Interview with Hou Hanru,

HH:
With a certain sense of humour, and even irony, you are proposing to see the vehicle as the destination. This reminds me of what the English architect Cedric Price proposed to build an airport that flies with the plane, or a bird cage flying with the bird… This project is located at the Museum of Contemporary Art. But it intends to go beyond the spatial constraints of the institution. Furthermore, it invites us to skip the bureaucratic constraints of the border control customs and the airport — one of the most evident and overwhelmingly impressive symbol of the power of the State institution. Doesn’t this manifest a strong will to challenge the established order defined by the ideology of stability and control of institutional powers in general? Then, the nice-looking but slightly misplaced plane, somehow highlighting your artistic and even political intentions, seems to be become a conveyor of social and political critique.

Do you agree, at the end, in spite of your refusal of utopianism, that one should understand your work, as well as your lifestyle, as an attempt to resist to be “institutionalized”? Perhaps, this is exactly what inhabiting, inevitably oscillating between settling and nomadism, really means in our time…

CH + SC:
We only refuse Utopianism in the same way a jilted partner refuses love: we have been let down by something we want to believe in, boo hoo to us! Our relationship to the institution is much like any individual’s relationship to the larger society. There is the illusion of personal freewill and personal vision but in the end, every action that we undertake is all part of a complex web of human networks.

We believe the artist must challenge the established order but in what way? The super-rich challenge the order of the state by simply not paying taxes, it is estimated that there is currently $US21 trillion stashed away in tax havens such as the Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. It is crucial for the artist to operate in the slipstream. But is this the model that we ought aspire to? Einstein covers the issue in “Why Socialism?”

Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being…. and their specific combination determines the extent to which an individual can achieve an inner equilibrium and can contribute to the well-being of society.

As artists we employ a combination of nomadism and permanence to achieve the best situation to create work and live or as you describe it- inhabiting. As artists we exploit the freedom of travel to produce the headspace and conditions necessary to create work but we also rely upon the support of our native society. The trick is how to gain the support of the society we live within while still maintaining a critical stance towards the institution.

The work Stasis illustrates this point. A plane flying towards a building represents the will of an individual to take a stand against an institution. Although this is a lone gesture it can never really be free from the society that it seeks to fight against- hence the supporting scaffolding around the plane; a parallel idea could be the image of a man buying petrol to throw a Molotov cocktail at a gas company.

Then again, a plane flying into a building may be the opposite of an act of protest; it may represent an act of colonialism. Our confabulation of vehicle and destination illustrates touristic colonialism- it is Starbucks in the Forbidden Palace, it is the flipside of nomadism. It is the philosophy of the Winnebago Warrior, where ever place is the same because you have brought your house with you. As artists, it is easy for us to claim to be nomadic. But what we offer or what we represent to the countries that we visit should also be questioned. It is a sad position to be in when you believe that you are a cultural critic but in reality you are really the inheritor of Gaugin’s syphilitic wanderings.

But that is a depressing way to finish an answer. Maybe the greatest gift that travel or nomadism can offer is humility, in the words of that great traveller Henry Miller:

“Over there you think of nothing but becoming President of the United States some day. Potentially every man is Presidential timber. Here it’s different. Here every man is potentially a zero.”

Stasis was made possible with the generous support of The Kier Foundation