Seecum - Interviewed by Adam

NCAC presents the ‘The Imposter’ an exhibition by Seecum Cheung. A series of beckoning grid like sculptures, dual advertisement posters and projections of upside-down cityscapes. Curator Adam Lewis-Jacob converses with the artist Seecum Cheung on the basis and concepts behind the work.

1. Thanks for coming into the gallery, I think now to help situate the show we should ask some questions that might give you a chance to share some additional information behind the decisions that you’ve made, and what the works might mean to you. The materials in the work seem very considered, also the idea of appropriation comes to mind when looking at the works. Could you tell me how you came to the decisions to the forms that you have.

So, what you see is a collection of crane like sculptures, made of steel lattices which cast shadows over the space. They have flashing lights attached to them, similar to the lights that you would see on the side of a road, a dock or industrial area. Punctuating the space is a series of self-designed advertising posters which have images on one side, and anarchistic like slogans on the back. The images can be seen together, or seen individually - depending on where the light is.

Overall the installation is reminiscent of a lot of the cranes in which you see in most cityscapes, overpoweringly high and lifting all these objects and material around but they’re always identified with a beacon of red. There’s something very industrial, city based, and global about them. And they exist in so many different countries, for me they’re a symbol of economy, a system of trade and industry which I think is something that we all have a relationship to. It’s in this circumstance I have used it as beacons, beacons which possibly transmit a sense of emergency and warning. I see the lights in these circumstances as an alert “SAFETY SAFETY” “BEWARE BEWARE” and in that sense it doesn’t gesture much more than this. I wanted to place the viewer in a state of unease. I wanted to generate an atmosphere of alertness, to create beacons and structures which causes one to feel anxious - to be in the position of fight or flight.

2. Maybe relating it to this idea of the state of ‘anxiety’ because you’ve mentioned the ideas of ‘us and them’ and possible ideas of immigration. And you also have the posters which allude to advertising, which again reminds me of movement, economical movement or not transient, not even nomadic either because that would suggest a never resting point, but there seems to be this idea of arriving somewhere and trying to either assimilate or make sense of the world that you’ve now entered. And maybe you could talk a little bit more about these ideas of ‘us and them’ and immigration.

The structures for me operate very simply to demarcate space and territory, to create the environment where borders and lines are drawn. The advertisements however offer me more room to establish the conversation that I wish to initiate. Mass communication has always been incredibly important in my research, and in my work. How branding agencies work to utilise a language, to target individuals within collective societies is relevant to us all because for many reasons we find that we do belong to groups, and in pressured circumstances these may in turn become our tribes. For example, I was told by a Taiwanese marketing executive that I was a 3rd culture kid - a TCK/3CK, this term was developed by marketers as a way to define a type of person, in effect a type of user/consumer.

3. Maybe you could explain and talk to us a little bit more about this idea of the 3rd culture, and maybe explain the concept of what it means but also what it means to you. And then possibly how this might be seen in the works in which you’ve shown.

So 3rd culture, as a little background are people who spend much of their formative years in countries that are not the origin of their parents. So for example, my mum is a Vietnamese refugee but she’s only half Chinese and half Vietnamese, and my dad is from China. They moved over to the UK in the 70’s to look for work, as most immigrants do, to establish better prospects for themselves. However they had no grasp of the language, or any education so they spent most of their time running a take away in the centre of Coventry - cooking their way to a better life. They never talked about the past, about where they came from so for me I didn’t have a strong connection to my heritage, to a Chinese or Vietnamese culture. It was there in my diet, and in my basic grasp of Cantonese but I didn’t have access to root myself into the history of ‘my people'.

I grew up in the UK, I grew up in a rough city where racism was really prevalent so questions of belonging or 'home' came to me at an early age. So these advertising campaigns, or situations in which you tick yourself into in a group through a questionnaire - that all exists and makes you realise that you’re always being placed, that you’re categorised in order to made sense of.

We’ve migrated for centuries, and more of us are mobilising and finding jobs or lives across the world, I’m quite intrigued about what that means for people. Will these travellers feel a sense of loss or will they feel more connected with their culture. In a sense I see generations of migrated individuals becoming Matryoshka dolls - the Russian wooden dolls that become every increasingly smaller. In a way I see us getting ever further away from our roots, as we modernise and assimilate to a Westernised capital culture, consuming our global products. How genuine will our connections be to the past, of where we come from. These advertising posters, these beacons allude to the concerns of what it means to place yourself. I haven’t arrived to an answer yet.

4. The last thing that I really wanted to bring up was the title of the work, which is very literal, very easy to read, very almost one-dimensional clear instruction ‘The Imposter’. If you were not in any doubt about the position of the artist or the position of the work, the title really hits it home. You mentioned this idea of expanding Western culture, might we suggest that that’s happening within maybe middle-eastern or eastern cultures? Something that always fascinates me, and maybe this relates to ‘The Imposter’ is that rather than assimilation or even rather than appropriation is that you sometimes see in other cultures, a very western lifestyle. Like within Japanese culture, there’s a really really big subculture of Jamaican Dancehall. The physicality of the women doing the dancing, couldn’t be more detached from Jamaican women to Japanese women. There’s things about scale, on a really en on a basic level of skinniness of voluptuousness. There’s a very different thing happening. I’ve spoken to friends in the past about this interest and this worry that this western disease is just spreading and now we’re going to lose these cultural identities with everyone else. The one strength seems to be that even if it’s similar it’s never going to be the same. That it’s an interpretation of the cultures that comes as a rebellion to what their parents had forced upon them. That’s they’re putting their personality and their own reality into it they’re putting their own spin on it and that’s something that I think about as an possible strength. The subculture baggage is always going to be there. If you’re a Scottish person who likes doing line dancing and listening to Elvis, you’re still going to do it all in a Scottish way.

Yeh I guess it’s true, you can see it in a point of view of it being cloudier or fetishising a culture. There’s a certain desirability to acquire a style or the behaviour culture but I wonder what it means to be authentic within this. An ex of mine was Jamaican, and when he moved to Japan all these women were trying to ‘acquire’ him to become closer, or more authentic to dancehall.