Ugly Blog

Asia Contemporary Art Week, in C-Arts Magazine (May 2008)

During the week of March 15 to 24, 2008, New York’s fifth Asian Contemporary Art Week (ACAW) brought together forty-six New York City museums and galleries in sixty special events-exhibitions, screenings, and conversations-featuring over a hundred artists from every corner of Asia.

Melissa Chiu, museum director of the Asia Society, a major fiscal sponsor of ACAW that itself holds roughly two contemporary exhibitions per year, noted that “Since the first Asian Contemporary Art Week held in 2002, there has been a dramatic increase in awareness of Asian contemporary art and we like to believe this initiative has contributed.” In fact, from Turkey to Taiwan, Israel to Indonesia, the availability of Asian art to New York viewers has exploded to such an extent that choosing which shows to attend becomes a curatorial experience: just on Thursday, March 20^th, between 6PM and 8PM, twenty participating galleries held openings.

Running from gallery to gallery, it quickly became clear that the idea of “Asian contemporary art” is as resistant to essentialization as the idea of “Western contemporary art.” Though New York City still boasts itself the centre of the art world, the art itself, whatever its geographic origin, has become a collection of peripheries.

This impression was not accidental. The director of ACAW, Leeza Ahmady, has made a concerted effort to represent the entirety of Asia, to reconnect Asia with itself. She was born in Afghanistan and came to the U.S. at thirteen. Her own identity didn’t fit comfortably into the definition of Asia at the time, and created in her a sense that Asia also had a centre of authority that failed to include its outer edges. “Until recently, Asia meant China, Japan and Korea. I am extremely pleased with the inclusion that imagines a much more representative Asia. But this expansion of what Asia means forces a redefinition of its relationship to the word. The idea of East and West just doesn’t exist anymore. Everyone is influenced by everyone else, by all the images we consume. There is a need to accept self-authority and self-validation.”

As a result, this year’s ACAW focused on the massive diversity of Asia, and for the first time included venues that were not inherently oriented towards Asia: the Guggenheim, the Whitney and MOMA. Institutions of impeccable merit.

Nevertheless, by virtue of this variety and lacking a single strand around which to structure one’s gallery night, viewers (and reviewers) were left with a dilemma.

One approach would have been to structure the week around importance within the art world. In other words, fame. By that measure, ACAW had plenty of recognized names: Akram Zaatari from Lebanon, Lin Yilin from China and currently based in Brooklyn, Navin Rawanchaikul of Thailand, Byron Kim, an Asian American artist based in New York, and Ranbir Kaleka from India. Less well known in the U.S. but established in Asia and Europe were Tie Ying and Xu Zhongmin, both from Beijing, who kicked off the week with a conversation at Sotheby’s. And then, of course, there was Cai Guo-Qiang’s mid-career retrospective at the Guggenheim.

But for those who consider fame too inherently conservative, or behind the curve, there was a better framework: focus on the shows that you like, shows that will stay in your mind. For us, this approach yielded some overlap. The way Cai Guo-Qiang filled Frank Lloyd Wright’s twisting space with exploding installations was not to be missed. Not only because I Want to Believe was the Guggenheim’s first solo show devoted to a Chinese-born artist, but because his destruction-born constructions are magnificent. And it’s not every day one gets to see nine white automobiles frozen as they fly through the air, six of them suspended in the Guggenheim’s iconic atrium transfixed with sequenced multichannel light tubes (Inopportune: Stage One, 2004).

Another fantastic show by a well-known artist was Punjabi-born Ranbir Kaleka’s marriage-transmutation really-of painting and video at Bose Pacia gallery. In Fables from the House of Ibaan: stage 1, a painting hung on the wall with a video projected onto it; Kaleka created a living tableau of a man sitting, contemplating life at his table while three candles of red, yellow, and blue flicker occasionally at his side. A house’s life passes behind him as he thinks, creating a space between real world and allegorical presence. In a jolt to the viewer the man then gets up: the stilled image suddenly moves (in the video) while continuing to sit where he always has (in the painting). He comes and goes during various events of his lifetime, then sits again for a long time, until one is comfortably sure he is a fiction, an allegory, a stand-in admonishing that “this is not real, but it could have been, it could be.”

Watching the work creates a sense of uneasiness, but also presents an exciting defense of painting: of its irreplaceability and relevance as an art medium. When asked for his definition of painting, Kaleka replied, “The mark can become a body or a bird or an evocative surface. It doesn’t hide the fact that it is an artifact, it is an invention. Painting is aware of its thingness. What excites me is the magic that a mark has to become things.”

Kaleka’s methodology was not enough to make the piece this good, however. Rather, it was the existential coupling of painting/video to contemplation/action, paralleling the idea that one participates or doesn’t in his own life: as painting provides the opportunity of a long gaze, a time-frozen contemplation, it is action, the movement of the video, that creates the life worth contemplating. Each alone cannot a life make. And then, as any great piece of work is liable to do, the mind believes a reality it did not know existed.

Another impressive video was Japanese-born India-based Ashok Sukumaran’s Glow Positioning System at Thomas Erben Gallery, a documentation of his 2005 public work in Fort Mumbai, India, that presented people on the street with a metal crank. Turning this hand crank lit up an artificial skyline, 400 meters of lights stretched around the upper edge of the architecture of the night square. Though the catalogue talks of “sensitizing us to our own vicinity” and other sesquipedalian nonsense, the real strength of the piece was its energy, its sense of necessary exuberance that remains longer than the image that creates it. Sukumaran offered this night square and its people the opportunity to transform street traffic into a playground, a chance to self-decorate and celebrate place and belonging where resources are few. The glamour he provided was remarkable, reachable.

Among countries included for the first time in this year’s ACAW were Lebanon, Palestine and Israel. Zipora Fried, from the latter, presented an exhibition of drawings, video and sculpture at Moti Hasson gallery. Though best known for her ten-meter graphite drawings, the exhibition featured work from several ongoing series linked by Fried’s process of transforming objects in a way that intensifies their potential. The piece that stood out for its physical and allegorical beauty was Chère Maman: an ordinary dinner table with 300 empty wine bottles protruding from its belly. When asked, she said that she chose a soft wooden table to contain the maternal element-with the bottles, it did end up looking like a giant set of glass udders. One wonders what kind of dinner parties furniture like this is invited to. What kind of dinner parties take place on a table like this. What kind of food preserves in the cupboard behind the table, with its hundreds of knives stuck in its back. But “stabbing in the back” and things happening “under the table” are both euphemisms of duplicity not usually associated with mother or things motherly. The feeling here was that mother is not so dear. Or that there exists in the domestic domain (or political landscape) a complex, unfulfilled need.

A photograph that similarly lingered in the mind was Ineffable Moments by Taiwanese Lan Yuan-Hung, the youngest artist in a group show called Snake Alley, curated by Eric Shiner at the Taipei Cultural Centre. The title refers to Snake Alley in Taipei’s red light district, where a discerning consumer could buy fresh blood from small live animals like turtles and snakes for a jolt of sexual power or life energy, much like a contemporary juice café. The digitally manipulated photo shows a youngish, very bony, tall and naked man supine on a bed, eyes closed but not asleep, exasperated by some perceived weight. He can no longer walk and see in front of himself at the same time, as his torso has been turned around and is now facing backwards. And he has at least one extra arm. The piece both typifies the theme of the show, with its simultaneous attraction and repulsion, and seems to speak to confusion of will. As with Fried’s unmotherly mother, the tensions and ties between Taiwan and China make it difficult to avoid reading at least the possibility of politics into the work.

On a lighter note, Korean artist Hyungkoo Lee’s Animatuseum at Arario Gallery caught odd white skeletons in mid-chase inside a black gallery, collectively forming an image of biological evolution driven by Bugs Bunny and friends. Humor deserves a place in art-at the Venice Biennale a couple of years ago, the Korean pavilion was by far the funniest-and if the prolific works in this exhibit overwhelm themselves, they also say, “Lighten up, art is also the science of play.”

Many other shows deserve mention, including Fay Ku’s Survey of Works at Kips Gallery, with girls eating barbed wire and an army of babies behind bars or wearing camouflage floaties, conjuring images of destruction and preservation in girlhood; Parable of the Garden: New Media Art from Iran and Central Asia at the College of New Jersey Art Gallery, with artists from Afghanistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan; and Semiosis, a group show of Chinese painters at China Square gallery, the most notable of which was He Duoling’s use of erotic nudes that revealed the influence of Goya’s Maha in the Prado. (He’s Dancer No. 6, a nude ballerina, was placed across from a clothed Dancer No. 7.) The show’s curator, Robert C. Morgan, tied He’s eroticism to a general freeing-up of Chinese artists, stating-in a quote too good to pass up-that “pleasure is the signifier of revolution and change.”

But despite the incredible diversity and quality of the installations, paintings, videos, sculptures and photographs on display, Ms. Ahmady admitted that for her personally the highlight of the week was a series of artist conversations, where artists including Pouran Jinchi, Yin Lilin, Viswanadhan Velu, Hiroshi Sunairi, Yuken Teruya, and Akram Zaatari, among others-who as artists are normally subjected to the indirect interpretations of critics or viewers or dealers-had the opportunity to sit and talk about their processes of work, cultural experiences, and art practices. That focus, and many of Ms. Ahmady’s other choices in putting the week together, reflect an event director who is very “artist-oriented.” Given the overloaded art scene in New York, with over 700 galleries just in Chelsea, and the need to reach and share audiences, this seems like a wise approach that reflects not only the contemporary Asian art scene, but also the way in which that art scene is adding to the wisdom of contemporary art internationally.

In our interview, Ms. Ahmady stated that “What is important in art is some kind of cultural specificity, but also a universal relevance.” The week clearly achieved universal relevance. The specificity came across in individual pieces and cultural peripheries brought into the light. But the idea of Asia is intermediate, perhaps best thought of as a platform “filled with energy and on the verge of bursting,” to quote Cai Guo-Qiang’s description of his own work. Or perhaps “Asia” is simply an argument that says hey, look this way: there is good art here.

–by Alexander Boldizar and Michelle Swayne

Asia Unbound: New York’s Asian Contemporary Art Week was originally published in C-Arts Magazine (May 2008)