, bySeang-Yuan Huang + Family Members of Field Office, endeavors to reconstruct nostalgic experiences in the fields within the new spatial forms of the global economy and information society, calling out in empathy with the uncomplicated dreamland rapidly disappearing amidst the changes transforming towns and cities.
In many places throughout Asia, skyscrapers, streets buzzing with pedestrians and automobiles, rapid spatial and physical rhythm, practically define its “cosmopolitan” character. Lee Yong Deok’s city outline employs a dualistic dialectic contrasting solid/empty, complete/deconstructed, speed/static to seemingly freeze a busy street scene in slow motion and suddenly in an instant turn a plainly familiar street scene into a silent and unfamiliar corner devoid of reference. A feeling of drifting uncertainty illustrates an existential state where people are both present and alienated in the rapid changes of urban civilization.
Varied mixtures and spatial imagery infused with dynamic feeling, ways of life, and bodily rhythms compose the unique urban experience of today’s Asian people. Cities are places of frequent contact between people, and the meeting between people and public space composes the city’s unique rhythm. In Moon Kyung Won’s works, this pulse is transformed into a sort of metaphor as “slices of movement” among crowds and their random flow are represented and interpreted as new communication and identity linkage modes for contemporary people. In contrast to cities, people are merely a humble existence, but the real-time energy of synergized humble dynamism propels the further production of spatial meaning and forges an urban vista that keeps transmogrifying with people’s dynamic rhythm. In Moon Kyung Won’s works, “the body” contains roaming images of the high tech, information, Internet, and media era. Even if she stresses a virtual reality contemporary experience, at the same time she forges a “third space” that is not entirely virtual, but is rather connected to life in the real world. This compression of space and time, transcendence of the real and virtual, are also manifest in the “city” images formed from data flow in Meena Park’s works. Park deconstructs the real brick and mortar cities we are accustomed to perceiving into an abstract world composed of such representative symbols as color bands, letters and numbers. Buildings, traffic on the streets, billboards, and bodily rhythms become symbols for the flow of information, choice, and exchange with a flat picture as the interface. Meena Park’s works point out the increasingly alienating modes of living, visual experiences and communication in the Internet information age. Hooked up through the Internet, people today are no longer constrained to the tangible world, but can link randomly, across realms, and in real time to any corner of the world, possessing seemingly different yet connected rhythms and identities from places around the globe and become transformed into a data mode that can exist here, there, or in a totally virtual realm.
Diverse urban ways of life are exhibited in the economic process directing heavy concentration of media industries (consumer, fashion, services, entertainment). This glittering picture of fluid, transnational, capital consumption prosperity, shaking up myriad urban modalities and transforming the ways of life, consumption, communication, and self-gratification on Asians. Under the manipulation of the media, “celebrities” in our post-modern urban cultural mélange are singular products of the diverse consumption age. Not only guiding the establishment of audience tastes, “idols” satisfy our need for spiritual compensation for our imperfect selves. Hiroyuki Matsukage’s Stardraws attention to pitfalls of popular consumption, simultaneously encouraging everyone not to be satisfied with melting into the city’s crowds – instead stepping up to the microphone to make yourself heard, and get a feel for what it’s like to be a star – to freely compose a rhapsody for the common man, and provide an outlet for venting the longing deep inside that so wants to be noticed.
As more and more Asian cities preside over unnatural 24-hour constantly moving time, nighttime recreation venues (like KTVs, pubs, and discos) have become paradises for denizens of the night, who seek feeling, lust, and belonging. Biologically instinctual rhythms of life under conventional understanding become secondary and vulnerable to being overturned. Daniel Lee has long exhibited penetrating observation of nightlife revelers, scrutinizing the range of human emotions and desires through a unique “man as beast” metaphorical approach. In Jungle, he displaces the phantasmagoric urban setting to a real desolate forest, where the bestial nature of people underneath their fancy clothes is revealed without holding back.
In Asia many people live in real cities, working hard to establish their own vision, optimistically approaching the reality of life. Yet the highly urban corners of the cities conceal a muddled, melancholy, alienated, isolated gray character; or exiled, alienated, and torn apart in open cities, as if in an overexposed Utopia – lost, confused, and off balance. Others oppose the mainstream through conflict, resisting against regimented living, opposing settled ideologies in the attempt to open up a place for self-identity to exist between the cracks of the rapidly changing city. These are today’s Asian cities, replete amidst the frantic pursuit of dreams with the most complex existential bearing of “have you eaten yet?”