FT, August 10, 2005
The void as the origin of being
WILLIAM PACKER

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is especially rich in its Asiatic and Oriental holdings. The Mystery of Empty Space, a small but exquisite current display that draws principally from the museum's Reyes Collection of 20th-century Chinese painting, shows how we should value the permanent riches of our great museums - carpe diem.

Such are our western prejudices and expectations that some may find the thought of modern Chinese art puzzling. Is it communist social realism we are invited to consider - the Great Leap Forward and all that? It is an interesting subject, but no: not this time. Or is it to be the response of some Chinese painters to western influences? Again, interesting enough, but no. What we have are modern paintings founded in the great historic tradition of Chinese painting - and that too may well prove problematic. So imbued are we with the modernist dogma that if a tradition is there, it must be challenged and subverted, and we automatically assume any work within it to be merely derivative, decadent and, worst of all, academic. The thought that, in embracing a great tradition, one may celebrate and renew it hardly occurs to us.

By its very title this little exhibition draws us up short. The unfilled sheet or canvas, the surface left bare, the space between marks and brush-strokes, have from the early 20th century been staples of modernist, and in recent years particularly of minimalist, enquiry: within the Chinese tradition - and by extension the Japanese and Korean - the space left vacant for the imagination to fill has been from time immemorial a point of principle. This is the Daoist philosophical concept of the void as the origin of being, with which is associated the concept of qi, which signifies the spiritual energy and life force that flow through such emptiness. In more formal terms, such negative gaps may reflect the positive, tangible realities in the work, and be taken to represent sky or water, cloud or smoke. "Let your mind fill voids," said Pan Tianshou, one of the artists represented here, "not your brush."

Yet there is to all this some special pleading: leaving the Zen aesthetic of the calligraphic commitment to the mark and gesture aside, there is perhaps not too wide a gap between eastern and western traditions of draughtsmanship after all. It is fundamental to our own principles of pictorial composition and objective observation to look as much to the spaces and shapes between the forms as to the forms themselves. Certainly any trawl through the western prints and drawings, ancient or modern, in the collections of the British Museum, say, would furnish no less effective a formal demonstration of the principle than this one. The distinction is only the conscious philosophy on one hand, and the lack of it on the other.

Quite apart from the sheer beauty of so many of these things, what is striking is not just the continuing vigour of the Chinese tradition but also how clever and formally inventive it is. More surprising still, perhaps, is how fresh and truly modern so much of it is, and, for all the obvious differences, how oddly consonant with western painting. The receding plane of a pool of water is established simply by the description of the goldfish that swim just beneath its surface, and the shadow of the wisteria branches that fall upon its surface (Cheng Shifa) - were Monet's water lilies more effective? Time and again the calligraphic inscription to the work, always so active an element in the composition, reads in counterpoint to the actual imagery - to the little figures walking through a ravine in the snow (Chen Zizhuang), to the trees that cling to the mountain tops (Song Wenzhi), to the drooping foliage of the wisteria (Wu Changsuo). And we find ourselves thinking of Mark Tobey, perhaps, and Sam Francis, Rothko and Kline.

But in the end it is the beauty that is inescapable, held as it is in that precarious balance between the means and the suggestion, the form and the content, that is the key to all art. And yet what in the end is there to say of such a thing as a landscape by Cheng Shifa, a landscape that is an overlaid succession of blue-grey, vaguely mountain- or island-like blobs washed in with an utterly deceptive ease and freedom, articulated only by an odd tree here and there, the inscription of course, and the white space that is the torrent rushing between? Or of the long horizontal scroll by Ya Ming that, simultaneously unrolled and rerolled, is to be read as an episodic pictorial narrative, taking us with him on his journey to the Huang Mountain? Or of Li Kuchan's wonderfully sinister black stork stalking along beneath the lotus? Hauntingly romantic in their evo-cative power, radical in their abstract authority, these are pictures that demand a visit.

'The Mystery of Empty Space: 20th-Century Chinese Painting' continues at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, until 16 October. Tel 1865 278000

WILLIAM PACKER

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/685aa56e-093a-11da-880b-00000e2511c8.html

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NYT, August 18, 2005
An Exquisite Path to an Elusive Past
By HOLLAND COTTER

SALEM, Mass. -Yul Brynner. Pad thai. That's what you know about the culture of Thailand? Never mind. Historians are in the dark about it too. This is one reason that "The Kingdom of Siam: The Art of Central Thailand, 1350-1800" at the Peabody Essex Museum here is the thrill it is. Completely gorgeous, with its comely Buddhas and paintings in light-struck gold, it is also a reconnaissance mission-in-progress to the past, with scholars clearing the path just a few steps ahead of you all the way.

Starting out, you should pack some basic information, like the fact that Thailand is sandwiched into Southeast Asia between Myanmar (formerly Burma) to the west and Cambodia to the east. At different times over the centuries each controlled it, and both did much to shape its predominantly Buddhist art.

In the mid-14th century, political balances shifted. Burma had long since run out of steam; Cambodia's fabled Angkor empire was on the slide. A powerful Thai kingdom was in ascendance. Foreigners called it Siam; the kingdom called itself Ayutthaya (pronounced ah-YOOT-tah-yah) and built a capital city of the same name.

The city must have been quite a place. With ambitious rulers and a sociable, multi-ethnic population in residence, and merchants from China, Japan, India, Persia and Europe pouring in, it became a major entrepôt for trade in Asian luxury goods.

When, in 1686, a royal embassy from Ayutthaya visited the court of Louis XIV in France, it brought an embarrassment of riches: shiploads of jewelry, silk, Chinese ceramics and crates of birds' nests for soup. The ordinarily unflappable staff at Versailles was nonplussed. No one knew where to put all the stuff, let alone what to make of it.

Still, Ayutthaya must have impressed them as a kingdom grand in every way, which it probably was. Gilded sculptures of the Buddha more than 60 feet tall were not uncommon in its temples. Those temples, like the Wat Mahathat and the Wat Ratchaburana, were awesome sights, their steep, tiered bases topped by towers shaped like NASA shuttles. Hidden inside were treasures fit for deities, donated by kings.

"Probably" is an important word here; most of the hard evidence is gone. In 1569, armies from a resurgent Burma leveled Ayutthaya. It was quickly rebuilt; indeed, the city reached its zenith of global celebrity in the 17th century. Then, in 1767, the Burmese slammed it again, leaving just a few structures intact. The site was then abandoned and a new capital was established near modern Bangkok.

It would be too much to say that Ayutthaya has been resurrected in the exhibition, organized by Forrest McGill, chief curator of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and M. L. Pattaratorn Chirapravati, assistant professor of Asian art at California State University, Sacramento. But certainly the foundations for an imaginative reconstruction are now well in place.

The show opens with a single image, an immense metal head of a Buddha, which instantly pulls us back to a world that was. Its placement high on a modern pedestal gives a sense of the original figure's staggering size. And a jagged gash at the top of the head speaks of the violence that brought it down.

The gallery behind it has traces of another monument, in a group of objects associated with the main temple tower of the Wat Ratchaburana. In 1957, looters broke into the tower and made off with hundreds of valuables. But archaeologists assessing the loss discovered something new: a sealed room, the temple's relic chamber, sunk deep in its base.

The vaultlike space was crammed with treasures: royal crowns, votive sculptures, a gold-covered miniature of the tower itself, all donated as pious gifts. Those gifts are now yielding information. The chamber would have been sealed the year the temple was finished; A.D. 1424 is the generally accepted date. And because everything in it would have been made before then, the contents stand as a body of comparative material by which other Thai art could be evaluated.

As vague as this method may be for establishing chronology, it is what we have. Almost nothing from Ayutthaya was dated by its makers. And because most of what survives is dynastic in nature, meant to perpetuate a royal style as well as convey an illusion of continuity and stability, artists were encouraged to create replicas of antique forms - replicas so exact as so to be indistinguishable from originals.

As scholars ruefully acknowledge in the show's catalog, those artists did their jobs extremely well, creating a time-baffling art suspended between past, present and future. And this fact, once fully grasped, lends the show a frisson of mystery that further burnishes the beauty of its 80 objects, many on loan from Thai museums for the first time.

A congregation of Buddhas and bodhisattvas, some with egg-shaped Sri Lankan heads or squared-off Khmer chins, fills the first two rooms. And certain types of figures, like one of the Buddha walking, are distinctively Thai. You see him bopping along, en pointe, in a carved stone relief panel, a piece that provided one of those revelations scholars live for. When the hefty panel was pulled away from a wall in a Thai museum storeroom in preparation for shipping, a date was found incised on its back: the equivalent, in Buddhist years, of A.D. 1375.

For me, the show's high point is its small selection of illuminated manuscripts and paintings. That such objects escaped the ravages of war and the country's damp, bug-friendly climate, is astounding. One of the finest of all Thai books is here, the Buddhist cosmology called "The Three Worlds," on loan from the Museum für Indische Kunst in Berlin.

And from the Asian Art Museum comes the first Thai paintings on cloth to be dated to the Ayutthaya period. A swatch from a processional banner shows a scene from one of the Buddha's past lives. Here he appears as a young sage named Vidhura, who is being pulled through the sky by a ferocious but not-too-swift demon. Technically, Vidhura is a prisoner, but this alert, amused face instantly let you know who's in charge.

People can get terribly sniffy about the art of the Ayutthaya's 18th-century golden years, especially its ornate black and gilt lacquerware painting. But the painting looks fabulous here, shimmering inexhaustibly over the surface of manuscript cabinets. And while most of the designs are of ceaselessly burgeoning flowers and mythical beasts, one set of cabinet doors carried two human figures.

One is a European dressed in a peculiarly puffy version of European armor, the other wears a turban. Traditionally, they've been identified as Louis XIV and the Indian Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. Ayutthaya's court had contacts with both. They also suggest sly depictions of exotic ethnic types as seen through Siamese eyes. Maybe they're both: the exalted Sun King and the Indian monarch as the equivalent of slightly over-the-top characters in a musical comedy. Nobody knows the answer, or at least we don't know it yet. Like so much else in this beguiling, expeditionary show, these images are elusive fantasies in a real history: mysteries materialized.

"The Kingdom of Siam: The Art of Central Thailand, 1350-1800" remains on view at the Peabody Essex Museum, East India Square, Salem, Mass. (866) 745-1876, through Oct. 16.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/18/arts/design/18cott.html

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IHT, AUGUST 5, 2005 (NYT, August 18, 2005)
Chinese artists interpret the Great Wall
By Sheila Melvin International Herald Tribune

BEIJING 'The Wall," a major retrospective of Chinese contemporary art from the past 20 years, is a thought-provoking exhibition that explores the many walls - physical and metaphorical - that both unite and divide Chinese society.

The show, which runs in Beijing until Aug. 21 and opens in Buffalo, New York, on Oct. 1, includes installations, performance art, video, photography and painting. These are displayed, fittingly enough, in the maze of circling walls and hidden cul-de-sacs that make up the exhibition space of the Millennium Monument Museum. Although "The Wall" is a retrospective, it is organized by theme rather than chronology, and much of the work is recent.

Unsurprisingly, given its title, many of the works on display concern China's famous Great Wall. Indeed, the exhibition is an offspring of the fascination of its curator, Gao Minglu, with the dichotomy between the Great Wall as an emblem of Chinese nationalism and its representation in contemporary art.

"The Great Wall as a symbol of the nation first emerged in the early 20th century," Gao said. "But the avant-garde has taken a very different perspective toward it - more skeptical, more ambiguous. They are mourning the Great Wall rather than celebrating it - this is very different than under Mao or in the World War II era."

The ambiguous nature of this view is evident in several pieces, including Gu Wenda's remarkable 2004-05 work "10,000 Kilometers," which at first resembles a minireplica of a section of Great Wall - until one realizes that the 15-centimeter-thick, or 6-inch-thick, bricks are made entirely of matted human hair. Behind the wall hangs a diaphanous curtain of swirled hair and glue that resembles filigree, or wisps of smoke. If the hair wall is somewhat nauseating, the hair curtain is inexplicably beautiful, and together the two pieces evoke both the horror of the Great Wall - the countless conscripts who labored and died building it - and its transcendent majesty.

Zheng Lianjie's "Big Explosion" performances of 1993, documented here in photographs, falls into the category of art that mourns the wall, its symbolism, or both. Indeed, as part of his series of performances Zheng worked with other artists and hired local villagers to carry 10,000 crumbling bricks from the bottom of the wall to the top; photos show the bricks wrapped in red crosses and strewn across a ruined section of wall. So as to erase any doubt regarding their intentions, Zheng and his colleagues then staged a funeral ceremony for the Great Wall and flung fake money over the "dead" bricks to send them off to heaven.

Even within the supposed security of the Great Wall, China has long been a nation of walls - cities were walled and the preferred architectural style for houses were those with walled courtyards. After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the city walls came down, and in the past 20 years countless other walls - of homes, theaters, temples and teahouses - have fallen to the blows of sledgehammers wielded by migrant-worker armies. This rapid redevelopment and attendant urbanization of once-rural suburbs and people - the absence of walls - is a second major theme in the show.

Wang Jingsong's 1999 photography work "A Hundred Chai" shows the Chinese character for "condemned" spray-painted on a hundred different buildings. The encircled characters are all the same, but their color, style and background are unique. The work is a moving evocation of the many individual sacrifices that have been necessitated by the march of urban development.

Mounted nearby is "Urban Fiction," a series of chromatic prints made by Xing Danwen in 2005. The prints show developers' models of the massive apartment complexes that have sprouted across Beijing in recent years, but are wistfully humanized by the imposition of fragments from real life - a woman on a balcony watering flowers, a couple in a passionate embrace, a lonely figure crying in a window.

Many of the works in the exhibition focus on the migrant laborers who demolish and construct the nation's walls and the ordinary workers who find themselves rendered unemployable by the economic reform process. Wang Bing's digital video "Tiexi District" is an exhaustive nine-hour documentary that explores the lives, loves and losses of factory workers in one of China's rust-belt areas. Zhang Dali's "Chinese Offspring" is a striking installation comprising dozens of naked human figures hung upside down from the ceiling. The figures, plaster body casts of migrant workers hired for the project, are in every imaginable position - bending, squatting, reaching, lolling - but all have their eyes closed tight. Suspended and shut-eyed, they produce a sense of vertigo and an overwhelming sympathy for the millions of men and women whose lives have been turned upside down in the torrent of modernization.

The invisible boundary that is perhaps most closely considered in "The Wall" is that which separates women from men; the exhibition attempts to surmount this divide by displaying a number of works by female artists. Because Chinese women often use needle, thread, laundry and the like in their art, Gao posits that such domestic materials may be meant to address their subordinate position. But if the pieces shown here by women artists do indeed use traditional "female" materials, the works themselves seem more celebratory than rebellious.

Yin Xiuzhen's "Supermarket" of 2002 is a light-hearted, compelling installation that consists of two ceiling-high shopping carts, eight pedal-operated sewing machines and 16 patchwork quilts on which elderly seamstresses stitched three-dimensional vistas. Some of the quilt vistas are urban, replete with high-rises, bridges, cars and trucks, while others are rural, with country houses, ponds, ducks and donkeys. All are made from old clothes and each can be viewed as an effort to stitch back together the nation's rapidly changing physical and cultural patchwork.

Yu Hong's 2005 "Memory Dress" is a series of oversize printed T-shirts hung from metal hangers, with each T-shirt representing a year from the life of the artist and the nation. The shirt from 1969, for example, shows Yu's painting of herself as a 3-year-old in Beihai Park; on the back is a 1969 propaganda photo of a family singing "The Quotations of Chairman Mao." Viewing the T-shirts, one becomes privy to Yu's personal progression from child to mother and artist, and at the same time is reminded of the massive changes the country has undergone in her young life. One is also confronted with the limits of these changes, since the T-shirt depicting 1989 was removed; all that is left to represent that momentous year of anti-government protests is an empty hanger.

The final wall evoked by this exhibition, albeit obliquely, is that which separated contemporary art and artists from China's mainstream culture for most of the 1980s and 1990s. This wall has been largely demolished in the past five years and contemporary art has entered what Gao aptly calls the Art Museum Age. Chinese artists are sought by collectors and curators from around the world, and major museums across China vie to hold the most attention-getting contemporary art exhibitions.

There is much good to be said about this breaching of the wall, for artists and audiences alike, but Gao also fears it has caused artists to compromise their work to fit curatorial interests and the demands of the market. Indeed, he rather ironically looks forward to the day when the hallowed walls of museums and galleries will lose their appeal.

"I hope some artists will rebel against the museum exhibition and criticize the institutional art world and the curatorial system," he says. "I want to be criticized! But right now artists have no time to criticize - they are just enjoying."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/08/04/opinion/wall.php
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/18/arts/design/18wall.html

 

 

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Matthias Arnold
(Art-Eastasia list)

http://www.chinaresource.org
http://www.fluktor.de

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