Asian Provocation Ayoto

My family immigrated to colonial Australia, just as the English, the Irish, the Scotts, the Welsch, Italians, Germans, Dutch, and the Polish decades earlier, eating up the exported Western myth of modernity and progress. We were swiftly inducted into the lore of the loyal ANZACs, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps and their sacrifices for Her Majesty. Yet, if the truth were our guide, it would reveal the terrors of Imperialism, of which the Anzacs were nothing but mere pawns on a chessboard they scarcely understood, mere cannon fodder to ensure victorious landgrabs and expansionism.
Years unfolded, and the theatre shifted to the jungles of Indochina. The neo-colonialist project of the United States found themselves entangled in a proxy war not too different from the masters they fought to free themselves from. Guided no longer by a monarchical society of sincerity (Moeller & D’Ambrosio, 2018), it cast itself as the world’s savior, embarking on a quest to extinguish the specter of communism, a mission predicated on the illusion of eradicating evil. A crusade fueled by a collective hysteria, a paranoia that blurred the lines between reality and fantasy, projecting onto the other the vilest facets of America’s own insecure psyche—its insecurities, a nation under money, with liberty and justice for none.
And so, the Empire conscripted its own once more, unveiling the deep divides that plagued its very core, for the question of slavery remained unresolved. Both white and black young men were sent across the world in echoes of the ANZAC’s journey to its sacrificial slaughter during the First World War. In contrast, for the Neo-Confederacy (O’Neil, 2017) and the Five Eyes intelligence network, absent is the glue of a monarch, an emblem of a motherly figurehead, and the myth of Western democracy fractured fragilely. At home, civil rights protests ignited, laying bare the long-standing issues of hatred, envy and prejudice; it became abundantly clear that the enemy was not the “Communist Gooks”, for “No Vietnamese ever called me N*****.”
The advent of photography helped circumvent censorship and questioned the validity of the empire’s propaganda. Images of the atrocious violence gazed back at the so-called democracy that the empire was so eager to project. People spoke up and protested violently, for civil disobedience is a moral obligation if one has a conscience. 
I met a woman once in Munich; she showed me her university, where ideas of Western philosophy and inquiry were taught. She showed me the square where the members of the White Rose questioned the principles and policies of the Nazi regime. She told me about the infamous Sophie Scholl, who gave flyers at the Ludwig Maximilian University. She showed me the atrium where stacks of leaflets detailing the atrocities and crimes of the Nazi party were flung from the top floor down. But it was Jakob Schmid, a janitor at the university, who informed them of the Gestapo, which led to their eventual arrest and, ultimately, public execution.
Sophie Scholl assumed full responsibility in an attempt to protect other members of the White Rose. During her trial before the People’s Court on 22 February 1943, Scholl stated, “Was wir sagten und schrieben, denken ja so viele, nur wagen sie nicht, es auszusprechen.” (So many people think what we said and wrote, but they don’t dare say it.)  
Where is my friend now? Where are the students and descendants of Sophie Scholl? Where are the Germans who are against fascism and totalitarianism, who have supposedly been educated about the horrors of their past? Where are the peace-loving Germans? Where are the Germans who fight for democracy, for justice, for freedom? What happened to the bastion of democracy, of free speech, of truthful journalism, as we sit silently watching the prosecution of our contemporary White Rose, Julian Assange? Have these ideas been coopted into nothing but empty memes to sell vacuous t

Photography and words by 鄭博榕 aka Ayoto Ataraxia, published in Far Near, Vol. 5, Divergence.
Special thanks to Lulu Yao Gioiello, Justine Liv and Ariana King for the edits and encouragement.
Foreward
Between the inception of this assignment and its publishing, my understanding of the world has changed drastically, particularly since October 7. What feels like cruel irony, my observation and critical voice of Coco Capitán’s work for LVMH, particularly the image of Boy in Green (a photograph of an anonymous Mongolian boy) and the subsequent interview with Gem Fletcher on her podcast, The Messy Truth, has revealed the authoritarian refusal for freedom of speech and critique. Albeit the subject matter is not of grave consequence, it revealed to me the chilling reason which, if unquestioned, leads to the alienated and apathetic society that stands in violent silence during a genocide.
This volume of Far Near questions what we idolize and gives an ode to divergent voices—artists who follow their gut even in the face of ridicule and who express passionate outcries of love despite opposition. In this portrait series of Enji and Urna, the gaze of their journey within the structure of colonialism and orientalism, but also where do I, the photographer, the journalist, and fellow nomad situate in this story?
Prelude
In February 2023, Lulu asked if I would like to do a portrait series of two Mongolian singers in Europe. It had been four years since I took on a photographic assignment. I felt like a washed-up artist, unemployed since the pandemic. Statistically, the government would label me as “retired.” Spiritually, I’m “disconnected.”
Lulu sent me the brief: Enji Erkhem was based in Munich and would be traveling to Berlin for a recording, but I would need to travel to Bagnoregio to find Urna Chahar-Tugchi.
But let us rewind momentarily to the beginning of the pandemic, during the summer of 2020, when a Spanish fashion photographer named Coco Capitán was hired by Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy to embark on a Mongolian journey for a glorified advertorial. The resulting project consisted of solemn portraits of unnamed and unidentified Mongolians, and the following year, a podcast episode on Gem Fletcher’s The Messy Truth, in which the photographer spoke at length about the discomfort and disappointment she experienced during her less-than-idyllic journey, a fantasy ruined by a lack of wifi, COVID-19 and unfriendly train passengers. At best, it appeared to be innocent multiculturalism and, at worst, inflight reading material.
Was this not Edward Said’s main critique of Orientalism par excellence? Apropos to contemporary understanding of the historical construction of Western representations and stereotypes of the East? Was the project not the latest iteration of neoliberalism utilizing cultural whitewashing to fund corporate greed?
Who has the privilege to benefit, mine, and reap the identities and bodies of non-whiteness? These are the ones who simultaneously maintain undisturbed supremacy and increase corporate profits under the veil of answering the public’s demand for “inclusion and diversity.” Who appointed these new priests of modernity, who gate-keep exoticism and ever-renewing beauty standards?
I took to Instagram to speak on the topic. I hoped for further awareness and discussion of Orientalism, an issue that my closest European friends around me were ignorant of. The most common response was, I’m so surprised to hear this. It was as if the symptoms of violence were just another iteration of negativity for which people didn’t have the space or time.
In these times of exhaustion, as observed by philosopher Byung-Chul Han in his book, The Burnout Society, we cannot deal with the fragments of a world steeped in violence. He writes, “The violence of positivity does not deprive, it saturates; it does not exclude, it exhausts.” We’re swimming within the violence, and still, we’re asking wh

on dimming the lights


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A news headline reposted gained much response, “Woman slams selfish paragliders who 'made her think Hamas was invading Doncaster’—A woman panicked her village near Doncaster was under attack when she spotted a number of paragliders flying over her home and thought they were from Hamas.”
The photo: a group of paragliders above the green rolling hills. It disturbed me to think of this woman in Doncaster. But what was even more disturbing was my ability to empathize with her sentiment.
My family and I emigrated to Australia in 1992. We were encouraged to assimilate. In that process, one does not only learn the language but also the cultural norms (one brings an Esky, short for the derogatory exonym, Eskimo, to the beach with beers, and not hotpot), fears (tall poppy syndrome and being perceived as Un-Australian), and anxieties (the Chinks are invading and taking over the country).
When we arrived, I knew only one word in the English language: Apple. Through neocolonialism, however, I was taught the English alphabet. I made friends pretty quickly. My mother would encourage me to socialize with the whites and integrate. I was to be 大方, be generous with a sense of magnanimity, open-hearted and open-minded, Großzugigkeit or Offenheit.
I was fond of the first few months in Australia. We had escaped the industrialization of Taiwan, a Faustian pact with the devil (United States of America), by becoming the new factory slave of the world. In a matter of a decade, some would call it a rags-to-riches story, but at the cost of environmental destruction. But I was seven years old, and all I know is that no teacher or parent in Australia was legally allowed to punish me physically. No more beatings. No more canning. It felt like dying and going to heaven. The air was clean, and we’d spot kangaroos and koalas outside our house.
Our school held its annual fete that spring. I participated in the first sports event, a 50-meter dash. I was so excited because I was the first to cross the finish line, but when the award came, they gave first prize to Brenton, the white boy who finished behind me. I didn’t have the words yet to speak up. Dad consoled me and reminded me to be 大方. We walked by a stand where they were recruiting kids for the local Cub Scouts. Dad signed me up that day, and I started to attend on Tuesday nights.
I was the only one non-White kid in the scouts. I got a uniform and learned the scout salute. We raised the Australian flag and learned bushcraft. We ate vegemite sandwiches and swapped Australian bush stories. I became good friends with Andrew and Nigel because they were also in my class at school. Was I integrating? I didn’t know that word yet at the time. But I knew how to respond when Andrew would say to me with a smile, “See you at Scouts tonight?”
Yep, you bet, I’d say in return.
Not only did we go to the same school and attend Scouts on Tuesday evenings, but we’d also go camping on the weekends. I learned to kayak, start fires, and eat cornflakes with sugar and milk for breakfast. Badges accumulated on my sleeve as I sewed them on myself over time.
One day, Andrew invited me to ride over to his place after school with Nigel, which turned out to be only a few blocks away. We’d ride our bikes in circles and play street cricket until his parents called him in for tea. I remember the mustache of his father and his mum standing by the screen door. What does racism look like? The next day, I saw Andrew at the water fountain and initiated this time, See you at Scouts tonight?
Andrew looked at me with a new face and emotion I didn’t recognize. Perhaps now I could categorize him as expressing a state of psychological distress, distrust, suspicion, or fear. But I remember understanding what he said, “We’ve been invaded by the Chinese!”
Over the next few years, I would experience being sneered at by kids at school as a “Qing Chong Chinaman” which was strange because my grandfath

I speak with Robert K. Beshara روبرت بشارة, Ph.D., a scholar, psychoanalyst, musician, actor, director and artist; he has authored Decolonial Psychoanalysis: Towards Critical Islamophobia Studies (Routledge, 2019), Freud & Said (2021), but I discovered his work through his book, A Psychoanalytic Biography of Ye (2023).
In this conversation, Robert speaks through a psychoanalytically informed lens about Ye, or the artist formally known as Kanye West, Fascism as False Being, the Legacy of Unconditional Love, Black Male Studies, and much more.
Additionally, from the episode, you may find interest in some further reading:
Through the Zone of Nonbeing: A Reading of Black Skin, White Masks in Celebration of Fanon’s Eightieth Birthday — LEWIS R. GORDON
The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood — Tommy J. Curry
Can't Get You Out of My Head - Part 1: Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain — Adam Curtis


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Over the last few years, new divisions have formed amongst people in how they express themselves, online and offline. There is the positive-no-matter-what type of people who will not be afraid to cut you off should you bring an iota of negativity since, after all, “you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with,” said some motivational speaker once upon a time. Remember those?
So how did we get here? I thought we were supposed to be doing just fine, bumbling along the trajectory of progressivism. Things might not be perfect, but hey, we’ve lifted more people out of poverty than ever! Look on the bright side; the meritocracy ideologues will insist. The World Bank released this press release in 2022, headlining “Lifting 800 Million People Out of Poverty – New Report Looks at Lessons from China’s Experience.”
But one year later, the United Nations Development Program wrote that 165 million people fell into poverty between 2020 and 2023 as debt servicing crowded out social protection, health, and education expenditures. As if none of this was enough, since October 7, Israel, with the support of the so-called democratic Western nations, has participated in the genocide in occupied territory and, during their trial for the war crime at the Hague, commences bombing of one of the poorest nations on earth, Yemen, simply because they refuse to allow Israeli commercial shipping to continue to pass.
History is not linear. Stories do not all adhere to a Hero’s Journey, as the Imperialists will want you to believe. No, there will not be an old white man with a beard that will call you into action at your darkest hour, Joseph Campbell. Often, people get genocided, and when you survive that, you may still end up in a gulag. Or, as Zizek reminded us, the light at the end of the tunnel might just be another train headed right for you.
Having spent half my life in the global north, I notice that those periods are marked with endless white men telling me about fantasies, insisting that they are universal truths. Opinions ranging from Disney and Mickey Mouse or Harry Potter as the most wondrous stories and films ever made (No, clearly it’s My Neighbor Totoro and Evangelion Neon Genesis) to the universality of Moby-Dick or Game of Thrones have never known about the 西遊記 (Journey to the West) and its relationship to Dragonball Z, nor the importance of the 紅樓夢 (Dream of the Red Chamber.) 
So when people attempt phatic expression, aka social grooming, the sharp awakening is, I am not your model minority. 
Some would mark this period as the era of radicalization; older generations will accuse the younger of consuming toxic content, ageism or disrespect through TikTok. “It’s just your age; wait till you get older, you’ll become more conservative like us, too.” It turns out that isn’t happening.
And as people learn to organize and educate themselves, people demand dignity and justice, but this, too, is translated as “reverse racism” or “genocidal intent.” Amidst the protests and boycotts, a sector of the “invisible” class will nod along and say yes, look at those insurgents and horrible racist rednecks. How shameless are the conservative Neo-Nazis? But who are these people? Who are the antisemites today? Who are the boogeyman clan members that are upholding the New Jim Crow?
Angie Beeman published “Liberal White Supremacy: How Progressives Silence Racial and Class Oppression” in September 2022. She argues that white supremacy is maintained not only by right-wing conservatives or stereotypically uneducated working-class racial bigots but also by progressives who operate from a liberal ideology of color-blindness, racism-evasiveness, and class elitism.
This is an era not only of radicalization but of another disturbing realization. A realization not of the newly undereducated, underprivileged global south but a shocking, disturbing realization of the invisible progressive w