Man of the World

On your way from Vienna's museum quarter to the Secession building there's a fair chance that you will cross Gumpendorfer Straße, where you will discover Ramien, a relatively new, hip restaurant serving all kinds of noodle dishes. The main room has the lofty, functional atmosphere typical nowadays of so many places from New York to Berlin. The bar downstairs, however - the Ramien Club, where you can order a Mojito and listen to Viennese electronica - is completely different, although its design is also somehow global in that it looks like a stereotypical Chinese restaurant. (It is, in fact, the interior of a former Chinese restaurant). With its richness of colour and detail, its mirrors and lanterns, it is the exact opposite of the space upstairs. The overall effect is like White Cube meets Hidden Dragon, and intentionally so - the owners of Ramien are not belated prophets of camp, but walk a line between appetite and appropriation. Tie and Jun Yang are brothers from a Chinese family that moved to Austria in the late 1970s. Tie Yang stayed with the family business, running the aforementioned restaurant, like so many people who live on the edge of a community and are reduced to trading on their 'exoticism'. Jun Yang moved on to art, but he never forgot about the lanterns, or about the dishes he traded with his classmates in primary school. Ramien is a Chinese restaurant that became Conceptual, and represents a sort of return home for Jun, who came to Vienna at the age of four and many years later began using his own life experiences as the main inspiration for his art. Coming Home - Daily Structures of Life (2000) is the title of Yang's most elaborate work to date. A video monitor is positioned beneath part of the ceiling of a Chinese restaurant that was actually built by his father in the mid-1980s and which now creates a 'room without walls' inside another room - a homage to architect Rudolf Schindler's Austro-Californian Modernism. The video shown on the monitor features a phone conversation, heard over a mainly black screen, between Yang and his mother, in which they reflect on his father's work in China and on growing up in a Chinese restaurant. Every once in a while the video offers glimpses from films such as John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China (1986) or Brett Ratner's Rush Hour (1998); scenes that take place in one of those restaurants that are like living-rooms for displaced Chinese scattered around the globe. Yang belongs to a generation that, because of home video, does not automatically relate film to the cinema: his first encounter with Hollywood was through video cassettes brought over from Belgium, where his brother lived. The shelves of a video rental shop, stocked with films bearing stars such as Jackie Chan on their covers, reappear in one of Yang's most recent works. Jun Yang & Soldier Woods (2002) is a contemplation of the name 'Jun Yang' and the characters used to write it, which among the various Chinese languages and scripts already have many possible layers of meaning. His name undergoes a variety of (often erroneous) transformations as Yang travels around the world, so that eventually he receives letters addressed to a certain 'June Young' - he is renamed and also re-gendered in the linguistic gap between Mandarin and English. The strength of the video, which was shown at Manifesta 4 in Frankfurt last summer, lies in the highly formalist, electro-calligraphic technique used to invest a minimum of material - two phonemes, two characters - with a depth and variety of meaning. Yang's voice, as in all his video works, is a key element. He speaks about intimate subjects in a sensitive, sometimes awkward way, very different from the authoritative voice-over so common in documentary filmmaking. It sounds almost like the voice of a boy who is still discovering strange things about his life, like Marty McFly and Clark Kent, the heroes of Back to the Future (1985) and Superman (1978). Both have extraordinary powers, but in their daily lives they try to blend in - as did Yang when he visited Tiananmen Square on a trip to China to learn more about his cultural origins. He found he was only able to see, interpret and re-contextualize his experiences in relation to his childhood memories of Hollywood films: one of the most striking images of Yang's video series 'From Salariiman to Superman' (1998?ongoing) is of Peter O'Toole standing alone among a crowd of Chinese wearing 'Mao jackets' in Beijing's Forbidden City. In the context of Yang's work this pirated footage from Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987) represents the most strange and paradoxical of identifications. Also included in the work are images of the artist himself, among them a series of photo booth pictures of Yang transforming himself into Superman by tearing off his suit and tie - which he had to wear when he was working for the United Nations in Vienna. (Some of Yang's previous work from the late 1990s addressed themes such as newspapers and advertising, with the artist re-staging himself as the subject of mass-media images: an earlier version of the Superman photo booth series, for example, was installed on an illuminated billboard at a tram station in Zagreb.) The artist's ambiguous status between salaryman and superman is constantly reflected in ways that are wryly ironic but also elegiac, situated among the mundane details of everyday life. Chopsticks/How to Do That? (2001), a series of three neon signs displaying information on the correct way of eating with chopsticks, featured prominently above the entrance of the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna. From ... (1998?2001) looks like the sort of safety instruction card shown to air travellers, but instead contains very basic information on cultural contact: whether people shake hands or bow to each other (to take the most obvious example) depends on understanding codes that Jun Yang has transgressed all his life. He works in ways that are autobiographical in a surprisingly traditional way, using new media almost like the famous camera-stylo beloved of French cinema theorists. But he manages to avoid both the ennui of the Postmodern subject and the loneliness of the migrant by becoming an artist at home in the world - with one home still being a Chinese restaurant in Vienna.