8 October 2024

It’s hard not to take the theme of “East meets West” personally. That phrase defined Hong Kong, the city where I was born, a literal product of the sentiment as a Eurasian. I imagine the tagline emerged after the British signed its final lease with the Qing Government in 1898, adding the New Territories to its portfolio, eventually creating the Frontier Closed Area along the Chinese border—our own DMZ, if you will—and transforming what was famously described as a barren rock into a strategic trading outpost. By the time Deng Xiaoping’s opening and reform era was launched in the late 1970s, Hong Kong had staked a position as a crucial gateway not just to China—the ideal middleman for international businesses seeking to trade with the Mainland—but to Asia as a whole.

By then, “East Meets West” seemed to frame Hong Kong’s cultural blend as a fruitful encounter for all involved, hence its oft-repeated moniker, “Asia’s World City.” No matter the racial capitalism embedded into the city’s colonial system, from the South Asians recruited by the colonial administration to police the local population in the colony’s early days, and the Southeast Asians composing Hong Kong’s foreign domestic worker class now. In its heyday, economist Milton Friedman encouraged people to visit the city to see “capitalism in action.”[1] As scholar Jamie Peck writes, “Friedman and his fellow Mont Pèlerinians”—the society founded in 1947 to theorise a neoliberal postwar economic system capable of maintaining Western dominance in a coming age of decolonialization—“sanctified Hong Kong as an original and immaculate site of laissez-faire governance, projecting a stylized, selective, and minimally documented vision of a free-market paradise...”[2]

Encapsulating this “ideologically affirmative myth” was that irresistible catchphrase, “East meets West.” What journalist Christopher DeWolf describes as “shorthand for a sentiment that has existed since the early days of its existence as a British colony: Hong Kong is exotic, but safely so, thanks to being securely nestled within the framework of Western modernity.”[3] In 2012, one year after MCH Group acquired a majority stake in the Hong Kong art fair ART HK, Magnus Renfrew, who directed Art Basel’s inaugural Hong Kong show in 2013 with a fifty-fifty split between galleries from Asia (or with spaces in the region) and the rest of the world, expressed similar sentiments. “Hong Kong’s shared history with the West, and its respect for freedom of expression creates an ideal platform for cross cultural exchange,” he said. “In addition, its low tax system creates an inviting environment for international business.”[4]

Of course, much has changed. Following political instability in 2019, and with some of the world’s toughest Covid border measures in place from 2020 to early 2023, a salivating Western arts media revealed its cultural bias—bearing in mind the zero-sum mindset of a fast-fading unipolar era defined by Western hegemony—by speculating on where Asia’s next arts capital would be after Hong Kong; as if there could only be one. Granted, the Western world’s thirst for Asia is nothing new. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Hong Kong’s embodiment of the “East Meets West” trope as a freeport rooted in the historical enterprise of colonial capitalism, a cursory search on JSTOR for essays about the “East meets West” idea yields texts predominately located within the field of business. Papers written in the early 2000s almost always cite 2010s projections that Asia’s share of world GDP would rise to over 40% in the 2020s, equalling if not surpassing that of the United States and Europe combined, which explains the importance that business studies—and indeed, businesses—have placed on exploiting Asian futures.

True to form, a 2023 McKinsey Global Institute study found that Asia’s economies collectively contributed 42% of world GDP (in terms of purchasing power parity) in 2021 and were expected to generate over 50 percent of global GDP by 2024, making it the world’s largest economic and trading region.[5] Importantly, that report highlighted a key fact: “To talk of Asia in the singular is naïve.” (Even if the art world seems to retain the antiquated tendency to equate the region solely with East Asia at best or Greater China at worst.) Asia is nearly five times the size of Europe, counts around 2,300 languages against Europe’s 300, and is defined by significant political differences and economic variations.[6] “But we can refer to these countries in the collective because they constitute a complementary and interlinked ecosystem,” the report notes.[7] This fact—that “Asia does not behave as a single politically and institutionally aligned bloc”—“makes its deep trade and economic integration that much more remarkable…”[8]

Asia, in short, is a region of regions, running from north to south, east to west: a multipolarity. With that in mind, what “East” does the historically unipolar “West” expect to meet, exactly, in the context of something like an art fair, and who, for that matter, defines the bounds by which the East is defined? Critiquing the need to define the commercial culture of each region in 2011, scholar Anil K. Gupta favoured a strict geographic understanding of both terms to minimise the reduction of culturally diverse regions into monolithic blocs, which lines up with capitalism’s penchant for organising territories of economic interest into geographical frames. Take “Global South,” which replaced “Third World” by the early 2000s, to define a “developing” region in relation to the “developed” North.[9] Or MENASA—combining “Middle East,” “North Africa,” and “South Asia”—which was coined in the finance world sometime in the mid-2000s. That acronym was later adopted by Art Dubai, before the fair shifted its purview to the Global South in an attempt to open up a site of encounter and discovery that privileges the non-Western world and decentres the West’s historic dominance.[10]

That dominance, of course, coalesces in the OG regional term, “Middle East,” which British colonizers coined in the 19th century to delineate the coveted territory between the so-called Far and Near East, whose boundaries have incorporated everywhere between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. In one of its earliest iterations, the term encapsulated the Arabian Gulf, Iraq, the eastern coast of Arabia, the Suez Canal, Sinai, the Arabian Peninsula, and the states of Iraq, Palestine, and Trans-Jordan[11] created by the Allied Powers divvying up the Ottoman Empire following its fall post-World War I. Crude borders drawn on maps by European men drunk on their supremacy demonstrated zero concern for the cultural complexities on the ground, “making a breeding place for future war,” as one observer put it.[12]

Of course, war and capitalism go hand and hand, and Hong Kong should know. The 19th-century Opium Wars, waged by the British—later joined by their frenemy the French—forced Imperial China to open its markets to European merchants, heralding an era of unequal treaties remembered in China as a century of humiliation. The British acquisition of Hong Kong was a direct result of these wars: a historical example of “East meets West” that contextualizes Mao Zedong’s 1957 retort during the Cold War, which notoriously pitted East and West (among other poles) against each other. Describing a battle between two worlds—and bringing to mind scholars like historian Andre Gunder Frank, who described this recent chapter of Western supremacy as an anomaly—Mao proclaimed: “The East Wind is bound to prevail over the West Wind.”

All of which brings to mind a commonly referenced source in relation to the “East meets West” phrase: Rudyard Kipling’s “The ballad of East and West,” whose first two lines—starting with “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”—are often quoted without the lines that follow—“But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth / When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!” It’s an interesting enough sentiment, recalling the field outside language that exists beyond good and evil described by Rumi, or the still-point of the Tao “beyond right and wrong” that Zhuangzi conceived it.[13] Still, Kipling’s words harbour a colonial worldview: it was “strong” men who set the terms of worldly relations through the polarising, top-down cartographies of geopolitical power, after all.

With that said, the phrase “East meets West” has become as elastic as the contexts to which it has been applied. It’s been used to describe Istanbul, where the continents of Europe and Asia literally meet, and Dubai, where the phrase has expanded in the context of the UAE and its positioning as a global hub to “Rest meets West.” There’s Greenwich in London, where the Prime Meridian, dividing East and West Longitude, was defined in 1884, and Sarajevo, where Europe’s internal East and West are said to come together—per tourism materials. Each example highlights the elephant in the room. In truth, the East or West could be anywhere. It depends where you stand—you’re always east or west of something, right?—or if you even buy into terms like this. Because despite violently desperate attempts to keep up appearances in the last year, the world is no longer dominated by one centre, which relates to how the theme of one pole meeting another might unfold in the realm of contemporary art, given how artists and art workers have long defied the terms that the old world keeps trying to impose on them.

This is where Kipling’s point about there being “neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,” when “two strong men” meet comes back into play. As individuals, we are East or West of something every minute of the day. To recognise that fluid reality—that freedom of position—is to decentre the rigid supremacy of geopolitical thinking that has shaped the globe through hard division, where names imposed on peoples and places have served to prepare them for their subjugation, if not erasure, as indistinct masses and claimable territories—even now. To resist that reduction is to bring the world we share in common into clearer view: where east, west, north and south are signs that direct us to, rather than away from, each other.

[1] "Speech by FS at London School of Economics," published as a press release on the Hong Kong Government website, 5 October 2010, https://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/201010/05/P201010040297.htm (https://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/201010/05/P201010040297.htm)

[2] Jamie Peck, "Milton’s Paradise: Situating Hong Kong in Neoliberal Lore," Journal of Law and Political Economy 189 (2021), 1, https://escholarship.org/content/qt7bb46936/qt7bb46936_noSplash_906f40f6fedbbbe61df8e22dcd6e8631.pdf?t=r2cqtn (https://escholarship.org/content/qt7bb46936/qt7bb46936_noSplash_906f40f6fedbbbe61df8e22dcd6e8631.pdf?t=r2cqtn).

[3] Christopher DeWolf, "The Steiner Series: The Problem With East Meets West," Zolima City Mag, 26 October, 2023, https://zolimacitymag.com/the-steiner-series-the-problem-with-east-meets-west/

[4] “Asia's World City, Hong Kong's attractions and opportunities," The Korea Herald, July 3, 2012, https://www.hketotyo.gov.hk/common/pdf/Herald-final-2012-0703-en.pdf

[5] "Asia on the cusp of a new era," McKinsey Global Institute, 22 September 2023, https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/asia-on-the-cusp-of-a-new-era# (https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/asia-on-the-cusp-of-a-new-era).

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] United Nations Development Programme, 'Forging a Global South' in the United Nations Day for South-South Co-operation, 19 December 2004. Referenced in Stephanie Bailey, "Now Where? On Navigating Without a Compass," Ibraaz, Platform 010, 1 August 2017, https://www.ibraaz.org/essays/177.

[10] Tom Speechley notes that Abraaj Capital coined the acronym in “Infrastructure needs in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia,” in Infrastructure Finance: Trends and Techniques, ed. Henry A. Davis (Euromoney Books: 2008), 127. Referenced in Bailey, "Now Where? On Navigating Without a Compass," Ibraaz.

[11] Sahar el-Nadi, 'Middle East of What?', The European Magazine, Debates: Democratization in the Middle East: The long story of a Label,” 18 March 2012. Referenced in Bailey, "Now Where? On Navigating Without a Compass," Ibraaz.

[12] Karl E. Meyer, Notebook; How the Middle East Was Invented, The New York Times, published 13 March 1991. http://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/13/opinion/editorial-notebook-how-the-middle-east-was-invented.html?mcubz=1 (http://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/13/opinion/editorial-notebook-how-the-middle-east-was-invented.html?mcubz=1). Referenced in Bailey, “Now Where? On Navigating Without a Compass,” Ibraaz

[13] Chuang-tzu, “Chapter Two: The Equality of All Things,” in Amber Lotus (ed.), Inner Chapters (trans. Gia-fu Feng and Jane English), San Francisco, CA: Amber Lotus Pub., 2000, quoted by Tan in ‘The Butterfly Dream and Zhuangzi’s Perspectivism’, 115.