A fluid awareness of the self is given shape—in the shape of a dot—in Guan Xiao’s latest three-channel video, Weather Forecast, produced for her upcoming solo exhibitions in France. In it, she narrates: “all things, with individual entity as a line, cut the world into two, with the individual entity as a dot, merge the two into one; ultimately, we’re driven by the things that grab us, merging together, into the sea of all things, and that becomes another dot in another vast world.” With the dot as an element and medium, an individual entity can freely transform into any form of existence, Guan proclaims. Although one might be tempted to read this as a Kantian metaphysical exercise, it is in fact the artist’s Zootopian take on identity politics. The question “Why can’t we view Europe from a chair?” is punctuated throughout the video. This provocation (from someone located outside the continent) is a radical one, especially in the current context, in a Europe besieged by refugee crisis and terrorism. Guan sees an analogy between the fluidity of identity and the change of weather. Every individual can achieve subjective transformation through a series of encounters at any time, any place. Guan offers a possibility of individual emancipation from the normative constraints of identity politics and geopolitics. She rejects cultural representations of any kind that serve the purpose of differentiating one from another. After all, cultural differences and geographical boundaries have already been broken down on the flattening surface of the internet. What attracts her, far more than the differences between humans, is our commonality.

Guan Xiao considers “human” to be the only identity for us, for we all share the same cognitive abilities—the faculties for sensing and feeling—everywhere in the world. A universal discussion of our cognitive experiences is central to Guan’s practice. In her work, she persistently looks for a common, and hybrid, meth- od of communication, one that transcends language and culture, that humans everywhere can receive. This communication is delivered in the form of rhythm in her video Action (2014). She sees rhythm as a common denominator of everything that can be understood—all living things and existences in the material world have their rhythms. Rhythm is the linkage that connects you and me, and a stone and a wig: “Everything meets constantly. In the frequency of the universe. Resonate together.” Guan choreographs shapes, sounds, text, humans, objects, animals, plants, clouds, and actions into a rhythmic celebration of human agency—our profound ability to perceive, act, and become.

The fact that Guan Xiao eschews any geographical or cultural framework when discussing her work and identity is remarkable, even among today’s cosmopolitan set of young Chinese artists. Identity labelling is closely tied to one’s visibility on a larger scale in the contemporary art world, and elsewhere. Some might worry that an absence of discourse around identity politics and ideology among younger artists today doesn’t serve well for national branding on a global stage, but Guan’s practice points to another possibility: the artists that have come of age with the proliferation of the internet no longer share the insecurities that propelled the statements of generations before “Without going to New York and Paris, life could be internationalized.” In their life and practice, artists like Guan willingly embrace postmodernity as a leveling force that shapes them into a new form of being—a “whatever singularity,” as Giorgio Agamben terms it. In his book The Coming Community, Agamben envisions a “new planetary humanity” that rejects any manifestation of identity or belonging: “the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging.” For a post-ideological society entrenched in the global economy, this could very well be the most radical solution to identity politics yet.

Written by Lai Fei

Published on《 LEAP》,  MAR / APR 2016

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

—Rumi

In autumn, 2000, New Literary History published an issue asking if there was life after identity politics, to which Marlon B. Ross responded: “Which ‘identity?’ What ‘politics?’ ‘After’ when and where?” Ross’s point was this: Before “identity politics” there was already a politics of identity—and “wherever there is identity, there is a struggle for power.”1 In the same issue, Eric Lott located this struggle within a “politics of participatory discrepancy,” created when emergent social movements collide and collude to form a dissonant social fabric composed of rampant intersections and interactions between groups.2 It is in this fabric that Lott located a potential for a uni ed, anti-normative politics, in which no one is represented by one movement, and no movement is expected to represent the entirety of a human being.3

In these hyper-global, hyper-connected, and hyper-volatile times, in which we have seen a new wave of neo-nationalism, regional power grabs, and the emergence of a networked movement in the nightmare image of ISIS, conversations around identity have become dangerously essentialist yet loaded with potential agency. Today, a politics based on difference offers a useful frame to think through the globalized present. This is especially true when considering Arjun Appadurai’s prescient vision in the 1990s of a transglobal, diasporic landscape in which the “materials for a post-national imaginary” are “around us already.”4 As proposed elsewhere, these “materials” are the histories that walk among us—people that transcend the frameworks laid down by the past precisely because their existence is based on being “caught in the discontinuous time of translation and negotiation.”5 As we move between different subjective and objective worlds, we are all such people.