The Asian Art Museum continues its march into the present and its bid to win the hearts and minds of younger audiences with "First Look: Collecting Contemporary" at the Asian, the second of two exhibitions this year that have accentuated modern art.
While the first venture in this forward-looking direction, 28 Chinese, an impressive showcase for a constellation of China's art stars, relied on loans from other institutions, First Look draws on the museum's diverse acquisitions over the last 15 years, some purchased as recently as 2015, by artists not only from China, Korea and Japan, but also from Saudi Arabia, the Philippines and Thailand.
Indian artist Shreyas Karle dives into the deep end with "Museum Shop of Fetish Objects" (2012), a collection of Dada-esque objects that could be kinky cast-offs from a Hollywood prop room. Among the oddities: a brass megaphone, a white marble sculpture with mysterious orbs rising from its base, an assortment of dildos, a pair of spectacles with protruding metal cones where lenses ought to be, a hand with one thumb up and two fingers pointing that-a-way encased in a tin-and-glass box, and books with pages of sinister Rube Goldberg diagrams of who-knows-what.
"Four Seasons: Spring" (2011), an eye-grabbing saturated color photograph by Chen Man, who combines her flair for glossy, high-fashion mag layouts with fine art, injects feminism and female pulchritude into a splashy cross between a haute-couture warrior princess and forest sprite. With one foot balanced on the point of a jagged rock at the edge of a primeval world, this glamorous amazon could've stepped out of the blue-tinged mountain jungle of James Cameron's "Avatar."
On the other side of the spectrum in mood and timbre is the black & white photograph "Untitled, No. 25" (2008). Husband-and-wife team RongRong & inri depart from their usual outdoor landscapes in favor of a hermetic bedroom scene, all white, from the chintz curtains and bed sheets to the tank-tops worn by the couple. Seated on the bed next to each other and viewed from behind, the pose and the mirror-image patterns formed by their matching manes of long black hair conjure thoughts of conjoined twins.
While the previous exhibition soared in its ambitious, inventive installations, the most adventurous artworks in this current iteration are found in contemporary treatments of traditional subjects such as landscape, nature and the spiritual world, as well as in ancient mediums such as ink-painting, translated, filtered through or combined with new media. Reconciling the modern with old-world traditions has been a prevalent theme for a younger generation of artists whose societies have been undergoing revolutionary change and meteoric economic growth. And it is in Innovating Ink, a section devoted to multi-disciplinary explorations of cinema, video and digital animation, that the show is at its best.
Take a pair of amazing, 3-D digital animations by Japan's teamLab, a self-described "ultra-technologists" collaborative comprised of programmers, mathematicians, architects, animators, web and graphic designers, artists and other geeks who blur boundaries between art, science, and tech. They merge calligraphy and the exquisite delicacy of Asian scroll paintings with anime and supernatural imagery in "Cold Life" (2014) and "Life Survives by the Power of Life" (2011), which run in seven- and six-minute loops, respectively. By fusing the cutting edge and the old with exhilarating immediacy and razor-sharp color, we get a close-up in tight, detailed rotating view of cherry-blossom branches, pine needles, snowflakes and a flurry of butterflies suggesting the morphing of seasons. The team's techniques offer multiple perspectives of nature much the way AutoCAD unlocks architectural schematics.
The presence of the past is palpable in Xu Bing's 15-minute, five-channel animated video "The Character of Characters" (2012). Projected on a narrow scroll-like strip on the wall, the narrative, with a cast of 10,000 simple line drawings, responds to work of late-13th or early-14th-century Chinese calligraphy. Imitating the cycle of life, the rural landscapes, village scenes and figures are sketched before our eyes, then vanish, as if erased, before new ones suddenly arrive. People of a certain age may be reminded of a segment on Walt Disney's TV show, where an artist sitting at his drawing board brought characters to life and made them exit, stage left, with a stroke of his pen - the animator as invisible creator and destroyer of worlds.
By far the biggest find of this exhibition is Yang Yongliang, who digitally collages photographs and animates them, allowing the real and unreal to reside uneasily beside each other in the same frame. Influenced by cinema, traditional Chinese landscape painting and the grand illusions of computer graphics, his captivating HD video "The Night of Perpetual Day" (2013), which unfolds like a futuristic film with an eye to the past, has its own room, a theater as it were. In this fantasy landscape, a blasted-out canyon in a mountainside serves as an ersatz drive-in movie where one can perceive images flickering in distance, primordial waterfalls spill over rocky promontories, cars move along winding roads, light shifts, and skies darken in a monochromatic world. China's unchecked urban development (taken from the artist's photographs) continues apace, smog shrouds cities, and a flying saucer unexpectedly materializes and zips out of sight. (Through Oct. 11.)