KAH BEE CHOW Malaysia / New Zealand
with Long March Project and Daniel Malone
Lantern Festival - Albert Park, 2- 4 March 2007, ARTSPACE, The Gus Fisher Gallery, ST PAUL ST, radio transmissions and online

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“When I was little, I remember how astonished and interested I was in how easy it is to take life – when you’re driving a car, all you have to do is move the wheel a few inches to the left and you kill somebody and also die yourself – and how difficult it is to keep alive someone who is sick. Building is interesting, because it’s ultimately impossible, I suppose, but killing is boring. It’s easy to see through something - to show how stupid it is, or how wrong – but that doesn’t take very long, and then you’re finished. If you want to show how boring India is, and how stupid it is, and how wrong Freud was, and how stupid analysts are, that doesn’t take more than a year or two. I think that’s the way it has been with Jeff – not so much caring about anything but caring only to kill. Killing may be amusing while it lasts, but it never lasts very long, and you are back where you started. Killing doesn’t solve the problem of boredom.” ¹

This quote appears at the end of the book, In The Freud Archives. Jeff Masson, “who only cared to kill” is one of the book’s central characters, and as the book tells us, he was once the enfant terrible of the psychoanalysis world until his attacks on Freud effectively expelled him from it.

Twenty years on, Jeff doesn’t seem so hell-bent on proving how boring or stupid something is anymore. I think of Jeff’s current situation, settled on an Auckland beach happy with wife and kids, now content with producing best-sellers about crying elephants and emotional lives of cats. ² And I wonder if he deliberately exhausted all this destructiveness early on so he could settle for peace. Or boredom.

Killing has always been a way of surviving. ³ Any survival guide worth its salt will include instructions on how to fashion and use killing devices - a rabbit stick is easiest I am told. Granted if you have the luxury of contemplating how a rabbit might feel, you don’t really need a rabbit stick. Your killing might be of different kind. And I wonder if Jeff’s determined killing of his place, his relationships, his interest in psychoanalysis was his way of learning to concede to the ordinary; and a way of surviving himself.

My own survival also consists of the ordinary, like paying the bills and remembering to keep myself fed. On Sundays, I work at the newspaper room at the library. At the start of the day, I staple six copies of Sunday newspapers and then put them on display. One time, an excerpt from the front page of one newspaper read,

“He pulverized my face… as he punched me, he kept saying ‘You’ve just got to learn, you’ve just got to learn, you’ve just got to learn." ⁴

I read this and thought it seemed like a terrible way to learn. Killing as a way of making things stick in your mind. But I suppose there has always been something synonymous between punishment and education. The trouble starts when punishment overtakes the latter and then all you see are stars. All you learn is, gee, punches really do hurt. Killing is for the self-taught, I guess – maybe you won’t go overboard that way, or maybe you’ll go overboard anyway.

- Kah Bee Chow

¹ Malcolm, Janet (1984) In The Freud Archives London: Jonathan Scape, p 163-164

² Other recent titles by Masson include Dogs Never Lie About Love (2006), The Pig Who Sang To The Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals (2003).

³ “Modernism repeatedly foreshadowed the death of the city” and postulated its ‘killing’ as a way for it to survive its imminent destruction. “For a while man has gained, through the perfection of the airplane, a revolutionary means of abbreviating space and of discovering a new urban and world vision, he has also been confronted by a destructive weapon of greater power than any known heretofore. The very power of this destructive force now demands that the structure of cities be subjected to drastic changes.” [fr Jose Luis Sert’s 1941 book Can Our Cities Survive?] … the ‘dead’ body of the traditional city was seen as a frustrating impediment to social change that must be swept away… The village, to be saved, had to be destroyed… new solutions were “dependent on the erasure of the old city in its entirety.”
Vanderbilt, Tom (2002) Survival City New York: Princeton Architectural Press p 62, 63 & 75.

⁴ Cook, Stephen (12 November 2006) ‘Shadbolt bashed me, says ex wife’ in New Zealand Herald, p 1.

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No Chinatown

For the 2007 Auckland Triennial, the Long March - Chinatown will be brought to Auckland in a collaborative project with artists Kah Bee Chow and Daniel Malone entitled No Chinatown. The project takes a public minded approach by utilising public spaces not just as exhibitions sites, but also involving the contributions of many other individuals, communities and collectives as a vital part of the work. The metaphor of 'Chinatown' will be used to engage with the Triennial's curatorial theme of turbulence, and the subsequent dynamics of immigration, tourism and cultural diaspora raised in the process of globalisation. Within this framework Chinatown serves not as an illustration of identity politics or post colonial discourse, but rather, as a metaphorical site to explore general notions of performed and constructed identity, as well as focusing on the local context of Auckland, a city, which has been deemed a 'high-immigration' city.

No Chinatown will engage with the ambivalent social atmosphere, at times ambiguously, at times provocatively, around the relationship between Auckland and its Chinatown(s). Should Auckland have a Chinatown? Does Auckland in fact already have Chinatown(s)? What indeed constitutes a Chinatown or any (self) determined cultural identification with place? No Chinatown will raise these questions and the discursive space for any number of simultaneous answers, sometimes contradictory, acting as a catalyst to precipitate the emotional state of Auckland; at times lamenting a lack, or proposing an action, at others giving voice to confusion or resisting over-determination. It will engage in the Triennial's broad discourse around multiculturalism, as well as the unique context of Aotearoa New Zealand's bicultural geo-politic and the notion of Maori as Tangata Whenua (people of the land).

- Long March Project, Kah Bee Chow and Daniel Malone

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Background

Born in Penang, Malaysia in 1980, Kah Bee Chow lives and works in Auckland. Key exhibitions include Chow-Browne, Anna Miles Gallery, Auckland, 2005 and Fallout, Special Gallery, Auckland, 2005. Recent group exhibitions include New New Zealand Art, MOP Projects Gallery, Sydney, 2004; The Bed You Lie In, ARTSPACE, Auckland, 2004; Duets: The Abandoned Sculpture Project, Ramp Gallery, Hamilton, 2004; Break Shift, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, 2004-5; Summer Fling, Artstation, Auckland, 2005; Duets II: The Abandoned Sculpture Project, rm103, Auckland, 2005; The New Situationists, SQUARE2, City Gallery, Wellington and Canary Gallery, Auckland, 2006; Hetero Utopia: Mapping the Urban Terrain, Bandung Centre for New Media Arts, 2006; Mostly Harmless, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, 2006; SATELLITE project: Shanghai Biennale, 2006; don't misbehave!: SCAPE 2006 Biennial of Art in Public Space, Christchurch Art Gallery; and Recovered Memory, 4th Goodman-Suter Contemporary Art Project, Suter Art Gallery, Nelson, 2006. For further reading see Laura Preston's essay in the don't misbehave! catalogue.

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