IN SAMUEL FOSSO'S self-portrait, The Chief Who Sold Africa to the Colonists, the Cameroon-born photographer gazes imperiously from a leopard-skin chair, drenched in gold and flanked at his feet by baubles of western comfort: a useless pair of a leather shoes and a shopping bag. The unsettling mixture of cultural signifiers is completed by what appear to be a pair of 3-D glasses perched on his nose.
It's not hard to understand why it was chosen as one of the signature pieces of the Africa Remix exhibition at the Mori Art Museum: defiant, sardonic and not in the least bit grateful for the attentions of a western audience. The photograph screams, 'Show me some respect!'
Fosso recently told a British newspaper that he wanted to say to westerners: 'Look, we had our own democracy before you came, we had our own rulers, our own presidents. But it was our ruler that you came and got rid of, and in his place, you set up your hierarchies, your systems.'
While clearly a polemicist, Fosso's concerns for Africa take a back seat to his favourite subject: himself. By his own admission he's narcissistic, and has spent decades taking photos to preserve his looks for his grandchildren. 'When I look at myself in the mirror, the only thing I can see is Samuel Fosso, who is trying to make himself as handsome as possible before taking a self-portrait.'
These tensions between context, geography and individuality are woven through this, the largest exhibition of African art ever shown in Asia: works by 84 men and women from 25 countries, often reluctantly carrying the cultural baggage of their troubled continent, but also determined to escape the confines of that loaded term: the African artist.
'What's important is to discover the diversity of Africa,' says chief curator Simon Njami. 'The media and the news makes everything look the same - the 'heart of darkness' and all the rest of it - but there are as many Africas as there are Africans. The artist is, first of all, an individual who translates his own unique nightmares. The first thing to look at is the work.'
Rather than try to pin down an entire continent, Njami and Mori director David Elliott say they have simply opted for what they call a 'frozen moment in time', putting some of the best of contemporary African art before western and now Asian audiences in an attempt to reddress a lopsided cultural relationship. 'Africa has always been read,' says Njami. 'And has never given its point of view.'