Mobilising Asia Skills Conference, March, 2000

ARTS/CULTURAL

John Young

There has been a lot of developmental aspects in the visual arts context. For Australian artists, there are now the many studios in Asian cities that are run by either the Australian Council or Asialink. Generally these residencies are for about three to four months and rely on whole generations of Australian artists to experience the arts Contemporary art is a global phenomenon, it is not something which is restricted to Europe and North America. However, it is one thing to live there for a short time to form oneâs own practice but another to break into the art market and the industries, for example to Tokyo and Hong Kong.

I remember when we first started these activities, back in the late eighties, a lot of people said, ãThere is no market, what are you talking about?ä Clearly there is but it is a matter of where Australiaâs actually situated in relationship to *** these cultures such as the Japanese. Recently, there was a question of why you would really want to Êwork in the Asian art market and the industry.

Iâll try and provide some rationale which have become more apparent to me over the years of working in that region. And Iâll more or less summarize it into two distinct aspects. One is the cultural and the other one is more of a developmental inclination. The cultural aspect is really to gain the experiences and skills. The second one, the financial one is really about, in the final instance, lifting the financial ceiling of Australian art prizes throughout the region and/or in Australia as well.

Iâll try to talk about the cultural issues. Iâll just quote one great Australian artist, Ian Fairweather. He wrote in 1963, ãOn the way from China down to Australia, I stayed in Bali. Coming from there to the west coast of Australia was a tremendous contrast. After the lush Bali landscape, the desert country looked terrible and I took a dislike to Australia and I tried to get away as quick as I could. I went back to China and from there to the Philippines where I stayed for quite a while. About that time, the war came on, (Second World War) and I went first to Hong Kong to try and join up with the English regiments and finally I got to India where I got a job with the army looking after Prisoners of War in India. When the war was over, I came back to Australia and started work.ä

Now, itâs a fairly bland sort of description of this but it was 1963 and he literally built a raft to sail into to places north of Darwin. Between the lines, we see that Australian art, personality really makes sense of itself through knowledge of its neighbors. That was in 1963. By the 1980s it was more a question of publicizing anything that is Australian and that included film, wine, cheese, Paul Hogan, Tony Bilson, Ken Done and contemporary art and probably in that order.

Today, art in the international field is extremely competitive. Australian Artists need to now to gain experience, not just on the level of professionalism and competitiveness but the ever expanding parameter of contemporary art world is something that makes us have to go out there and understand what the art world really is about. The art world continually, as I see it - Iâm talking about the global art world now - continually seeks out new sectors of the world to redefine itself. For example in the eighties, Russian artists were very popular and in the nineties, it is China. Chinese artists, particularly dissidents from the Tianenmen massacre came out of the country and have become a very very significant international force in the international art world environment.

Quite obviously, so will India and Africa in the near future. So these new alignments with different sectors of the world, together with the old sectors of Europe and North America bring up new ways of practices in artists. The way we see ourselves as global or glocal (that the relationship between the global and the local) define artists with different skills now.

There is one skill that Iâm a bit distressed about. A lot of international artists seem to have it and which we are at a distinct disadvantage, is one of dealing with a vast number of people. Itâs the cosmopolitan nature - you donât necessarily just look at the stage of development of the particular city. The reason why Chinese artists are very successful at the moment, I feel there are several reasons but one distinct reason is because artists coming from Shanghai for example, have been dealing with vast numbers of people. They come from metropolises basically and to go from that level onto a world stage, on a global level is quite a natural thing for them.

Theyâve managed to deal with very large numbers of people in very efficient ways. Some of them with broken English, not speaking English very well, and the reason why they are successful is because of this ability. I feel that Australians who actually live in smaller cities really need to learn skills regarding how to deal with large numbers of people.

Different cities in Asia have different infrastructure, of course, and ironically along these infrastructures, for example, are more Euro-centric and American-centric than Australians are. For example, infrastructure in Tokyo has very established art museums and art world. In Tokyo and Taipei, for example, the people went to study abroad quite early and they always look towards North America or towards Germany for their sense of contemporaneity. I feel that Australia does feature very low in terms of what they consider as being something coming out of contemporary art.

I find that this sort of Euro-centricism in Asian cities is a little bit of a problem because we approach Asian cities with a sense of Îmiageâ of working in the region and it not necessarily immediately reciprocal. The other thing is that these infrastructures are quite different. Ones in Tokyo and Taipei (as I said earlier) have very established art circuits and different layers as opposed to Australiaâs and New Zealandâs critic scene.

Hong Kong, for example, barely has any museums, just one or two and hardly any critical scenes, yet there is actually a very large corporate sector which purchases contemporary art. So I find that these are the main developmental facts that we really have to look at.

The second issue is the financial one. Australiaâs support for young artists historically and particularly in the last twenty years has been very good. For example, questions of young artists getting prizes and grants. For example, a one hundred thousand dollar prize has been won by a twenty-four year old lately. So in terms of support for young artists and for fostering the beginning of art, it is quite good. But the question is that of the mid-rear artist. You find that all of a sudden the grants drop and you are left on your own to actually survive financially. People either do it through continuing to teach in arts schools or you actually have to find an economic base.

When you try and find an economic base - itâs possible to do so and after working for a while showing in commercial galleries in Australia, you suddenly realize that you hit a ceiling. The ceiling is a problem because artists in between the ages of thirty and fifty, would have a ceiling of art prizes, say between thirty to sixty thousand dollars for an artwork. That particular ceiling, if you look at it in relationship to American art classes of our contemporaries, itâs probably about a third or quarter of that of American art prizes. In a way, it is a very difficult situation to be put into ö you cannot lift that ceiling. I find that perhaps, working more in the region and getting more public commissions in perhaps Hong Kong and Tokyo is a way to lift that particular ceiling of Australian art prizes for contemporary artists.

These two issues, the cultural developmental one and the financial one, are two major aspects that every Australian artist actually working in the Asia region do have to think about. Professional artists, when they go to work in these countries, quite often do need the help from either the consulate-generals or the embassies. The problem there, quite often, is if oneâs case is not made clear, you always fall between Austrade and the Australian embassies cultural and diplomatic sectors.

Somehow there is this big hazard that one gets lost in because the embassies donât really know which area you are actually dealing. So it is a very important thing to make clear, right from the very start that oneâs work is particularly this time, in relationship to more cultural and diplomatic issues or perhaps in another time, that you actually need a lot of help from Austrade. Itâs about articulating oneself clearly in that situation.

I will very quickly go through two case studies. One is a Tokyo subway project which I am working on. Unfortunately, I cannot show you any slides today because the images are still under embargo and I canât show these in public. The issues about working with that particular subway was quite a complicated one ö most things during work in Japan are complicated as lots here have had experience with. Working in Tokyo, I found that it is indispensable to have an institutional legitimization and support. That is absolutely important.

The Japanese, particularly in the art world, tend to only look at artists if you have been legitimized by an institution. For example, in my case, the project had to be supported by the Australian embassy and the Australian-Japan Foundation. Japanese people rarely want to put a bet on a person or an artist who are actually door knocking on their own. Australian artists endlessly do this to Japanese galleries and I think that one of the primary states is that we really have to have key introductory figures. This is not unlike the Chinese argue of guanxi. You really have develop relationships with people that know Australians and often know a lot of the Japanese art world, not just know it but also living some position of power.

Patience with projects is absolutely crucial. There was an artist called David Zoe from New York who actually took six years to do aÊ project in a Japanese subway in Osaka. Projects require endless amounts of information being passed back and forth and often you feel absolutely frustrated but generally, I think, at the end of the day that it is more about developing trust. After that, there is the actual flying over there to discuss the work, sometimes over very trivial issues.

I just want to give you a very quick example. They were rather distressed about one particular image that I used in the project and basically itâs a work if large areas of color and small sections of images. I thought I had made hollinge** very accessible but it was meant to be a very general image about cross-culture between Australia and Japan. I had this particular image of this embryoâs hand to suggest possibilities of the next millennium. I had three hours of discussion with about eight people sitting around discussing this issue of the image and I couldnât understand what was the problem until somebody said, ãthe problem is that the abortion issue is very important in Japanä.

They were asking me to take this image out of the work but at the end of the day it didnât really have to do much with the image, it was really about me giving the Japanese subway authorities some face, that as an artist, I wasnât bull-dozing them, that I was actually deferent and take out any image out that they requested. As soon as I said that, they said the project was O.K. and that I could go ahead. So there are very subtle maneuvers and manners that are involved.

Another sort of manner is when people have expressions of doing something wrong or apologizing. For example, if you are in a queue and they say, ãIâm sorry Iâm taking so long.ä Theyâre not actually saying that they are in the wrong, it is a sense of deferral to the other person and it is the expectation of the other party to reciprocate in the same way. You donât go up there and say, ãOh yes, you were wrong, you were standing there for such a long time and didnât let any body through.ä Itâs not like that. Itâs about a sense of deferral. These sorts of subtle maneuvers were endless in Japan and I was rather relieved to come back to Australia actually. But doing work there, one has to develop that sense of passion.

The second case study is more about corporate commissions and negotiations with processes. This one relates to Hong Kong and itâs dealing with the private art market; doing work for large clubs and hotels. I think there needs to be a lot of balance in those cases between a sense of generosity and a sense of caution. First of all, a sense of generosity in the initial stages of the commission is applying information and being very optimistic. Oneâs outlook is very important. However, you do need a sense of caution in relation to copy-writing and intellectual property because that doesnât exist in particularly China and Hong Kong. Iâll just give here a very simple scenario of that.

A friend of mine actually did some large sculptural works. Basically he had small maquettes, sculptural maquettes, which he was having scaled up in China and to be placed in a significant site in China. That was all fine, the whole work was done and it was quite an expensive project. But suddenly, the following year, he went back to China and discovered that in small hotels, sprinkled around different smaller cities, there were these copies of his maquettes everywhere, in little entrances and foyer areas. So there is no such thing as copyright rules and you have to be very cautious if you are working in a larger scale, to be very scrupulous in making sure that do things like that donât happen.

Of course thereâs the bounds between visibility and exclusivity in the art world. There is a lack of copyright rules means that there is a possibility your work becomes over visible. and because the work is based on and has this aura of exclusivity, there is a problem if that gets transgressed.

I think there is one thing that needs to be articulated about working in the performing arts and that is, when we tour our products, we are actually talking about touring groups of people of anything from ten to forty. We are not touring inanimate objects and so the whole production systems from our culture that we are taking with us are essential to staging a production.

Iâll just tell you about who we are and what we do. We are a very small arts management company. I work with my partner who is co-director and we have half to one person in the office. Weâve been trading for seven years now and weâre based in Melbourne. What do we do? Well, our principle activity has become to ring Australian artists and productions within Asia. Minor activities are co-productions and presenting Asian artists here in Australia. Some of the clients that we tour on regular basis are Circus Oz, Chunky Moves and Strange Fruit and we work off a one-off basis with a lot of smaller Australian independent companies.

Weâve also just begun to work as booking agents for an event company within Singapore for physical performers. I guess this is a fairly typical year for us. We will tour six companies to about five different countries on ten separate tours. Weâll present a season of choreographers from Taiwan, Tokyo and Hong Kong in a small season within Melbourne. We have curated for the Australian National Playwright Center as part of the Adelaide Festival, a playwrightâs workshop which is the first stage to something that we hope will go into production that involves bringing together seven playwrights from seven different countries within Asia.

Iâve been asked to talk about my personal involvement with Asia and how it started. On factual information, I resided in Asia in three different countries for anything from a few months a few years. Iâve learnt an Asian language. Iâve undertaken study in research tours. Some have been self-funded and at least two of them were funded by the private sector. Iâve also studied and worked in countries in Asia. Iâve probably traveled three to five times a year. Sometimes with the companies Iâm touring but more often quite independently to work on setting up the tours.

I started my interest in Asia and it grew out of a very arbitrary set of circumstances in the 1980s when it was a fantastically exciting time in Asia because high economic growth produced enormous cultural and socially shifts within countries in the region so I had a strong interest in it. I donât think I could have become an exporter unless I first became an importer because learning about importing involves learning a lot about the countries in which we were importing and thatâs when I was the deputy general manager in the Melbourne Festival. Obviously I was involved in a range in tours through companies from a whole lot of different countries.

For whatever reason, the companies and the artists and the management that I picked up on and got on well with, were actually from Asian countries. If I got on particularly well with the companies and artists from Italy, France and Spain which are countries I have a real hard time dealing with, I guess I would be working in that area and focusing on that area but I didnât. So it was through just a quite arbitrary personal set of connections that I developed the interests.

One thing about importing is that I guess that it requires a knowledge of Asian productions from both needing to understand the history and the culture and the political and social context in which those productions come. You need to be able to brief marketing staff, you need to be able promote the shows and sell tickets here. Therefore you need to know more than just looking at a show and thinking whether or not it well work. So that was the kind of learning ground for me. Also, as a byproduct of being an importer I acquired knowledge of the markets that I was buying from.

For example, how those domestic markets function, what the market size was, what sort of pricing structures were in place, what kind of styles of productions were in fashion, what the sort of interim mechanisms to those markets were and what the kinds of barriers to entry were. That was a kind of by-product really. So that information was acquired over a long period of time, either as a byproduct or in a conscious research capacity. And I had no interest whatsoever in exporting Australian productions to Asia or anywhere else at that time. I did have a strong interest in countries and cultures within Asia and so I subsequently went to live there and went to work in industry there.

Some of the barriers encountered and I should say, I think the barriers to selling Australian productions in Asia are much less than the barriers in selling Asian productions in Australia. The principle barriers are the availability of suitable products from Australia. Itâs because we are a small country, we produce a small volume of productions. That makes branding difficult because you donât have volume to sustain and create a brand. A second barrier is the perception by Asian promoters that Australian product is not distinguishable from American, European or even Asian products - itâs simply not as good. Our principle competitors, therefore within Asia are from the US and Europe.

I guess another barrier thatâs starting to emerge is that even though Australiaâs had low inflation over the last few years, the costs of production within Australia, seem to me, outpacing the fees that we can get from Asia. As an example, this is a very extreme example which relates to Japan which is not typical in other countries. There is one festival in Japan that I have been dealing with now and selling productions to for nearly ten years I guess. In the beginning, the fees they offered were inflated and they were inflated by bubble economy conditions and Japanese fees tended to be high at that stage.

We held a production there last year and the fee that we achieved was exactly the same as the fee we had achieved ten years ago. So that's the problem. Itâs a bigger problem in the performing arts because youâre talking about escalating labour costs because youâre touring people.

Another barrier I guess, is a barrier of size within a small industry within a small country. My company is very small. Probably most independent or commercial companies in Australia are also very small. So it makes it impossible to do what firms in bigger industries do which is go to the market, establish a presence and set up an office. There are companies in Asia that do that regularly. IMG which is a big producer, has an Asia-Pacific division. Cirque-de-Soliel which we saw in Australia last year also has an Asia-Pacific division established in Asia. So that enables much greater awareness of changes in the market and a greater sensitivity to the market because you canât second guess it.

A third barrier, which I guess is a sort of personal one, and that is something that in the beginning I find quite difficult to deal with and all the artists that work with meÊ routinely find it difficult to deal with, and that is we are dealing with hierarchies in most of the places that we tour to. I think Australians have a more egalitarian attitude to the social structures in which they work and find it actually quite difficult to then slot in and deal in a hierarchy.

So, how have I gone about overcoming some of these barriers? Firstly is to restrict the product area that I deal in. So while there is a market for classical music in Asia, thatâs not one Iâd plan on entering. I want to focus on a particular brand of product and become known for that sort of product. So, while itâs more difficult to sell contemporary products in some ways, it actually enables me to have stronger focus and to retain stronger connections with a group and network of promoters. To also remain focused in the market that I present to ö some very clever people can do it - I canât see myself setting up a business any where international that just sees the market as global ö I have to focus on particular places that I think have good prospects and potentially good presenters.

The second and probably major way Iâve attempted to overcome those barriers is to work within networks of companies in Asia that are of comparable size, have similar purposes and similar focuses to me that we are a group of presenters and producers who have common interests. These networks are both formal and informal but its not just me knowing one person and someone else knows one person; we all know each other for whatever sort of reasons. These people who Iâve worked with over the years, over probably fifteen years now in some cases are my peers.

They are the same as me, there is probably a disproportionate representation of women and what we do is function as a support network. This can save a lot of wasted energy. We supply information, we supply size. As an example of the kind of way we all use this informal network of likeminded industry professionals like theirs is if decided I wanted to promote a production and its quite expensive to launch a new production. You have to send out a lot of promotional material, you have to travel, to do that just once is quite expensive.

Before embarking on that and just hoping that my second guessing is right and I have no way of knowing whether it is or not because I donât have branch offices in those markets, what I do is send a limited amount of material about the company or production Iâm planning on tour to the sort of trusties network who I can rely to give me honest feedback. So before I move up to someone higher up in the hierarchy whoâs going to be important, I can do a little test run and they might say, ãThis is the most stupid idea Iâve ever heard, donât waste your money.ä or they might say, ã This is a really good idea, this person, this person and this person are likely to do it.ä It Îs reciprocal, I have to do the same for them with any contacts I know or have. I guess this strengthens our efforts and enables us to collectively overcome those barriers.

Opportunities available to the industry and my organization, I think, its an extremely difficult and small and limited area to work in. There is no pretending that itâs not. There are opportunities though and I think the next step for us which weâve just commenced with a Singapore-based company is to create works specifically for the market.

This is in a corporate, commercial situation. Instead of just selling a show, weâre working together on a whole promotional event with the performance being created for that event. This opens up a lot of opportunity for us to supply higher value products along the chain. This even itself is being financed by a third party but I think, probably the next step is for Australian companies to actually invest long term in the creation in those kinds of products.

Weâre also looking at licencing products so that we donât do the performance but we sell the concept of the show. We send in the people to train up other people to do that show and that is the kind of long run show. That is the new area and there is potential for that. There is not just within a narrow band of performing arts but there are a lot of popular culture outlets within Asia. There are nightclubs, there are theme parks, there are promotional events in shopping centers that all use artists. There is a shortage of artists in those countries that the local promotional companies will use.

The third thing that provides an opportunity is the success of Australian productions in Europe and the USA. Presenters travel everywhere. They donât just travel within a defined geographic area. Quite often, Australian companies will be picked up from the European or American circuit and then bought into Asia. This is more likely to be a success strategy and all my main clients actually tour extensively in Europe and the United States. Itâs more likely to be a success strategy because the companies are seen as already having established a credibility and having been identified as prestige companies. If they can succeed in Europe and the US, a lot of presenters think, ãWell, if theyâve succeeded there, then we can take the risk on them.ä

Also in the performing arts, the nature of the risks that we are asking presenters to take is essentially larger that in Australia and in Europe. Because it's basically a commercial system, it's not a heavily subsidized cultural infrastructure in any of the places that I work. What weâre doing effectively is taking shows that are being produced in, by their way of thinking, a heavily subsidized system to a completely, in some cases unsubsidized system and so thatâs actually a big ask and a big risk. They have to be sure that there is an audience there. They canât take the kind of risks that Australian Festivals can take or any other subsidized kind of cultural organization.

I think the thing that are going to help sort of move things for me are greater regional integration and Iâve just returned last week from Hong Kong where I was actually at an Asia-Euro dance networking forum which was a meeting of about fifty presenters from Asia and from Europe. I was actually there as part of the Asian contingent because Iâm part a contemporary-dance network in Asia. That is actually looking at taking Asian existing network and extending them to Europe and actually working back the other way.

I actually think having a global perspective in which you see Asia is quite crucial. All the presenters I know who work in Asia think like that too. I also think increasingly, people are taking longer term perspectives on the development of Asia as a market. Companies and clients and artists are taking longer term perspectives and theyâre not expecting quick rewards where I think thatâs how they thought a bit in the eighties. I donât have any kind of tips or whatever really. Firstly, Iâd like to say that I had absolutely no desperate ambition to run to my own company whatsoever. I did it because I could see that in all the other performing arts companies that I looked at within Australia, Asia was never going to be the number one focus and I could see that you needed a lot of strategic focused work within those markets, over a long period of time if you were going to get there. I couldnât see any opportunities that currently existed hence I had to create my own and so the only sort of tip I have is that donât expect the opportunities to be there, theyâre not. You have to create them yourself.