The place of Asian artists in the mainstream art world is surely rising, despite the fact that they are often written about as if they were occupying some parallel universe much like – but not exactly contiguous with – our own. As the number of Asian artists, curators, gallerists, and (hopefully) collectors continues to increase, it makes sense to see them as they are: a group of heterogeneous intellectuals with heterogeneous interests.
It is unfortunate that Asia is collectively categorised in terms of its art production, for the truth is that the cultures may only have geographical proximity in common. We are wise insofar as we seek out not only the commonalities but also the differences between, for example, China and Japan, for it is the particulars of a culture – their discrete individuality as signifiers of social meaning – that set up the accumulation of unlikenesses that makes the culture Other.
Yet the interesting thing about art coming
from Asia is that, consciously or not, contemporary artists from that part
of the world are using techniques that are part of Western modernist and
postmodernist traditions, without which the interpretation of Asian art
would be relegated to a rather tame description of surface characteristics.
Who came first to the techniques, say, of installation or performance art
matters less than why contemporary art from Asia superficially resembles
certain kinds of Western art, while introducing a specifically Asian content
with profound anthropological, historical, and aesthetic implications.
My guess is that much of the art from Asia addresses social change primarily
because the culture there is undergoing deep-seated alterations. I am
thinking primarily of Mainland China, whose embrace of Western-style
capitalism, along with the enduring and near-absolute power of the Communist
Party, seems to have unleashed a torrent of creative impulse. The three
leading Chinese artists currently in mid-career – Xu Bing, Cai Guo-Qiang and
Gu Wenda – now live in New York and exhibit internationally, but are seen in
the West as representatives of the Chinese culture from which they emigrated
years ago. It is ironic, then, that in China this triumvirate is referred to
as ‘international’ rather than Chinese, for despite incorporating Asian
beliefs and history, the visual language they employ was first explored in
the West as long as a generation ago.
For Western audiences, however, the problem is not so much accepting the now familiar idiom of contemporary Asian art as making sense of it, for there is often a deep gap in our knowledge of what is being referred to, and, without explanation, we simply do not know enough to comprehend these references. As a result, the criticism of such art must take on the burden of explanation as well as judgement, and the audience must necessarily be educated so as to come to terms with its meanings and intentions. This has happened often enough in the last decade, especially in the face of Chinese artists’ increasing confidence in producing art that remains, well, Chinese, at least in intention if not expression.
But it should also be noted that there is another, more easily comprehensible tack that has been taken. Here, artists from Asia have so completely internalised the pluralism of contemporary art that their work has become essentially only a personal statement, their exposure to Western culture so pervasive that they have little choice but to create within an idiom that is instantly comprehendible to a Western audience. The two women photographers discussed in this article – Japan-born Mayumi Terada and China-born DoDo Jin Ming – are artists who express themselves very much as individuals and whose work does not lend itself to an overtly cultural reading. It proves hard, then, to construe their efforts as ‘Asian’ alone, even when their art may be read within an Asian context. Instead, they belong to an increasingly large, increasingly international art world, joined by a more or less widely accepted, personalised language.
Terada constructs small interiors, of which
she makes photographs that she then enlarges; Jin Ming takes pictures of
sunflowers and the sea, in a way that intensifies their, and her,
idiosyncratic nature. For both artists, personal authenticity is primary;
however, the integrity of their work is not so much geographically as
authorially placed. What is being communicated is the essence or force of
the artist’s nature, and coming from a particular place appears to be a
construct of chance rather than a structure of identity. This is not to say
that these artists wilfully discard their background – indeed, in the case
of Jin Ming’s most recent work there is a real attempt to connect with
Chinese landscape painting – but rather it is to remark on the extent to
which much of their work eludes cultural classification.
The moody, evocative interiors of Terada suggest not a country but a state
of being, a collective childhood in which memory becomes important as a
universalising influence: we were all young once, we are all affected by the
pull of memory. By photographing models whose components are generalised
rather than specific, by allowing a vague sense of drama to permeate an
atmosphere, Terada creates a world that is perfectly accessible, and also
believable, to the Western viewer. She does this by negation, by
deliberately eschewing those visual elements, such as furniture, that we
would see as typically Japanese.
Terada, who came to New York a little more than a year ago, asserts that what she creates does not belong to a specific group or ethnicity: ‘I always try to find out and express an image of space that we can possess in common.’ Each of her photographs is of an isolated architectural element or space: there is an image of stairs, one of a bed, another of a door, and so on. Collectively, Terada’s discrete architectural components, titled the Dollhouse series, might be pieced together to make up a house, that is, something fulfilled or completed; however, the impression of these pictures as they stand is one of relentless isolation. From her partial versions of places, it is not hard to see that the artist is zeroing in on experiences of difference and aloneness, most especially those of childhood. The works also speak to the way we, as adults, experience the mysteries of loneliness, of a solitude that has its share not only of moments in the dark but also of dark moments. In Terada’s art, there is a call to awareness that mocks its very recognition; knowing our isolation, we are powerless to do more than point it out, an action which changes nothing in our lives. Terada is an artist of psychological states without ever including the human figure in her compositions, compelling by means of intuitive implication. Anyone who identifies with an imaginary world that, even as it is being imagined, proves psychologically menacing is able to connect with the not so gentle implications of these photographs. And in that sense the work is open to everyone.
Another area of interest here is the relationship of the photograph to the sculptural model, where the technical distancing between image and subject supports the psychological distancing resulting from the way we as adults look at the childlike suggestiveness of the Dollhouse series. The artificiality of a photographic rendition that looks like something real but which is in fact itself a version of a constructed model is inherently alienated, not in a political but rather in an imaginative sense. The suggestiveness of a reality based only on what has been imagined turns on our willingness to suspend disbelief. Of course, much of Western painting is predicated on the illusion of a would-be natural perspective, but in that case the meaningfulness of the composition is often tied to a religious iconography. Here, in Terada’s unusual photographs, we see artificiality as a major topic in itself: we are meant to see the model as visually, but not absolutely, convincing. It is the touch of the spurious that makes Terada’s pictures contemporary, for without the intellectual recognition that the images are not made to be utterly believable we would drift off into an appraisal of the work as essentially true.
It is the tension between belief and non-belief that attracts us to Terada’s art. Mostly we live our lives in exactly that narrow impasse – instancing the need for conviction that embraces rather than transcends the real. In the work of Jin Ming, we can see how the artificiality of the image is embraced in an attempt to relay a view of the object that is persuasively different from that which is seen. In transforming sunflowers into oddly human-seeming creatures, or the white water of a wave into fire (its manifest opposite), Jin Ming opts for the magical ability of art to seem other than it is. No cultural base is reached for in either the work of Terada or Jin Ming, perhaps because they trade on the most basic, and therefore global, attributes of art, namely the metamorphosis of one kind of ‘seeming’ into another kind of representation. Things look like something but mean something else; the eye is fooled into associating something with its opposite, as happens with Jin Ming’s fiery treatment of water.
In the work of the three Chinese artists mentioned earlier, the major element is one of didacticism rather than persuasion; on seeing their art, we become students with homework to be done. In Jin Ming’s art, we see ourselves alchemically; like the artist, we compel an interpretation highly different from what seems to be there. In a sense, then, we repeat, in our reading, the kind of transfiguration attended to by the artist, whose visionary changes argue for the essentially democratic nature of the imagination, its ability to speak to and change anyone willing to show an interest.
Other images of Jin Ming – she tends to work in series – document the essentially protean nature of water. In her Free Element series, the artist claims the liquid’s fluid element as evidence of a fiery inferno. The white water seethes and burns as if on fire, and the compositions glower with an apocalyptic energy that transforms them into incandescent masses, so much so that they resemble the fields of chaos in Turner’s luminous seascapes. Like Terada’s art, Jin Ming’s photographs conceal as much as they reveal; they are darkly charged, however, with the violence of nature more than they are with the threatening reach of a memory that is imagined rather than real. It is not difficult to see this work as an outpouring of Jin Ming’s psychological processes, the struggle to free her nature in the rapid intensities of what she sees. Her art exchanges the certainty of the image for the intuited complexities of its meaning, that is, for what is made of the image after it has been seen by its audience. In Burn Water Melting, a remarkable group of works from 2002, the images resemble Chinese landscape painting, suggestive of mountains and rivers without end. In this most recent body of work in particular, one senses that Jin Ming is recapturing her culture’s ancient and great tradition in the guise of nature photography. Even so, it is the personal, rather than the public, nature of the artist that predominates; the images border on the obscure and the eccentric, so determined is Jin Ming to take one kind of vision and reroute it within the boundaries of another.
Even though Jin Ming does seem to return to a culturally identifiable language, this does not detract from the point made above, that the private has taken charge in art. Jin Ming’s view is askew enough to cause viewers to see her art through her, as opposed to public, eyes, without which her photographic sequences would likely appear accessible but not necessarily deep. It is her ability to effect a change of vision without altering the images themselves that makes her so challenging an artist; we try, in the moment, to see what is spiritually but not actually there, becoming much like the artist herself.
In the art of Terada there is the call of memory, which attempts to sustain the vision of childhood in the face of the ongoing assault of age. Like Jin Ming, she too would have us see her art through an approximation of her view; we can recognise and comprehend only insofar as we try imaginatively to inhabit their worlds, however idiosyncratic. These two Asian women artists do not participate in the consciously didactic art of their colleagues because they have adopted a point of view that speaks to their individual sensibilities rather than their symbolic role in emblematising a culture. That they express themselves this way only opens the door wider to younger generations of Asian artists, whose freedom of mind, along with their public acceptance, will inevitably increase as time goes by.
Jonathan Goodman is a New York-based poet and author who writes extensively on contemporary Asian art DoDo Jin Ming, from the series Free Element, 2001