I believe in magic

A vastly capacious hotel room built on top of a pavillion in Yokohama's Chinatown is part of the Yokohama Trieniale contemporary art exhibition. Defiantly superfluous and flippant, it even comes with its own brochure full of marketing-speek. It's an extravagant bit of nonsense, but one illuminatingly in the wrong context; because of that minor distinction (the 'significant' world of contemporary art vs. the travel agent's brochure stand) it seems to draw our attention to the vast abundance of nonsense all around us. . .

The artist, Nishino Taro, describes his artistic mission as "creativity will save the world," arguing that artworks that scream out 'stop the war' in the end have the opposite effect because they deaden our creative sensibilities. But isn't saying that creativity is going to stop mankind from making war pretty much the same thing as saying you believe in magic?

But while confronting this piece I had a sudden flash of empathy. Today Chinatown was overrun by ROC flags because of the National Day holiday (Oct. 10th). On the other hand, certain shops refused to fly the ROC flag, and the PRC-backed associations were shuttered, somber, silent while the firecrackers snapped and popped around town. In the midst of this I began to wonder if there is any hope in resolving the entangled dilemma of Yokohama Chinatown within the framework of PRC-ROC political identities. More broadly speaking, thinking about China and Japan, I have my doubts over the efficacy of treating national categories as natural descriptive words around which reality should conform. Certainly as political and legal boundaries, they have a certain inescapable influence on our reality. But what I wish we could share is the creativity to see that nations can be unnecessary for the compartmentalization of our cultural and social lives. If we could imagine our communities in a different way, couldn't we rearrange the game such that we could actually win? What type of magic would that take?