'Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China'
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Through April 6, 2014
Stepping into the Asian galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art we are unexpectedly greeted by colorful triptychs hanging from the ceiling in a hall otherwise filled with centuries-old sculptures. They form Yang Jiechang's 2002 "Crying Landscape," whose postcard-perfect scenes of such sites as oil refineries and the British Parliament appear inviolable until in the last triptych a plane crashes into the Pentagon.
This is not the only unexpected find as we make our way through the permanent collection to "Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China," housed in the calligraphy and painting galleries. The Coca-Cola logo painted on a Western Han dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 9) earthenware jar catches the eye— Ai Weiwei 's 1995 commentary on the impact of Western consumer culture. A few steps later, six prints by Hong Hao upend conventional notions of maps. It is as though "Ink Art" has burst from its confines, invading the realm of ancient bronzes, jade and statuary.
Hard to imagine a better way to express the vitality and questioning that has characterized China's art scene for the past 30 years. After the devastation of the Cultural Revolution, artists gradually gained easier access to European and American art scenes and could stay abroad for longer periods. They were now experimenting and pushing boundaries, looking outward and inward, wrestling with the past as they shaped their future.
"Ink Art" is a selection from this period, not an overview, all of its 70-plus works connecting specifically with China's 2,000-year-old tradition of ink calligraphy and painting and, more generally, with the world of artist-scholars. It focuses on paintings, video, prints and photography that variously deal with the written word, abstraction, landscapes and their contemporary equivalent, cityscapes. An additional grouping loosely labeled "Beyond the Brush" includes reflections prompted by Ming furniture and imperial robes.
As the show's curator and head of the Asian art department, Maxwell K. Hearn, takes pains to explain, we could just as fruitfully look at these works in the context of global contemporary art, and indeed many a name is familiar from that world. But by showcasing them in the Chinese galleries—a first for the Met—rather than in the modern and contemporary wing, Mr. Hearn invites us to look at the works through the lens of Chinese history. And a powerful lens this proves to be.
In galleries where the paintings are usually no more than 5 feet tall, we are dwarfed by hanging scrolls reaching 9 to 13 feet, handscrolls that are 5 feet wide and up to 100 feet long (only portions are unfurled), and sets of multiple photographs that fill entire walls. In many cases, their sheer monumentality dictates new relationships to familiar formats. Thus Liu Dan's 1990 "Ink Handscroll" requires us to walk alongside it as if it were a mural. Unlike traditional landscapes, where a solitary figure might offer a way into the scene, these uninhabited mountains, clouds, rivers and splinters of ice are so angular and dense they yield no point of entry, their impenetrability made all the starker by their size. A genre that once offered escape now pushes us away.
Similarly, Li Huasheng's 9-foot scrolls subvert the way we appreciate line in Chinese painting. Rather than the element that reveals the artist's individual energy, or qi, his lines—evenly executed horizontals and verticals—embody pure concentration devoid of personality. It is man in the service of ink—or perhaps this thought arises because Mr. Li's work hangs near abstract works in which the ink seizes control. In the 1994 "100 Layers of Ink," for example, Mr. Yang's gestures are lost beneath an accumulation of ink so thick it pulls the paper into crests and ripples.
Time and again, artists subvert the familiar, perhaps none more charmingly than Duan Jianyu in her 2008 "Beautiful Dream 4" with its silhouetted mountain peaks and their reflection in water. The theme is classic, but she paints on a flattened cardboard box where the top layer has been ripped to expose a corrugated surface. Similarly, a small handscroll presents interlocking vignettes of people lounging along a walkway, its low wall weaving through each scene much like streams in ancient paintings connect pockets of poets loitering along the banks. But in Xing Danwen's "Scroll A1," they are ordinary folk, not lofty intellectuals, and her medium, photography, imposes a foreign convention. Chinese handscrolls read right to left; but Ms. Xing lets us see Kodak 's left-to-right numbering of the frames. So which way do we travel?
Threaded throughout the show are works that deal with writing, the art form Chinese literati most valued. We see artists variously challenging the power, trustworthiness and permanence of words. In "Family Tree" (2001), for instance, a series of photographs show the accumulation of characters inked on Zhang Huan's face, gradually obliterating his identity.
The authority of text is such a strong theme in Chinese history, both ancient and modern, that it is fitting it should bookend the show.
At the start, huge characters cover one of Gu Wenda's 9-foot-tall hanging scrolls from his "Mythos of Lost Dynasties Series." Some characters are circled in red, others crossed out with red strokes that shout judgment. The last gallery, on the other hand, houses an installation of Xu Bing's famous 1987-91 "Book from the Sky," a most apt conclusion for a show that plays with themes of subversion, estrangement and history.
Accordion books filled with rows of crisply printed characters unfold on the floor, while lengths of paper with more writing drape down the center of the ceiling and line the walls. In a phonetic alphabet, all this writing would fill our minds with babble, because Mr. Xu invented every single character. None contains meaning—but a reader of Chinese would not sound out nonsense, just draw a blank. As authoritative as it appears, the text is not just unintelligible. It is mute.
Ms. Lawrence writes about Asian and Islamic art for the Journal.