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Calligraphy, Cavorting Pigs and Other Body-Mind Happenings

January 25, 2002

By HOLLAND COTTER




Performance art and body art were far-out stuff in the
United States and Europe starting in the 1960's. But a
version of them had already existed for centuries in East
Asia. It was called calligraphy.

In the right hands, calligraphy was about much more than
putting words down on a page. It was a total body- mind
discipline requiring balletic precision and hair-trigger
expressive reflexes. With its attention to movement,
attitude and physical props, it was a species of theater,
through which cultural and spiritual values were distilled
and embodied in intensely personal ways.

And it was always, at its most inventive, a vanguard art,
one that used the inspired gesture to do radical, even
outlandish things to revered traditions. So it makes sense
that when Western performance and body art - both also
about radical gestures - filtered into East Asia, they were
avidly assimilated and multifariously transformed.

Some sense of this dynamic can be gleaned from two
concurrent and very different exhibitions, "Word Play:
Contemporary Art by Xu Bing" at the Arthur M. Sackler
Gallery in Washington and "Translated Acts: Performance and
Body Art From East Asia 1990-2001" at the Queens Museum of
Art. The first considers written language as performance;
the second expands this subject into other formal realms.

"Word Play" is a midcareer look at Xu Bing, one of the most
visible of several Chinese artists who began their work in
the 1980's and have become international figures in the
last few years. It gives him full-dress treatment, with
impressive results. His pieces are spread over two floors
of galleries and hold the space. The small catalog by the
curator, Britta Erickson, is clearly written and critically
on the ball.

The written word as both subject and medium came naturally
to the artist, born in 1955. His mother was a librarian.
Books were ever-present when he was growing up and he took
calligraphy lessons from his father at an early age. But
his youth coincided with the Cultural Revolution, a time
when language was a dangerously complicated political tool.


In the 1970's, he was assigned to write and paint posters
in a local propaganda office, then sent to the countryside,
where he created banners for village events and produced a
newspaper, designing the typeface himself. Eventually he
brought all of those skills to his art, and they came
together in his most famous work, the monumental
installation titled "Book From the Sky."

The centerpiece of the Sackler show, it is an architectural
environment made entirely of books, wall panels and
enormous paper scrolls that hang from the ceiling like a
canopy. Every surface is covered with words, printed from
thousands of woodblock plates hand-carved by the artist.
The language resembles Chinese but actually consists of
nonsense characters he invented.

What results is a walk-in monument to unreadability, at
once magnetic and suffocating, a stage set in which viewers
become actors in an absurdist linguistic drama. Mr. Xu's
apparently nihilistic approach to language cast him into
instant political disfavor, encouraging him to move to the
United States in 1991.

The work he has done since then is still language-based,
though with an increasing interactive and performative
dimension. He has become best known recently for
installations in the form of hands-on calligraphy classes,
equipped with desks, utensils and an instructional video.
The script taught is one of the artist's devising; it
cleverly uses Chinese calligraphic elements to produce
English words.

More stimulating, though, is a series of Happening-style
events with live animals that Mr. Xu produced and filmed in
the mid-1990's. A piece titled "A Case Study in
Transference" involved two randy pigs as actors. The artist
hand-stamped the female with Chinese-style nonsense
characters, the male with meaningless phrases in English,
then let them loose to mate. In a second piece, titled
"Cultural Animal," the text- embellished stars were a male
pig and a dummy of a crouching man. Their union was
unconsummated.

Both performances offer a satirical, Orwellian take on the
loony ways of cultural interchange, global and personal.
They present language as a kind of instinctual drive,
urgent but illogical, with a potential for fruitful
pleasure, but also for frustration.

Neither of these indecorous videos is on view at the
Sackler, where the emphasis is on the roots of Mr. Xu's art
in classical Chinese sources. (Tang dynasty calligraphy and
Qing- period writing utensils accompany his work.) But
"Cultural Animal" is included in the messier, zanier Queens
Museum exhibition, and it looks right at home there.

The show, organized by Yu Yeon Kim, an independent curator,
has its share of problems. With two dozen artists from
China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, it covers too much cultural
ground. And it doesn't resolve the problem of how to
present performance and body art without the charismatic
presence of live bodies. Photographs, films and
installations do the job, but with varying success.

That said, there are interesting things here, beginning
with further links between performance and calligraphy. In
a video, the Chinese- born, New York-based artist Wenda Gu
is shown wielding a king-size brush to write a Chinese
version of an English translation of a Tang dynasty poem.
He uses ink processed from samples of human hair gathered
from around the world, finessing the notion that cultural
traditions are an exclusive product of racial DNA.

In another film, the Taiwan-based Chun-chi Lin writes the
words reality and illusion on paper, burns the sheets and
mixes the ashes with wine, which he drinks, then spits out
onto the wall to create a Zen version of abstract painting.
The words he writes have particular resonance within
Buddhism and Taoism, and references to these religions make
up one of the show's thematic strands.

In photographs by Atta Kim, nude models sit in
reliquarylike display cases on Buddhist temple altars, as
well as in museums and on city streets. In a video loop by
Gong Xin Wang, a man's face dissolves into a pool of
seething water, then rematerializes. And in a film by
Michael Joo, the Asian-American artist makes an arduous
pilgrimage across the Great Salt Lake Desert in Utah and
ends up on a verdant Korean hillside, sitting motionless,
his skin caked with salt as wild elk lick his skin.

Mr. Joo's "Salt Transfer Cycle" is one of the show's most
poetic entries. Another is a film by Young Jin Kim of hands
- young and old, gloved and bare - passing a threaded
needle to one another through an embroidery frame, a silent
gesture that seems at once tender and aggressive. Here, as
in much of the show, performance is detached from language;
social and cultural issues are approached abstractly; the
tone is surreal.

This is particularly true of Japanese work with roots in a
pop-cultural blend of futuristic fantasy, infantile
cuteness and eroticized violence. Motohiko Odani's
photographs of a little girl dressed in pristine white,
floating in space, her hands apparently bloodied by a
stigmata, might be explained in many ways, but it projects
the gruesome sensuality of Renaissance paintings of
Christian martyrdoms.

Much of the art at the Queens Museum might not exist, or at
least not in the same form, without Western models, though
how such influences work is not explored, nor is the story
of home-grown Asian performance and body art, from Japanese
Gutai onward. By contrast, the Sackler presents Mr. Xu's
work within an Asian context and carefully traces Western
elements that have been added. In such contrasts, the two
shows - one narrowly focused, the other scrappy but
expansive - complement each other well. And together they
give at least some sense of the recent history and
developing future of vigorous new art coming out of Asia.

``Word Play: Contemporary Art by Xu Bing'' remains at the
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution,
Independence Avenue at 12th Street SW, Washington,
(202)357-2700, through May 12. ``Translated Acts:
Performance and Body Art From East Asia 1990-2001'' remains
at the Queens Museum of Art, New York City Building,
Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens, (718)592-9700,
through Feb. 17.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/25/arts/design/25COTT.html?ex=1012962296&ei=1&en=253dcddbbc4a3c47



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