In recent years, the Asian Art Museum, an institution deeply embedded and perhaps most comfortable in art of the distant past, has lurched unsteadily toward modernity with a few flawed exhibitions that could be characterized as noble failures.
Now comes "28 Chinese," their latest embrace of contemporary art, and it can be counted as a surefooted success. It features 48 works by 28 cutting-edge, individualistic Chinese artists, some of whom are getting their first exposure to West Coast audiences. Ranging in age from 29-61, they respond to modern China, and their artwork, taken together, forms a loose cultural portrait of a vast country and powerful force in the world that many Westerners know only from books and media reports.
One thing is for sure: China has a thriving art scene with skilled, imaginative practitioners who have a lot on their minds and much to say. The most exciting works here are the installations, which is not to say that the abstract paintings, narrative pieces, videos and color photographs aren't equally provocative or fun.
On the first floor, one can't miss "Boat" (2012) by Zhu Jinshi, a huge, 40-foot cylindrical construction that's open at the bottom, and made from 8,000 pieces of off-white calligraphy paper, every sheet crumpled, we're told, at least nine times. The structure, suspended from the ceiling by cotton threads and supported by bamboo rods, is proportionally suited to its setting, the museum's spacious North Court. It looks a little like a giant roll of paper towels, and there's an exhilarating contrast between the airy, lightweight materials and the entity as a whole, which somehow conveys the weighty presence of steel. It's possible to walk under and through the colossal sculpture, whose insides resemble the bowels of an ocean liner or a mammoth underground tunnel; like those feats of engineering, it's a marvel.
The same artist also created one of my favorite pieces in the show, "Black and White Summer Palace" (2007), an imposing, thickly textured, abstract oil painting with luscious gobs of impasto that gets, and deserves, a wall to itself.
Residing in the South Court is He Xiangyu's "The Man on the Chair" (2008-09), a grouping of distressed wood chairs that could have been carved from magnificent ancient gnarled trees the artist stumbled upon in an enchanted forest. Their origins, though, are more prosaic. They're actually made from reclaimed wooden drainage pipes crafted by the Donga people in southwest China. High-backed with low-slung seats, each one a vessel for the passage of time, they're an unmatched set arranged for tea or an assignation with a sorcerer. The artist, who has created over 100 similar yet unique chairs in the course of this project, says they "evoke an ambiguous yet tenacious sense of collective fatalism."
For a separate, very different installation, He Xiangyu boiled down 127 tons of Coca Cola, a process that yielded 40 cubic meters of an unappetizing, lava-like substance exuding a sickly sweet aroma. A small portion of the residue fills a vitrine in his "Cola Project" (2009-10), displayed in a room containing photographs, collaged sketches, etc., documenting the project.
Don't forget to climb up to the second and third levels, where nearly hidden among the treasures of the permanent collection are several pieces that are part of the show, including Wang Xingwei's "Comrade Xiao He No. 3" (2008), a large, exaggerated cartoonish rendering of a harried, uniformed military nurse assistant with pursed mouth and droopy breasts. A leather satchel strapped across one shoulder and a canteen flying away from her body, she hurtles down a deserted rural road, hustling to catch up with her regiment, an excruciatingly turquoise sky dotted with too-perfect, puffy white clouds as backdrop. Humorous and slightly menacing, the painting's style has the feel of an illustration from a children's book along the lines of Daniel Handler, a.k.a. Lemony Snicket's "A Series of Unfortunate Events" and its cast of super-sized sinister adults.
Shanghai photographer/performance artist Zhang Yuan, a protege of Ai Weiwei, produces startling color photographs. For "12 Square Meters" (1994), he coated his naked body in honey and fish juice and sat for an hour in a public toilet, where he was swarmed by thousands of flies. Talk about suffering for one's art. In "1/2" (1998), his body was marked with calligraphy characters, inked by audience members, and he draped a bloody pig carcass across his naked torso, a la Lady Gaga.
In the top-floor gallery is the shocking coup de gras that concludes the exhibit. Visitors entering a room containing Chinese funerary objects will suddenly catch sight of a dead man, dressed in the traditional dark suit of a Communist Party People's Representative, laying face down on the floor; the flesh of his left palm, open toward the ceiling, grabs the light. The lifeless body is actually an astonishingly lifelike fiberglass sculpture of Ai Weiwei, China's most high-profile dissident artist. The work, by He Xiangyu, is titled "The Death of Marat" (2011) after Jacques-Louis David's famous 1793 painting of the same name depicting the aftermath of the assassination of a French politician and human rights advocate during the Reign of Terror. The artist says he was inspired by Ai's tax evasion case and oppression by the Chinese authorities, but perhaps he was driven by an unconscious desire to eliminate the competition.
Through Aug. 16