Proximities in public

Proximities 1 is open to the public and it has been a thrill to see the first phase as an actual exhibition. It looks like it was intended to—lush, colorful, a little bit critical.

The gallery now seems a contemporary interjection between areas devoted to traditional galleries of Korean and Japanese objects, a spot within which to ponder notions of time and place.

As the show faces a public, this is also an opportunity for feedback. The week before the show opened, I began to hear, second hand, questions about who is included in the show—particularly why it is that there are mostly non-Asian artists in What Time Is It There?. The beauty of having the blog platform is that it allows for this issue to be acknowledged. Here are some curatorial notes:

One of the show’s goals is to create new connections between the museum and the local contemporary art public. As I began the process, I considered the idea that the museum was interested in broadening its audience and addressing a community of artists who live and work here.  I began with my own position: Why wasn’t I more connected to the venue? Partly it’s because I am not schooled in Asian art history, and partly because my interests are more focused on contemporary art, which is only sporadically presented at the Asian. I figured I wasn’t the only one who felt this way.  (It turned out that a surprising number of the artists in the shows had never actually been to the museum before, and in that regard, the show has begun to do its job of broadening the scope of visitors.) And of course there is always the question of identity as an entry point: Does an artist or viewer have to be Asian or Asian American to consider the subject? Spending time at the museum, it’s clear that the audience and staff are a diverse bunch.

With the first show, I wanted to create entry points for artists and viewers of all stripes. There was a directive from the museum to address “Asia” as a totality, which is a huge, unwieldy theme. I considered artists who had some connection to this vast idea; the more unlikely the connection seemed the most interesting to me. When I told colleagues about the show, they assumed that it would only include Asian artists, making the idea of thwarting expectation all the more appealing. James Gobel, for example, seems like the last person you’d expect to be showing in this particular museum, and yet his abstract painting reveals fitting connections to the themes (Manila being his subject). Hopefully his work suggests more entry points to the museum, and who has a connection to it, than we might initially consider. There are Asian and hyphenate artists in the trio of exhibitions; the artists selected are those who had not exhibited in an “Asian” context before (in upcoming shows you’ll see Barry McGee, Kota Ezawa, Imin Yeh, Michael Jang, and others).

The first show is purposefully about distance from place, about imagining the far away. I was initially inspired by Raymond Roussel’s 1910 surrealist novel, Impressions of Africa, which revels in the notion of the imagined place through a formalized lens. In Proximities, we are viewing the concept of “Asia” from California, in a museum that is very much a constructed presentation of culture and an institution beset with unavoidable cultural baggage. I think the first show offers its criticisms subtly. It’s a small show, but hopefully one that will generate some productive discussion along with its aesthetic pleasures.

Water Stains on the Wall

Xu Bing in front of his video installation ‘Character of Characters’

Our book on Xu Bing’s fascinating animation The Character of Characters will be arriving in the museum store soon.  Featuring essays by Britta Erickson, a leading expert on Chinese contemporary art, and by the artist, as well as a version of the actual animation, its arrival will be something to keep on your radar.

We have just finished translating Xu Bing’s essay, which makes clear the artist’s intellectual as well as artistic depth.  It follows the order of the animation and makes many aspects much clearer; it is also full of delightful and sometimes challenging references to writings from the past.  An example is the simple sentence: “The stroke’s force should convey the aesthetic sensibility of ‘water stains caused by rain on the wall of a country cottage’.”

If you’ve seen Out of Character already, that quotation may sound familiar. Included in the exhibition is a video of contemporary dance work Water Stains on the Wall, by Cloud Gate Dance Theater from Taiwan.

The title of Cloud Gate’s work and Xu Bing’s reference both derive from a legendary conversation between two of the most respected Chinese calligraphers of the Tang Dynasty (618 – 907):

“Where do you get inspirations for your calligraphic style?” asked Yan Zhenqing, whose signature style of standard script brought Chinese calligraphy to a new height. “I observe summer clouds that resemble mountains with spectacular peaks,” replied Huaisu, the young monk who later became the most renowned master of wild cursive style. “The most exciting parts remind one of birds flying out of woods and snakes slithering into bushes. . .” “How about water stains on the wall?” asked Yan Zhenqing. “Right on! You old devil!” exclaimed Huaisu.

Water stains on a wall are the result of a long process of natural, organic, and fluid evolution. The legend of the conversation established “water stains on the wall” as a popular metaphor that represents the highest aesthetics of Chinese calligraphy. Inspired by this metaphor, choreographer Lin Hwai-min and the Cloud Gate dancers create an abstract work of spellbinding beauty and breathtaking technique that stands sublimely on its own.

We’re thrilled that in Out of Character you can experience both of these contemporary works in the context of the artform that inspired them. And be looking for the publication on Xu Bing’s The Character of Characters at the museum store soon.

Designing “Out of Character”

Strong visual impact was a primary goal for our exhibition Out of Character: Decoding Chinese Calligraphy.  This is not always easy to accomplish in an art form often intended for private viewings by small groups or individuals.  An example is Thousand Character Classic by Wen Peng (1498-1573), an album of 85 double leaves.  The album is a format that is meant to be viewed page by page, but we asked Marco Centin, our exhibition designer, Shiho Sasaki, our paper conservator, and Vincent Avalos, our mount maker to come up with a way to show all 85 leaves and the cover on a large curved wall.  As shown in the photograph here, their solution is ingenious and the result is stunning and magical.  It took almost the entire summer for the team to make this happen!

Installing Calligraphy

Curators Michael and Joseph in front of the installation of Wen Peng’s “Thousand Character Essay”. Photo courtesy of Jerry Yang.

Out of Character: Decoding Chinese Calligraphy opens next week, and installation is in full swing. This is always a frantic, stressful, and exciting time for us, especially for the people at the coal face: curators, registrars, conservators and the preparations team.

Yesterday I was lucky enough to walk past one of the galleries while the team was installing. I felt compelled to press my face against the tinted glass doors to try to get a better look. Although unfinished, the display in the galleries is breathtaking. I must confess, I had trouble getting excited about an exhibition of calligraphy at first. But having seen the exhibition take shape over the past few months, I can’t wait for it to open. It’s going to be amazing.

Luckily for you, our photographer has been snapping some images of the installation, so you can have your own sneak peek on Flickr. Out of Character opens on October 5, but we’re kicking off with artist Xu Bing and collector Jerry Yang in conversation with museum director Jay Xu on October 4. See you there.

Bamboo artwork: preparing to say goodbye

Charwei Tsai, Bamboo Mantra, 2012. Black ink on bamboo. Site-specific installation.

Charwei Tsai’s Bamboo Mantra continues to reinvent itself. Last time I wrote about a thumb-sized sprout that had emerged from the soil. Look how big our shoot has become! You have less than a week to see this work as it was created because Phantoms of Asia will close on September 2. Once it is de-installed, it will only exist in photographs and memories.

Xu Bing: The Character of Characters, coming soon

One of Xu Bing’s sketches for The Character of Characters.

One of the most exciting things about Out of Character: Decoding Chinese Calligraphy is without doubt the new work acclaimed Chinese artist Xu Bing is creating for the exhibition.

Xu Bing’s work is an animation, but as it is being created right now there’s not a whole lot more we can tell you about it yet. However, we did just receive some amazing stats from the artist.

Each day 14 people (including Xu Bing) are working on the project. They work 10 hours per day and have worked 35 days thus far; a total of 4900 person hours to date. Given that work will continue through September, they expect a further 5600 hours to be added to this number.

Xu Bing has drawn approximately 50 drafts and more than 1000 hand drawn sketches. There could be thousands more sketches by the end of the project.

Given all of that, we’re expecting something extraordinary. Don’t miss it.

Art of Cultivation, Cultivation of Art: Tending Charwei Tsai’s “Bamboo Mantra”.

Laurel never expected to turn gardener when she joined the Art and Programs team.

The label for Charwei Tsai’s Bamboo Mantra states that the canvas of the work, twelve potted bamboo plants, will inevitably wither and die, as an example of the Buddhist precept of nonattachment. It is my job, however, to make sure the inevitable is staved off until after September 2, when our current exhibition Phantoms of Asia closes. Therefore, I can be found every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning with a big yellow watering can, making sure the bamboo gets the water it needs to stay alive.

Despite appearances I am not actually the staff gardener. As an assistant in the exhibitions department, most of my day involves administrative work ensuring the success of our exhibitions—scheduling, budgeting, and planning for the shows we will be hosting in the coming years. When we added Charwei’s work to the object list for Phantoms, there were many questions to answer—was it safe to have living plants in the galleries? Would the bamboo come with any insects that might pose a threat to artworks? Would they get enough sun? And, finally, who was going to take care of them? As the staff member with the most confidence in her green thumb, I happily volunteered.

It’s been fun to take care of this artwork for the last two months. Bamboo, which is actually more closely related to grass than to trees, grows very quickly. In its native environment, it has been observed growing up to 39 inches in one day. Due to the foggy San Francisco summers, our bamboo has been performing considerably worse than that, but its vigor is still impressive. In the last few weeks I have watched stalks grow from new buds to towering eight-foot shoots. Just this morning, while tending to the grove behind Ganesh on the third floor, I spotted a new sprout emerging from the soil. I look forward to watching it grow. At the moment it looks just like this Japanese lacquered netsuke from our collection. There’s something very satisfying about the plump shape of this bamboo bud—brimming with life, possibilities, or, in some cuisines, deliciousness.

As part of her art practice, Charwei delicately painted the heart sutra on the surface of the plant itself. Eventually, the plant will outgrow all the calligraphy, shedding old leaves and stalks. Every day, one or two painted leaves fall from the plants, but they are always replaced by new, fresh green leaves. The heart sutra describes the temporary nature of all things. There is flux at the heart of this artwork. It’s been rewarding to visit it so often. Every time I see it, there is something new.

Phantoms of Asia Tour, Part 7: Art from Home

Adeela Suleman with “Untitled (Peacock with Missiles) with added elements”.

Recently staff were treated to an exclusive tour of Phantoms of Asia led by Associate Curator of Contemporary Art Allison Harding. While Allison can’t personally escort every visitor around the galleries, we wanted to share the experience. In this, the final in our series of posts based on the tour, we look at four works rooted in the artists’ home towns.

Jagannath Panda‘s The Cult of Survival II is a response to modernization and development in Indian cities like Bhubaneswar, where Panda was born, and Gurgaon, the satellite-city of New Delhi where he currently lives. Panda explores these themes using traditional icons built from industrial materials such as sewage pipes. This work was created specifically for Phantoms, and is now a larger series.

Opposite the sewage-snake is another of Panda’s works, The Cult of Appearance III, which is being shown for this first time. The painting includes collage elements made from traditional Indian fabrics. For those who know Indian textiles these fabric pieces would be identifiable as being from a particular region; thus the artist has used the very materials of the work to create an additional layer of meaning. The piece depicts scenes from epics alongside contemporary images of Indian life. The figures at the bottom of the painting show people fleeing from floodwaters in Bhubaneswar in 2011. Some experts claim that the floods were caused by the mismanagement of water from a nearby dam.

Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul creates an eerie otherworld in Phantoms of Nabua. The film is set in the artist’s hometown, which suffered in the military crackdowns from the 1960s to 80s, forcing the men of the village to flee. There is a legend in the area of a witch who abducts the men of the village, and this intersection of myth and reality has earned the village the name “widow town”. In the ten-minute film we watch the rituals of young men hanging out, kicking a soccer ball, but in the film the ball is on fire; this peaceful activity holds the seeds of destruction. The film reminds us that  notions of home can be destroyed, burned down.

Another artist with a complex relationship with home is Pakistani Adeela Suleman. Suleman lives in Karachi, where she holds the Chair of Fine Arts at the Indus Valley University of Art and Architecture. She is also a mother of three. Her steel reliefs are based on the metal decorations used in the city’s delivery trucks and buses, and is strongly rooted in the everday live of the city. But for people in Karachi, death is a part of everyday life, and Suleman’s work powerfully confronts the reality of living surrounded by violence. She says that when her husband goes to work each day, she never knows if he will come home. Her juxtaposition of symbols of violence such as missiles and suicide vests with images from nature and scenes from myth are unsettling, and tell a powerful and disturbing story of home.

Tour Part 1: Heman Chong
Tour Part 2: Hiroshi Sugimoto
Tour Part 3: Asian Cosmologies
Tour Part 4:  Hidden Energies
Tour Part 5: The Afterlife
Tour Part 6: Myth, Ritual, Meditation

Phantoms of Asia Tour, Part 6: Myth, Ritual, Meditation

Adrian Wong in our library during the planning of his feng shui installation.

Recently staff were treated to an exclusive tour of Phantoms of Asia led by Associate Curator of Contemporary Art Allison Harding. While Allison can’t personally escort every visitor around the galleries, we wanted to share the experience. We’ll be presenting a series of posts based on the tour, with Allison’s insights into the works and the artists who created them.

Osher Gallery is the final room of the exhibition and also the largest. The diverse collection of works here deals with the overarching theme of myth, ritual and meditation. These works ask how we can commune with spiritual.

As you enter the room you are confronted by Motohiko Odani‘s masks, which are styled on the masks worn in Japanese no theater. These, though, are half anatomical, half trapped here on the physical plane. There seems to be a tension as well as a communion between the physical and the spiritual. On the opposite wall is a selection of traditional masks from our collection; old and new confront each other across the room. I wonder what they make of their counterparts from another time.

As you continue through the gallery you reach one of the most unusual—and funniest—works in the exhibition. Canadian artist Adrian Wong
has created two rooms using the principles of feng shui, one auspicious and one inauspicious.  Wong is trained as a research psychologist, and his art practice is a fusion of science and art.  He was inspired to create this work after learning that many people wouldn’t come to the Asian Art Museum because they believe that our building has bad feng shui. He began researching feng shui with a scientific eye, interviewing many experts from the Bay Area and becoming along the way a leading expert on the feng shui of our building. Walking through the rooms, with their linoleum floors creating a cheesy 70s aesthetic, you get the feeling that the artist’s tongue is firmly in his cheek.

From the somewhat ridiculous to the sublime, you next encounter Prabhavathi Meppayil‘s white panels. Meppayil is from a family of traditional metalworkers. Using traditional tools and techniques, she blends 1960s minimalilsm and her own cultural tradition to create these meditative pieces. The works are created by embedding copper wire in the panel; you need to get low  to see the metallic quality of the wires and really appreciate the detail of the piece. Achieving this kind of simplicity is a complex process; maybe that’s why these tend to be favorites among the artists that come through the exhibition.

Tour part 1: Heman Chong
Tour Part 2: Hiroshi Sugimoto
Tour Part 3: Asian Cosmologies
Tour Part 4: Hidden Energies
Tour Part 5: The Afterlife
Tour Part 7: Art from Home 

Phantoms of Asia Tour, Part 5: The Afterlife

Jompet, Anno Domini, 2011. Wooden pillars, sound installation, text, soldier figures and video components. Dimensions variable. Installation view. Photo: Kaz Tsuruta.

Recently staff were treated to an exclusive tour of Phantoms of Asia led by Associate Curator of Contemporary Art Allison Harding. While Allison can’t personally escort every visitor around the galleries, we wanted to share the experience. We’ll be presenting a series of posts based on the tour, with Allison’s insights into the works and the artists who created them.

As you leave Hambrecht gallery you encounter a video installation by Thai artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook. In this provocative piece, Araya lectures a group of cadavers on death and the afterlife. Her work explores how we react to death, and is very much tied up with her own Buddhist faith. The reactions to her work bring home the different attitudes to death across cultures.  In many cultures the body is brought into the home for ritual and preparation. Araya’s work in some ways reflects these traditions, while also being irreverent–she is, after all, using dead bodies as props. This caused her some problems when she performed a similar piece in Italy, where corpses cannot be used for any purpose. In the end, denied access to the Italian dead, it is rumored Araya had cadavers flown over from New York. For me, these stories add to the experience of the work itself, prompting me to think about how different cultures think about death.

Outside the gallery is an alcove charmingly named Vinson Nook, currently housing an installation by Indonesian artist Jompet. Works from this series have been shown around the world and made a huge splash at the Venice Biennale last year. Jompet’s work delves into the history and syncretic culture of Java. This piece depicts bodiless soldiers, the symbolic protectors of a blended past. The guards’ costumes incorporate Dutch and Javanese elements, the music references street parades, and the whole is contained within the frame of a traditional Javanese house. The installation weaves these elements together to physically depict the story of modern Java.

Tour Part 1: Heman Chong
Tour Part 2: Hiroshi Sugimoto
Tour Part 3: Asian Cosmologies
Tour Part 4: Hidden Energies
Tour Part 6: Myth, Ritual, Meditation
Tour Part 7: Art from Home