Tasting the Identity exchange
Zhang Songren
The identity game represents a trend in China’s contemporary cultural scene. It plays hide and seek with the mirror of the floating world, and is an entertaining way of admitting bewilderment in a time of flux. It also reserves the right to change from one image, one life-style today to something totally different tomorrow. Likewise, the bewilderment needs not be steadfast, and may be fickle like seasonal fashion, serving only the arousal of desire. In Cang Xin we have two approaches to this issue in the series of Communication and Identity Exchange (also known as My Identity as a Tourist).
Cang Xin has persisted with the Communication series for some years now, and his taste buds have serviced cherries and files, buttons and pebbles. His travels in recent years have brought him to ground level contact with monuments in international cities. The performance has now become something of an emblem for Cang Xin. Through persistence he has turned a slightly wayward gesture into a routine, an obsession into a work of art. What started as a formula for expanding the artist's experiential horizons has now the cumulative effect of forming his artistic identity.
If bodily contact is a working process for identity formation, then the systematic borrowing of the professional insignia of others also expands one's sense of self. My Identity As A Tourist touches on two ideas, that of the “other” and of the “tourist”, while exploring the boundaries of the self.
The “tourist” activity would immediately imply oneself to be an outsider, and the “other” to be the exotic object. Distance is maintained between the sceneries and customs being observed so that they may be appreciated and studied. On the other hand, proper appreciation and study require the tourist to both maintain a distance and to make intimate contact.
The working procedure of this series of works by Cang Xin is to enter the world of the “other” while affirming that the “other” is alternative ways of life, with the understanding that the “other” is different, irreplaceable, and only overlaps with oneself during this brief rehearsal of role-play.
To truly enter another life is to share the dreams and aspirations of that person, and feel his frustrations and constrictions. Here we find that it is the artist, privileged to play the game of the tourist, whose frustrations and constrictions cannot be appreciated by another, except the tourist. Cang Xin's tourist Identity comments on the multiple roles played by each person, which are more complex than meets the eye. Or perhaps it is truly the Identity of the artist that is at stake here; after all, only an artist may make a career of exchanging uniforms, and be applauded for playing through life.
