This article from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by [log in to unmask] /-------------------- advertisement -----------------------\ Share the spirit with a gift from Starbucks. Our coffee brewers & espresso machines at special holiday prices. http://www.starbucks.com/shop/subcategory.asp?category_name=Sale/Clearance&ci=274&cookie_test=1 \----------------------------------------------------------/ 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 HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact Alyson Racer at [log in to unmask] or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to [log in to unmask] Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company ========================================================= Important Subscriber Information: The Museum-L FAQ file is located at http://www.finalchapter.com/museum-l-faq/ . 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