Simon Leung

Test the West! 1994. Test the West! I am squatting under a sign. Test the West! Inserting my body into a test. Test the West! Germany had been administering since reunification. By now I’ve been thinking… Test the West! About the squatting body… Test the West! At the bus stop for more than a decade. Ever since I was a teenager when my brother told me he was sure that the people at a bus stop in the suburban California city where we lived were Vietnamese because they were squatting where there were seats. Did his observation arise from anxiety that the bodies we inhabited could be misrecognized as those of new refugees were we to avail ourselves of this style of waiting? Test the West! Waiting in the style; testing… Test the West! To see how this body might read in this metropolitan part of “the… Test the West!” thinking about later in the year when I will return to Berlin to make a work for an exhibition addressing “violence against the other” in Germany. Wars in Croatia and Bosnia were in the background as was the daily violence against guest workers contracted to work in the former East and former West.  Test the West! Among them are those occupying bodies like this one, indivisible remainders of other wars that once divided the former North and former South of a country far away. Test the West! Misrecognition as medium. A friend, who is African American, has been living in Berlin. Once we took a trip outside the city, and stopped in a store. Our German guide asked, “Do you know where the Gropius building is? It’s now an unemployment agency.” The woman said, “I don’t know where it is and if the wall didn’t come down we wouldn’t need an unemployment agency.” When we walked down the street in a small town outside Berlin, people almost turned their heads. Another time, I’ll tell you more about the secret intimacy I felt between people of color in the art world in the late 1980s, in the early 1990s.