FF : Chinatown Press Round-up

In the same spirit with which Kalakaua went to centers of European power to negotiate on behalf of colonized Pacific Island people, the group FoundFutures samples and repurposes the visual language that colonizes us today. From recognizable branding strategies to government-style posters, FoundFutures projects look at current political, ecological and socioeconomic situations and projects them forward by 10 to 20 years.

"Birdcage," the story of the 2016 H8N2 or "Hang Ten Flu" flu epidemic in Hawai'i, is the most thoroughly realized. FoundFutures, led by University of Hawai'i graduate students Jake Dunagan and Stuart Candy, crafted everything from the government's quarantine zone maps to this-property-is-condemned posters, to the 9/11-style missing-persons fliers that citizens would post in the wake of forced quarantines. The finishing touch is a tourism poster for Maui (unscathed by the flu, how?) which proudly declares that the island is "Still Paradise."

Typically cinema is the chosen medium for visualizing the future. By installing elements of their projects in the urban fabric itself, FoundFutures turns Chinatown into a movie set of sorts, approaching the level of production design that goes into films like "Children of Men."

"It is unique and surprising and stretches the expectation of what to find in a gallery."[-Richardson.]

The exhibit actually began outside the gallery on the streets of Chinatown in early October, when Marks Garage helped the collaborative multimedia group FoundFutures present four scenarios of the district's future via agitprop (political perspectives communicated through art).

Fictitious ads were plastered along Chinatown streets that had some folks worried. One scenario, titled "McChinatown," for instance, utilized posters announcing the arrival of such franchises as Starbucks.

Coming soon to Chinatown: a Starbucks, TGI Friday's, American Apparel and luxury lofts priced at $2.5 million each?

No, but that's what several signs announced earlier this month in what turned out to be a controversial campaign by two University of Hawai'i doctoral students to get Chinatown residents talking about their community's future.

It was part public installation art, part social experiment, and only the first of more scenarios to come.

The intention, according to Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagan, was to manifest a possible future for the district, and simulate a real scenario to get business owners, residents and others engaged in a discussion about what they would like the neighborhood to become.

Their goal was to get a conversation started -- and the dialogue has begun.

Reactions were both emotional and intellectual. Many were fooled by the hoax, some angry, some apathetic and yet others amused.

The pair fielded a range of public responses, from those who were perfectly appalled at the corporate invasion, to those who welcomed Starbucks as a sign of economic achievement.