TRANSGRESSION/CANTOSPHERE
The exhibit Transgression/Cantonsphere, is about defending the independence of Cantonese (as a language and, by extension, as culture). The “gallery” in which the exhibit is situated is a small 5×5 square sized room. The room is dimly lit and in the front of the room there is a screen in shape of a scroll rolling down. The screen shows a sentence in Cantonese, and alters one particular character to a series of other ones that are phonetically similar. In turn, each alternation of the character changes the meaning of the entire sentence. In short, it is a demonstration of, as the curator put it, “a pun generator.” While this process of alternation is happening, eerie ambient music is being played in the background with deep and engulfing bass, and as the characters on the screen slowly unfolds, each of them is also annunciated by a mechanized voice that echoes in the confined room..
All these effects creates an eerie and almost hypnotic experience. I think this experience renders the exhibit unsuccessful, if we were to believe the objective the exhibit is, as the curator claimed, to move people to be more conscious about preserving Cantonese culture from the “Mandarinization” of the central government. the intellectual material that the exhibit wants to present is dominated by the emotional experience that the exhibit renders. The ambient and eerie atmosphere makes the audience unsettled and hypnotized, and thus I had a difficult time concentrating on the political message that we are supposed to digest from the experience.
It is unclear if the eerie experience is intended by the artists or is it the result of the space in which the exhibit took place. Certainly the confined space (which might not be the ideal choice for the artists’) contributes heavily to this particular horror-movie atmosphere, and perhaps the ill choice of the space yields the overall failure of the exhibit.
Regardless of the failure or the success of the exhibit, the political significance of the exhibit cannot be overlooked. The fact that the exhibit took place in Vancouver (as opposed to Canton or Hong Kong) reflects that Cantonese people’s anxiety about the dominance of the mandarin culture is global. The Cantonese diasporic community’s connection with the Cantonese community at “home” is deep despite the geographical distance.
On eeriness: To a linguist, nothing is more horrifying than the loss of a language (and the culture that it carries). If you felt unsettled, you and the curator were connected through this experience.
🙂