Mapping Consciousness, an interview with Gong Jie Xi 龔捷西 (Jessica Kung)

DC: Your practice is truly multidisciplinary, encompassing art, architecture and poetry, and is manifested through maps, rituals, writings and performances: it connects multitudes. Could you tell us how you navigate through all these modes?

GJX: I always say it's just one thing, I don't feel like it's many things. It fundamentally [revolves] around healing our consciousness, and understanding that consciousness is layered. The way I've always worked is that if there's something I need to learn, I will learn it. I won't take on a project unless I'm learning something new. So every project I have had, I learned another modality.

I feel people live in these little boxes, where you do one thing, and you're only supposed to do that one thing over and over again. When I look at our work, we never do the same thing. That would be boring!

BB: Can you talk about how your attitude to your practice was nurtured by your own traditions and education, and how it shaped your view on what it means to be an artist with heightened consciousness of such narratives? 

GJX: I come from a family that loves history and cares about culture. My parents were on the losing side [of the Chinese Civil War], so they left China in 1949 and [they] grew up in Taiwan. My mother was an anthropologist who studied indigenous textiles of Aboriginal peoples. In a way, I'm just doing what she did, I'm not falling that far from the tree. When we went to Taiwan, she would talk to me about the textiles we saw and how she did her fieldwork with the indigenous peoples in Taiwan. I was raised to care deeply about Chinese history, and I'm just continuing their work.

I grew up with an international consciousness. At 12, I told my parents I wanted to study Latin so I could learn all of the languages on the planet. I studied Latin for six years at Dalton, then ended up studying architecture in Rome with the Cornell program. I feel like being able to read Latin changes your ability to access the land. I could understand the relationship between language and structures of consciousness -- everything is just different. 

I studied with Vincent Scully at Yale and he was foundational – mainly his book on Greek temple architecture. When I was in Segesta in Sicily it changed my life, because that's the first moment I experienced what Scully was writing and talking about, which was sitting with the Muse. So my work with the Phenomenal Museum now goes back to that moment when I was in Segesta, and I sat with the Muse. The original idea of the Museum was an architecture to frame your relationship with a Muse, and because the Greeks and the Italians saw the Muses within the land.

As I see it, museums now have distorted that original conception, and I learned that in Sicily, she's still there – there are so few places in the world where she's so present! You can't avoid her in Segesta.

BB: Is that where the Phenomenal Museum project idea came from? 

GJX: The Phenomenal Museum has become the crystallization of just about everything I do. It brings together architecture, land ritual, consciousness, meditation and drawing into an experience that does not require the participants to know how to do any of them.

I wanted to take people through what's underneath our process, because what makes it a Phenomenal Museum is our design process in an interactive, accessible way. How you design is how you see the world, and how you see your relationship to art objects and culture. So instead of showing images of work, I thought I would create a work, that's about the work. 

You are invited to engage with the objects as ritual objects. We create a ritual container, where we're not tourists, but everyone is empowered to activate the ritual process within that object. People have a lot of preconceived ideas of what they need to do in a museum, so we strip those away. 

I draw on my training as a yoga and meditation teacher for 20 years, but I do it with art. I start with a meditation where you connect to the land, do a land acknowledgement, and then we connect to the muse of the museum, and everybody is invited to call in the muse. Then they're invited to draw it. We create a divination deck and activate  it. Each person draws a card, and will then lead us to that object.

Nobody knows what the object is, the card has a life of its own, and it sends out moving devices. We tap into the miraculous nature of the objects – what if you engage with it as a priestess, and not as a tourist? It's a matter of intentionality. When you shift your frame and are given permission to relate to these objects the way they were related back when they were functional, it changes your experience. 

For me, that's the heart of our process: we reject this materialist call, the ‘collector mentality’ towards design and art. We need to dismantle those structures but also the way to understand it. 

This tile is a smorgasbord of how far away we have gone. It's a perfect example of what we don't want more of – it’s decorative, meaningless. This, to me, is museum consciousness. This is a perfect example of a normal tourist to museums. They see a bit of Arabic, a bit of Moroccan, a bit of 18th century, 19th century, and then they take pictures, and it just goes through their brain – it becomes a bad tile. 

Have you ever seen gardens where it's just the head of a Buddha? No. People don't realize that became something mass produced for Target because it started with colonists cutting off the heads of Buddhas and temples. No sculptor would just make a headless Buddha. When I went to China, as a young child, I saw all these headless Buddhas and then in the Met, you have all the heads. So you know, you put one and one, two and two together. 

Buddha heads without bodies; they're just decapitated vestiges of what people want to take from cultures or civilizations without there being an appreciation or understanding for context.

EL: Your website says that your work and your process begins where land acknowledgement ends. Can you explain what a land acknowledgement is and how does the work that you do go beyond it? 

Land acknowledgement, I think most of us understand it as an institutional statement posted on their website and saying, for example, “We, the American Museum of Natural History, still hold indigenous remains. But we acknowledge that this museum is on Lenape  lands.” 

It's a double edged sword – it's good in that it starts to open the door for institutions to look at themselves, but how it's often practiced is as an excuse to not do anything beyond that. So that's where we step in. In the work that we do, we find a ridiculous expectation placed on Indigenous peoples that, somehow, they're supposed to help us heal atrocities against them, and [the institution’s] justified by giving them this land acknowledgement.

Once we were hired [on a project], and we asked the clients if they would like to have someone from the tribe come and do an acknowledgment for their land. They have multiple properties, and for their San Francisco land they said, ‘but there's no land in San Francisco.’ That was their consciousness at the beginning of the project, literally not acknowledging the land – “That's not land, it's just my backyard.” But as we worked with them, in a year’s time they actually said yes to having a member of the tribe come and do a land ceremony. It was beautiful to watch that arc. 

There are so many traps built into language. How people learned to refer to things without taking into account the spirit. I think that part of the legacies of colonization is the erasure of genius. It's a systematic erasure of genius loci, and it's deliberate. 

That's also how architectural ornament degenerated into architectural decorative floof. Because it used to be meaningful, and used to be coded to be of the spirit of place where they were relevant. It wasn’t some random Moroccan tile in Beverly Hills.

Our whole process is, when I say where land acknowledgment ends, it's really regenerating cosmos and reseeding -  the cause of cosmos and ornament. ‘Why does what I'm building need to exist?’ It's addressing a spiritual theme, it's addressing an existential need.

I think if you're not addressing that you really have no business building anything. We have too many buildings. If we're going to build it has to address all of this, otherwise, don't create further. Don't do another demo.

BB: One of the things that we gleaned from your work is about connecting with the land in a way that it's almost like part of the body. 

GJX :Thank you for bringing that up. I was about to bring up how the Indigenous elders carry the suffering of the land and their bodies. They need healing too. In fact, they need more healing than anyone else, and they're not in a position to have to resolve your karmic debt to them. A lot of bridges have to be built for that to happen – they need to be invited into spaces that make decisions about their ancestral land, where they're honored, where they're listened to, where they feel safe, and where they're not just tokenized. They're not going to say yes to being tokenized, and they shouldn't.

I have this fantasy project, which I will get funding for, to do portraits of Indigenous elders. Phenomenal site analyses that look at their land, their reservations, and their physical bodies from an energetic standpoint, and how the traumas that they hold in their body and the land are mirrors of each other. One tribal Chief that we worked with shared that before she got acupuncture, she literally could not walk. She was in so much pain, and through the acupuncture was able to heal so that she can actually walk. When I saw her move, it was like it was the pain of the land. I want to do a portrait of her where we can go to the reservation, do that land healing, body healing, and intergenerational mapping, we call the Phenomenal Site Analysis process. We would do an energetic map of the land and of the client's body energy ancestry. 

 EL:  Are there any practices in terms of your work with listening to and healing the land that you can share? 

When you turn off the noise, you can listen to the land. For me, meditation is really training to be able to listen. And then when you listen, you hear what's loudest. For some reason, land is really loud. If you look at what's happening in the Middle East right now, I think it's land-based trauma, and land healing. So I would say the key is to give yourself permission to put down on paper and to make a deliverable of things that you previously thought were intangible or ignorable, because we've desensitized ourselves to marginalized voices. We have to give ourselves permission to put to paper, and take the time to visualize and write those stories. It's not that I can hear something you can't hear. It's  simply in silence, I’ve given myself permission to document the undocumented.

That's what Phenomenal Site Analysis is – this concept that what we consider to be information relevant to building is such a fraction of the experience of that site. It can be started with very simple projects or drawing exercises. Most people have something that is a lens through which they know –  they're connected to birds, or trees, or bees. So instead of a human perspective of mapping land, you can start by saying, “what do the bees see?” And do a bee’s eye view, or a tree’s eye view, or a leaf’s point of view. And then draw how they see the site. It gets us out of our property line heads, because we're so stuck by the property line. The minute you drop into a piece of nature, we realize how absurd those constructs are. It doesn't have to be a deliverable or a tangible, it can just be a form of expression. 

For me, what's missing from the design process is designers giving themselves permission to be creative. And being creative involves increasing the dataset with which you're able to create. 

I think every client that has a dog needs a dog’s nose view site analysis. They come to us with dog problems, but it wasn’t designed with your dog in mind. So now you're blaming the dog, but you just didn't program it properly. They are equal inhabitants and if they aren't programmed for, they will affect the maintenance of the space. And that, I think, is a window into opening it up to things that are less obvious.

DC: Museums as well as art institutions and publications have been in public controversies in relation to political stances taken by some art curators, museum directors and artists. Following the cancellation of his London exhibition Ai Weiwei wrote: “If culture is a form of soft power, this represents a method of soft violence aimed at stifling voices. It’s not directed solely at me but at the broader culture of a society lacking a spiritual immune system.” Wondering if you would like to comment on the concept of “spiritual immune system” or on this statement?

I was very aware of when the London gallery canceled him. This is so hypocritical. First they celebrate him because he's critical of China, but the minute he's critical of the West, they cancel him. That's an example of no spiritual immune system where you're totally in service to the destruction.

Soft power, soft violence, broader culture lacks a spiritual immune system. And so he's saying that our society, if I interpret this right, lacks any kind of self-preservation of its spirit.

And I’d say that it's deeper than the word spirit, I'd say it's existential. And I think that's why I like the word phenomenal. Because it references phenomenology, as well. And we're talking about existentialism, and that's another one of my background [influences] is Hubert Dreyfus, my father-in-law.

A lot of this work also comes out in debating him. Honing my understanding through my years in discussion with him, it became very apparent how Western phenomenology doesn't give any room for metaphysical concepts like spirit. The very definition of what it means to exist, you know, Cogitorgo sum in Western consciousness, does not include the spiritual. Spirituality is part of that existence. That is fundamentally at the root of mechanisms of colonization. These are very complex ideas.

I'd say society lacks more than a spiritual immune system. It's not including spirit in what's considered to make you exist in terms of your identity. 

More info on Gong Jie Xi at this link:

www.gongjiexi.com

More Info on Make Conscious at this link: https://makeconscious.com/

Interview by:

El Larson 

Donatella Cusmá

Bojána Bányász (guest interviewer)