nwasianweekly.com
Sept. 15, 2007

Image provided by Seattle Art Museum

Qin Siyuan’s “A Self-Portrait Book, 2003”

The text is there, but you can’t read it

By N.P. Thompson
Northwest Asian Weekly

The overarching theme of the bizarre conceptual pieces on display in “Shu: Reinventing Books in Contemporary Chinese Art” appears to be that the written word has lost all relevance in a society that has better things to do than read. The texts that accompany these works at the Seattle Asian Art Museum are by turns deliberately blotted out, mutilated or printed using invented letters that resemble an alphabet, yet are wholly unpronounceable.

The Beijing-based Zhang Xiaogang contributes the most entertaining variation on this in “Written Memories” (2005), a collection of 20 framed photographs jammed together, in four rows of five, on the same wall. All the shots, whether they’re in color, black and white or hand-tinted sepia, are from 1970s television shows. The images include a book open to a photo of Chairman Mao, a folding chair propped against a wall next to black leather recliners in an empty room (which would you rather sit in, the picture seems to ask), and a man and a woman clad in overalls before a theatrical curtain. The man, grinning brashly, extends his right hand forward, as if delivering a comedy routine. The woman stands there, her mouth open, awaiting a punch line. But the joke is on us: Zhang scrawls each photo with randomly chosen text that intentionally doesn’t correlate to what we’re seeing. It’s a prank on the viewer’s obsession with knowing the “meaning” of art.

An earlier and more unsettling Zhang series, “Private Notes: Four, nos. 1-7” (1991), suggests what Kafka might have produced, had he been a painter “re-educated” during the Cultural Revolution. These oils on paper depict a headless torso in a kind of conversation with a large severed head. Dismembered hands, either red or white, point to or splay across pages of text. The top half of a sliced-in-two figure lies on a trunk as he tries to read in a dark brown room; in the distance behind him, a tiny pair of legs dangles from hooks on the wall. No matter where or how Zhang arrived at these visions, they are irresistible portraits of alienation and fear.

Yue Minjun’s blatantly satirical “Garbage Dump” (2005-06) invites us to regard books as trash. Six identical life-size fiberglass male nudes, their mouths open from ear to ear in ugly, jeering expressions, squat on stacks of ribbon-festooned paperbacks. A contented black pig, holding a calligraphy brush aloft in its smiling snout, beams at us with satisfaction in the ceramic sculpture “Piling Up Books” (2005) by Yuan Chin-t’a. I’d call it an excellent piece for introducing children to the mildly avant-garde and getting them to like it.

Qin Chong’s 2002 wood installation “Birthday I-IV” (a quartet devoted to controlled burning) is worthwhile. Even more impressive, there’s Chen Xinmao’s “History Book Series — Blurred Printing” (2002), a set of 14 woodblocks in which jagged textures combine with deep cobalt explosions of color to create something rich and vibrant. Fragmenting red seals float along, submerging in the blur of spectral gray. In one print, rows of calligraphic characters cascade downward in the manner of an imploded building giving way as it collapses.

Paradoxically, the most hopeful and forward-looking piece in the show emerges as Gu Xiong’s “Cultural Revolution Sketch Books.” These ink and pencil drawings date from 1972-76, when the artist, then a teenager, labored in camps. Bound in notepads stitched by Gu’s own needle and thread, the work could stand as an early example of the graphic novel. Images of a uniformed man squeezing an accordion, and of two laborers in remote mountains awaiting letters flown to them by birds, may only hint of the hardships endured; nonetheless, that such delicacies have survived at all is plainly triumphant.

N.P. Thompson can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.




“Reinventing Books”

What: “Shu: Reinventing Books in Contemporary Chinese Art,” an art exhibit that examines the impact and notion of the book

When: Aug. 9 - Dec. 2

Where: Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St., Seattle
Cost: Free-$5

More info: 206-654-3100 or www.seattleartmuseum.org

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