No, not of art, but in art, as it happened when we met in the summer of 2020, during the field sessions of After Hope: Videos of Resistance.
I ask because I am not sure if I am too much of a stranger to be speaking of the good withyou. Did we build and share the trust we need for something so grave and intimate?
We barely even know each other. Yes, I saw the intensity of your gaze, your occasional frown, how your shoulders raised and your palm swished in the air. I heard also the tone of your voice, the rhythm of the way you mouth words. But I didn’t get to match your Zoom-ed face with your height, the way you walk, how your arms hang and your strides touch the ground. Did you also find it hard to make something of me? Sometimes we were more than my laptop screen-page could accommodate. Sometimes, a shared screen turned us into a sidebar. How were these our moves through life, the good lives you and I aspire to?
There are other troubles. Expert voices say no one is an expert on the good. The good registers in such a variety of ways that no single, simple structure can exhaust its account. This is a healthy dose of caution one could use against preformed, hasty, and rigidly closed judgements on what the good is. And yet, I find myself questioning whether this habit of mind might lead to indifference and insensitivity towards the good. What is the right amount of cognitive distance one needs when it comes to identifying the good? Does preparing for errors of judgment overly determine the search for the good as beginning from failure to find the good?
To place art alongside the good does not seem urgent these days. Or shall I say it is not in fashion, assuming that the good requires fashion as much as—if not more than—other things do. We spend time circulating names, honors, goods, and services. There is already so much in art as material and symbolic labor to exchange. There must be good reasons we choose to keep doing these. What else is there about the good that arose in the After Hope field sessions that is different from the good we are already doing?
We certainly came together out of good intentions: the necessity and beauty of resistance against that which had been troubling our worlds, our multitude of worlds. But we also know distant and recent pasts where good intentions anywhere could fail everywhere.
The good wasn’t even our topic of discussion. Hope was. Is my desire to be sure that the good did happen merely willful and wishful?
Is hope itself already the good, or does the good require a different way of telling?
2
Not that I know what the good is, but I can usually recognize it when it happens. My friends call this naiveté and obstinance on my part. True. But I say in response, “Just in case, just in case.” You see, I never said I am looking for perfection. I just tend to be more attuned to the good in case it visits.
Like the other day, from a second floor café in Hong Kong, I looked down towards the plaza and spotted this woman. Her palms were clasped gently around his right elbow, not weighing it down, not gripping, just touching and resting. That man, too. He leaned his ears just close enough to his partner so he could hear her whispers. This is good—a sensitivity to others’ needs, a bodily orientation that expresses loving kindness. Small deeds, small goods. It reminds me of a friend running off from a conversation with me in Chicago to help strangers salvage their car from piled snow.
There is more: I have noticed many times the congee shop owner walking elderly customers out the door. Believe it or not, my eyes would swell, just as when I see giant double-decker buses yield to each other on congested roads. An artist composed letters to birds as the 2019 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong turned into police tear gas showdowns. Illustrators sent letters to imprisoned protestors. Haven’t you met people who are willing to stay to keep a difficult conversation going, and others who are ready to forgive or shake up invisible barriers in the process of communication?
Here’s an anomaly, a personal one, and a pleasant surprise: a cherished friend included in an artist statement of a recent work of his that we had conversations about it and sometimes he didn’t understand me. I told him his words made me feel sheltered. Did he know what I meant? This is in hindsight: “This shelter is built by the two in the respect for mutual differences, nature being transmuted into a spiritual matter which little by little envelops and protects the subjects on their path while constraining them to pursue it.”[1]
Once I made a silly mistake in devising my teaching schedule. My apology to students probably communicated the guilt I felt. One student emailed me and said, “Life is full of surprises.” It was not only the words. I imagined how he perceived the situation and his involvement in it, then drew a conclusion about the best offer of relief he could make. All these culminated into a moment of good. When the good arrives, something shines.
Sometimes, it is tempting to say, “It’s too good to be true!” Absurd, isn’t it, that we need to choose between what’s good and what’s true. Is this necessary caution against excessive attachment to the good, or is it false humility? No doubt I made mistakes. Not that I misrecognize the “bad” for the good, but that I might favor and let the good speak so readily, so much, that I fail to recognize how competitive or aggressive its counterpower could be. Would you regard these as acceptable tribulations in the learning of the good—in every effort of following it, always already the possibility of losing track of its peregrinations?
Please trust me that all these idiosyncrasies are sparked off by what you did and did not do, and what we did and did not do together. Every time we met, you told us what you have chosen to make, where you were resisting and striving, how your life had been conditioned by these ongoing activities. You shared with us what you chose as good. I am not saying you had a theory of the good to lecture us on or that you have offered a moral manual that could turn us all into better persons. I am not saying we ever stopped identifying what needs to be changed and how we could be part of that change. It’s just that in the quiet laugh you directed towards narcissistic Power, in the solace you found in distraction, in the attention you brought to sunrise and sunset, in the joy you sought in making art with your parents, I see that you let the good come out through your art. I was touched, but never in the same way, at the same time, at the same place, as the same me, which is why I would like to speak with you about the good in art before it disappears.
3
For two hours on each of seven days over four months, I sat next to the window of my study at Plover Cove. The morning sun on my side of the ocean was the onset of twilight on yours, most of the time. Lines were drawn in our encounters, but not for marking territories. Knowledge and skills were made visible, but not for flaunting ownership. All were for sharing. Admiration and gratitude were the mostly frequently exchanged goods.
Yes, admiration, not praise. If praise is to be declared to be heard or for the sake of being heard, admiration is more of a quiet whisper. It requires a different kind of listening. In her beautifully written book on listening and attunement, Lisbeth Lipari cites Corradi Fiumara: “the inability to listen… can only result in a surrender to the pull of numbing trends… [A]n alternation of ‘praise’ and ‘crucify’ seems to emerge, exempting us from those ‘deeper’ transformations that are unique in permitting renewal.”[2] The good inhabits a different ecology. It has no need for advertising, just rippling to stay alive. This is what the diary I kept from our meetings shows—I might as well call it Diary of the Way the Good Moves. Can I share it with you? I am curious what you will make of this—you, named or unnamed between the ripples:
When Josie Browne said, “If you have hope, take someone along with you,” I recognize joy and how it makes sharing and appreciation possible.[3] When Sai Htin Lunn Htet affirms the importance of standing for young people who have no voice in the art industry in Myanmar, I see care and care for justice.[4] Ohm Phanphiroj’s film on underaged prostitutes in Thailand brought tears to many of our eyes.[5] I think of the tremendous composure he needs when countering such unjust situations, and the empathy he lends. When Zikri Rahman speaks of reading together in public space, how books are the collective medium, while utopia is a shadow we want to grasp but fail to, I think of hope.[6] So too did Collective Cukucumu build confidence from libraries as spaces of learning.[7] They have all deposited deep appreciation for the importance of others’ presence in our lives and our dependence on their well-being to thrive. Generosity moved between our eyes and ears. It moved our skin.
When I see the Chaw Ei Thein of sixteen years ago performing on the streets of military-ruled Myanmar I see courage.[8] Hearing Tiffany Chung describe how we are: “breathing in the silence of our befallen world,” I recognize the willingness to be vulnerable and to confront enduring uncertainties.[9] Laushan Collective shares reconstructed memories as a “residue of hope.” I recognize in them persistence and resilience.[10] When Jaemin Cha said she wanted to find a woman “not touched by power,” I hear determination and love of truth.[11] When I see Minoosh Zomorodinia’s emergency blanket fluttering in the wind, her body braving the wind as a way to learn to live with solitude, I see the wisdom of humor.[12] Somewhere during the session, I uttered, “power is everywhere but it isn’t everything.” I was stealing Camus’ “history is everywhere but it isn’t everything.” I prefer not to participate in portraying the encounter between good and evil as some big, spectacularly fantasized power struggles in big-shot blockbusters. I’d rather see all fights, where necessary, as good fights. You reminded me that fights had better be good where they are necessary: principled steadfastness in the face of adversity.
When Jane Jin Kaisen’s video first became our shared screen, I couldn’t quite make out the scale of the space she was in. As her body spun and the drone camera view moving farther away from her, I saw the strength of her belief in our bondage with nature, and the history of violence that tried to take that bondage away.[13] I can imagine the suppleness and fluidity of grace. A humility arising out of realizing our finiteness in relation to the world and others.
Tsui Kuang-yu’s video series “Exercise Living: Stay Calm” was a timely reminder of how lovers of freedom are in permanent exile in worlds of unfreedom.[14] No martyrdom. No heroism. No question of “where?” needs be asked. To persist and live with this in composure requires tremendous concentration and sense of purpose. Simple as it looks, but no easy thing to accomplish—a conviction to live and to live well.
We did not see the entirety of your work presented in the museum program. But in what you did show—your articulation, reflection, faith, and doubt—you transformed us into a copresence. Copresence is when “presence precedes meaning.”[15] It was “immediate and concrete,” a means “through which social experiences existing in different times, spaces, and cultures become more easily accessible and intelligible, a type of copresence that cannot be achieved by conceptual language (whether technical, philosophical, or scientific).”[16] You were not advocating about yourselves and art. There is no personal glory and no glory to be made for art. Rather, your narratives, “by recounting exemplary struggles of life and death, suffering and liberation, loss and gain, reinforce sentiments of joy and fear, awe and wonder, revenge and compassion.”[17] I would add that you also know solitude through the unknown other in you. You dwell in both and you and the not-you; you don’t let either scare you. In exercising freedom as necessity rather than privilege, you enabled “a kind of bottom-up shared wisdom of the world.” This wisdom “converts the past into an energy to empower the present and strengthen the not yet or the perhaps of the future.”[18]
I hope it is clearer now what compels me to speak with you about the good in art: a possibility that when you make art, you make the good happen. Not that artists are good for being artists. Of course not. No one needs to be somebody to be good. Since the good can and has arisen in complex but concrete circumstances in art, can artists not also be regarded as pursuing the good, learning the good, and having something to teach about the good? In your way, in anyone’s particular and peculiar way, you, too, could be a moral exemplar. In fact, I am troubled by why this hasn’t been spoken about more often.
No, I don’t think this is too much. It is good and it is true.
Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski proposes “exemplarism” as a model that bridges moral theory and moral practice. In “exemplarism,” “the good, a right act, and a virtue,” as well as “concepts of a duty and a good life, are defined by reference to exemplars, which are identified directly through the emotion of admiration.”[19]
Not that exemplars don’t make mistakes. Amy Olberding develops the exemplary model and likens a moral exemplar to a virtuoso pianist, in that both the moral exemplar and musician must “play live.”[20] In live performances, Olberding argues, the pianist “must enact the score in urgency. The life of training, habituation, and practice must be distilled in the raw immediacy of the moment.”[21] The moral exemplar performs in a different sense in that “he crafts a life of long duration out of an innumerable larger set of variables,” a performance “without end or respite.”[22] As exemplars in their own respect, both affect us even when there might be flaws in their performance, for “no skill can supplant an abiding capacity to get things wrong.”[23]
You lead complex intellectual lives. You are challenged by the risks of losing control over your materials, losing faith in what you do, losing the reality of who you are and could be, of coming under pressures of all sorts. But I thought you also made it clear that hope is when we don’t stop preparing ourselves for the good—heeding it, attending to its becoming, welcoming it when it happens.
4
Maybe what happened was that when we began with stories about our struggles, we were after hope. And then, the good took its turn, demanding a narrative. At some point it is an itch, waiting for the right amount of scratch in the right quality of tenderness. It could also touch a soft spot as a hue or a hum, until all of a sudden, it lays claim to our attention more than we have prepared for. To recognize the good, one has to be fast, like taking a snapshot. Other times, one has to be slow, so as to take in the sheer immensity of what that snapshot conveys. In the brevity of a moment, the good moves—and moves us. I mean that good that releases hope from its occasional compulsion to make the future urgent, I mean that good that affords hope a recuperative pause. If we practice receiving the good in its intensity, its tenacity, we can only become more ready for the next moment it returns. And there, hope is.
Yang Yeung February 2, 2021 Hong Kong
Endnotes
[1] Luce Irigaray, The Way of Love, trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluhacek (London: Continuum, 2002), 81. [2] Lisbeth Lipari, Listening, Thinking, Being: Toward an Ethics of Attunement (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014), 206. [3] After Hope: Videos of Resistance Field Session, July 31, 2020. [4] Ibid., July 31, 2020. [5] Ibid., July 31, 2020. [6] Ibid., August 14, 2020. [7] Ibid., August 14, 2020. [8] Ibid., July 31, 2020. [9] Ibid., August 14, 2020. [10] Ibid., August 14, 2020. [11] Ibid., August 28, 2020. [12] Ibid., October 9, 2020. [13] Ibid., October 30, 2020. [14] Ibid., November 13, 2020. [15] Boaventura de Sousa Santos, If God Were A Human Rights Activist (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 78. [16] Ibid., 76. [17] Ibid. [18] Ibid. [19] Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, “Exemplarist Virtue Theory,” Metaphilosophy 41, no. 1/2, (January 2010): 41. [20] Amy Olberding, Moral Exemplars in the Analects: The Good Person is That (New York: Routledge, 2012), 128. [21] Ibid., 127. [22] Ibid., 129. [23] Ibid., 129.
