My Thoughts and My Actions - Qing Wu

A Few Exhibitions from Second Part of 2005

July -Los Angeles : Tom Hawkinson
LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) delighted me a great deal again by mounting another great exhibition this June. Tom Hawkinson makes his own kind of “geek’ art which inspires awe, wonder and emotional tenderness. They can be very large or very small. Five months later I could still remember a lot of his works in details, a feat few artists can achieve on me. Mr. Hawkins is infinitely curious about human bodies (especially his own). Using various medium and with inventive and scientific forms, he showed to us that human bodies are the most amazing creation, beautiful and mysterious, organic and mechanic at the same time. I could never think about the finger nails the same way again after I saw the little sculpture he made out his own. The kinetic machine works, or the meticulous drawings with intricate lines and shapes, are simply divine. Who knows how many hours he must have labored in his studio to make them? It takes genius, dedication, obsession and something close to insanity.

June – San Francisco: Richard Tuttle
Friends of mine seemed to have mixed feelings about Richard Tuttle. Stephanie wondered what this buzz was all about, while Diego liked a few pieces of his (or a few rooms in the SFMOMA) but did not care much about the rest. In my opinions, his latest sculptures are simply ugly, but I enjoyed his early works, especially the simple and whimsical drawings in his sketch books.

October - Montreal: Landscape of Provence
My sister loves lavender and Provence comes to her mind as that particular smell. For me Provence brings back memories of poplar trees, sunlight, Dudet’s windmill, the crazy Van Gogh and a defeated Cezanne. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, in collaboration with the Art Museum of Marseille, organized this very crowd-pleasing exhibition with a long title: Right Under the Sun, Painting in Provence, from Classicism to Modernism. I was chased by a relentless pollster long after I came back to SF. When I finally found time to answer his questions through the phone, it became clear to me that they really wanted to find out how this exhibition could generate money for the city by attracting tourists. Nevertheless I enjoyed the exhibition tremendously. Other than the usual suspects such as Monet, Signac, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Braque, there are a whole set of lesser-known names from before-impressionism and after-impressionism years that were great artists themselves but got over-shadowed by the more revolutionary ones. It is amazing how one area inspired and changed the whole course of the art history, and those same landscapes, seen through the prism of eyes and mind of artists, could contort and distort, and eventually decorate millions of house walls around the world.

November - London: Jeff Wall
One thing about photography exhibition is that, once you are familiar with the works through books and websites, seeing the actual photos becomes much less awe-inspiring. A replicated painting is quite different from the original, and one not only looks at the image but also at the texture, the shifting lighting, and the genuine human marks left on the canvas. But this does not apply to photography. Even though large format has become a norm and made a photography exhibition experience closer to paintings, the difference is still there. Tate museum’s new exhibition on Jeff Wall used a few rooms to display his large light boxes, each of which can be 10 feet high. Walking through them is like walking through frozen scenes of cinema, with a wide range of genres and themes, from war horror to intimate domestic dramas. Jeff Wall is one of the first few photographers I studied and admired, and his sophisticated skill and extensive research and premeditation before shooting changed my perception of photography. All those references to art history, all those social commentaries, ambiguous or poignant, can be conveyed subtly using staging and acting. Jeff Wall is also a theorist who writes prolifically, and his works often infuse layers of meanings through very conscious construction. One has to stand in front of them and think deep in order to grasp, and through that Jeff Wall made a photography experience closer to a combination of voyeurism and meditation.

December - Boston: Zhang Huan: Seed of Hamburg
Zhang Huan is a household name for houses that hosts someone who knows one or two about contemporary Chinese Art. Since mid nineties he performed and exhibited all over the West. Using pain and extreme bondage or other sadistic means, his works can be disturbing and poetic, easy to attract crowd and generate buzz. One always wonders why performance art is always associated with discomfort and pain, and I have to say that these ideas have got old and don’t appeal much to me anymore. In the early 90s when Chinese artists were confronting a very repressive and hopeless environment, act of self-infliction was a profound way to express emotional suffering and dream of liberation. Zhang came out from that movement and became the most successful among them all. He did extend his early works and started to borrow freely from allegories, symbolism and rituals, forming a very unique style that went beyond simple classification. When I browsed through the series of large photographs showing pigeons pecking at the seeds glued to Zhang’s body in the rotunda room of Boston Museum of Art, I was both enchanted and a little repulsed by the showcase quality of Zhang’s works. I don’t want to deny his talent, but I still detect his intention to make something catering to the West’s taste.

POSTSECRET

POSTSECRET is a public art project: You can send them a self-designed postcard to confess your secrets. There are plenty of really funny ones at their site, but I will quote two here:

Tate Modern and Saatchi Gallery

Tate Modern is the grand cathedral for modern art (more precisely, the Western Modern Art). The building, with high ceiling and narrow window openings, inspires awe and imposes unstated authority for the pious art pilgrims, or more precisely, the common people who want to know about modern art so eagerly but have not got much glue yet. It does two things very distinctively from other modern art museums. First, instead of exhibiting works chronologically, it breaks the exhibition into four themes and managed to pack everything into them, ranging from still life to nudes, or using one entire room featuring one movement or one artist. Second, the curators got very busy with writing, providing lengthy comments that explained the works way beyond most people’s immediate understanding of these works. Both mean to help people to grasp the art of the last century, but art snobs surely would scream for the Lord.

When I was in Tate, half of the ground floor was covered by an exhibition by Herzog & Meuron, one of the most prestigious architecture firms that originally designed the remodeling of Tate. Showing all the intermediate models and studies used to come up with the final concepts, the exhibition reveals the entire creative process and could delight any serious architecture fan or student (I only wish Diego were there with me!) Interesting enough, most of their recent big projects came from China. Their famous bird-nest-like Olympic stadium design made them a household name in China, and commissions from both government and private companies poured in after that, a further proof of rising China with big spendings. On the third floor, the much-anticipated Frida Kahlo exhibition won’t open until this weekend, but an exhibition called “Open System, which featured a diverse set of artists (lots of Americans) most of whom came out of age in 60s and 70s, had already been opened. The roster read like who-and-who of minimalism, environment art and conceptualism. But by then I was too tired to check this out: The art from 70s requires both an alert sensory system and keen intellect, and I was short of both on that particular afternoon.

One mile away, along the same river and next to the crowded London eye, is the sedate London County Hall which houses one of the most respected private galleries. Saatchi Gallery has been well-known for its boldness thanks to its relentless promotion of BYA (British Young Artist) in the nineties, and both critics and art collectors look to Saattich for reference of the latest trend or the next big shot. Much like the stock market or real estate, the art market has seen Saatich himself buying and selling and faring extremely well despite of his great loss suffered from last year’s fire. This year Saatich Gallery embarked on a new series of exhibitions called “Triumph of Painting”, which consist of four parts and run through the entire year. It aims to showcase the diverse and the most prominent cotemporary painters in one setting and defies the doomsday prophecy of this oldest medium.

I was lucky enough to catch part 1, and the gallery’s layout (long corridors and small rooms on the sides) served extremely well for exhibition of this kind. Part 1 featured six painters, all Europeans, whose styles vary so significantly that the grouping of them seems random and unintentional. Two artists stood out for me: Peter Doig, whom paints landcapes and peoplescapes with assistances of photos, appeals to my photographer's sensitivity. Melancholy and mystery haunt his rivers, lakes and snowy mountains, where elusive human presence has left euphemeral marks. Martin Kippenberg, a multi-talented whiz child who built a cult reputation with his relentless self-promotion, displayed all his whit and whim in those seemingly effortlessly-constructed works. I walked away feeling that I could never look at beach towers or street lamps in the same way as I used to. Austrian artist Hermann Nistsch also left an impression on me, whose proneness to cult ceremony, blood and anatomical details, both revolted and stirred me.

I never believed the demise of painting since painting, much as singing and dancing, is one of the most basic human expressions that would continue to evolve and to be practiced. The theorists or the critics may pull alarm signals to push the art boundary or to stimulate the art market, but painting would live on!

Sui Jian Guo: The Sleep of Reason

Suddenly Sui JianGuo is everywhere in San Francisco. At the bus stops, on the top of the taxies, on the moving Munis…it is hard not to miss the iconographic Mao’s jackets in these posters, but I wonder how many people really paused and thought about going to find out more about this exhibition. San Francisco Asian Art museum gambled on Sui as if it was gambling on an unknown startup stock, hoping that a more avant-garde show can bring in younger and more serious art fans. I am afraid it might have missed the popular taste and generated too little buzz. Compared to a painted geisha face or terra-cotta warriors, Sui’s Jacket is too subtle and too obscure to call any layman’s attention.

But I have to respect the museum’s bold move. Asian Art advanced just like the art in the West, and it is far more than ink paintings, porcelains or ancient calligraphies. Although most of the major modern movements in art originated in Europe or United States, Asian artists have been adopting the approaches and tried hard to fuse them with native motifs and techniques, and among them all, some of the Chinese artists are gaining unprecedented recognition due to their unique political and historical roots. As the oldest civilization with largest population and tumultuous histories, the time seems ripe for China to produce some good art that should appeal to the Western eyes, and Asian Art museum apparently handpicked Sui and thought he could be a crowd-pleaser.

But is that all justified? With that question in my mind, I went to the museum on a Sunday afternoon. I am not unfamiliar with Sui: As a sculptor doing large scale works, he has been active in the Chinese art scene since mid eighties and is one of the very few who also won the official endorsement. He currently holds the head of sculpture department in Central Academy of Fine Arts and plays pivotal role reforming the art education in the most prominent art school of China. Flipping through pages of China Art or the book on Beijing’s new art district 798, you can always spot some part of his sculptures in the background. Due to the large sizes and realistic forms, Sui’s works are very recognizable but also open for interpretations. Using metaphors and distortions, he builds social criticism and ironies in very concrete objects. The huge hollow Mao’s jacket, the red dragon made by fiberglass printed with Made in China, the Roman-Greco classic figure dressed in Mao’s jacket, Sui throws the East-West culture clash and political reality right in front of your eyes. No wonder Asian Art museum embraced him: Eye-catching, timely, and ultimately modern, Sui’s works represent both the recent past and the very present and raise poignant questions to the audience without making an judgment.

But my mind was truly blown away by the large installation titled “The Sleep of Reason”.
A sleeping Mao was surrounded by tens of thousands of colorful dinosaur toys which were neatly arranged in patterns…they looked like streams of consciousness, flows of Qi, or a map of underworld. Mao looked peaceful and rested, as if he was done with all the wreckage or creations and he no longer needed to be bothered by all the chaos and turmoil. One could easily get very impressed by the huge number of toys, which seems to comment on that limitless labor power in China and how much impact it would eventually have on the world.

Would Sui’s works stand the test of time? While I walked out of the installation room and wander around the rest of the museum and looked at those beautiful pieces from dynasties ago, I was not sure I could answer that. Works based on social realism often gets a dated feel after it ages. They get kept in museum to remind people of particular time point in history, but people no longer consider them timeless or want to hang them or install them home. A hundred years from now, if someone ever comes across this piece again, when the civilizations have taken their turns to rise and fall, I wonder what he still know about what China was like only a hundred years ago.

The Gates, New York MOMA, and Chelsea Art Galleries

Much has been said about Cristo’s Gates project since it inaugurated this Saturday. No matter what people think, it has already been stipulated into the art history as a success due to all that publicity and the buzz it generated, and thus the huge crowd, numerous conversations about public art, and enormous economic benefits gained by the city. It seems for a project of this scale and right in the middle of Manhattan, most of the success lies in the Cristo’s ability to pull this off. How good it is does not quite matter, and the more controversial it is, the more impact it has. I personally think choosing Central Park Manhattan was a brilliant idea due to its maximum exposure. There are other larger environmental art projects in history, such as the Walter DeMaria’s Lightning Fields in New Mexico or Michael Heizer’s monuments in Nevada. But how many people would travel to those remote places and actually see them?

Thanks to our friend Jonathan’s parents, we stayed right along 59th street and had the first chance to witness the unfurling of the saffron ribbons in the early morning. Through Saturday and Sunday, we walked back to Central Park for a couple of times and observed the Gates under different light conditions and on alternative paths. The varied topography of Central Park and the ever-changing winter light give infinite possibilities to see the project. Sometimes it wiggles and marches along on the opposite side of a wide meadow; sometimes it jumps out from behind the hill like orange flames; and at other times it sits quietly along a pond. The orange color invigorates an otherwise dreary winter landscape, but it can be a bit too intrusive or garish, depending on what your aesthetics is. The very point of environment art is to impose an altered reality that challenges the conventional perspectives on existing landscape. The Cristo couple certainly hope that everyone would think this is beautiful, but they could care less if half of the people think the other way.

NY MOMA opened in the end of last year in a cacophonic praise for its Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi. I am a skeptic on flashy museum architecture since the spotlight on the building can dangerously override its exhibitions, although it can be argued that good buildings can draw more people to the museums. Without Frank Gehry, who would even think about going to Bilbao? Anyway, when I fought through the crowd and finally got into the new MOMA building last Friday, I felt the media ravings were justified. Tanguchi’s new MOMA building is understated but beautiful. It tucks itself comfortably in the urban landscape and offers the museum goers both chances to look back into art history as well as look out to the city. Centered around the atrium, it has a very easy-to-follow layout and a focus point. The atrium, with Barnett Newman’s obelisk in the center and Monet’s lily pond spanning across an entire wall, is always gorgeous to look at from any of the floors. My only complaints are the narrow escalators and small waiting room for the coat check.

As the art critic Michael Kimmerman (from New York Times) pointed out, the NY MOMAexhibitions on the 3rd and 4th floors are well organized and confident, while the contemporary art on the 2nd floor seems a bit chaotic and less assured. It is probably not quite MOMA’s fault. New art has much less time to test out, and MOMA can only select one piece each from all the prominent names, while it ends up canceling out each other without telling any coherent story. On the contrary, art before 70s had a clear evolutionary progression. From Cubism to Pop to minimalism, MOMA picked up the most important works with highlights of a few real masters. It simply could not go wrong.

On the 5th floor the new MOMA hosted temporary exhibitions and this time it turned out to be a private UBS collection. With a roster including Gerhart Richter, Andy Walhol, Chuck Glose, and Andreas Gursky, the UBS collection share a lot in common with Gap’s collection, and one wonders whether they actually hired the same art consultant. After all, corporations buy art as investments and as status symbols. They target the most well-known names who have already established their market values. They also can’t really focus on one genre or one art movement, although there is often a time line to be followed.

On Sunday we strolled to Chelsea and checked a few galleries along 22nd street and 24th street. Compared to San Francisco, Chelsea’s galleries are full of more established names. Within two blocks, I spotted Sara Lucas, Joseph Bueys, Leonardo Drew, Calder, Mark Quinn and Robert Doisneau, a list of art-world who-and-who’s that include both old maters and the new darlings. For lesser known artists, they probably have better chance in Brooklyn.

An Architect and a Photographer

Daniel Liebskind and Eugene Richard would not have shared much in common if there were no 9/11. One is an architect who has been a theorist for all his life but suddenly found himself in spotlight and great demands after winning the master plan on World Trade Center; and the other one has long established himself as one of the most respected photojournalists who worked most of his life among the poor, the sick and the neglected. But they both came up with something to remember an event that fundamentally changed the America yet quickly faded into people’s memory. The two recent lectures I attended once again brought those days back to focus: Liebskind inevitably had to talk about his design for WTC and his fight with David Childs, while Eugene Richards spared his own words and showed his eulogy that combined projection of slides and live recording of interviews and funerals. Liebskind’s speech was fast-paced, upbeat and optimistic; Eugene Richards remained somber and mellow through his talk. The two artists could not be more different, but they both relied on sentimentality to move their audiences, reflecting two different ways to confront with losses and tragedies.

It is no accident that both artists ended up making these works. Liebskind first became well-known due to Berlin Jewish museum, and Richards’s most famous early works documented his wife dying of breast cancer. Life seemed to have dealt something very tragic to them from early on and they were destined to spend their whole life to deal with it with art, not just in different mediums but also in styles and motifs.

Making something or anything artistic out of September 11th is a tricky thing in this politically confusing environment. Just as Liebskind’s soaring freedom tower has won both hearts and detractors, Eugene Richards’s new works also gave him a sensationalist reputation (other than some early criticism on his exploiting the un-privileged). Liebskind insisted that the terrorists aimed to attack our freedom and wanted to use his design to manifest the American spirit of freedom (which can also be interpreted as a symbol of imperialism, depending on who you talk to), while Richards avoided the whole politics and focused on grieving, providing no clue why this happened and where we should go from here. Their works are perfect examples in which art can’t please everyone and can not escape politics entirely. It can inspire one group and help them heal, but it can appear trite, cliché or even vulgar for another group.

Two Exhibitions in September: Beyond Geometry and Ed Ruscha

LA county museum of Art is an unpretentious gem hidden at Wilshire Boulevard. Under the glow of Getty it does not get much attention from the public although it has one of the best art collections in the country and frequently mounts impressive special exhibitions. Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form, 1949s-70s, was an ambitious thematic project that sets out to examine the role of simplified form in art from a global point of view. It lumps many post-world war II art movements into one compact space, giving special attention to non-American artists whom have not been widely exhibited in this country, encouraging the audience to find the links and evolutions in such an expansive intercontinental discourse. Starting from early geometric art to concrete and neo-concrete art (some put all these three under post-painterly abstraction as opposed to abstract expressionism), the show becomes the most lively at the op art, kinetic art and American minimalism phases and then somehow ends up confusingly with all the diverse styles of “conceptual art”. With all the unusual forms, sounds, colors and lights and pieces all over the places, the exhibition hall feels like an Exploratorium for an untrained layman. The experience is further discounted due to the cramped space. Since most of these pieces work on the senses and perceptions, a spacious and well-lighted environment is much more preferred (as in Dia Becon). The other problem is the inclusion of the conceptual art. It seems to me that any of the new movements after kinetic art, no matter it is installation, performances or environmental art, as long as it dealt with forms or used serializations, they can all be included here (which they did). They do fit under the theme “Beyond Geometry” here, but somehow the connection with geometry could be quite a stretch. On the positive side, I really enjoyed works from a few South Americans: Lygia Pape, Helio Oiticica, and Jesus Rafael Soto. They may not be as spiritually ground-breaking as minimalism, but they were quite skilled and experimental and left wonderful works that aged better with time.

Ed Ruscha has always been lionized as the icon of pop art from LA. But instead of seeing his works in LA, I caught the large retrospective at New York Whitney one day before the show was closed. Actually the exhibition was divided into two parts. The photographs were shown at the first floor, and the drawings and larger pieces took the entire third floor. However, I found the photography session much more memorable than his more well-known word paintings. Some of his photos, such as all the buildings on Sunset Boulevard or the aerial view of parking lots, were already famous enough to end up in art history books. But it was the more obscure photo books and early photos taken in his Europe trip that caught my eyes. In the photo books Ed Ruscha demonstrated his deadpan humor that was both hilarious and thought-provoking, while in the European photos we could already detect many of the ideas and aesthetics he would develop much further in his future paintings. Even among the word paintings, the works from 60s and 70s, although often in much smaller canvases, give away much more subtlety and tenderness his later and larger paintings don’t have. Their small sizes draw the viewer in so that all the details and shades are observed, yet the linguistic meaning of the word remains mystic and indecipherable since there is not much background to interpret it other than the word’s own meaning. This ambivalence is exactly the trick. In 80s and 90s, Ed Rusha’s paintings got bigger and more colorful and start to resemble the posters more and more. On the first sight they almost look computer-generated by some graphic designers with slick surfaces and block letters of varying sizes. The earlier charm is unfortunately lost.

Manifesto

What is purpose of blogging? Self absorption? Existential crisis? Or, as one writer said, defiance of the time passing by? I also remember how one of my elder friends described a younger friend of his: He is one of those generation Y people who would keep on-line journals and put everything about himself there. A little pretentious, but damn smart and interesting. No, I don't exactly know why I want to start this. I doubt I would reveal everything about myself without any inhibition. That is not the point of writing. Whatever that point is, I would discover it from writting them, under the condition that I stay disciplined enough.

But the existential question is definitely one part of my thinking here. It was barely a hundred years ago when human voice got recorded for the first time. And now, all you have ever written, all the pictures ever taken of you, all the home videos ever shot about you, could be well stored in one tiny memory chip and preserved way past your own existence in this physical world. I could imagine that the future mausoleums or tombs not only store the ashes or bodies, but also a small chip with all the digital information about the departued person. Our future generation would be overwhelmed with information about their ancestors if they ever want to find out, unless, hm, you accidently crash your computer and lose all that stored information about yourself. But then, remember, they may be in a Yahoo or Google server too. This does make the life of future biographers or anthropologists a lot easier.

So, blogging, archiving, posting, they can be viewed as a means for leaving a trace in this ever-changing and fast-paced world, or more meaningfully, a way to help communicate our thoughts and understand each other, other than, say, to spread good gossips. But gossips are always fun to read, and in the end, who really cares?!