29 March - 19 June 2005
Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
One of the exhibition's intentions is to 'counteract Western
prejudice'2 or the West's tendency to judge the art of other cultures
according to its own formal framework of criticism. Perhaps though,
this framework is impossible to escape entirely, even the identity
of difference implied by the subtitle 'from East Asia' could be
seen as playing the game according to Western rules. Furthermore,
the artists exhibited here all practise in a cultural context
in which Western ideas and objects are so commonly encountered,
that a wholesale denial of them is somewhat futile. However, as
Sunhee suggests in the exhibition catalogue, the emergence since
the 1980s of an internationalist set of artists working in new
media and technology supports the view that tradition never dies,
it just evolves. A sense of historical continuity and of an aesthetic
perspective that diverges significantly from that of many Western
artists is discernable and this show has been designed to allow
it maximum resonance.
The exhibition has been split into two parts in a way that reflects
the traditional divisions of East Asian art. The first, 'San sui',
groups together works that deal with the outer landscape; the
second, 'Feng shui', focuses on the inner landscape, or what might
be loosely termed interior design. As the name suggests, it has
been laid out using feng shui as a guiding principle.
The exhibition opens with Kobayashi Toshiya's series of landscape
photographs entitled 'Landscape in the Mist'. These ambiguous
shots of a German forest were taken from a speeding car with a
high-speed camera, but the resulting work is reminiscent of 'sumi-e',
Japanese ink and brush paintings. The merest suggestion of trees
is enough to set the imagination free in a landscape of delicate
greys, in confirmation of the Buddhist-inspired precept that the
partial can stand for the whole.
A similar philosophy can be detected in the oil paintings of Song
Hyun-Sook, in which sparse techniques create ambiguity. In '9
Brushstrokes, Dec. 1, 2003', for example, what appears to be a
swathe of delicate fabric hung from a bamboo bar is constructed
from the eponymous nine strokes. The flowing lines recall calligraphy
and traditional ink painting, but the deliberate foregrounding
of technique in the title blurs the boundary between representation
and abstraction. Are we supposed to view these works in the light
of abstract expressionism, or to see in their silence and use
of space the unbroken line of a much older tradition?
Other pieces are concerned with the reanalysis of traditional
landscape masterpieces in the light of contemporary East Asian
culture. Whang Inkie's 'Mt. Tiger after Rain' is a rendering,
in the sharply contrasting medium of reflective crystal pieces
over a black painted board, of the scanned image of a classical
Korean landscape painting. A hint of the serenity of the original
remains, despite the artificial iridescence of the materials.
In contrast, Yoo Seung-Ho's work 'shoooo...' retains, from a distance,
its ancient appearance: a monochrome landscape of mountains and
waterfall. It is only on closer inspection that this piece, a
reproduction of a painting by the Chinese old master Guo Xi, reveals
itself as composed of hundreds of tiny repetitions of the word
'shoooo' written in pen in modern Korean script. Seung-Ho found
the word in a Japanese comic book as the onomatopoeic description
of a rocket's lift-off. Two other pieces use the words 'yodeleheehoo'
and 'dada' to construct similarly vertiginous rock-and-water landscapes.
This practice of dislocating words as carriers of meaning could
perhaps be read as a reference to the Buddhist tradition of paradoxical
riddles, designed to create a rational impasse and allow access
to deeper levels of understanding.
Kwon Ki-Soo's video art is even more tongue-in-cheek. In his animated
film, 'Plum Blossoms around a Cottage - Visiting a friend on a
snowy day', Kwon inserts his cartoon alter ego, Donguri, into
a classical landscape setting by the Korean painter Goram Jonki
(1825-1854).
The first part of the exhibition has been organised as if it were
itself a landscape painting, allowing visitors to experience the
juxtaposition of different pieces. Thus, Suh Do-Ho's 'North Wall',
a stitched recreation in translucent green fabric of the north
façade of the artist's Seoul house, is suspended over Shon
Jeung-Eun's 'The River of Immortality', a meandering collection
of plastic glasses filled with antiseptic solution. The river
ends in a small pond where Xu Bing's 'The Living Word' takes off.
This installation begins in a text laid out on the floor, featuring
the Chinese character meaning 'bird'. From this 'bird', many more
characters lift off in a flock towards the ceiling, gradually
changing shape into pictograms and finally into realistic bird
forms.
The second part of the exhibition has been planned according to
the traditional geomantic principles of feng shui, in an effort
to escape the 'white cube' method of presentation and provide
an environment in harmony with the works. The feng shui expert,
Hong Sung-Dong, was enlisted to plot the presence of exterior
natural forces such as Tokyo Bay and Mount Fuji and to divide
the space, like a home, into areas suitable for recreation, meditation,
eating, or relaxing, according to the nature of the artworks.
Akira Yamaguchi is primarily known for his detailed paintings
in the classical Japanese manner which collapse asynchronous subjects
together in a way that is equally informed by art history and
sci-fi manga. His 'Portable Folding Tea Ceremony Room' updates
the austere aesthetic of the tea room, constructing a tiny hut
from corrugated plastic with a camping stove inside. The overall
effect is somewhat like an earthquake relief centre, and really
quite funny, the absurdity lying in the juxtaposition of studied
ritual with modern materials and take-away philosophy. The other
installation shown here, 'White Path', is a fairly literal rendering
of a Buddhist allegory with a modern twist.
In the exhibition catalogue, the Mori's Deputy Director, Nanjo
Fumio, claims:
In one view, the West sees nature as something that human beings are in conflict with and that human beings must control and rule over, whereas the East sees nature as something that is accepted and loved, something that is more human.3Whether one accepts this opinion or not, a few works in this exhibition do make political points, such as 'Eating Landscape' by Song Dong, a Beijing-based artist who has previously exhibited at the Tablet Gallery in London. In his video projections, miniature landscapes sculpted from food are disrupted by the appearance of a hand and a pair of chopsticks that consume the beauty, bit by bit. The calligraphy adorning the landscapes is revealed as a mundane list of ingredients and recipes - though only if you can read Chinese characters. The work is a sarcastic, thought-provoking joke on those who can see the beauty of the calligraphy or landscape but cannot understand its deeper import.
