黑料不打烊

Asian Contemporary Art Fair New York City, NY, at Pier 92, November 6 through 10, 2008 It鈥檚 best to allow yourself one hour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, maybe a cup of coffee in the caf?, then another hour, maximum. If you stay too long you get a stomach ache from overseeing and a headache from overthinking. But in New York City the Met is always there for another day, while a fair is 鈥渢his weekend only.鈥� A very short time to see, think and re-see. But fairs are a bonus to art lovers, they鈥檙e like travelling museums of the moment. Jessica Park, the marketing director of the Asian Contemporary Art Fair reminded me that, 鈥淭he art market has become increasingly event driven,鈥� and ACAF is, of course, an event filled with opportunities. This year 80 exhibitors drew 15,000 visitors to see art from China, Japan, India, Bangladesh, Turkey, Vietnam, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Korea, Singapore the Philippines and more. Started three years ago, it鈥檚 the first of its kind in New York City. But it鈥檚 more than that, more than 鈥渁 highly successful method for collectors to see the market,鈥� more even than an exceptional overview of contemporary Asian art. It鈥檚 a living, open question about the nature of difference, the vestigial power of geography. By the end of my first three-hour look-see at ACAF 2008 I was spinning 360 degrees鈥攊n New York, looking at the work of artists from the other side of the world. Although everything was mesmerizing at Sundaram Tagore Gallery (including the transporting stains of Sohan Qadri), Hiroshi Senju鈥檚 work is a showstopper. Using fluorescent pigment on rice paper the artist channels the sublime long-ago Japanese landscape with a Helen Frankenthaler-esque viscerality. What he offers is something we need: beauty. Also beautiful were some small watercolors by Guo Hongwei at Chambers Fine Art sitting quietly in the busyness of the fair. Featureless and shy human shapes were drenched and disappearing into paper. As a special exhibition Dr. Charles Merewether curated the show 鈥淕iven Difference鈥� with artists from the newly seen (in the art world) regions of Kazakhstan, Turkey and Georgia. All the work was good. Most memorable was the work of Yerbossyn Meldibekov of Kazakhstan in Family Album, where the artist takes photos of families standing in front of political monuments and buildings, recreating personal photos that the same family had taken some thirty years earlier. Same family, identical monument; add time, progeny and color; subtract the once living, position the others as before and place a new leader in the backdrop. The dedication to authority as good manners is still thick. These works engaged on so many levels they almost feel cliche in their profundity. But genuine sentiment reigns. Gold bones, a slashed foot and a boat of skulls hinted at something seen before by curator Feng Boyi in a show called My Bone, Flesh, and Skin with young artists from China. But then I walked into a giant woman at the rear, her eyes fixed in the air waiting to understand something or do something or be told to do something. A pudgy, wounded and naked woman, she just sat there eyes ablaze, and although she was three meters tall I wanted to pet her. I asked the artist, Xiang Jing if she could tell me about the work. She replied, it is just 鈥渕y body.鈥� She meant the title but also that all the women whom she sculpts and gets to know intimately (there are so many!) become mirrors to her, and she finds them intoxicating. To understand is to become one and sort of consume in empathy. The same work鈥攕he does these massive pieces in editions鈥攊s also on show at the moment at Saatchi in London. Although wrought of hard material, the effect is one of tender flesh, like the gravity felt in the folds of fat. Then, with a Bouguereau-worthy paint finish, she animates the body, making it delicious to be near鈥攅xploiting a most subtle profound desire: proximity to (larger than) life. Another giant work was by Li Xi called Wu Ju, referring to the Buddhist idea of 鈥渘o fear.鈥� Included in the exhibit 鈥淵ou in the Red Chamber, I Journey West,鈥� curated by Liang Chong, Li Xi鈥檚 piece is a large canvas tarp that looks like it鈥檚 been dragged on muddy ground for a thousand years. Most of the painting is this ambient mud-ochre, but in one corner of the image is painted a tumultuous 鈥渢iger-like鈥� mangle. The particularly painted stripes allude to a traditional Chinese painting style and reveal a struggle; there are no heads and no claws, just the essence of courage-bodies in brave battle鈥攖he conquerors rewarded with the anxiety-free mind of a Zen Buddhist. A new twist on the art of bonsai had trees growing down at Eli Klein by artist Shen Shaomin. Hardware tools contort the trees in twin ceramic vases, the end result looking like a dinner centerpiece from the film Metropolis. This piece along with the black-and-white painting by Luo Qing of headless men running into the woods seems mythically relevant in the moment. At Regis Krampf, two artists never before seen in NY debuted works of note. Guangping Chiu paints a reckless and happy but grisly horse charging the limits of the picture plane, mounted by a torch-wielding rider who threatens to burn what鈥檚 underfoot. In Mongolian Feast, Fu Jijang spreads a banquet sculpted in porcelain of tasty-looking and elegant but inedible cats, pigs and dogs, laid like pretty meat on platters. Most striking was Chen Quilin鈥檚 Ellisis鈥� Series No 3 at Max Protetch. It is a photograph of a beautiful young girl, a kind of post apocalyptic heroine, crazy-brilliant, who sits with wedding gown on in a vacant landscape applying her makeup, nuclear power plant in the background. We can see an almost imperceptible horde of people watching her womanly rituals through the circular mirror smudged with her beauty potions. It is one of those images that is ahead of its time and timeless. Crossing the tragedy of Chinese Opera and the mythic timekeeping of a Jodorowsky film, she provokes so many fantasies and realities at once that you want to be in the horde watching. The crossings, the fantasies and realities of all the work in the fair, for that matter even the reminder of Jodorowsky with his yogis and cowboys shooting it out, had brought me full circle. It seemed that there is still a difference conceptually, formally, and materially between how art is made in New York and how it is made in, say, Kazakhstan鈥攂ut not much. The difference that remains seems to be some kind of socio-art education鈥攏ot just art school, but the symbolic icon-zeitgeist inherent in each region and the sense of humor or seriousness, irony or earnestness, the simple aesthetic syntax by which people are surrounded: basically, flavor of thought. Difference is not necessarily where you鈥檙e from anymore but how you choose to think鈥攖hough undeniably how you can think is still shaped partially by where you鈥檙e from. The world has long had a love affair between the Orient and the Occident. On either side, Exotic is the name of the other. Growing up I thought Exotic was a dirty word鈥攊t was just too sensual a concept to indulge; it meant to me 鈥渦nknown strange goings on elsewhere.鈥� How sexy not to know. Today it takes a little money, a Lonely Planet, and a friendly visa department to find out that quite far away people are doing the same things in another house. Artists included. On VIP night, as I marvelled how we鈥檝e lost this dirty word, how it had dissipated itself, I heard a man serenading his girl. They weren鈥檛 artists鈥攋ust getting the vibe of the fair. What is left after a great love affair is over? Everything in fact. In the immortal words of Leonard Cohen, 鈥淪o the great affair is over, But whoever would have guessed, It would leave us all so vacant, And so deeply unimpressed, It鈥檚 like our visit to the moon, Or to that other star, I guess you go for nothing, If you really want to go that far.鈥� Using everything from everywhere these artists allude not to just their own lives but to the multitudes of world culture, commerce, religion, making work that no one can understand more than a block away (yet) with visual languages gathered from the breadth of the globe and the length of human history. While Indian painters are poring over images of Pollock, Mexican painters use the Kama Sutra to make erotic rocket launchers. In a way, artists from Asia are taking the cultural advantage: they are using Western history and market development, meting and mixing it with their own terra firma and churning up art as fresh as it comes. Because fresh is in the mix.