Things and Meanings: 28 Chinese at the Asian Art Museum
28 Chinese at the Asian Art Museum features works by three generations of contemporary Chinese artists, produced between 1994 and 2014, on loan from the Rubell Family Collection. Anchoring the exhibition are pieces from the contemporary canon, for instance Ai Weiwei’s A Ton of Tea (2007), a cubic sculpture of compressed tea leaves, and Zhang Huan’s To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond (1997), a photograph of an attempt to use human bodies to raise a body of water by one meter. These works, displayed on the second floor amid traditional ink landscapes and blue and white porcelain, represent iconic experiments by Chinese artists engaging with modernist sculpture and performance art.
The exhibition’s newer works, which dominate the first-floor galleries, vary somewhat in quality and lack a clear, unifying theme. Organized by medium, with oil paintings in one gallery, video art in another, this portion of the show mirrors the fractured state of China’s current art landscape and asks viewers to draw their own connections. Several works within this group explore materials in new and interesting ways.
Qiu Zhijie’s Memorial for Revolutionary Speech (2007) is a cement cube that Qiu built up, layer upon layer, by repeatedly carving political slogans onto square tablets and then pouring cement over each inscription, creating the ground for a new layer of text. The sixteen slogans that Qiu carved and then concealed are displayed as ink rubbings on the wall behind the cube. The slogans date from the third century BCE to today and are all written in historically appropriate script. The result is an object both exceedingly plain and ideologically weighty.
A clear metaphor for history, Qiu’s work is also, more subtly, an assertion of the language of things—specifically Walter Benjamin’s notion that all things, even inanimate objects, have their own language through which they declare their essence, or name.1 Although Qiu’s inscriptions are concealed and no longer separable from the cement block, his memorial persists in speaking its “name.” Whereas Ai’s A Ton of Tea thrusts contemporary Chinese artists into conversation with contemporary Western sculptors (for instance Larry Bell) and minimalists (such as Sol LeWitt) through its use of a recognizably “Chinese” material, Qiu’s engagement with the material world goes further, suggesting that even the most ordinary object contains within it an index of past material conditions.
He Xiangyu’s Cola Project—Extraction (2009–11) is a conceptual work that involved He and ten assistants boiling down 127,000 liters of Coca-Cola to “extract” a solid black residue.2 A case of this coal-like Coke residuum is displayed along with photographs of the industrial-scale process that created it and a wooden case of empty, time-stamped two-liter Coke bottles. One chromogenic print depicts workers shoveling residue with bandannas tied across their faces; another shows rivers of industrial waste flowing like lava. A Dutch still-life painter might represent Coca-Cola by observing a bottle and meticulously representing its form, shape, and color. Andy Warhol would likely reproduce its universally recognizable logo, forgoing the likeness of the physical bottle to capture what he regarded as the iconic essence of the thing. He Xiangyu’s Coca Cola Project suggests that Coca-Cola is neither essentially the thing itself (the sugary liquid, the bottle containing it) nor the sign of the thing (the label), but rather the flows of human labor, power, and capital that produce it. If Zhang’s To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond objectifies human bodies, using them as volumes that simply serve to displace water, He goes one step further, exploiting their labor and exposing his workers to potentially hazardous conditions in the name of art. Both artists show how easily bodies become material inputs into systems of regulation and production.
Liu Wei’s Liberation No. 1 (2013) and Zhu Jinshi’s Boat (2012) also engage meaningfully with materiality. Liberation No. 1 is a monumental oil painting featuring vertical and horizontal lines of various widths and colors. Designed using computer software and evocative of glitch art, it encodes the visual culture of screens and pixels in a traditional Western medium. The result is an anachronistic image caught between a digital future and an analog past.
Architectural and organic, Boat is a hanging installation, roughly 10 feet tall and 50 feet long, constructed from thousands of sheets of overlapping xuan (calligraphy) paper. Folded over bamboo rods and suspended from the ceiling on thin cotton threads, the translucent xuan paper forms a semipermeable membrane that sways in a breeze and lets light pass through. While Liberation No. 1 thrusts the future into the past, Boat suggests a way forward, borrowing forms from nature to suggest that contemporary cultures must also allow for permeability if they are to survive and thrive.
Art serves two functions: to capture the essence of objects in the external, material world, and to materialize things from the internal, immaterial world. A herd of buffalo becomes a cave painting; a feeling of love becomes the Venus de Milo. The best works in 28 Chinese take as their subject this tension between material conditions and ideological constructs—between things and meanings—to offer new ways of observing the contemporary condition.
Original version in Art Practical. Reprint in Daily Serving.
From Two Arises Three: The Collaborative Works of Arnold Chang and Michael Cherney
Chinese landscape painting is notoriously inaccessible—the format is foreign, the subject deep in historicity, the materiality unassuming. Photography, on the other hand, is eminently familiar—a daily practice for many in the digital age. Enter From Two Arises Three, an exhibition of painter Arnold Chang and photographer Michael Cherney’s collaborative works at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum.
At first blush, From Two Arises Three resembles a traditional landscape exhibition. Black-and-white hanging scrolls line the gallery walls; paper fans and album leaves fill cases in the center. But look closer and a genuinely contemporary collaboration begins to unfold. Many images are actually composites, with Cherney’s grainy, out-of-focus photographs bleeding into Chang’s traditional landscape painting. In a video interview that accompanies the show, Chang and Cherney describe their process: Cherney travels across China, taking photographs. He mails these to Chang’s studio in New Jersey. Chang pastes Cherney’s photos onto paper and extends the imagery with ink and brush. Like an exquisite corpse, Chang’s paintings grow out of Cherney’s photographs.
To add another layer of complexity, many of Cherney and Chang’s collaborations are reinterpretations of Chinese masterpieces. In After Mi Fu (2010)—a long, meditative skyscape—Cherney’s ethereal photography imitates the Song master’s gentle washes of sky, while Chang’s brushwork re-creates Fu’s soft mountain peaks, which seem to float in a sea of clouds. In After Huang Gongwang 1-4 (2009), Cherney’s pointillist trees and distorted waterfalls remarkably resemble Yuan master Gongwang’s originals and blend seamlessly into Chang’s studied brushwork. Cherney’s novel use of photographic technology renders with a lens and printer what was once accomplished with ink and brush.
One of the pair’s more recent works, Mount Huang (2012), plays even more deliberately on the notion of binaries. The folding album features twelve pairings of photographs and paintings, each with varying levels of abstraction. While some photographic panels clearly describe peaks and valleys, others appear as formal compositions of light and dark. Similarly, some painted panels use fine, controlled lines to outline trees and rock formations, while others combine rushing, fluid movements and light and dark ink splashes to merely suggest a landscape. When the work is taken as a whole, one gets the sense of moving back and forth between two worlds, each evolving in its own right while also conversing with the other.
By combining elements from opposing art practices and traditions, Chang and Cherney bring into question supposed binaries of painting and photography: what is real and imagined, the past and present, and divisions between East and West. Their landscapes represent a hybrid vision of a world that is not “either/or” but “both/and”—a world that blends cultures and perspectives to create something new.
Original version in Art Practical. Reprint in Daily Serving’s “Best of 2014 - Shotgun Reviews.”
Pleasure and Longing: Yang Fudong’s Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest
Yang Fudong’s film Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest captures seven friends on holiday at the Yellow Mountains in Anhui Province. The celebrated landscape features rugged mountains shrouded in fog, jagged crags, lush foliage, gentle brooks, and staggering ravines. Against beautiful scenes of the natural landscape, posed scenes of couples and groups that suggest tourist photographs, and cinematic close-ups of faces pressed against window panes or rocks, the artist juxtaposes monologues on love, familial duty, sentiment, memory, and tourism. Amidst the timeless beauty of this iconic Chinese landscape, seven companions, male and female, explore both the scenery around them and the landscape of their own emotions.
In the opening scene of the film, seven young friends dress themselves on various elevations on a rock. They don stylish Western clothes, which they will wear throughout the rest of the film. Not quite contemporary but also not mired in tradition, their outfits allude to their familiarity with China’s history and cosmopolitanism and mark them as part of an intellectual class. Yet from the beginning, we are left to wonder why they were naked and what they are concealing as they become the smartly dressed protagonists--the stars--of the film.
In another scene, the artist pans over the prickly skin of a pineapple before cutting to a woman using fruit to tease and feed a man. The sensuous picnic and abundance of fruit are a good metaphor for the film as a whole, which points both to the relative affluence and leisure of the protagonists and to their penchant for indulgence in sensory pleasures--the taste of fruit, the touch of bark, the smell of a blossom, the warmth of a kiss.
In this film however, pleasure is never without longing, and while the compatriots laugh and smile, love and revel together, their moments of solitude are steeped in longing. Contrast the spontaneous carousing captured in a scene of men yelling at the mountains with the longing revealed in the monologues--sexual longing, longing to be a better son, longing filled with hopes and dreams for the future.
By combining pleasure and longing, Yang sets his work squarely within a long tradition of Chinese landscape painting, juxtaposing text and landscape to reveal both august physical beauty and exquisite internal pain. Traditional landscapes offer escape from the problems of pleasure and longing by asserting the insignificance of man against the majesty of nature. However Yang’s moving picture landscape also draws liberally from tropes of cinema--the close-up, the passionate kiss--that emphasize and glorify human actors. Through his film, Yang inverts the traditional balance of the Chinese landscape, foregrounding the pleasure and longing of the “Seven Intellectuals” against the background of the “Bamboo Forest.” By blending two visual languages, traditional landscape painting and modern cinema, Yang reveals an uneasy tension in contemporary China--how does one reconcile the historical insignificance of man with the recent rise of heroic individualism? Like the seven intellectuals, the viewer is left to find her own answers to the problems of pleasure and longing.
Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest from blausphoto on Vimeo.
