Book Review: The Monograph Project, Jun Yang

In our digital age of infinite reproducibility, does the artist’s monograph still matter? After all, the monograph’s historically rooted life-and-work paradigm, with its formulaic structure and approach, can feel obsolete, particularly when compared with digital media’s swift, unpredictable and ephemeral currents. For Chinese-Austrian artist Jun Yang, whose work is invested in notions of personhood, biographic writing, and artistic meta-awareness, the monograph remains relevant insofar as the genre itself can be turned into a subject of examination, and his The Monograph Project gestures towards potential alternative directions for its future, ones which offer re-imagined possibilities for what has become a rigid, dogmatic and canonizing form of writing done typically by scholars or curators but not by artists themselves.

Tracing 18 years of the artist’s work across a variety of media—including performances, videos, films, installations, proposals, public interventions, and even restaurants—and seven years in the making, The Monograph Project encompasses six volumes, amounting to 975 pages of text by Jun Yang and his two primary collaborators, curator Barbara Steiner and designer Oliver Klimpel, as well as a number of other contributors. A whole consisting of two parts, the first three volumes were published in 2015, with the remaining three released in 2018. If the initial draft for the project had been realized, the scope would have been even grander in scale, resulting in eight volumes in German and Chinese and another eight in English and Japanese—the languages associated with Yang’s work. 

Eschewing a chronological or media-specific approach to structuring the project, Yang and his collaborators chose instead to emphasize myriad interconnections in no particular order. While many readers will surely anticipate some of them, for example, within the artist’s body of work and between Yang and his fellow collaborators, others, such as the relationship between the reproducibility of the book and postmodern notions of a positional, unstable and fluid self, are perhaps less obvious, particularly in a monograph project ostensibly devoted to the still-developing oeuvre of an artist in his forties. 

Broadly speaking, the two halves (and six individual volumes) can be understood according to certain thematic principles. In keeping with its content, the first volume, which comes closest to what Klimpel describes as “the respectable hardcover volume,” is cinematic in look and feel. Focusing on films made by Yang in Taiwan, Norway and South Korea, the volume’s large and colorful glossy pages point to the connection between filmic language and autobiographical narration. Resembling an “amateur copyshop-bound brochure,” the second volume focuses on the project a contemporary art centre, Taipei (a proposal) (2008–09), Yang’s contribution to the 2008 Taipei Biennial that led to the founding of the Taipei Contemporary Art Center in 2010. In addition to being a practicing artist, Yang is also a successful Viennese restaurateur—his business portfolio includes five restaurants, two bars, and two cafés—and the third volume, more vade mecum than monograph, considers the tension between economic and artistic agendas.

Although not an activist per se, Yang’s art can be decidedly political, whether it is his video project Camouflage – Look like them – Talk like them (2002/04), created using cut-outs from New York magazines and newspapers published post-9/11, and about the life of an imagined Chinese illegal immigrant in Austria, or his “Camouflage: X-Guide” (2002) series, which offers a variety of pictograms on how one might hide one’s outsider status in order to assimilate and thereby become invisible (panels include Get a formal haircut, Don’t wear headscarf, Don’t spit on the ground, and Learn the local language). Underpinning such issues is an implied questioning, if not an overt critique, of the institutional role of art and activism in the increasingly fragmented and transitory constellation of public-private places and spaces, a point that Martin Fritz takes up in his essay when he asks, “Can art galleries, museums, and biennales really claim to provide open, communicative infrastructures for today’s societies and their discourses” or do they turn their backs on these realities?

The most compact book in the monograph series, volume five examines artistic authorship and recalls Jean-Luc Nancy’s dictum “The singular is a plural.” Throughout the six volumes, Yang alters his name, variously June Young (1), Yang Jun (2), Tun Yang (3), Jan Jung (4), Yi Chuan (5), and Jun Yang (6), thereby underscoring the performative aspect of constructing a self that is both positional, contingent, and, at times, merely random or incidental. No longer singular, subjectivity assumes a multitudinous plurality, suggestive more of communities of languages and identities rather than of individual ones. An ego soon cedes to alter egos in which the self is inscribed and inflected by communities of others. Primed by such insights, the reader immediately “gets” the first image that they encounter: a black-and-white photograph of female interpreter Noriko Kobayashi, with the words “My name is Jun Yang.” The self, particularly the artistic self, ought to be understood as a pliable vessel to be embodied, transferred, forgotten or remembered in search of self. 

The final volume, then, draws together Jun Yang, Barbara Steiner and Oliver Klimpel in order to reflect critically on the project’s defining features, aims and outputs as well as to introduce the practices of the two aforementioned collaborators and their practices as curator/editor/graphic designer. In fact, the nature of the project is stated and re-stated in each volume:

“The Monograph Project [. . .] challenges the genre of monographs as monographic and biographic writing centred round the persona of one artist and his oeuvre. By varying the name of Jun Yang different artists are evoked. Monograph and biography turn themselves into subjects of examination. Although different in content, format, materiality, design, and—not to forget—the slightly changing name of the artist, the single books are interrelated [. . .] Gaps are deliberately produced to keep the entire monograph as fragmented and fragile as the issues related to it.”

The result is less a monograph of an individual artist and more a catalog of relational and dynamic selves. Despite the multiplicity of motifs, tropes, designs, fonts, materials, contributors and volumes, it is this overriding commitment to a parallax perspective of life that comes to unify and thereby define the project. Authorial authority and authenticity are challenged, occasionally undermined, and even kept at a distance in order to deconstruct an artistic self in favor of a polyphonic conception of space, place and selfhood. Inevitably, the effect can be dizzying and even disorienting. As Kimpel suggests, the monograph can be representational, non-representational, and even misrepresentational, but the occasional conceptual culs-de-sac are indeed part of the hermeneutic process of understanding the meaning and significance of past experiences.