In 1996, the journal October published the Visual Culture Questionnaire—four questions about the study of visual culture—alongside responses from art and architecture historians, film theorists, literary critics, and artists. These four questions have been republished in Chinese and English by M+, with October’s permission, to reflect on how the understanding of visual culture has changed since this 1996 enquiry. Below is Lee Weng Choy’s response.

If I may speak personally, and I often do in my writing, though rarely do I mean to go on about myself; rather, the aim is for empathetic contact with the reader. As an art critic, I see the job as less about winning agreement than fostering understanding.^[1] On this occasion, however, the personal might seem out of place. My remit is to revisit a set of questions from over twenty years ago that emanated from across the Pacific Ocean and the North American continent: the October Visual Culture Questionnaire, published in the summer of 1996.^[2] The reason for evoking the personal is because I want to raise the issue of intellectual vulnerability.

Art criticism is not something I would consider a discipline, an example of which would be art history. Art criticism is a practice, like art making. If you want to become an artist, you simply start making art; likewise, to become an art critic you start writing about it. In either case, it’s not easy, but you keep practising. In most cases, critics and artists go to university, whether for degrees in fine art or design, literature, philosophy, and so on—there are few departments of art criticism, by the way; but these excursions into the academy, while highly recommended, are not required. You can’t say the same about becoming a historian, sociologist, anthropologist, and the like; these are professions that are far more institutionally regulated.

When a museum embraces visual culture as its purview, does it matter whether or not visual culture has become a discipline like art history? Is it necessary for visual culture to have institutional legitimacy and rigour as a museological category? As I read the October Questionnaire—instructive and edifying as it was—I realised that I didn’t have a stake in the theoretical debates from back then, and was unsure how to respond to them now. It has taken me many years, but I have gained some clarity about working outside a discipline; I feel I know what it means to practice criticism. Yet I have struggled to write this text, stumbled to articulate an argument, and I hope the reader cares to understand why.

In Southeast Asia, the corner of the art world I call home, there is a recurring suspicion towards theory—often read as Western in its essence—that comes from audiences, artists, curators, writers, and even academics. To be sure, an increasing number of scholars and cultural workers espouse theory—but I am not suggesting a dominant tendency, only a common one. I have no surveys or ethnographic studies to cite, but after twenty-five years of attending and participating in all manner of gatherings held at museums, universities, art spaces, fairs, and galleries—from academic conferences to artist talks and writing workshops—I have a good deal of anecdotal evidence that warrants at least a serviceable generalisation if not a fully formed position.

What are some of the patterns in these various suspicions or refusals of theory? I could chart a range of underlying reasons. Instead, let me point to something that these refusals of theory might have in common with the intricate debates in October about the intrusion of visual culture into art history. What strikes me reading the Visual Culture Questionnaire today is the level of apprehension: a number of respondents worried about how the visual might dominate over the discursive, though others, like Susan Buck-Morss and Martin Jay, argued that there was no going back, since visual culture had already changed the way we think about art and art history. Surprisingly, only a few, like Thomas Crow, explicitly argued for the importance of comparative studies of different geographies. While there was diversity in tone and message, with hindsight, it seems the very framework of the whole exercise was about specialised self-reflexivity as a highly evolved modality of anxiety.

It is important to make a distinction between a ‘refusal’ and a ‘resistance’ to theory. The two might be reactions rather than carefully considered responses to the same situation, and both could be rooted in anxiety. (I don’t mean to pathologise or normalise the emotion, but it bears emphasising how much it figures in intellectual activity, on both personal and institutional registers.) Resistance has a criticality that refusal lacks. Small reactive resistances can build to a critique, whereas even the most enduring refusal can belie insecurities that remain unexamined.

Trying to respond to the October Questionnaire has made me confront some of my own resistances, refusals, and anxieties. Eleven years ago I gave a talk in Hong Kong called ‘Biennale Demand’.^[3] In preparing to write for Podium, I returned to that essay. It described the various demands that ‘we’—local audiences, the international art world, governments, sponsors, and so forth—make on biennales. But my point was to ask instead what biennales demand of us: our attention, and in many instances our guilt. Beyond this, I suggested that biennales also ask us to think of them in time, in history.

Usually, I am ready to acknowledge my own mistakes—how else do you learn but by recognising and admitting them? Still, it can be an uneasy thing to look back at an old text. Reading ‘Biennale Demand’ now, I see it as too polemical: it rushes over complexities, and I would not depict biennales in the same way today. Moreover, it did not address the discourse around exhibition histories. Chelsea Haines identifies Reesa Greenberg, writing in 1996, as providing one of the earlier scholarly discussions on the topic of exhibition histories, although Haines notes that it was really in the 2000s when the surge of attention on the subject began.^[4] Doubtless, the field deserves study, but I find myself anxious about the subject’s increasing popularity. Am I afraid that exhibition histories may eclipse other modes of writing stories of art? Surely we do not have to choose between curatorial or artistic authorship, or between the exhibition and the production of art, as the site of meaning.

And why compare M+, and its framing as a museum of visual culture, with the biennale? Across Asia there isn’t a strong tradition of the regional art museum—most have a national focus. The older Fukuoka Asian Art Museum and the newer National Gallery Singapore are among the few exceptions.^[5] It is the biennale that has become the platform for the contemporary art and culture of the region. If M+ proves any different from existing museums, perhaps it has less to do with the shift to expand beyond art to include visual culture as it does with the commonalities that the museum shares with the Asian biennale—and not just because of its wide geographic scope, or its interdisciplinary approach. Could we say that what many biennales in the region share is a foundational anxiety about how to frame everything that they display, and how to thematise what they contain? Is this same anxiety also shared by M+?

To speak of anxiety and M+ inevitably raises the larger question of anxiety in Hong Kong, a topic well beyond my capacity to comment on, although I’ve mentioned it in a text comparing the Special Administrative Region with Singapore.^[6] Let me address only a specific instance of unease that Hong Kong arts communities share with many others across Southeast Asia: not the refusal of theory, but an overcompensating embrace of it. How often has one read a text that explains an artwork with plenty of references to this and that theorist, yet the work remains unconvincing? I have focused on ‘theory’ not only because it is one example among others of the conceptual tools used in the construction and understanding of art, but precisely because it is a powerful apparatus of intellectual legitimation. When does a tendency to lean on theory speak to an anxiety—on the part of artists, writers, and curators in this part of the world—about becoming accepted by the gatekeepers of ‘global art’? And when is the application of theory genuine? Could such a distinction ever be maintained?

Some of my best encounters with theory, history, ethnography, and other tools and materials, are not moments when intellectual anxiety is overcome, but when vulnerability is accepted. I know I am far from the best expert—there is always so much more to read, so many more people to speak with and listen to. But the point is to try and try again, and to speak with a sense of conviction, even if I know for certain that there will be corrections. Much as I appreciate institutions and disciplines, would it be fair to say that they do not always provide the best conditions for practicing intellectual vulnerability? I’d like to think the ideal of criticism is a practice of radical openness: to both care deeply and risk greatly with one’s attention, analysis, and reflection.