Wikipedia:School and university projects/Open Source Culture/leung

In this interview with artists, Wenda Gu and Xu Bing, who participate in a program with Jonathan Hay an associate professor of Chinese Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, the role of the Chinese language in modern art is discussed. In a very broad sense, open source is often related to the notion of pushing the envelope of conservatism of ideas. This brings up the question of how art would function in a purely, unrestricted open world. What would happen if the copyright limits were taken away? Would open source be a moribund concept if there were no limits to push against? In a certain sense, this interview poses such situations. The enormous installations of Gu and Bing often consist of over-blown and redundant words, fragments of words, or made-up languages; 'The repetition of words echoes the ubiquity of exactly such sentiments displayed in the celebratory signs throughout Hong Kong before the handover.' The article and artwork conjures ideas of overblown open source; open source taken to the limit, where the repetition renders the words and original phrasings as mundane, public domain works.

In an exhibition at P.S. 1, Bing uses a certain typeface, which the artist invented, to create lettering. This poses another reading into the ideas of open source. The viewer is confronted with a typeface that looks to be borrowed and appropriated, but is, in fact, an original. How does this play with the psyche of the viewer who might believe they are not lookng at an original, especially with the Western viewer who is even more detached and less able to identify the print? Possibly even more controversial, is a Bing work contributed to the Pori Art Museum in Finland, in which live sheep where situated within a metal fence and whose leashes were wire bent into a form of a phrase from a John Berger poem. In this installation, it is interesting to consider that the words themselves form some sort of restraining object. Is the artist commenting on issues relating to open source?

The article continues with identifying the practices of a controlled language under the Cultural Revolution of Mao. In this Revolution, copying and memorization of masters and new characters is more than encouraged, it is enforced. Again, Western viewers are forced to cope with new ideas of forced open source, in a sense. The interview provides an interesting perspective to open source in a non-Western artistic practice.