artdaily.com, 11/22/2005
The Crow Collection of Asian Art Presents: TRUE WORDS

DALLAS, TX.-The Crow Collection of Asian Art, located in downtown
Dallas, announces the opening of True Words: Wood Sculpture Relief by a
Group of Artists from Shandong, China. This exceptional exhibit is
making its third appearance in the United States since 2003. This is its
second appearance in Texas. It will run at the Crow Collection through
January 2, 2006. Admission is free. The twenty pieces of the True Words
exhibit are artistically captivating and emotionally moving. The works
have been created by a group of deaf and mute artists in their early
thirties, who live and work near the northeast coast of China.

The eight artists live with their adopted guardians in a remote village
outside the town of Wei Fang, China. Notably, the works and artistic
genius are not compromised by their imposing disabilities. The ability
to reflect upon poignant subject matter such as family relationships,
sexual anxieties and longing for brotherhood are articulated through
these intricate carvings.

The artists’ highly developed visual vocabularies are presented in
woodcarvings that are both extraordinarily innovative and culturally
time- honored. The works encompass many traditional Chinese art and folk
art traditions, while simultaneously combining the flavors of modern
western art, as well as the techniques of primitive African woodcarving
and Mayan culture. The juxtaposition of these various elements adds to
the visual appeal of the works. The collection debuted at The China
National Art Museum in Beijing in May of 1997.

“The Crow Collection of Asian Art is proud to bring this distinctive
exhibit to Dallas. The combination of the artists’ touching stories and
the aesthetics of the carvings distinguishes this very special
collection,” said Amy Lewis Hofland, director of The Crow Collection of
Asian Art. “We encourage visitors and members alike to come to the
museum and take advantage of this unique opportunity.”

In celebration of this exhibit, The Crow Collection of Asian Art will
sponsor a Members’ Preview event; a public lecture by Christopher Zhu,
the exhibition curator; and SCULPT IT!, a fun family festival. The
Members’ Preview will be held on Tuesday, September 20 from 6-8 p.m. For
admission to the Members’ Preview, visitors may join the membership
program, Friends of the Crow Collection. For more information, please
visit www.crowcollection.org.

The Trammell & Margaret Crow Collection of Asian Art contains more than
600 paintings, objects of metal and stone, and large architectural
pieces from China, Japan, India, and Southeast Asia. Over 300 works are
on display in the galleries including precious jade ornaments from
China, delicate Japanese scrolls and a rarely seen twenty-eight foot by
twelve foot sandstone facade of an eighteenth century Indian residence.

http://www.artdaily.com/section/news/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=15572

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artdaily.com, 11/20/2005
Evocative Creatures: Animal Motifs and Symbols Opens

CAMBRIDGE, MA.-The Arthur M. Sackler Museum presents Evocative
Creatures: Animal Motifs and Symbols in East Asian Art, on view through
June 11, 2006. Although the landscape, with its towering mountains and
rushing streams, has traditionally been the principal subject matter of
East Asian painting, the smaller details of nature, including birds,
beasts, and insects, have also occupied a place of distinction in the
visual arts. By the Han dynasty (206 bc-ad 220), domesticated animals
and fantastic creatures alike had entered the chinese artistic
repertoire, and in late Imperial times (the Ming [1368-1644] and Qing
[1644-1911] dynasties), the phoenix and the dragon-ancient symbols of
the yin and yang (female and male) forces of the universe-became
official symbols of the royal house. Many of those mythical creatures
came to be embraced by artists in Korea and Japan.

Through paintings, ceramics, sculptures, jades, and textiles from the
permanent collections, this exhibition explores the symbolism and
significance of a variety of real and fictitious animals in the arts of
East Asia, and includes a section on animals that, according to Buddhist
religious texts, serve as symbols for specific deities. Organized by
Robert D. Mowry, Alan J. Dworsky Curator of chinese art.

[image] Gibbons Playing in an Old Tree along the Banks of a Stream,
Japanese; Early Edo period, c. 1630. One panel (detail) from a two-panel
folding screen; ink on paper, 179 x 174.7 cm (painting proper). Arthur
M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Gift from the
Collection of Millard L. and Margaret L. Meiss, 1995.6. Photo: Rick
Stafford, HUAM, © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

http://www.artdaily.com/section/news/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=15546

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NYT, November 20, 2005
Royal Ontario's Refurbished Galleries to Showcase Asian Art Holdings
By SUSAN CATTO

The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto will open 10 renovated galleries on
Dec. 26, including seven devoted to China, Japan and Korea. Four of
these Far Eastern galleries showcase the museum's extensive collection
of Chinese art, artifacts and sculpture.

The highlights include newly restored temple wall paintings from the
Yuan dynasty (1271-1368), a female polo player in lead-glazed
earthenware from about A.D. 700, right, and an 18th-century throne.

The Gallery of Chinese Architecture, the first of its kind in North
America, includes a tomb complex from the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). The
new Japanese gallery displays prints and paintings, armor and sculpture.
In addition to a permanent gallery of Korean culture, a temporary
exhibition (until Sept. 4, 2006), explores the work of Gim Gisan, an
early 20th-century Korean painter. Other new galleries focus on Bronze
Age Aegean culture, ancient Cyprus and Canada's aboriginal societies.

The opening of the galleries will complete the first stage of the
museum's five-year expansion project. A new building designed by Daniel
Libeskind is expected to open next fall, adding over 50,000 square feet
of gallery space.

Information: (416) 586-5549 or www.rom.on.ca.

http://travel2.nytimes.com/2005/11/20/travel/20advmuseum.html?pagewanted=print

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Taipei Times, Thursday, Nov 10
A diplomatic success for Taiwan's rising artists
A 'Peep into Taiwanese Contemporary Photography' got its first airing at the UK's cultural office while Main Trend and TIVAC have worthwhile exhibitions
By Susan Kendzulak

If you didn't make the gala party last week at the British Trade and Cultural Office Residence in Yangmingshan, the first time an exhibition of local art has been shown at a diplomatic residence, you can still see the avant-garde art that was exhibited and which is now being shown at the Taipei MOMA Gallery.

Entitled A Peep into Taiwanese Contemporary Photography the exhibition brings together several of the hottest Taiwanese artists working today.

The party was an important event as it merged two audiences that normally do not cross paths: those working in the foreign services and those in the art world. The exhibition helped to broaden the audience for the local art while also highlighting the importance of cultural exchanges.

The concise exhibition at the gallery contains digital imagery, video and photographs by some of the top Taiwanese artists and provides a general overview of what is happening currently in art. This is a great opportunity to see the work of some of the best artists in Taiwan.
[image] Companion for Life by Wu Tien-Chang. PHOTOS COURTESY OF TAIPEI MOMA

For some flashy images, Hung Tung-lu's (洪東祿) lenticular boxes which combine manga-style nubile queens with a Western art-historical image; while Peng Hung-chih's (彭弘智) costumed-clad mutts doing it doggy-style provide quite a chuckle.

Wu Tien-chang's (吳天章) disturbing burlesque and grotesque tandem cyclists broadly provide synchronous smiles in a large digital work that is partly cynical while being aesthetically pleasing; while Chang Chien-chi's (張乾琦) The Chain gives us a glimpse of unbearable reality.
[image] Huang Tung-lu's Chun-li.

On view are two video works that range from deeply somber to sidesplitting slapstick. Chen Chieh-ren's (陳界仁) has a DVD shot of the Majestic Tower, a utopic site, but in reality a disused factory that symbolizes the faded hopes and dreams of the local populace.

In contrast, the lighthearted and humorous videos of Tsui Kuang-yu (崔廣 宇) are on view, in which he knocks over a flock of pigeons with a bowling bowl.

Taipei MOMA Gallery is at 3F, 19, Ln 252, Dunhua S Rd, Sec 1, Taipei (台 北市大安區敦化南路一段252巷19號3樓). Call (02) 8771 3372.

Besides this, there are several exhibitions about town. If you're still in a photographic mood, then go to TIVAC to see its current show of Taiwanese and German photographers. Taiwan International Visual Arts Center, 1 F, 29, Ln 45, Liaoning Street (台北市遼寧街45巷29號1樓). Call (02) 2773 3347.

Song of the Wanderer -- Taiwan German Photography Exhibition includes work by Ulrike Myrzik and Manfred Jarisch, with the theme "Architecture of the Homeless." Ho Ching-tai (何經泰) and Jiang Shih-Shien (江思賢) show their documentary-style photos of homeless people.

At the Main Trend Gallery there is a solo show by Chang Chen-jen (張正 仁) titled Parallelism that features collages and small sculptural installations. For all you art history buffs, Main Trend is known for its well-researched publications (now defunct, but still collectible) about the local art scene. Main Trend Gallery (大趨勢畫廊) is at 209-1, Chengde Rd, Sec 3, Taipei (台北市大同區承德路三段209-1號).

Taking place simultaneously, in Kaohsiung at the Sin Pin Pier and at the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design in Birmingham, England, Seesaw is a conceptual art exhibition that tries to merge two time-zones via digital art. The exhibition includes the work of UK artists and of Taiwanese artists. Since the works are electronic, they disappear when switched off; therefore the art seesaws between the two cities separated by an eight-hour time difference.

Hsu Su-chen (許淑真) is one of the artists who recently finished an art residency in the UK and works prolifically as an artist and curator. If you are unable to travel to either place, the work can be seen in cyberspace at www.seesawsite.net.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2005/11/10/2003279621

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The Japan Times, Nov. 10, 2005
MONO-HA
The thing itself
By MATT LARKING

In October 1968 Nobuo Sekine dug a hole in the ground, shaped the extracted dirt into a large cylinder and called the work "Phase -- Mother Earth." It was probably an experiment, influenced by discussions of the new Land Art and Minimalist works taking place in the United States.
[image] Nobuo Sekine in front of his "Phase -- Mother Earth" (1968) News photo

When it was first constructed, the prevailing view in Japan was that it was a kind of quirky visual play of positive and negative spaces. But artist Lee Ufan disagreed, claiming that this was actually the end of visual manipulation; it was in fact a real time, real life absence and presence presented in temporal juxtaposition -- a before and an after.

This, Sekine's piece and Lee's comment, is typically pointed to as the founding moment of Japan's influential, homegrown Mono-ha art movement.

Born into the post-war years and the supposed ruins of consumer culture, a small group of artists were attempting to create a new, utopian reality. They proceeded as if art might be re-enchanted by shifting attention away from the objectification of images and to the creation of a world of encounters, with everyday objects, that might end up looking like mythic gestures.

Mono-ha, literally "the school of things," was initially an informal term -- sometimes used derisively -- that brought together loosely affiliated artists around Tokyo including Sekine, Lee, Susumu Koshimizu, Katsuro Yoshida, and 12 or so others. From 1968 to the mid '70s, these artists used natural materials such as charcoal, stones and earth or manufactured ones such as acrylic sheets, girders and glass.

More practically, the overriding tenet was that plain materials be used without doing much of anything to them. This prevented the presentation of the material from being artificially constrained by the limited perspective of an individual artist's ego. Time and space were valued more, and so were relationships to the surrounding world in all their Zen-like interconnectedness and ephemerality.

News photo
Jiro Takamatsu's "Kami no Tantai (Paper Itself)" (1971); bottom: Lee Ufan's "System A" (1969); right: Susumu Koshimizu's ``Paper 2'' (1969)
News photo

Lee's "System A" (1969), for example, is a large cube of cotton wool to which steel plates are attached to the flanks, exploring tensions between soft and hard, natural and man-made, and Koshimizu made giant paper envelopes that contain slabs of rock, like "Paper 2" (1969).

Mono-ha fizzled out by the mid-'70s as its members took to various alternative creative directions, and only retrospectively, like many groups, did it really seem cohesive. Its legacy, however, is unlikely to fade: the movement is largely synonymous with the beginnings of contemporary art in Japan, especially as a modern Asian aesthetic untrammeled by imported Western preoccupations.

Much of the daily work of museums and art historians is to tell stories about artists and art movements, locating pivotal moments and seminal works, while serving up plausible explanations for the motives behind the pieces. So it goes with Osaka's National Museum of Art's "Reconsidering Mono-ha." The gist of the show is to revise the commonly accepted belief that Mono-ha got under way with Sekine's "Phase -- Mother Earth."

The Osaka show chooses instead to locate Mono-ha's beginnings in the uncertainties of perception -- optical puzzles of juxtaposition, line and color, like those found in university psychology textbooks -- that characterized many 1960s Japanese paintings and sculptures. This was, actually, the approach that Lee rejected in his original comments on "Phase -- Mother Earth." But in "Reconsidering Mono-ha," Sekine's mentor Jiro Takamatsu (b.1936) is accorded a founding role for his influential "Shadow" paintings of the 1960s that played with perspective or depicted source-less silhouettes on the canvas.

Sekine had been Takamatsu's assistant, and toyed with eye-deceiving works like the seemingly circular painting "Phase No.5," a contemporaneous work of "Phase -- Mother Earth." From these origins in visually challenging the surety of seeing, artists would ultimately move to more conceptual explorations of materials.

The National Museum of Art, Osaka, isn't the only place where the period is being reconsidered. As the leading Mono-ha artist/philosopher/critic, Lee has been dealing with the movements' emphasis on space, time and minimally reductive use of materials for nearly 40 years. Some 36 recent sculptures and paintings are currently at the artist's solo show, "The Art of Margins," at the Yokohama Museum of Art till Dec. 23.

Since his revelation during "Phase -- Mother Earth," Lee's approach has been to resist definite forms. By using repetitive practices that slowly dissolve through variation and contrast over decades, his pieces remain ultimately incomplete. His current paintings are similar to early works that attempt to fashion a space for correspondences between the painted and unpainted areas. And much like Robert Ryman, a fellow winner of the Praemium Imperiale, it's as if he were searching for the beginnings of painting itself -- the application of pigment to a surface, resulting in a multiplication of relations.
[image] Susumu Koshimizu's "Paper 2" (1969),News photo

In the end, the Osaka show does not dislodge the importance of "Phase -- Mother Earth," or Lee's understanding of it, but broadens the context of its inception. Installation and site-specific artists, for whom the placement of a piece is everything, have essentially embraced Mono-ha's principles -- much as Lee did after observing Sekine's revolutionary work 40 years earlier. Mono-ha artists were truly the progenitors of such art as has now become seamlessly absorbed within, and a staple of, contemporary art. Lee's recent work reminds us that he remains one of its leaders.

"Reconsidering Mono-ha" is at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, till Dec. 18; open 10 a.m.-5 p.m., closed Mondays. For more information, visit www.nmao.go.jp

"Lee Ufan -- The Art of Margins" is at the Yokohama Museum of Art till Dec. 23; open 10 a.m.-6 p.m. (8 p.m. on Fridays), closed Thursdays. For more information, visit www.yma.city.yokohama.jp

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?fa20051110a1.htm

 

 

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with kind regards,

Matthias Arnold
(Art-Eastasia list)

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

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