I just finished the first semester of my MFA at [a well-regarded East Coast school]. At the end of last term, I had a disappointing review and my professors said that I wasn’t working hard enough to produce an integrated body of work (I showed them a series of things that were conceptually connected but materially diverse). I get the feeling that what they want me to do is work like most of the other artists in the department, who essentially just make the same painting over and over again. I don’t know what direction to take. Do I stand my ground, or give in?

Andy Warhol. Triple Elvis [Ferus Type], 1963; silkscreen ink and silver paint on linen; 82 x 69 in.

Without knowing the specifics of your situation (such as your current oeuvre, the stated goals of the program, or the methods for assessing first-semester work), I’m going to throw out a few very general statements: In many MFA programs, the expectation for the first year is that students will push their work in new directions. If you came to the program with materially diverse work, it might have been assumed that you’d use your initial months to explore a different kind of production. Additionally, your professors may be hoping to see your ideas brought to conclusions that are thoroughly considered and explored in high definition; cohesion in a body of work can teach you to self-analyze and develop your intentions. Finally, it could be that the conceptual connection between the works is not at clear as you think. But in any case, don’t just make inferences or “get the feeling”—find out! Inquire directly, and talk to more than just a couple of people. Over the next few weeks, schedule a handful of studio visits from different faculty members, fellow students, and curators outside your institution. Prepare questions for them and listen to what they say as they observe your work.

There’s a caveat, of course: If their feedback is not germane to what you’re trying to do, or if it doesn’t provide assistance that furthers your thinking, then it’s probably not very useful and you’re free to let it go. Some professors can only approach the critique process from their own praxis, and their advice may not be beneficial to artists who have divergent practices. Students have to be able to take feedback with a grain of salt.

MFA programs are, to varying degrees, organs of the market; at the very least, the narratives that pervade most contemporary arts programs are market-driven. A quick glance through the portfolio of most “successful” (read: currently making money) artists will show you that if you want to sell your work, you will benefit from having a recognizable product—and that is easily achieved by making things that all look alike. You needn’t adopt that particular strategy, but you should be aware of how it is shaping the world around you. The question is: What kind of artist do you want to be? The direction you take with your work should reflect what you want to achieve—be it development of technique, a conceptual platform, gallery representation, a job, etc.

Because I can’t be there in the studio with you, I’m tempted to play devil’s advocate from afar. If you’re used to making visually and materially diverse works, what would it mean to make similar things? Is there a conceptual space from which you could explore sameness? Since you’re in grad school, surely you are reading something edifying and at least slightly pretentious on the subject (cough Benjamin Buchloh cough cough). Consider this passage from When the Moon Waxes Red, by Trinh T. Minh-Ha:

“When repetition calls attention on itself as repetition, it can no longer be reduced to connote sameness and stagnancy as it usually does in the context of Western progress and accumulation, and its globally imposed emancipatory projects. When repetition reflects on itself as repetition, it constitutes this doubling back movement through which language (verbal, visual, musical) looks at itself exerting power and, therefore, creates for itself possibilities to repeatedly thwart its own power, inflating it only to deflate it better. Repetition outplays itself as repetition, and each repetition is never the same as the former. In it, there is circulation, there is intensity, and there is innovation.”

(Incidentally, I read this in the first semester of my MFA.) Good luck!

Of course, Quincey’s opiate-fueled reflections of Asia as an imagined site of mystic sublimity have all the familiar trappings of a particular system of thought that has dominated Western representations of Asia in the past few centuries: the power of the gaze to fabricate and invent an eroticized and exoticized Other. For a large part, the rhetoric of Paradise Lost, the inaugural exhibition of the newly established Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Singapore, plays to this outdated but still oft-studied dialectic with three major video works by Fiona Tan, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Zarina Bhimji, all of which seek to question the politics of migration, cultural identity, and transnational boundaries.

Fiona Tan. Disorient, 2009 (film still); double-screen video installation; color HD installation, 5:1 surround, 2 HD-cam safety masters, 2 HD projectors, 2 computers, 2 surround amplifiers, surround speakers. Courtesy of Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Arnhem.

Fiona Tan. Disorient, 2009 (film still); double-screen video installation; color HD installation, 5:1 surround, 2 HD-cam safety masters, 2 HD projectors, 2 computers, 2 surround amplifiers, surround speakers. Courtesy of Frith Street Gallery, London. Photo: Per Kristiansen.

Fiona Tan’s Disorient (2009) is a two-channel production commissioned for the Dutch Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale that contrasts discordant perceptions of Asia. The first video delineates a fictional but richly textured space curated to showcase objects found and gleaned from an exotic Other. Accompanied by a voice-over narration of Marco Polo’s travel accounts that were written at the end of the thirteenth century, Tan’s theatrical set—designed to emulate the exotic appeal of a cabinet of curiosities—imagines Polo’s lived experience of the material world, with shelves filled to the brim with figurines, taxidermied beasts, and other unnamed ornaments. But if the cabinet of curiosities is often meant to provide a visual narrative for the classification and analysis of the material world, Tan’s enormous Kunstkammer seems solely designed to disorient and to celebrate the act of collection for its own sake, highlighting perhaps the West’s centuries-old unilateral perception of the East. Yet the pursuit of capturing atavistic myth, so intricately drawn out in the first video, is dashed away by the jarring contemporary footage of the second video. The unsentimental, poverty-stricken urban landscape of East Asia, derelict and in disrepair, concurrently provides an ironic counterpoint to Polo’s romanticized configuration of these same regions, and bluntly questions the ideology presented in the first screen.

Zarina Bhimji. Yellow Patch, 2011 (film still); single-screen installation; HD Blu-ray and Dolby 5.1; 35mm film transferred to HD; 29:43. Courtesy of the Artist.

Zarina Bhimji. Yellow Patch, 2011 (film still); single-screen installation; HD Blu-ray and Dolby 5.1; 35mm film transferred to HD; 29:43. Courtesy of the Artist.

Zarina Bhimji’s Yellow Patch (2011) is a slow, delicious cinematic exploration of architecture, hinterlands, and destinations that utilizes the camera’s ability to create a disjuncture between image and referent. By carefully correlating the moving image to affective sounds, Yellow Patch eschews cerebral contextualization and factual presentation in favor of visual sensations created by mise-en-scène where interiors are merely obliquely equated with individual and collective memory. Like reticent sentinels of a time long past, monuments and buildings serve as Bhimji’s markers, which foreground the migration and movement of peoples and cultures in the British colonial subcontinent of the late 19th to the early 20th century. The passing of time is marked by abandoned buildings, peeling paint, and decaying walls, as the desolate urban landscapes—elegiacally softened by slow-moving shots and framing—carries the tumultuous weight of a nation’s history.

Trinh T. Minh-ha. Surname Viet Given Name Nam, 1989 (film still); 16mm; 108 min. Courtesy of Moongift Films.

Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) tackles issues of documenting, translation, and interviewing within the familiar territory of cultural voyeurism, identity politics, and the construction of memory. Through a series of montages, archival footage, voice-over narrations, obscure Vietnamese proverbs, and English subtitles, Surname Viet Given Name Nam uses the power of fragmentary storytelling to explore aspects of Vietnamese reality as seen through the lives of women in Vietnam and the United States. The camera shots are deliberately unsteady as though wielded by an amateur’s hand, yielding information that is only coherent enough to glean partial information of the injustices that women suffer. The staged quality of these “ethnographic” interviews becomes more pronounced as the film progresses, until we realize that Trinh’s deliberate intention is not for us to misconstrue their halting speech as shyness or them as people struggling to speak in a different language, but rather the uncertainty of amateur actors who are in fact Vietnamese women living in the United States. Surname Viet Given Name Nam redefines identity as an interview experience, a quasi-fictional way of encountering the ethnographic self through the act of speaking and recollecting. But Trinh’s feminist critical discourse also raises questions that strike at the core of identity politics: What is selfhood and how should (or can) it be represented?

Seen in this light, Paradise Lost does not merely showcase narratives of displacement but also validates the notion that encoded within people are an indeterminate amount of political and cultural selves. As a consequence, identity—whether personal or collective—is at best too slippery to be pinned down by a taxonomic and digestible checklist of authentication. Certainly, the exhibition makes a convincing case of the value of exploring diasporic perspectives and the global aesthetic influences that come into play, despite the recurrent eagerness of such exhibitions to assimilate the oft-explored hallmarks of post-colonial discourse. At every turn, we are constantly reminded that the show is an unrelenting exercise in probing issues of memory and identity (which seem to be recurrent obsessions of regions that have a colonial past), and of the artifice of such illusions. There are questions heaped upon questions, but no ready answers as we are left to ponder the politics of conflicting narratives and sensitivities in each installation. As acutely sensitive to such concepts as the exhibition has proven to be, perhaps the most unsettling realization it leaves is that representation—rewritten from the perspective of an object that has always been represented—obfuscates as much as it reveals.

Paradise Lost is on view at the Centre for Contemporary Art at the Gillman Barracks through March 30, 2014.