Prototype Issue
Leo Zhao's Nomadic Anti-Vapid World
By Cinnamon Twist
(page 1 of 2)We live in an era where the old categories of cool versus straight, radical versus establishment seem to hold little water. Virulent critiques of advertising and TV are published by ex-advertising and TV executives (think Adbusters).
The hip controllers of mass media all have copies of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle on their bookshelves—even if they’ve never read it. Exposés of 911 are published by ex-Bush admin insiders. Silicon Valley venture capitalists flock to the Black Rock playa every Labor Day weekend for the Burning Man Festival; Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google, can be seen wandering there in blue and green body paint, all the while Google has a CIA officer on its board and allegedly was funded in part with CIA money.
Perhaps none of this is all that new, but it seems as appropriate an introduction as any to an interview with hot LA-based designer, deejay and post-post theorist Leo Zhao. I had known Zhao as an Otis grad with a bad attitude and never at loss for a sarcastic quip.
Can a weakness for designer duds and a critique of corporate culture cohabit the same human? It’s a dilemma many of us still share.
Do you still believe in French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s theory of rhizomes? What else is there to believe in? But I’ve been thinking about roots a lot lately too. For instance the incredible wealth of knowledge and understanding within the roots of spiritual traditions around the world. Much of it is probably forgotten, libraries burnt to the ground, temples destroyed in wave after wave of wars, crusades, colonization.
What is a rhizome anyway and why should people care? A rhizome is the underground stem of a plant which sends out shoots and roots. And in Deleuzian terms the rhizome becomes a metaphor, a model of a way for ideas to proliferate along horizontal, spontaneous connections. It represents constantly shifting states of mind, nomadic and decentralized—an antithesis to dogma and ideology.
It’s very much needed in the messed-up global situation of today: non-hierarchal, symbiotic—cooperative—rather than competitive systems, a spontaneous and intense way of being.
I think It’s important to recognize the trappings of thinking within systems of knowledge that we unquestioningly accept—systems which appears to be more and more chancy, unreliable and arbitrary the closer we examine them. The ground is not as solid as we would like to think. Every age has a grand narrative which explains the world. When we look back at the past some of them seemed ludicrous. But I have no doubt that our time and our theories will prove to be no different.
Rumor has it you’ve been quite successful in the past couple of year’s, with a logo design for a Visa card, gaming projects debuting at E3and some lucrative snowboard designs. Are you saving to buy a downtown loft or blowing it all on weekends in Las Vegas? Or putting it all in commodities? Or…? The last couple of years my design work has consisted mostly of motion graphics for television and film. HBO, MTV, Discovery, etcetera, etcetera. No, not buying property…even though it might be the smart thing to do…but that would not be very rhizomatic.
Do you feel your Chinese background influences your outlook? I see the West with a little bit of a different perspective…in America there are no soldiers with red armbands that come into your house and take you away, but commercials will decide exactly what you think and want. In terms of my visual work, classic Chinese painting is a huge influence.
Do you think Taoist and Zen sensibilities can have relevance today? Sure. I think some kind of spiritual discipline and connection is very lacking today. Speaking more generally, a source of almost constant annoyance lately is the trendy wave of liberals and “progressives” to hate on religion. They are just as blind as the fundamentalists. Today’s religious institutions may largely be ass-backwards and fanatic about their convoluted beliefs—be it Christianity or Islam—but it is absurd to condemn all religious practice and forget that spiritual traditions are central to any civilization. Sure atrocities are committed in the name of religion, but equally heinous crimes have also been perpetrated under the flags of progress, patriotism, market capitalism and “democracy.”
What makes a Zhao tick? Vegetarian burritos and melon juice.
What’s it like bridging French theory with street culture with Ford Motors? Does it ever give you ethical or esthetic angst? Is it possible to be a cultural radical, whatever that might mean, and make your living from corporate clients?
You calling me a champagne socialist, or what? Well, to an extent I am. I mean, I won’t turn down free drinks at a Scion-sponsored party or whatever, but at the same time I try to make people see the world in different ways, through personal interaction and my work.
Artists have always needed their patrons, and today the patrons happen to be corporate. And speaking of champagne socialists, one has to remember that Albert Camus owned six race cars (and died in one), and I don’t think anyone has ever thought of him as shallow.
My point is that the old dichotomies of selling out and keeping it real are outdated and have been for sometime. For instance, the clichés of impoverished Bohemia and vapid society types. These distinctions are themselves a huge problem, because they trap our thinking and perception. There are plenty of trustafarian twats out there that sport blue-collar chic and there is no reason an anarchist can’t wear Prada.
Street art, cyber-techno visuals, hip-hop, electronic music. Do you have any good principles for parsing the esthetics of this murky, ever-morphing universe? Pop culture is a very good example of the rhizome. For example if you look at the way breakbeats evolved out of funk and hip-hop, forming a lattice with modern reggae to become jungle, and how it is related to 2step or UK Garage, which today becomes dubstep or grime. There are no central guiding principles, things are constantly fluctuating, ideas cross and multi-pollinate in many directions at once.
My deejay sets have come to reflect this—during the course of one performance my selection might go from Egypt to Algeria to India to Puerto Rico to Turkey to Germany to Jamaica, using similar tempos and beat patterns to form lattices between many different styles. it was great to play a lot of Middle Eastern pop and dance music at the Standard Hotel downtown this past summer.
But on the side of roots, some of the most exciting music I have been immersed in in recent years is academic French avant classical music, the spectral school to be exact. Composers like Grisey, Murail, Dumitrescu, Radulescu, Dufourt…some of the most gorgeous, wild and uncompromising sounds ever. On my music blog [differentwaters.blogspot.com] there are many commercially unavailable recordings for download.
Is there such a thing as authentic street culture anymore? The ghettos of Kingston, Rio, Oakland, etc., continue to pump out the most vital pop music in the world. The pirate radio stations in London are still constantly in danger of being busted and fined thousand’s of pounds. Avant-garde jazz musicians have always been and continue to be mostly starving. I personally would love to see more graffiti go up. Doesn’t even have to be good as long as it makes the city more interesting or destroys some annoying advert. I’ve personally called those anti-graffiti numbers to make false reports.
‘The old dichotomies of selling out and keeping it real are outdated. They trap our thinking and perception. There are plenty of trustafarian twats out there that sport blue-collar chic and there is no reason an anarchist can’t wear Prada.’
A few years back you were active in the laptop/glitch/IDM [Intelligent Dance Music] scene. Can you describe that sound to people who don’t listen to electronica?
I used to hate country music, but then I realized that I just wasn’t exposed to the good stuff. I think all the bad house music out there turns people off from electronic music. The indie-electronica scene is exciting because it constantly seeks innovation, unlike the indie-rock scene, which is mostly content with tired revisionism and vacuous appropriation. …I mean it’s fine if you are 15 and discovering rock ’n’ roll for the first time.
The IDM “scene” [late ’90s and early ’00s], depending on who you talk to, is over or has branched out in many directions. A very impressive recent record which is kind of related to or an evolution of that kind of thing is Ben Frost—“Theory of Machines.”
What I used to be heavily involved with and am still very much interested in is microsound, both in the post-jazz improvisation sense as well as electro-acoustic composition.
Back at Otis Art Institute, you were doing Ernst-like psychedelic landscape paintings with a Chinese inflection. Where has that work gone? I’ve been making some paintings. There will be more in the future.
What are your favorite restaurants in LA? Marios Peruvian Seafood, Din Tai Fung and Pastis.
Zhao on the Web: www.optikom.com, www.differentwaters.blogspot.com and www.thesameriver.blogspot.com. The author, Cinnamon Twist, blogs at www.eblips.net.
He's moving Posted by don_guarisco 435 days ago
The word on the street is that Leo is moving to Berlin in a couple of weeks!
Deleuze! We need much more of him! DeLanda! Doyle! Hayles! Posted by mi shi 434 days ago
Way to go Mr Twist! Please cover Manual DeLanda and Richard Doyle for more on Applied Deleuze! They are all Masters of Hyper-Materialism. All is Emergent Processing... and there is our own L.A. home-girl at UCLA, Dr N. Katherine Hayles! She is wonderful on doing post-modern Frenchies in our vernacular... Rich Doyle's new book on Ecodelics, TechnoScience, & History is due out this year.
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