Art has been called a universal impulse. People have faith in the romantic notion that art bypasses borders to tap into some primal human core. But does it really? When visual culture migrates—across geographies, histories, or ideologies—something slips away, and something else accrues. To presume art communicates seamlessly is to ignore the messiness of meaning-making. Translation—visual and otherwise—is never a neutral act.
Take The Starry Night. Van Gogh’s swirling cosmos is interpreted as a metaphor for his personal anguish. Yet here in Asia, the same painting morphs into a meditation of Zen impermanence. I wasn’t aware of the latter interpretation, because the Eurocentric interpretation made a great deal of sense to me. But once I heard the alternative version, I could see it, and once I saw it, I could never un-see Starry Night in the same way again. Like Paris folding in on itself in Christopher Nolan’s Inception, the painting enfolded me with two superimposed interpretations.
Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds performs a similar trick. To Western eyes, the sprawling installation—millions of porcelain husks hand-painted by artisans—reads as a biting allegory: individuality swallowed by Maoist conformity, labor exploited under capitalist (or communist) machinery. But in China? The work’s political teeth recede, overshadowed by its material genealogy. We focus on the porcelain itself, a centuries-old craft tradition, or the sunflower’s complicated symbolism as both Mao-era propaganda and a snack shared among friends. The artwork becomes malleable, and the meaning becomes contingent on who’s looking, where they stand, and what they are allowed to comment on.
This brings us to cultural literacy, that unwieldy X-factor in art’s globalized theater. Without it, we risk flattening works into aesthetic tokens. Consider Indigenous art: a totem pole’s ochre grooves might dazzle a Parisian gallery-goer as “primitive” elegance, severed from its role as ancestral record, territorial claim, or living ritual object. The violence of decontextualization has become as bad as colonial genocide.
So yes, art bridges cultures, but let’s not mistake that for stability. I picture more of a rope ladder swaying between two sheer-faced cliffs. The view changes depending on who’s climbing, which way they face, and what they’ve been taught to notice. As the tired adage goes, beauty resides in the eye of the beholder. But the cliché holds a kernel of subversion: so does power, history, and the weight of a thousand inherited gazes.
