East Expected

Robin Rice on Visual Art: "Ink Not Ink" at Drexel University

by Robin Rice

	print	email	reply	rss feed

Published: Apr 7, 2009

This monumental exhibit will undoubtedly get plenty of journalistic ink, and rightly so. Curated by China's Shenzhen Art Museum, the most important exhibition of contemporary Chinese art ever in the Philadelphia region showcases the work of 40 Chinese artists of several generations and does it on a grand scale. The show, brought to Philadelphia by Drexel's Westphal College of Media Arts and Design, occupies three locations on its campus. As the title might suggest, the selection emphasizes painting, but "Ink" also includes most permutations of contemporary art: assemblage, photography, installation, sculpture, interactive art and video.

On one level, the title invokes the origins of all Chinese art and the primal role of ink in the linked culture-building activities of painting and writing. Another interpretation could suggest the Taoist understanding of the importance of what-is-not as a way of defining what is. In Western art, this phenomenon is often expressed as "negative space." For example, the shape of the space between tree branches describes the branches themselves.

A large black-and-white photograph like Yang Guoxin's print of droplets of water on which a defined area of printed poetry has been superimposed is clearly embedded in historical Chinese ink painting forms. However, exhibit co-director Joseph Gregory says, "The ink tradition in China is so mysterious; anyone who says they understand it is full of baloney."

Regardless, Western and Chinese viewers will equally enjoy Li Bangyao's Landscape Manual. Some will recognize its source as the classic text Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden, used to teach landscape painting through the mastery of specific models. Li provides plenty of mountains, buildings, bridges, foliage and whatever you might want in clear plastic bins. The three-dimensional linear elements resemble oversize refrigerator magnets and make it possible — and fun — to construct a do-it-yourself traditional landscape on a white surface. It's clever and silly on one level, but packed with meaning. Although anchored in Chinese art, it demonstrates that all cultures possess a lexicon of visual tropes — or several lexicons. The fact that anyone can deconstruct the Chinese basis of Li's particular vocabulary reminds us that it is as iconic as, say, the elements of the Mona Lisa.

The work that has received the most attention is the biggest — Gu Wenda's enormous fiber installation UN: Man & Space. The abstract panels, executed over a period of 15 years by the eminent scholar, incorporate the hair of perhaps a million people from all over the world: mysterious, monumental and wonderful.

Yuan Xiaofang's The Magnificent Landscape of My Country is a full-scale bi-level scroll placing a reproduction of Wang Ximeng's famous Song dynasty landscape over Yuan's digital tongue-in-cheek (but not entirely) expanse of high-rise apartment buildings on a river. Even the color distortions in the reproduction of Wang's painting contribute to our thoughts about "magnificence" — and history itself.

Many women are included in the show, and some have produced work we might call "feminist." Tao Aimin's Female Text works, incorporating rubbings made from traditional washboards in elegantly constructed installations, and Yan Yinhong's The Smile and the Nightmare, combining dozens of haunting images to form one innocent girl's face (pictured, p. 20), are just two examples. Gregory is particularly impressed with the accomplishments of contemporary Chinese women artists and says he plans to center his next projects on them.

(r_rice@citypaper.net)

Ink Not Ink | Through May 9, Drexel University, various locations, 215-895-2548, drexel.edu

Mind Made Up
Gerald Kolpan
Un-Nature
Jihad Jones
ArtHouse
Here[begin] Dance Co.
Kaleidoscope
How Not to Write a Play
Power Play
Buy Shaver: "I Don't Know"