That giant red lotus that sprang up in San Francisco's Civic Center Plaza on Saturday - a 24-foot-tall "Breathing Flower" of kinetic fabric in the form of the ancient Asian symbol of spiritual illumination and renewal - is the most visible artwork in an exhibition that explores the invisible energies and forces summoned by artists in 200 B.C. - and just last week.
Created by the Korean artist Choi Jeong Hwa, the monumental lotus stands across the street from the Asian Art Museum, where 60 other contemporary pieces play off and connect with the museum's prized historical objects in "Phantoms of Asia: Contemporary Awakens the Past," an expansive and ambitious show that opens Friday.
Ancient Chinese and Indian devotional sculptures, created by anonymous artisans to access the divine, and 19th century Tibetan thangka paintings depicting the cosmos share space with contemporary works such as the sublime-seeking minimalist abstract paintings and light boxes of Tibetan-born artist Palden Weinreb. A section of the show about death and the afterlife brings together the 17th century Korean scroll painting "A King of Hell" - which portrays the underworld and the cyclical Buddhist view of death and reincarnation - and a seriocomic video by Thai artist Araya Radsjarmrearnsook called "The Class." It shows the artist talking about death to a group of shrouded corpses.
"We're trying to create a dialogue between art of the past and art of the present, and look at the way in which artists today are exploring many of the same concerns of artists throughout time," says Allison Harding, the Asian Art Museum's assistant curator of contemporary art. "Where do we come from? Where are we going? How is the universe structured? What is the nature of the universe, and what is my place in that unknowable expanse?"
The museum chose to delve into those big questions in its first large-scale exhibition of contemporary art. Over the years, the museum, whose vast and priceless pan-Asian collection spans 6,000 years, has put on many fine solo shows by living artists. With "Phantoms of Asia," which features the works of 31 prominent artists from Japan, Indonesia, Iran, China, the Philippines, India and elsewhere, the museum is trumpeting its intention to focus seriously on contemporary art - and connect it to the impulses and traditions that inspired the treasures in its permanent collection.
Open-ended idea
Harding and her colleagues tapped Mami Kataoka, the chief curator at Tokyo's Mori Art Museum, to curate "Phantoms of Asia." She was chosen over 24 other international curators who submitted proposals. Unlike others who suggested merely juxtaposing old and new pieces and talking about stylistic affinities and influences, Kataoka "created a more open-ended idea, setting up a condition for new resonances to occur, not only between the contemporary and traditional art, but between different objects in and of themselves," Harding says.
Kataoka is a contemporary art expert who'd never been to the Asian Art Museum until she took on this project. She became fascinated by the objects in the museum's collection. Looking through its database of images, she had several pieces brought out of storage and put on view, including a magnificent Indian cosmological painting, circa 1750-1850. It's alive with Hindu gods, demons, serpents, and a pair of humans linked by black lines to the celestial and earthly realms that encompass them.
Macro and micro
"It's one of the most important pieces I selected for the show. It just blew me away," says Kataoka, who knew many of the contemporary artists she tapped for the show and met others while doing research in India, Thailand and other locales. "I was very much interested in this fundamental understanding of cosmology, and the relationship between the macro and micro, how your body relates to a large cosmos, and how you feel another cosmos inside your body."
Kataoka began to mull these things deeply in 2010, when she put on the show in Tokyo called "Sensing Nature." It explored the perception of nature and space, "some sort of invisible forces, and how we understand nature in Japan and Asia. I really wanted to explore the sensory understanding of the whole cosmology. The spiritual essences."
Although Asian countries are all different, and changing in different ways, she adds, they share certain ways of thinking. "I was really looking for what could be interconnected. ... We think now because of all the science and technology that we understand what the world is. But there are so many things we still don't understand. I wanted to go back to the time of ancient people who shared our desire to understand how the universe functions."
Unseen forces
Kataoka asked the museum's various curators to highlight pieces that dealt with unseen forces, among them ritual vessels, masks, and incense burners with dragons and birds made to communicate with deities. She sought out contemporary artists whose work gives off its own spiritual hum.
One is the esteemed Japanese-born photographer and sculptor Hiroshi Sugimoto, whose "Five-Elements" installation consists of seven small crystal pagodas, sitting on thin wooden plinths. They were inspired by the 13th century Japanese Buddhist stupas whose geometric shapes symbolize the five universals of the cosmos (earth, water, fire, wind, emptiness). Each glass pagoda encases a photograph from the artist's famed "Seascape" series, letting the viewer look at sea and sky through an ancient Buddhist prism.
"The light comes through the crystal pagoda, and you can imagine how ancient people looked at the landscape," Kataoka says.
Swirling black drawing
Walking into the museum's light-filled north court, visitors will see a swirling black drawing that wraps around the columns and climbs skyward along the wall. It's a pulsing space drawing by New York-based Korean artist Sun K. Kwak, who was creating the piece last week. Loosely working from a sketch she made in response to the light, architecture and feeling of the sky-lit space, the artist laid wide strips of black masking tape on the wall, skillfully ripping them back to form the curves and angles of the flaming, flowing shapes she envisioned.
"I'm interested in orchestrating the energies in the space, and transforming it into a new pictorial reality," says Kwak, 45, a diminutive woman wearing blue Korean sneakers, black pants and shirt. The lyrical drawing, which she describes as full of longing and powerful movement, "is dealing with the invisible energy and the ephemeral quality of it."
After the show closes, the drawing will be taken down and thrown away. "For me, it's a life. It's going to be alive in this space for a limited time then disappear. Just like us. But for people who interact with it, it will be embedded in their minds, so it's not really gone. It's emptiness we're talking about, but in a very positive way."
'Sweep you away'
While the drawing still exists physically, "it should sweep you away," says the self-critical Kwak, who will be pleased if 70 percent of what she intended comes across. "Less than that, it's a disaster," she adds with a laugh.
Elsewhere, you enter two small connected rooms - one harmonious, or auspicious, the other not - designed by the American artist Adrian Wong using Korean ceremonial objects from the museum's collection and the advice of local feng shui experts. Up in the Chinese ceramics gallery, surrounded by pieces adorned with mythological creatures and other traditional imagery, you find a vivid and grotesque painting by Hong Kong-born Canadian artist Howie Tsui. It draws on everything from ancient Chinese mythology and Edo-period ghost paintings to contemporary Japanese anime. Among other fantastical figures, there's a headless guy with a hatchet dancing on a two-headed elephant.
"The artist goes back to all these traditional stories and mythologies and characters and reinterprets and reshapes them his own way," Harding says. "He uses those characters to comment on how in our culture today, storytelling is used more to incite fear, rather that teach moral lessons."
Intricately decorated
Then there are the Han Dynasty bronze mirrors, some dating back to 480 B.C.E. The backsides are intricately decorated with cosmological symbols, deities and constellations. The mirrors reflected not just face of the person holding it, "but also the whole universe," says Kataoka, who found a similar resonance in the work of Filipino artist Poklong Anading. In his "Anonymity" pictures, nine of which are in view in light boxes, he photographed people holding mirrors to their faces to reflect a round flash of sunlight that obscures their image
Kataoka has some advice for viewers, who don't need to know the backstory of these pieces to experience them fully.
"What you have to do is take a big breath and try to feel the invisible energy. Then you begin the show." {sbox}
Phantoms of Asia: Contemporary Awakens the Past: Fri.-Sept. 2. $7-$12. Asian Art Museum, 200 Larkin St, S.F. (415) 581-3500. www.asianart.org.
Jesse Hamlin is a freelance writer. sadolphson@sfchronicle.com
This article appeared on page P - 14 of the San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/05/13/PK4C1OCP8V.DTL
Sunday, May 13, 2012
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