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“Camouflage. LOOK like them TALK like them” Jun Yang In “Camouflage” the artist Jun Yang observes the time after September 11, 2001, since when many persons are under suspicion for no other reason than their appearance. In his video, he quotes the account of a hobby pilot who was taken into custody since he was “male” and “Muslim”, hence “suspicious”. On the image level, Yang has recorded articles from newspapers and fashion magazines that report on extended police measures which have been gaining ground over the last years. “All citizens under general suspicion” – this is the headline of a report by the weekly magazine Spiegel from 2002, when the Minister of the Interior Otto Schily had proposed to have all foreigners in Germany registered. This background of opinion-leading is followed by advertising images for trade-marked clothes in the second part of the video. Yang comments on the global trend to uniformity by example of China and Japan. He presents the products of the globalized textile industry as a means of camouflage. The main concern of potentially suspicious individuals is to look like everybody else and thus become invisible. Camouflage by following the fashion is recommended as a strategy of “passing”, that is as being seen as a different person. The actual central figure in the film, about which Yang reports in a voice-over, did not follow the recommendation of “look like them, be like them”. The Chinese man called “X” discarded his passport and along with it his identity when he arrived in Austria. Because of his appearance and his behaviour – in this case running after a bus – he was identified as illegal and arrested. With the uniform manager style in Eastern Asia and the migrant X from China, two contrasting, although mutually dependent, sides of globalization are juxtaposed in “Camouflage”. However, only one of the sides in Jun Yang’s video disposes of the means of camouflage to escape from general suspicion. Artist, born 1975, lives and works in Vienna. |
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