IHT
East Asian art and the virtue of silence
By Elizabeth Heilman Brooke International Herald Tribune
TUESDAY, MAY 10, 2005

TOKYO At a time when East Asia's leaders are measuring their words most
carefully, speaking volumes with actions and acquiescence, posturing
from different perspectives in different tongues, there is a tower here
reminiscent of Babel. High in the sky, two grand rooms on the 53rd floor
of the Roppongi Hills Mori Tower are filled with challenging artistic
expressions of shared East Asian virtues.

In "The Elegance of Silence," one of two exhibitions at the Mori Art
Museum until June 19, the messages of 26 contemporary artists from
Japan, China, Korea and Taiwan have been brought together in an attempt
to study common artistic themes among countries increasingly keen to
assert their distinctions.

Wide-eyed viewers, still more at ease with familiar masters of
watercolor, silk, ink and clay, are backing into and knocking over the
plastic cup waters of the Korean artist Shon Jeung-Eun's "River of
Immortality." They are guffawing as they peak into the corrugated
plastic teahouse, "Portable Folding Tea Ceremony Room" by the Japanese
artist Akira Yamaguchi. They smile sheepishly as they sprawl on the
white-cushioned floor of the Taiwanese artist Lin Shumin's "Hypnosis
No.1" and gaze up at a ceiling of video gold fish shimmering in and out
of diminutive white furniture, bed and bookshelves, table and chairs.

In this exhibition, the first group show to strictly focus on East Asian
contemporary art since the museum's 2003 opening, the Korean curator,
Kim Sunhee, has gathered the works of some of this region's most
successful contemporary artists to explore their creative use of common
traditions, appreciations and sensibilities. This "Commemorative
Activity of Japan-Korea Friendship Year 2005" aims to show that in a
time of globalization, economic instability and tremendous Western
influence, many artists from East Asia continue to express a common
fascination with nature, an inner calm, a sense of harmony and a refined
balance in all things.

The exhibit is divided into two parts: San Sui, landscape, nature as
portrayed in the great outdoors; and feng shui, wind, water, interior
spaces. A Korean artist and feng shui specialist, Hong Sung-Dong, was
consulted on how to position pieces to allow for a free-flowing life
energy, or chi. Arranging the gallery space with respect to Mount Fuji
and Tokyo Bay, artworks were placed according to Taoist feng shui
principles, considering harmony with nature, complementary energy and
spirit. While many exhibits are typically organized from right to left,
Hong flipped the orientation, drawing viewers first to the left.

Photographs, DVDs, paintings, sculptures and installations in the first
room explore themes found in nature, mountains, water, birds,
butterflies, rain, snow, rocks and earth. According to Kim, there is no
suggested route for viewing the works. It should "almost feel like going
through a garden," she said. Viewers should feel free to wander back and
pause, making new discoveries from fresh angles.

With nature in mind, the rainbow-colored bird characters of the Chinese
artist Xu Bing's "The Living Word" take flight from the waters of Shon's
"The River Of Immortality." Inspired by the American Joseph Kosuth's
studies of a chair, Xu investigates and illustrates the influence of
society on language. At an opening preview he said he recalled a time
when all he was allowed to read was Mao's "Little Red Book." In his
installation of language taking flight, he studies the word 'bird' in
officially approved characters, standard characters and pictographs that
become sea foam-, mauve- and cantaloupe-colored birds breaking away,
flying into the gallery's heights.

The birds fly in front of what, at a glance, appear to be black and
white landscapes of a mountain and waterfall, perhaps even famous
depictions created by a Chinese master of the Northern Sung dynasty. But
a closer look at the forested peak shows tiny Korean letters spelling
"yodeleheehoo," and in the falling waters can be seen minuscule
repetitions of "shoooo." Yoo Seung-Ho's works alternatively leave
viewers giggling or offended by what they consider a visual display of
disrespect for a master work.

"I keep wondering why these are considered works of art," said Toshiko
Kanai, an expert on traditional Japanese Imari porcelain. "I feel like I
am suffocating."

But Yuji Kasahara, an aikido teacher who was visiting the museum
recently, stood beside "The River of Immortality," which he took to mean
a river of sperm, and said, "At first we don't know what to think. Each
person has a different idea of what the artist had in mind, but it is
kind of stimulating and certainly good for keeping the conversation going."

In the "Wind, Water" gallery space, Yamaguchi's pale blue corrugated
plastic teahouse, complete with tatami mats and a teapot on an electric
burner, is eliciting conversation and amusement. Kiyoshi Wako, a Tokyo
gallery owner, laughed and shook his head. He said this portable
rendition of a tea hut - a reminder of a 500-year-old ritual of harmony
and elegance - looked "like a house for the homeless."

In a teahouse, in a 21st-century depiction of yamato-e, or classic
Japanese painting, or in byobu-e, a painted folding screen, Yamaguchi
melds modern-day references with classic frameworks. Humor and an
appreciation for Old World traditions mark his pieces.

"Traditions have been disappearing under wave after wave of Western
culture," Kim, the curator, wrote in a catalogue essay. "Traditions have
been disappearing under wave after wave of Western culture."

Another show called "The World is a Stage: Stories Behind Pictures"
finds more stories in what the Japanese call ma: a pause, a void, a
space, a silence.

In an exhibit essay titled "Rich Silence," Akira Tatehata, an art critic
and professor at Tama Art University, wrote: "Silence in our age is
inserted in order to save the world from a situation shattered under the
pretext of the end of the grand narrative, and to restore harmony and
tolerance."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/05/09/features/silence.php

*************************

NYT, May 4, 2005
ART REVIEW | 'RECARVING CHINA'S PAST'
Death's Hints About the Past
By HOLLAND COTTER

[image] Bruce M. White/Princeton University Art Museum
"Sleeve Dancer," an earthenware figure with pigments, from the Western
Han Dynasty.

Multimedia
China's Mortuary Shrines
A handsome show of Chinese artifacts at the Princeton University Art
Museum revolves around a single famous, but elusive, monument known as
the Wu family shrines.
(http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2005/05/03/arts/20050504_COTT_SLIDESHOW_index.html)

RELATED SITES
Princeton Art Museum (princetonartmuseum.org)
"Recarving China's Past: Art, Archaeology and Architecture of the 'Wu
Family Shrines'" is at the Princeton University Art Museum through June
26. "Providing for the Afterlife: 'Brilliant Artifacts' From Shandong"
is at the China Institute Gallery, 125 East 65th Street, Manhattan,
through June 4.
(http://www.princetonartmuseum.org/pop_exhibitions.cfm?id=56)

[image] Bruce M. White/Princeton University Art Museum
A horse in red earthenware with a green glaze, from the Eastern Han
Dynasty, part of the "Recarving China’s Past" exhibition currently at
the Princeton University Art Museum.

Antiquities, the essayist Francis Bacon wrote, are "history defaced."
And defacement is a process, not an event. What time and nature don't
obliterate, people will. They break things, misremember dates, forget
names, tell lies. This was true even of the ancient Chinese, to whom the
past was more precious, more real than the present. They were
antiquities junkies; the idea of defacement, erasure, made them crazy.

It makes art historians crazy too, which is one reason many of them
spend careers trying to persuade this or that inanimate object to say
something - anything - truthful about where it has been, what it has
done, who it has known.

Sometimes questioning takes the form of rock-the-boat interrogation;
sometimes it's a matter of empathetic telepathy. Both methods figure in
"Recarving China's Past: Art, Archaeology and Architecture of the 'Wu
Family Shrines,' " at the Princeton University Art Museum, a small,
handsome, complicated exhibition that is actually two different shows in
one.

They each revolve around a single famous, but elusive, monument known as
the Wu family shrines, a set of mortuary structures in eastern China.
The shrines have been fixtures of Chinese art history since they were
first described in the 11th century. They were dated to the Han dynasty
(206 B.C. to 220 A.D.), and their stone-carved inscriptions, including
Confucian texts, and scenes from history, myth and everyday life were,
and are, considered embodiments of Han culture, and touchstones for
dating and interpreting art of early imperial China.

The thing is, few people who described the shrines had seen them
firsthand, or were even sure where they were. The 11th-century Song
scholars gleaned most of their information, it seems, from copies of
inscriptions and pictures, often in the medium of ink rubbings on paper.
And after the 13th century, the shrines were reputed to have disappeared
entirely from view, perhaps under flood water.

Only in the late 18th century did the stone carvings physically enter
the historical record, when in 1786 an amateur archaeologist, Huang Yi,
reported that he had unearthed them in their original cemetery site in
Shandong Province. Fresh rubbings were made and circulated
internationally. A set that arrived at Princeton in the early 20th
century is the basis for the show.

But the stones continued to evade close inspection. Just a few
Westerners had direct access to them, and none did from 1949 until the
end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. But once China opened up and its
current archaeology boom was under way, the time felt ripe for a
comprehensive study of the stones.

"Recarving China's Past," organized by Cary Y. Liu, curator of Asian art
at the Princeton University Art Museum, is not that study. Instead, it
is an assiduous, tradition-baiting mapping out of the many hard
questions that such a project would have to ask. And those questions
ultimately boil down to one: Is the antique monument known as the Wu
family shrines a reality, however abraded by time, or a fiction, created
and elaborated over centuries?

Mr. Liu and several of 40 scholars he worked with - chief among them
Michael Nylan from the University of California at Berkeley and Anthony
Barbieri-Low from the University of Pittsburgh - wrestle with such
issues in the massive catalog. And in effect, the first of the two shows
that make up the larger exhibition takes place primarily in its pages.

The second show, however, is in the museum gallery. It too relates
directly to the Wu complex, but approaches it from the inside rather
than the outside, as a metaphor rather than a monument, a symbolic
embodiment of Han concepts of death and the afterlife.

When you enter the darkened installation, you're in the tomb, surrounded
by mural-size rubbings that speak of where you've been and where you've
arrived. They include vibrant images in black silhouette of the natural
world: lush gardens, soaring birds, gesticulating figures. The animation
has a decorative, patterlike, stop-action stiffness. This isn't life on
parade; it's life in procession, moving to a grave rhythm.

As Mr. Liu suggests in the Princeton catalog - and in the catalog for a
related exhibition, "Providing for the Afterlife: 'Brilliant Artifacts'
From Shandong," which he has organized with Susan L. Beningson at China
Institute Gallery in Manhattan - the Han may have seen the tomb as a way
station between mortal life and some final, unchanging condition of
deathlessness. And they designed it accordingly.

Tombs for the wealthy had stables, lavatories and storage rooms with
windows and doors, all of which resembled earthly counterparts but were
nonfunctional. The same applied to funerary objects, known as mingqi, or
"brilliant artifacts." Some 60 from Princeton's rich collection make up
the bulk of the show, among them models of cooking stoves, wellheads,
pet dogs and a ceramic fief of farms, villages and watchtowers.

Equivalent forms are also found in the Wu shrine rubbings on the gallery
walls. And their depiction supports Mr. Liu's theory that the Han
conceived of their tombs as total, balanced environments, walk-in
"brilliant artifacts," and bastions of harmony in an afterlife fraught
with the same stresses experienced in earthly life: the dead had to pay
stiff netherworld taxes, and appear in court if called.

Finally, to ward off terminal loneliness, the deceased was supplied with
company. And a disarmingly eclectic array of household personnel are in
the show, from a stolid bronze guard with a sword in his belt, a lamp in
his hand and plugs in his ears; to an earthenware dancer, young,
slender, smiling serenely as she swings a long sleeve of her gown over
one shoulder, and bows.

Did the Han truly believe in the eternity such images promised? They
certainly seem to have wanted to, the way we want to believe that our
monuments from the past are what they say they are, or what we think
they say they are. Truth, the brilliant artifact. What an antique and
corroded notion that is. And how it does live on.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/04/arts/design/04cott.html?

*************************

The Japan Times: May 4, 2005
TOMOKO KONOIKE
Girls in the company of wolves
By MONTY DiPIETRO

For more than a decade female Japanese artists have been a dynamic force
in contemporary photography, and now they are making big waves in other
artistic media as well, as the phantasmagoric work of Tomoko Konoike
best illustrates.
[image] "Knife Girl" 2004, by Tomoko Konoike

I can think of few Japanese artists today who are more exciting than
Konoike. Her signature multimedia installations juxtapose plastic toy
daggers with quiet, hand-drawn monochrome anime of a figure she calls
"Mimio," and gigantic multi-panel paintings of wolves devouring girls
(these done up in a riot of super-saturated color). The installations
sink their teeth into your throat and drag you into haunting and
captivating neo-surrealist atmospheres. Nobody else is doing anything
like this.

Born in Akita Prefecture, Konoike graduated from the Tokyo National
University of Fine Art and Music in 1985, and emerged on the
contemporary art scene some 10 years later. It has taken Konoike almost
another decade to flourish, and only now has she begun to claim the
respect she rightly deserves. Congratulations to her representatives at
the Mizuma for supporting the development of an artist who was already
about 40 in an era when gallerists routinely raid art schools, ever on
the hunt for the next young thing -- a practice which sees more than a
few artists dismissed as "burnt-out" before they hit 35.

The Mori Art Museum and and Mizuma Gallery are the places to head to
right now if you want to see Konoike at her best. Both are showing
pieces from a work-in-progress -- a four-part "tale," the artist is
revealing from its end to its beginning, "Like Star Wars," she explains.
The fourth chapter, "The Return -- Sirius Odyssey," was exhibited in
"Life Actually"; and chapter three, "Wreck," is now in at the Mori as
part of the "World is a Stage: Stories Behind Pictures" exhibition. The
current Mizuma show, meanwhile, features the second chapter, "Giant."
Aptly titled it, like its companions, is more than two meters high and
six meters across. "Giant" sees a tornado twisting up into the sky where
it engulfs an upside-down wolf head with bared teeth, its body seemingly
morphed with a pair of young female legs. There are daggers every where,
some with human-looking bumble bees riding cowboy-style atop them.
[image] Tomoko Konoike in front of her work

There is no indication from the Mizuma or from Konoike when she will
show the fourth work, which will be the first chapter in the tale. When
I ask the soft-spoken Konoike about the violent imagery in the series
and in her other work (recurring themes include young girls apparently
being devoured by storms of swirling knives, or half-eaten by wolves)
she just laughs. "I don't think I have a violent imagination," she says.
"People find their own meanings in my work, but I only focus on visual
aesthetic forms, not violence. Even the swirl of knives, that seems a
comfortable image to me. Is that weird. Am I strange?"

Yes, Konoike, you are strange. But in a good way.

Konoike says she gets her inspiration from children's books, and points
to "Little Red Riding Hood" as well as classic Japanese stories such as
like "The Night of the Ribbon" by Tezuka Osamu as examples. She rejects
the suggestion that she is a symbolist, stressing she wants viewers to
find their own meanings in the components that make up her multilayered
work, the better to get personally involved.

"My current tale is an adventure, but the main character in the story is
the viewer," she explains. "I hope people can look at these big pictures
and feel that they are in the scene, that they are part of the story."

"Emergency Landing in the Meadow" at the Mizuma Art Gallery, 1-3-9
Kamimeguro, Meguro-ku, Tokyo, (03) 3793-7931 till May 21,
www.mizuma-art.co.jp; Works on Paper at art/bookstore gallery Nadiff at
B1 Jingumae 4-9-8, Shibuya-ku; tel: (03) 3403-8814 till May 29; "The
World is a Stage: Stories Behind Pictures," till June 19 at the Mori;
tel. (03) 6406-6100; www.mori.art.museum
Monty DiPietro welcomes readers' comments at newartseen@assemblylanguage.com

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?fa20050504md.htm

 

__________________

with kind regards,

Matthias Arnold
(Art-Eastasia list)

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

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