But just as significantly, hip-hop has been shaped by global culture, evolving under the influence of disparate peoples and regional trends. Now two new exhibits–featuring installations, photographs, paintings, drawings and multimedia projects, mostly by contemporary young artists with African-American and Asian-American ties–explore hip-hop’s ability to absorb outside forces and adapt. “Black Belt,” at the Studio Museum in Harlem (through January 2004), looks specifically at hip-hop’s debt to Asian culture. When hip-hop was born in the early 1970s, “people of color were looking to each other for political and philosophical inspiration,” says curator Christine Y. Kim. One place hip-hop’s founders looked was to the Eastern martial arts–particularly kung fu and Bruce Lee. Sanford Biggers’s “Nanchakus,” a plastic-and-steel replica of the martial-arts weapon, lights up like a modern-day Excalibur. David Diao’s huge silk-screen portraits of Bruce Lee hang on the walls, and Rico Gatson’s video footage of Muhammad Ali and Lee fighting in their prime blare MTV-style from nine screens.
But there is far more to this Asia obsession than a thirst for action heroes. Well before the 1970s, African-Americans admired Asians as a colonized people who had managed to retain their sense of self. “There was an envy of not having been completely ripped from their country, language and roots,” says Kim. In the Harlem exhibit, Iona Rozeal Brown draws on this, offering up a rice-paper painting of Qing-dynasty emperor Qianlong wearing FUBU gear and trendy sneakers. Brown’s other paintings present black women as Asian (or, depending on your interpretation, Asian women as black), neatly illustrating the parallel between the African-American fascination with Asia in the 1970s and the Asian obsession with black American culture today.
Hip-hop’s global journey is the subject of a striking new exhibit at Munich’s Museum Villa Stuck, “One Planet Under a Groove: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art” (through January 2004). For sheer visual beauty, Korean-born Nikki Lee’s snap-shots steal the show. Lee donned hip-hop clothes, caked her face with layers of dark blush and submerged herself in a predominantly black New York hip-hop crowd. Then she had herself photographed. The images raise some provocative questions: Was she living hip-hop or merely recording it? Is the beauty of hip-hop that it belongs to no one, or does that cross-cultural portability detract from its authenticity?
David Hammons explores the popular hip-hop theme of solidarity in oppression via a series of manipulated photos of Tupac Shakur called “Out of Sequence.” In life, Shakur was a platinum-selling rapper with a penchant for dangerous living. In death, he has become a symbol of destroyed opportunity and lost youth. Hammons offers a photo of Shakur in a straitjacket, his soulful eyes expressing a burden any oppressed person could identify with. Another work, “In the Hood,” eliminates the subject entirely, simply pinning a hood to the wall.
Both exhibits highlight the fluid, timeless nature of hip-hop’s relationship to global culture. When waves of Asians immigrated to the United States after the wars in Korea and Vietnam, many settled in urban areas heavily populated by African-Americans. And to a large extent, African-Americans identified with their struggles. Hip-hop sprang from that new, fused world. And through evolution and appropriation, today’s global hip-hop culture has become homogeneous as well as dynamic, both concrete and elusive. One particular installation in “Black Belt” sums up its ambiguous state: inspired by the hall-of-mirrors action sequence in Bruce Lee’s hit film “Enter the Dragon,” Luis Gispert created “Enter My 37th Chamber.” You expect an actual hall of mirrors; instead you walk up a ramp into a small, pitch-black, dead-end tunnel while a motion sensor activates the sound of body blows. That’s the power of global hip-hop: you expect one thing, but you get another. Then you walk out and make it your own.
