by Meiling Cheng and John OBrien
Before we start writing (and you reading), we wish to make one thing known: we started as something else. We started out as Meiling Cheng and John O'Brien; we have undergone changes since then. Then (and still a little now) Meiling Cheng was completing her book In Other Los Angeleses: Multicentric Performance Art (forthcoming with University of California Press, 2001). In Chapter 2 Out of Order: Reading, Writing, and Performing (in) L.A., which pivots around her own perspective as an Asian immigrant to critique the ongoing cultural master narrative in LA that claims its multifarious connections with the world, she was already looking through/at Southern California as a microcosm of the world. Then (and still a little now) John O'Brien was curating/organizing visual arts exchanges and performances. He was finishing up a four year artist's project space (visual and performing) that dealt with artist groups from abroad, who would bring their art and, more importantly themselves, to LA for a brief stint as a part of the microcosm. He was also doing what he could to expand the acknowledgment of Los Angeles' visual arts bandwidth. Cheng and O'Brien were working on separate projects with analogous goals.
At this moment, for the length of our essay, however, weas co-curators of this project called Mediated Asias: In the Fleshwill no longer be separated into those two names. We have fused our individual curatorial/critical voices into one and will write accordingly. Together with the artists who have mediated their Asias with their flesh, we participated in a surprising synergetic blending of our intentions and ideas. We both are fully responsible for the outcome, but we no longer represent discrete entities able to discern what was ours from what was theirs. Actually, we consider this form of authorship to be a very successful aspect of the overall project: mediation as linkage. This recollection in prose is then the flesh of our mediated asias.