by Kay Curry
Northwest Asia Weekly
Ink Media #4, 2011-2013, Chen Shaoxiong, ink on rice paper.
If there’s one word to describe Seattle’s Asian Art Museum, it’s juxtaposition. old and new. Classic and modern. Concepts and eras come together in a way that is pleasing and thought-provoking every time. This time, the special exhibition “Beyond the Mountains: Classical Forms of Chinese Contemporary Artists”, which runs until June 2023, will comment on how traditional Chinese artistic practices and philosophies still exist today, and how the world’s turmoil has contributed to the growing of us all. The desire to escape “beyond” our troubled world.
Along with students from the University of Washington’s “China Art Exhibition” 2020 Symposium, Foster Foundation Chinese Art Curator Feng Bingshun used SAM Asian’s unique gallery space (renovated and reopened in 2020) to invite several contemporary Chinese Artists share their work. The beauty of the museum is that it allows for interesting juxtapositions of works of art with 1930s architecture, and the ability to move already displayed works into different configurations to meet new goals.
For example, Ai Weiwei’s famous work “Color Vase” was re-installed before the current flagship work (some works will be rotated) before the new exhibition, Zhang Huan’s “Anonymous Mountain Plus One Meter”.
Foong’s students provided many ideas for “Beyond” and some of the text in the gallery, this time arranging Ai’s vases so that they appear to be “walking”, thus reflecting the landscape in Zhang’s work. How are these works related? Feng has an answer. Both refer to classical Chinese artistic concepts, such as the preeminence of landscapes in Song Dynasty paintings, or the presupposed preciousness of ancient Chinese pots that Ai Weiwei questioned and even profaned.
Departure, 2019, Yang Yongliang, screenshot
Single channel 4K video
Foong explained that the pieces, and the exhibition as a whole, changed “the very nature of the object”. They questioned “the way we create value systems” – one of the original themes of museums now based on subject rather than location or time. In Zhang’s work, the performance artist hints at our human misunderstanding of our own importance. Nature is always bigger than us – you can’t make mountains grow. This notion of artificial insignificance in the greatness of the world is reflected in Yang Yongliang’s black-and-white video “Leaving.” Yang has created a Chinese landscape painting, but in a new and disturbing way – it is composed of thousands of photographs of China’s megacities.
Can we “go” for this work? Should we “leave” the message of Earth’s urbanization? Or are we surrounded by nature or cities that make us want to “leave”? Yang’s work is some of Feng’s first proudly displayed in Seattle. They “force you to do something, which I think is really important for all of us right now, which is to slow down and stop and think and reflect,” she said. (It’s worth noting that Yang’s accompaniment piece is titled “Return.” You do take a while to come back).
Yang’s work is deliberately placed on bookends on either side of the open gallery. Another video, on the other hand, made sounds that sounded like gunshots rather than noise like waves coming from “Going Off.” Chen Shaoxiong’s “Ink Media” also uses what we usually think of as Chinese materials, but in a new way. When people think of Chinese art, Feng said: “They think of ink, brush, paper… The artist did use the medium, but depicted something ‘other’.”
Other things are collages of protests around the world from social media. Chen recreated the images in ink, then fused them into a video in which it no longer mattered where the protesters were, who they were, or what they were protesting. We are a family. Language and face work together. The background is “Les Miserables”, but in Chinese. These images are bold and “original”. The collective effect may resemble a long howl. Again, we question, what are we doing? We want to escape, or change.
“During the pandemic, we all have to change the way we do things,” Feng noted. She had to rush to change the face-to-face seminars to online seminars. In Hong Kong, artist Lam Tung-peng, who was in lockdown in 2020, got into trouble again when he and Foong started discussing how to create site-specific work for SAM Asian.
“We decided to just do this and have hope,” Foong said, which seemed to echo a larger truth about the durability of living in difficult times. The result is an installation by Lin, in which the crown jewel is “The Great Escape.”
“The Great Escape” (yes, you should think of Houdini) sits in several smaller pieces, like a small room like a lantern. A projector in the center shows the mountainside, which also acts as the sun. Created in 2020, Lam adds some new elements to the 2022 exhibition. Some of the additions are so tiny and out of reach (viewers are not meant to cross the white line, but a warning, hard to resist) that they may just be messages or treats for Foong and staff.
Feng explained that Lin designed the lantern as a “flow of thought” during the lockdown. He is reading children’s books – he often uses images of children or toys and cartoons in ways of “escaping reality”, “dreaming about going somewhere else” and “how to get there”. Pandemic. Believe it or not, the concept of “armchair travel” was coined by Chinese philosophers as early as the 11th century, shared Feng. Even then, they knew that humans needed to escape reality, into nature, and even outer space (think the latest space travel).
All of Lin’s works in this installation deal with this theme. They seem to imply that this desire for escapism is increasingly frustrating and urgent. A recent work depicts an astronaut perched high on a mountain, his shadow cast on the landscape (shadow is another theme). Lam will be visiting Seattle and the SAM Asian Art Museum in the near future. He and Feng laughed, “When he came, what he wanted to photograph most was me, him, and the exit sign.”
“Beyond the mountain there is a big mountain” is the Chinese proverb on which the entire exhibition is based. Feng explained the phrase in part as “Challenge the mountain, and the challenge is naturally ridiculous—it’s always there and you’re small.” There will always be someone bigger or smaller than you. There will always be another higher mountain. Perhaps, always eager to escape “outside the mountain”.
For details and tickets visit seattleartmuseum.org/Exhibitions/Details?EventId=85115.
Kay can reach info@nwasianweekly.com.
