Permeable Borders

When I was a reckless and carefree young man I read one book which convinced me to change my ways. It was titled (as I recall) Sugar, the White Death and, even before I had turned the last page, my mind was made up never to eat the sweet poison again. Which could well be the reason why I am alive today and able to take advantage of Mr Tate's other legacy - his art galleries - to which I was recently attracted by exhibitions of the works of Patrick Caulfield and Gary Hume. And so I made my way to London's Tate Modern last week full of expectation.

I arrived, however, at the wrong gallery. Caulfield and Hume are modern artists but they are also British: so their work is being shown at Tate Britain. It's a mistake I might not have made if I had paid due attention, but I consider myself misled by the trend towards "globalisation" which is blurring boundaries all over the place. While it has long been the norm for nations to nurture their native art for posterity, the global village now favours internationalism. Resistance to this trend is, I am sure, futile but not everyone is giving up without a struggle. The French, famously, have an aggressive official policy of defending and preserving la culture exceptionnelle in all its forms but, whilst I agree that it is certainly worth fighting for, even their future is looking increasingly mondiale.

I may have been at the wrong Tate but, since I was there, I toured the five galleries of the permanent collection which are themed in such a way that Mondrian, for example, is shown in the ‘Structure and Clarity’ section and Dali is in ‘Poetry and Dream’. This is helpful in making sense of the artists’ intentions, although some of the pieces lose a little of their mystique when defined thus. At Tate Britain there is a different policy: the works there have recently been re-organised into a chronological presentation. This is very useful in understanding the development in Britain of techniques and schools of thought, the influences of one artist upon another and the parts played by society, religion and power in dictating style and subject matter. I may have arrived too late in the day to enjoy the individual Caulfield and Hume exhibitions but I appreciated the broad overview afforded otherwise.

A few days later I heard a lecture on the subject of Chinese cinema which reinforced my conviction that all nations are moving, with the inevitability of tectonic plates, in the same cultural direction. There is a uniquely Chinese cinematic tradition - strictly speaking there are there are three of them: the tradition of the Peoples’ Republic of China, where creative freedom has been severely constrained by totalitarian politics; Taiwan’s, where 60 years of Japanese colonisation took its toll; and Hong Kong’s, where capitalism enabled the popularisation of kung fu.

The repatriation of Hong Kong to the mainland and the softening of attitudes towards Taiwan have at last allowed the citizens of the PRC some limited exposure to films from the other two Chinas – providing they are politically neutral. But the biggest breakthrough has come from another direction. The most popular film in China recently was Iron Man 3. But this is not a straightforward example of the unstoppable advance of American culture: Hollywood has taken a sophisticated approach to cracking the Chinese market by cunningly including an extra scene in the film. It features a popular Chinese actor playing a doctor who saves the western hero’s life, thereby trumping Capitalism with Communist know-how. This device not only satisfies the dirigisme of The Party but also delights the audiences. Furthermore, it serves to circumvent the strict quota of 14 foreign films per year allowed because it counts as a collaborative production. Now that’s what I call sweet – and poisonous.