Tocqueville Lecture Series: Aihwa Ong

What Marco Polo Forgot: Asian Art Reconfigures the Global
In 1995, Cai Guo-Qiang set adrift a Chinese junk on the Grand Canal in Venice, marking the 700th anniversary of Marco Polos return to Europe. In 2008, as the world spiraled into a far reaching financial collapse, a historian warned that in the long haul, New York could turn into Venice. These two historical moments set the stage for a discussion of how contemporary Asian art navigates the world of conceptual geography.

Drawing on Cais exhibition I Want to Believe, at the Guggenheim Museum, New York City (2008), Professor Ong will focus on the contrasting interpretations of Cais key installations, i.e. perspectives that dramatize different notions of the global. Is contemporary art the latest form of Chinese entrepreneurialism, or an expression of an emerging global civil society? Or should modern Chinese art be viewed as a distinctive kind of anticipatory politics in undoing Western categories of knowledge? In an art of assemblage and juxtaposition, how is China repositioned from an object of Western knowledge to a tool of global intervention?

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[Taimursalamkhan]

can anyone explain what she and Collier mean by global assemblages