The Museum Formerly Known as Centre A

27 Apr 2011, Posted in Articles,Featured, 0 Comments

***image caption: The Dig (Detail), 2010. Courtesy: Centre A***

The Museum Formerly Known as Centre A:

Jesse McKee in conversation with Hank Bull, Makiko Hara, Debra Zhou and Jinhan Koh

For the past 10 years, Centre A — Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art — has been a vigorous anomaly in the contemporary art scene in Vancouver. The institution straddles the roles of artist-run centre and public gallery, as it focuses on connecting artistic practices from across the pacific region. Originally intended to be a collecting institution, the centre has instead become a constantly adapting space dedicated to artistic production, exhibition and the discursive activity surrounding contemporary art from Asia and work by Asian artists from elsewhere.

September 2010 marked Centre A’s first decade of activity and it was commemorated with the exhibition The Dig. This show addressed, for the first time, the institution’s collection of works, which accumulated and remained in the Centre’s storage room over the years. The anniversary was also marked by a major conference, “Let’s Twist Again,” which sought to address the centre’s position in Vancouver, Canada, and the rest of the world. This conference was marked by a keynote address from Sydney Biennale curator David Elliot, and saw papers and presentations from a plethora of stakeholders in the institution past, present and future.

What follows is a round-table discussion held six months after the exhibition and conference. Taking stock of the outcomes and internal recommendations that have resulted from recent activities, Centre A imagines its next decade.

Jesse McKee: Let’s start by talking about the exhibition The Dig, which served as an inadvertent archive of Centre A’s 10 years of activity as a producing and presenting institution. How did all these works end up sticking around? How was the installation conceived? And where did the works go after the exhibition?

Hank Bull: The first question is about the collection. The organization is empowered in its constitution to be a collecting institution. At the beginning, Centre A was imagined as a museum and a museum would have an international collection. That didn’t happen for two main reasons. One, there was a lot of opposition to the idea of a museum. Especially a museum only focused on contemporary Asian art. There was a fear that this might be a neo-colonialist hangover, at worst a neo-orientalist fetish.

The other reason is that to be a collecting institution, and to be recognized as such, requires an enormous capital investment for climate control and conservation, which is set in stone by the federal government. Instead we became a place for dialogue and projects. But, nevertheless, we ended up with things. People leave stuff.

Makiko Hara: For instance, in The Dig exhibition, the work by Hong Hao was the first to be gifted to the organization with the idea that it would go toward building a collection. But, because the concept of the organization changed, we never had a chance to show that work as we became more like a contemporary art centre. On several occasions we got gifts from artists or objects were left over from installations. We also made editions and things accumulated over the years. After all this time, we wanted to return to the question of how we function differently from a contemporary museum. The show was a way to deal with this.

HB: That’s a question that is faced by virtually every artist-run centre. You’re anti-museum. You’re not supposed to be like that. But at the end of the day… 5, 10, 15 years later, every single centre has a back room full of extremely valuable cultural artifacts: ephemera, video recordings, letters, correspondence, even paintings and sculptures. As an organization you have a responsibility to take care of these things. There’s no accreditation or legitimacy to the collection and yet it is still a collection. What is the implication of this in museological terms? What does that mean for the evolution or reinvention of museums of the future? Those are some of the questions we wanted to pose with the show.

Jinhan Koh: It’s reflective of Centre A’s exhibition space, which in some ways works like a project space. Often, you exhibit work that has had a previous exhibition history. But also a lot of work is commissioned, and at times isn’t finished, or is still in process when it’s shown to the public. In a way, it’s inevitable that this becomes reflective of how we frame the work that is being exhibited, as well as Centre A as an institution.

HB: There is an Italian collector who used to go to Fluxus performances, where say, Geoffrey Hendricks would cut his own beard off. The collector would run up on stage and pick up all the hair, put it in a ziplock bag and label it. He would fill his house in rural Italy with this stuff. Now he’s got this incredible collection of broken furniture, scraps of paper… whatever was left after the performances. We’ve done a lot of that too. Sometimes it’s fragments of installations, bits and pieces of things, but it was all important. For instance, we kept that work by you Jinhan, all those years ago, and then it came back into The Dig show. So it was worth it.

MH: And looking through this little fragment, how can we at least tell the story of what was there? The impetus for the exhibition was our knowledge that Hank is moving onward. So we were in this moment of succession and we all realized that we don’t know the whole history of Centre A. We wanted to hear from him through these pieces and remnants. Many of the shows that I didn’t get to see were very poorly documented. It was an important moment for us to get the first decade together. Through these fragments and works, we tried to understand each show and why it was curated. So ours was very different from most museum collection shows.

JM: This exhibition— and Centre A in general — is an alternative to many presentations of Asian contemporary art in North America and Europe. When you talk about Asian contemporary art here, it’s big scale stuff, expensive, shiny works. At Centre A, there is a modest but substantial collection of documents and objects that represent crucial activity.

HB: When you put each show that we’ve done together, like we did in The Dig, it also includes European and First Nations artists. Our work becomes an interesting network, actively mapping a lot of cultural translations.

JM: In August 2010, Oscar Ho, an artist, curator and academic from Hong Kong, responsible for developing projects such as Shanghai MOMA and M+, was visiting Vancouver. I took the opportunity to invite him to walk through The Dig exhibition with me. Oscar was shocked that a major collection was not part of Centre A’s current activity. He talked about what a rich collection Centre A could have had after 10 years of operation. Can we take some time to address that choice 10 years ago to focus on presenting and producing, instead of collecting? Would you have done things differently had you known what a frenetic amount of momentum the market in Asia was able to create? Could you ever imagine Centre A existing like that now?

HB: One way would be to imagine collaborations with other institutions. A lot has been done now by much bigger museums than us in that regard. Artworks have become so expensive that some museums not only share the cost of a work, but also collaborate on taking care of and showing it.

One question now is, are we allowed to sell some of these things? Collectors come along and say oh I like that… and we need the money. That very sensitive issue of de- deaccessing … do we go there? So far we haven’t. All the work from the show was bundled up at the end and put into the storage room until we decide what to do with it.

MH: As I came in as the curator in the middle of the first 10 years, my focus was more on contemporary art centre practice. I’ve never worked for a museum. At the same time, whenever we go to Asia there is a huge market and collectors. And all those structures exist. In Vancouver, for instance, the photo collectors support the Vancouver Art Gallery’s collection. We haven’t really developed any serious Asian collectors, so to speak.

HB: There is a very strong case to be made for an Asian museum of historical and contemporary work. A lot of people want to see that for many reasons. One of those is that there are some very historical collections in Canada, and especially in Vancouver, that are looking for a home. There are collectors who have amazing work, like 20^th-century ink paintings. There are people willing to donate to a museum if there was one. It would be interesting to imagine a museum that would collect both of these types of work and deal with the interference between them. It’s a very exciting notion to be able to make an Asian museum without all that colonial baggage. Because all the Asian museums we have were created in a colonial era. To not have one now is good news, there is a lot of potential there.

JM: If that museum gets built in the next 15 years, could you see Centre A moving into it and acting as a kunsthalle space? Or would you hope to advise the museum on what they buy as contemporary work? Or would you try to maintain an independence from them?

HB: Centre A is very happy with what we do right now. We love what we do, we love our independence and our ability to improvise. Those of us who work here now cringe at the thought of becoming a museum wing with a top-heavy bureaucracy. We’re nimble, we’re mobile, we’re tricksters, we’re pirates and that is the place to be, so we can really do exciting things. Imagine how difficult it would be to produce shows like one of ours at the VAG or Vancouver Museum. We cherish our position. At the same time, if it becomes a matter of a political necessity and someone says OK here is 200 million dollars … Would we be a wing in someone else’s museum? Would we be the whole thing? Maybe. We don’t have a home right now. We’re month to month. If someone offered us a permanent home we’d have to seriously consider accepting that.

MH: It’s pretty frustrating as an institution not to have the ability to sell the works we have to larger institutions. For example, Khan Lee’s piece in The Dig, which we commissioned and built, is obviously a piece for a museum. We need the infrastructure to be able to organize these relationships.

HB: All those things are ghettos. The international biennial circuit is a ghetto. The local representation of identity politics is a ghetto. There are all these identifiers. There are so many ways to package your commodity and sell it. We want to avoid having to refine our product and sell it.

JK: Nimble is good, but it’s also kind of a liability. You need to see how you can take that liability and turn it into something positive. We’re still trying to come to terms with figuring out what is positive in focusing on a geographical region. In a way, Centre A’s position has to be post identity politics. I’m old enough to have been around when identity-based art became a genre of practice. It was necessary, but it was also destined for failure. For one, you couldn’t criticize it. Room for aesthetic, conceptual and other forms of criticism were waylaid by the specific politics. Secondly, there was an immediate repetition, not only of the issues represented, but also in the aesthetics. And thirdly, art wasn’t necessarily the best way to represent the issues that were being addressed. Art-making was too much about conveying information, and frankly there are much better forms to do this in.

MH: It’s also due to the status of the organizations that deal with identity politics. We’re tied to government funding structures. As long as we define ourselves as Asian contemporary art, we are part of cultural diversity initiatives. From a funding perspective this best benefits the organization. But it also narrows what we can do. The freedom of Centre A comes a lot from Hank, because we started operating not just based on the government funding, but also private money. That gave us more freedom than many traditional artist-run centres.

HB: I would be really quick to counter the myth that Centre A defines itself as culturally diverse and therefore it has easy access to government money. It’s absolutely not the case. We thought we were pretty lucky getting these capacity-building grants, but then you see everyone is getting those. We’re not special. If you look at our operating grants compared to our peer organizations, we receive about half. There is this kind of managerialism that goes on that says: “we’re going to have cultural diversity and you can be this big… but you can’t be that big, because you’re going to threaten the status quo.” So actually there is no advantage to being culturally diverse. All you have to do is look at the rhetoric of the National Gallery or open any copy of Canadian Art and just see how culturally diverse it is outside of our institutions… not very.

JM: The conference that Centre A hosted in September, 2010, “Let’s Twist Again” at Simon Fraser University’s Morris J. Wask Centre for Dialogue, was inspired by the original plenary conference held over 10 years ago, which was responsible for forming the institution’s mandate. This recent conference had David Elliot as the keynote speaker and it focused on three different talking points: i. Vancouver’s location in global art networks; ii. The increasing use of web platforms and internet communication by art centres; and iii. the health of Vancouver’s infrastructure for contemporary art. What internal conclusions and recommendations have you made for the institution’s next decade of activity based on this conference?

MH: The purpose of the conference was to consider how to shape or revise Centre A’s directions. We wanted to track what changes happened in the last 10 years and consider what we had accomplished. In the end, we diversified the content of the conference. The part about cultural capital was the furthest direction. But we needed to deal with this issue of new direction, not just for Centre A, but for Vancouver itself. We were interested in what our community was expecting from Centre A. I don’t know whether the conference was a success or not. Some parts were good feedback and others made us deal with the real politics of our space issues and things like BC arts council cuts.

HB: One of the big things we got out of it was from Debra’s panel #artfutures. This was the online component where everyone was skyping in from around the world. This comes on top of the fact that Centre A has 250 unique visits to its website a day, which is far more than the 20 people who come into the gallery every day. It’s a really strong signal to build that and go Web 2.0 and develop an interface between your real space and online space.

Debra Zhou: When I visited Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, they said they get 350 visits a day to their website. Which is not much more than us. They are better known internationally and have a longer history, but we almost have the same web traffic. This is interesting because they have a solid and comprehensive archive of material about artists and artworks produced in Asia. Our collection and archive at Centre A fills part of the gap that AAA has. We are a map of things happening outside Asia since 2000. It’s a record of Asian artists showing in Vancouver and also asks what is Asia? And what does Asia mean in Vancouver? Going back to talking about the internet, I’m happy to say we’ve been approved for new funding to build a web 2.0 interactive and experimental website. This is going to be a state-of-the-art website, where everyone has a user interface and can upload their own materials, and interact with the online content that the artists and institution provide. That might start as early as next January. We’ll be able to generate much more response.

HB: The website in a way is a parallel for the space itself. I like to think of Centre A as a space in which everybody has a role to play. You might be a journalist, someone walking off the street, an artist, a student, a collector. But everyone has a way in somehow. And the space is a place for all to meet. To have a place online that amplifies that is the goal.

JM: I was recently speaking with the artists Oliver Laric and Aleksandra Domanovic, they contribute to this website vvork.com. They told me that their primary interaction with art is now through the internet. So this had me thinking about the next decade when we’ll have a whole generation of art students and young artists who will have a primary knowledge of contemporary art from around the world through this medium. How does this affect the practices, knowledge and the tastes of art students and young emerging artists?

DZ : More than just disseminating information and letting people discover it, the important thing is that we can bring people together. Centre A is essentially a place for people to meet and come to see art. Ideally, the website is not just a broadcast site, it’s a place for exchanging ideas and bringing people together.

HB: This is something that Makiko outlined in her artistic program here. This is a gallery, but it is more than a showcase. It’s more than a place to go as a spectator, an appreciator or consumer. We’re also a production studio or a residency, or a platform for a conference. There are all these different ways that you can interact with the space. The art object in a way becomes a trigger for interaction.

JK: One concern that never came up and something I’d like to address is that this meeting place shouldn’t become a diasporic one. That would do us a disservice. The problem with this kind of institution is that it needs to go beyond that. It’s filled with good intentions, but it’s a bit hippy-dippy. The problem, when you mention Asian, is that it locates the concerns of the institution too far away from this place, Vancouver, Canada, and its relationship to the diaspora that gives reason for Centre A to exist. Of course, what we territorially and culturally define as Asia is the starting point for this dialogue, but we need to set this in the context of the whole of Canadian culture. I don’t want to be too utopian or wishy-washy about it, but it is a danger. By calling it a meeting place it’s too feel-good. It is left too open, albeit with good intent, but without direction, focus, an articulated directive, and a voice that is specific to Centre A.

HB Maybe a boxing ring?

JK: Yeah, it is more like a boxing ring. What will survive? I don’t want to be too Darwinian about it, but that is closer to the cultural process. But it is fraught with lots of challenges.

DZ: Meeting place has a reference to Centre A’s unique structure. We’re not a museum. For instance, if you go to the Vancouver Art Gallery, you don’t go there to meet the people who work there or meet the artists. In a way it has a reference to the fact that we want to make friends, it’s a very simple idea at first.

Biographies

Hank Bull is the founder and outgoing director of Centre A. As an artist, curator and director, he has been a major contributor to the contemporary art scene in Vancouver for nearly 40 years.

Makiko Hara has been Centre A’s curator since 2007. Originally from Tokyo, she has worked as a curator on major international projects such as the Yokohama Triennial in Japan, and Scotia Bank’s Nuit Blanche in Toronto.

Debra Zhou has been Centre A’s curator-in-residence since 2009. Originally from Shanghai, she has worked on projects at the Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art and Yishu Journal. She recently curated Hau Jin’s exhibition My Big Family at 221a Artist Run Centre in Vancouver.

Jinhan Koh is an artist whose work was exhibited work in Centre A’s 10 year retrospective exhibition The Dig in 2010. He is an active member of Instant Coffee, a collective now primarily based in Vancouver.

Jesse McKee is the exhibitions curator at the Western Front in Vancouver and previously worked as a public programs curator at the Barbican Art Gallery, London.