When I was eighteen, I moved out of my parents’ home in Doncaster. A lot of my friends did the same, and most of us didn’t move back. I meet others from Doncaster all the time, wherever I am and wherever I go, so it seems we weren’t the only ones to leave. Throughout its long history, Doncaster has been a place for passing through; a staging post, a rest stop on the way to somewhere else.
The great roads and rails from city to city were built through it and today it is a hub of national distribution centres where millions of packaged goods arrive to await the rest of their journeys. I had always wondered how my parents had come to choose such a place as their home, a place to settle and a place to stay — a place many consider to be only halfway there, or halfway home.
Whenever I was asked where I had come from, ‘Doncaster’ was never an adequate enough answer from a child of Chinese migrants. I wasn’t sure if I was really being asked the right question and I had a stubborn reluctance to offer the desired answer to badly posed questions. This was a trait born of a kind of forced precociousness, the result of having to speak on behalf of my parents so often in shops and restaurants, to lawyers and doctors, whilst their English developed a few steps behind mine. My small voice had to carry theirs too. To be articulate in English, I realised, was the only way we might all be heard. The Yorkshire in my voice became more credible than even a passport. I learnt not how to speak properly, but only how to be heard. Later my voice would learn to shape-shift, adopting certain vocabulary and tones for different contexts.
I was surprised when my work brought me back to South Yorkshire. I was excited, nervous, delighted and unsure about what I would say or do, what place I might have as an artist at home. I had come back several times this year on invitations to establish new imaginations; to imagine where it is we might be going, but also to ask what and from where it is we are leaving; is there anything we might take with us?
‘What of Donny did I take with me?’, I asked myself.
The first invitation came from Sunshine Wong at Bloc Projects. Like my parents, she too had come to Yorkshire from Hong Kong. The invitation was to join Bloc as artist-in-residence, to think together on notions of critical care and arts organisational practices, to invent through praxis a better way to work together as artist and curator. When Covid-19 first emerged, Mark Rappolt, the editor of ArtReview Asia, wrote that ‘the devastating impact of Covid-19 makes art, and the communities that engage with it, more worthy of preservation than ever’.[1] I responded some months later via an essay in another magazine, ArtAsiaPacific, by asking: ‘what’s worth preserving?’.[2] I wasn’t sure what Mark wanted to save about contemporary art and the communities that engaged with it. Is the art world that we currently have really something we want to keep? What kind of art was he talking about, I wondered, and who comprised the communities that engaged with it? His statement seemed to separate those who did engage with art from those who didn’t, and left me wondering whether the people he had in mind really were the ones that needed support. As many talked about a return to ‘normal’, I wondered whether the normal is really where we want to be, if the normal is anything like what we had before. ‘As we start to rebuild our normalities’, I wrote, ‘we need to ask ourselves what our past normalities had neglected, what they had marginalised, and what we might bring with us into the newly emerging’. As we emerge from lockdown, what normalities are we going to accept?
This is a question I have been asking all year and will continue to ask. Later invitations came from David Gilbert and Roger McKinley of the Yorkshire and Humber Visual Arts Network to imagine a ‘commons forum’ via a performance lecture at the Artists Journey Conference, hosted by Rose Butler; from Eelyn Lee to join Clare Devaney and Bipolar Abdul, Doncaster’s favourite drag queen, to imagine Doncaster as a ‘Parallel State’[3] where all citizens are equal through a speech later described by Duncan Whitley as an ‘essay-address’;[4] words later carried by Olivia Jones into Doncapolitan Magazine; and from Yuen Fong Ling and his brilliant students to imagine emergence via Paul B. Preciado’s notion of a parliament of vulnerable bodies[5] at Sheffield Hallam University. The essay-address became a new way to be heard. I have since essay-addressed at several other lecterns, on the picket line, in the classroom and in the bathroom mirror. An Instagram caption became an essay-address via the provocation of artist and local councillor for Adwick and Carcroft, Sarah Smizz, to save the community space of Brodworth Miners Welfare Hall,[6] which sits right across from my former primary school.
I’m sorry I didn’t come home sooner.
…
This is an excerpt from YVAN’s publication Beyond The Obvious 2, part of an Arts Council England funded programme in collaboration with Sheffield Hallam University focusing a critical eye on the relationship between artists and the culture and education environment in Yorkshire and the Humber. The publication was designed by Azizah Raghib (SHU) and will be launched on 28 March at the Old Post Hall in Sheffield Hallam University, 4-7pm. Book your free ticket here. A limited number of print copies will be free to take away at this event.
JJ Chan is an artist born in Doncaster who works across sculpture, moving image and writing.
[1] Rappolt, M, ‘Can’t touch this’, ArtReview Asia 8:1 (2020), p9.
[2] Chan, JJ, ‘The Year of the Rat [鼠年]’, ArtAsiaPacific 119 (2020): pp 28-29.
[3] The Parallel State is a series of provocative events which collectively imagine a ‘breakaway state: a space to collectively imagine alternative solutions to life on earth free from the oppositional constraints of the failed states in which we live’. #ParallelState
[4] Whitley, D, ‘Plurality, Plurality, Plurality’, Doncopolitan [online], 2021. Doncopolitan.com
[5] Preciado, P. B., ‘Learning from the Virus’, Artforum, 58:9 (2020).
[6] The Brodsworth Miners Welfare Hall is a GradeII listed community building that opened in 1924.The funds for the building were crowdfunded by the community. Right up into the 2010s my sister was still performing there with her troop (an internationally award-winning dance troop that charged their students £1 and trained them entirely in communitycentres and church halls), alongside boxers and afootball team. The trustees announced their intentionto sell the building for redevelopment and in October2021 the building was listed for auction. The localcommunity set up a crowd-funder to purchase thebuilding but did not reach their financial target.Despite this, negotiations with local stakeholders in the days before the sale resulted in the pause of the sale, and the property was withdrawn from the auction. The sale of community-owned spaces is a penultimate gesture of the privatisation of social space, a shifting from public place ownership towards space as a private commodity. It displaces creativity embedded in community. It displaces dancers, and boxers, and artists. It joins an attack on creative and critical thinking, on imagination and innovation. It ends our stay in the halfway there, halfway home. Instead, some may never be there, and others will always feel at home. Creativity in our society is not equally accessible.
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Published 17.03.2022 by Lara Eggleton in Explorations
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