Mid week trip to 白沙灣

I always longed for an artistic community but never had the chance to meet likeminded people with the same interests and ambitions. For a while I was motivated to get a foot into the comics world, but the longer I hang at the margins, the less interest I have in it as a community. So much pressure to agree with and support others, and as usual these days you have certain political beliefs you’re expected to hold.

What I want to do has so little commercial appeal that I might as well just make it for myself and wait for it to be picked up by someone who wants to bother with publishing. As soon as I put my work out into the ether and let it sit next to others, I start comparing it. It’s not that I fear others thinking my work is bad, but that I will think others’ work is bad once we’re out there together. I don’t want to be arrogant and look down on others’ efforts, but there is so much low-quality work that receives praise that it just seems unavoidable.

The most exciting visual work tends to be woefully abstract and doesn’t give the reader anything to chew on. These are largely vanity projects that fill art book fairs. It all costs too much and contributes very little. The story-centered work is often simple or (worse yet) pandering. It’s a shame that so much focus is on identity. The publishing industry is cynical and rewards those who put forth the identity-focused narratives that are challenging only to those who would never read them.

Valuing these narratives purely for representation will bring us further away from sublimity and truth in art. Right now, most conversations happening about media are about whether a work is morally correct— not whether it is challenging or explorative but rather that it is Right. Strong moral imperatives always lower the quality of art. There is a reason there are no great works born of communism.

This isn’t to say I don’t think representation isn’t important or that there haven’t been great injustices and horrible social ramifications as a result of marginalizing certain groups in the art world and excluding their representative works from our canons. I think that we should be aware of this. However, if the emphasis on quality is low, then we are losing the point of it all, and instead of evening the playing field (lowering the amount of mediocre artwork produced by dominating identities/increasing the amount of quality work by marginalized identities) we will actually damn talented artists to obscurity and create a new canon of work that could be used as an argument for the inferiority of the people it represents and provide a lower bar to which subsequent artists will aspire.