MCLC: Ink Art exhibit at the Met

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Ink Art exhibit at the Met
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Source: The Daily Beast (1/4/14):
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/05/a-new-exhibit-at-the-metro
politan-museum-puts-a-modern-face-on-chinese-art.html

A New Exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum Puts a Modern Face on Chinese Art
The art world has embraced the evolution of Western art, but when it comes
to China, we seem stuck in the past. A new exhibit at the Met wants to
shake up these stereotypes.
By Melik Kaylan

When a major department at the Metropolitan Museum puts on a show of over
seventy works by thirty-five living artists across a huge sprawl of
gallery rooms, you know you’re witnessing a Significant Cultural Moment.
You’re in the presence of an overarching curatorial statement or argument,
one composed of artworks. Usually, the mission involves overturning
received assumptions, breaking down preconceptions about genre boundaries,
cultural norms, and the like. Generally such a show takes aim at an
implicit set of conventional notions, namely yours, and wants to shake
them up. It wants to tell you that, while you weren’t looking, the world
changed. Your views are too rigid. Time to get with it.

All of which is precisely true of “Ink Art: Past as Present in
Contemporary China,” a blockbuster presentation inspired by, but not
necessarily composed of, ink-on-paper works which are displayed throughout
the traditional Chinese wing of the Metropolitan Museum. And here,
already, in the show’s very location, viewers are confronted by the first
‘subversive’ juxtaposition.

“There’s so much excitement and hype around contemporary art, the western
variety, so we wanted to show that it’s happening in Asia too, that it’s
happening even in the most traditional of forms—that Asia has a cultural
present as well as a past,” says Maxwell Hearn, the curator and head of
the Asian Art department. “And where can one say that more arrestingly
than in the historical galleries?”

The shock of the unexpected is, emphatically, part of the message. Imagine
you’re a regular, unsuspecting Met-goer dropping by for a soothing dose of
Ming vases and Literati scrolls depicting mountains. Instead, you find
your favorite objects displaced by a cacophony of contemporary works,
often highly avant-garde and challenging. Or, conversely, you are lured in
by the promise of traditional Chinese aesthetics extended into the
present: modern versions of placid misty landscapes, rock-faces, and
calligraphic studies, but you’re ambushed by polychrome cityscapes,
photorealist images, photos of tattoo art and body painting, and
unreadable calligraphy. Perhaps, you come in to see some of Ai Wei Wei’s
works, and you’re mystified when you encounter ceramics by him that seem
gratuitously included.

The curators have set out to show that art in China, even the most purely
homegrown Chinese genre of ink-art, is merging with global influences and
creating astonishing, vibrant hybrids that both illuminate the native
tradition and expand the collective consciousness. At its profoundest, the
show awakens us to what is happening to national cultural aesthetics
everywhere, including our own, as motifs and symbols and visual paradigms
wash back and forth across divides.

“We should all be grateful that the Met, however belatedly, has now
acknowledged that living Chinese artists have arrived in the world.”

The first stunning foretaste of the exhibit’s leitmotif comes in the form
of Gu Wenda’s huge, hanging, single Chinese characters from the
mid-1980’s. The work is entitled “Mythos of Lost Dynasties,” and the
blurry, inky ideograms play with the notion of a monumental script that
gets deified and then fades. This being an artwork from the early post-Mao
time of newfound freedoms, one can imagine the implied commentary on
propaganda homiletics that lose their relevance and turn opaquely visual.

Other big-name artists explore similar themes. From the 1990’s, Xu Bing’s
ideographic renderings of English words bunched up to look like Chinese
characters, executed in the brushwork styles of Ming and Song dynasties,
explore inter-cultural fusion and confusion. The artist spent part of that
decade at the University of Wisconsin, and his art expresses the reverence
and alienation of language created by distance. An entire room is devoted
to his deservedly famous, magnificent “Book From The Sky,” a vast scroll
that hangs across the ceiling and down the walls, block-printed with an
entirely invented language made of fake Chinese characters. Wang
Dongling’s black-on-white massive almost-characters stretching to
abstraction tell a parallel story of form and meaning diverging into
mysterious shapes.

These artists and others, including Ai Wei Wei and Zhang Huan whose photo
of his face overwritten by Chinese letters serves as the catalog cover,
all had their U.S. debut over the years at Ethan Cohen’s pioneering
eponymous New York gallery. Cohen’s mother, Joan, wrote the first book on
Chinese contemporary art and his father, Jerome, launched the Chinese law
department at Harvard and advised Kissinger on the famous Nixon trip to
China. Ethan Cohen says, “they [the artists] represent a moment when
received notions of beauty and of expression broke open and let in the
world of experimentation, a kind of Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’ moment.”

This questioning of form can be seen in a number of works that substitute
cityscapes for the traditional landscape studies of artist-scholars
through the centuries. Perhaps the one that makes its point most concisely
and indelibly is Yang Yongliang’s “A View of Tide” from 2008. As you stare
at the protean work, the massive, fake, ink landscape fools you. You
realize you’re looking at a digital photomontage of an urban silhouette
crafted into swirling, shadowy hill-shapes with high-rises transformed
into rock faces. The artist has witnessed China’s countryside everywhere
overrun by development and is trying to find beauty in the content by
imitating a millennium-old form. This, one realizes, is the kind of subtly
radical morphing of the environment that challenges and unsettles a
billion minds every day.

By any measure, the Met exhibition offers some great masterpieces even by
traditional criteria. Liu Dan’s “Ink Handscroll” (1990) for example, gives
us a long unfurling of the elements in grand and minute detail. It
demonstrates the greatness of ink-painting as a genre if it had evolved in
a straight line from the past. Yet the show has gotten a deal of negative
criticism for being inchoate, unselective, too rambling, and uneven. The
New York Times’ Roberta Smith blamed the flaws on Maxwell Hearn being more
familiar with classical than contemporary art.

Still, according to Ethan Cohen, “we should all be grateful that the Met,
however belatedly, has now acknowledged that living Chinese artists have
arrived in the world. Since the death of Mao, there’s been a huge
renaissance in the visual arts there. Mr. Hearn has touched on the tip of
the iceberg.” One could argue, in the curator’s defense, that hit-or-miss
standards of quality always pervade times of experimentation, and the show
remains true to the adventure. The Met’s show reflects a phenomenon that
remains, in reality, a work in progress.