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TheCube Project Space
2F, No 13, Aly 1, Ln 136
Sec 4, Roosevelt Rd
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The Starry Heavens Above and the Moral Law Within
by TheCube Project Space
Location: TheCube Project Space
Artist(s): James T. HONG, Yin Ju CHEN
Date: 11 Jul - 4 Oct 2015

TheCube Project Space is pleased to present the duo artists James T. HONG and Yin-Ju CHEN's collaborative project titled The Starry Heavens Above and the Moral Law Within.

Contemporary analyses of "drugs" are mostly confined to the disciplines of medical science and jurisprudence. In this collaborative project, the two artists innovatively address the issue of "drugs" in an interdisciplinary context by examining in depth its relationship with modernity, clashes of civilizations and consciousness awareness. Adopting various media by juxtaposing files, historical documents, paintings and videos to create the perceptional atmosphere and narration, the two artists not only investigate the concepts and metaphors of "drugs," but also transform them into the media as reflections of the human spirit, history, culture and society.

James T. HONG and Yin-Ju CHEN have participated in numerous international exhibitions. HONG is also a director of experimental films in addition to being an artist. His works cover a profusion of issues ranging from philosophical themes and figures to racism, class, and historical conflicts in Asia. CHEN adopts video, painting, photography and performance as the media for her artistic practice. Her focus of attention is the power structure of society, which incorporates nationalism, racism, collective (un)consciousness, and occultism. Working collaboratively, the two artists consider "drugs" a battlefield and the symbol of the clash of civilizations, thereby developing two historical perspectives for discussing pre-modernity/modernity/anti-modernity.

Artist's Statement

This exhibition begins with the epitaph on Immanuel Kant's tombstone in the Kaliningrad Oblast.

"Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."

Perhaps Kant's most famous quote, it encapsulates much of Kant's metaphysical and moral theory by demarcating the mechanical world of nature, which follows the law of cause and effect, as opposed to one's individual consciousness, which despite being beholden to causality is also creatively and morally free. Kant's "Copernican Revolution" elevated the roles of human understanding and reason by emphasizing the constructive and organizational role of the human mind in the perception of the natural world. In other words, for Kant, the laws of nature are not simply passively observed or dictated by scientists, they are in some respects products of the human mind.

Modernity

Our focus is on one of the basic methods of "filling the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe" - namely drugs. The use of natural substances (herbalism) predates written history. However, today natural and, for the most part, synthetic pharmaceuticals have become an essential aspect of modern human existence. Billions of people around the world ingest caffeine daily by drinking coffee, tea, or other beverages. Millions drink alcohol and/or smoke cigarettes, and millions of others take prescribed and illegally procured medicines on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis. If we can predict anything about drug use, it is that the use of chemicals to affect our bodies and minds will only increase in the future.

Medicine

As an illegal psychoactive substance throughout much of the world, cannabis is usually demonized as a "drug." With the rise of cannabis legalization in the United States, marijuana has magically transformed itself to the American public as not simply a "drug," but rather a "medication." Medicines or medications are designed to enhance or prolong human life, while the lowly "drug" is seen to reduce one's average lifespan and/or degrade one's well-being. Conversely, many ancient societies considered opium a utile "medication," and it was not until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that opium became a universally condemned vice or "drug" that had to be controlled in the name of "public health" and national progress.

Control

For changing moral, economic, and other ideological reasons, modern governments promote, legalize, criminalize, tax, commodify, and even weaponize drugs. The outlawing or marketing of certain drugs is an integral component of a government's political strategy for controlling its subjects - what Foucault would call "bio-power." In other words, illegal drugs cause laziness, violence, or criminality, while modern medicines prolong health and create more obedient citizens.

Drug companies promote the use of many prescription drugs to make citizens more compliant, "normal," and efficient workers. Many young children are prescribed psychoactive drugs for "acting out" or other undesired behavior. The variations and types of medicines has exploded, and drugs can seemingly address any physical or mental ailment, such as depression, embarrassing gas, obesity, shyness, stress, and hyperactivity. Modern militaries also experiment with and currently employ various drugs or "medicines" to improve the effectiveness of their troops.

After certain chemical compounds are discovered, they are quickly copyrighted and/or patented. With billions of dollars in annual profits, drug companies, and the governments that tax them, are motivated to keep people taking their "approved" drugs habitually - a form of "commodified addiction." The drug company is now the legalized modern drug lord.

Since drugs as medicine are seen as improving our lives, the likelihood of regularly using drugs increases significantly as one gets older, especially in the developed world. It is difficult to find a senior citizen who does not have at least one prescription medication. "Normal," healthy adults can usually decline or refuse to take government-sanctioned drugs, but this choice seems to be disappearing in the developed world, as governments have taken it upon themselves to force certain drugs on its citizens, e.g., immunity shots, fluoride, hormones, etc.

Freedom

Scientific advances in pharmacology continue to map the purely physiological reactions of drugs in our bodies. However, the comprehensive detailing of a chemical's specific "mechanism of action" cannot thoroughly describe the subjective feelings, thoughts, or qualia that a drug may cause or inspire. This is precisely the opening of freedom.

Shamans, witches, and other traditional healers or seers have used chemical substances for centuries. For them, some naturally occurring plants or other drugs (entheogens) can create an epistemological pathway that is normally closed in the "real" world. The shamanistic cosmology is ontologically additive, as it incorporates a metaphysical, spiritual world "beyond" everyday sensory experience. The shamanistic drug "trip" is not one of truth or falsity, but rather one of personal experience and subjective value that transcends the bounds of common sense and modern science.

The now historical hippies of 1960's America promoted the use of hallucinogens and other drugs as a way of rejecting conformity and traditional social mores. Moreover, the widespread use of recreational drugs by teenagers in the West during the late twentieth century has had a lasting effect not only upon social norms, but also on our current "progressive" attitudes towards certain political issues such as war and racism. For many of the hippies, the use of illegal or legal drugs for recreational or quasi-religious purposes not only expressed their disenchantment with modern society, it also became a necessary instrument for creative expression. One need only consider the relationship between modern music or art and drug addiction.

Conclusion

For Kant, it is the use of reason as the ability to make free choices that distinguishes us from non-human animals. Following his thinking, dogs, cats, and other non-human animals cannot act immorally, only humans can. To act immorally, one must act willfully and freely. To act morally, one must freely act according to "duty" in accordance with "the moral law," which should by itself be sufficient for determining to act in accordance with it. As humans, we are morally free because we can choose or reject our moral duty ("the categorical imperative").

Since reason ennobles us, it is our obligation to nurture it, and any capricious and unnecessary actions that obviously reduce our rational capacities are either undignified or immoral. Hence Kant was opposed to the casual use of debilitating intoxicants such as strong liquors and opium. As he writes near the end of The Metaphysics of Morals,

A man who is drunk is like a mere animal, not to be treated like a human being.... Gluttony is even lower than that animal enjoyment of the senses, since it only lulls the senses into a passive condition and, unlike drunkenness, does not even arouse imagination to an active play of representations; so it approaches even more closely the enjoyment of cattle.

Pharmacology was still in its infancy during Kant's day, and as a racist and cultural chauvinist, Kant saw little value in traditional, non-European traditions. Even though he deplores drunkenness and drug-induced stupor, he does allow for medicinal opium and moderate amounts of wine consumption to stimulate talkativeness and sociability. Thomas de Quincey in his famous Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) writes about studying Kant while high on laudanum binges. It is unfortunate that Kant never considered the use of drugs/medications to enhance or enrich the use of reason.

Some shamans claim to either communicate with or actually become animal spirits. For them the starry heavens are not always above, but always already here, whether we are conscious of them or not, and it is we, as thinking things, who must consider and contemplate the moral law within us. Here is the full context of Kant's famous quote:

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more frequently and persistently one's meditation deals with them: the starry sky above me and the moral law within me. Neither of them do I need to seek or merely suspect outside my purview, as veiled in obscurities or [as lying] in the extravagant: I see them before me and connect them directly with the consciousness of my existence. The first thing starts from the place that I occupy in the external world of sense and expands the connection in which I stand into the immensely large, with worlds upon worlds and systems of systems, and also into boundless times of their periodic motion, the beginning and continuance thereof. The second thing starts from my invisible self, my personality, and exhibits me in a world that has true infinity but that is discernible only to the understanding, and with that world (but thereby simultaneously also with all those visible worlds) I cognize myself not, as in the first case, in a merely contingent connection, but in a universal and necessary one. The first sight, of a countless multitude of worlds, annihilates, as it were, my importance as an animal creature that, after having for a short time been provided (one knows not how) with vital force, must give back again to the planet (a mere dot in the universe) the matter from which it came. The second sight, on the contrary, elevates infinitely my worth as that of an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the entire world of sense, at least as far as can be gleaned from the purposive determination of my existence by this law, a determination that is not restricted to conditions and boundaries of this life but proceeds to infinity.

The Artists

Yin-Ju CHEN

Yin-Ju CHEN's primary medium is video, but her works also include photos, installations and drawings. In the past few years she has focused on the function of "power" in human society. Her recent projects also investigate the relationship between the cosmos and human behaviour.

CHEN has participated in many exhibitions, including: Action at a Distance - Yin-Ju Chen Solo Exhibition (IT PARK, Taipei, 2015), Shanghai Biennale 2014 - Social Factory (Power Station of Art, Shanghai, 2014), A Journal of the Plague Year. Fear, ghosts, rebels. SARS, Leslie and the Hong Kong story (2013 - 2014 Touring: Hong Kong, Taipei, Seoul, San Francisco), The 2nd CAFAM Biennale - The Invisible Hand: Curating as Gesture, curated by Weng Xiaoyu (The Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum, Beijing, 2014), Utopien vermeiden - Werkleitz Anniversary Festival, curated by Anselm Franke, Halle, 2013, etc. She was a resident artist at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (Amsterdam, The Netherland, 2010-2011).

James T. HONG

James T. HONG is a filmmaker and artist who has been producing films and videos for nearly twenty years. He has produced works about Heidegger, Spinoza, Japanese biological warfare, and racism. His current research focuses on nationalism and disputed territories in East Asia.

His films and videos include Behold the Asian: How One Becomes What One Is, Condor: A Film from California, Suprematist Kapital, and The Denazification of MH about Martin Heidegger, which is analyzed in the journal Film-Philosophy. Hong produced the award-winning documentary 731: Two Versions of Hell about Japan's Unit 731 in 2007, which was followed by Lessons of the Blood in 2010. His 2012 short film The Turner Film Diaries is based on the infamous, racist American novel, The Turner Diaries.

HONG has participated in many exhibitions, including: A Journal of the Plague Year. Fear, ghosts, rebels. SARS, Leslie and the Hong Kong story (2013 - 2014 Touring: Hong Kong, Taipei, Seoul, San Francisco), The 2nd CAFAM Biennale - The Invisible Hand: Curating as Gesture (The Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum, Beijing , 2014), Utopien vermeiden - Werkleitz Anniversary Festival, Halle, 2013, etc.

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