First published on ArtSlant China.
Text by Robin Peckham.
The Burden of Representation: Abstraction in Asia Today
Osage Kwun Tong
73-75 Hung To Road, Kwun Tong, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China
May 1, 2010 – June 27, 2010
The first thing to know about “The Burden of Representation” is that it is not, in fact, concerned with abstraction in Asia today. According to curator Eugene Tan, it is instead “about” painting, surveying the limit case of pictorial abstraction as a metonymic model for the medium as a whole. This is important because the announcement of the artist list under the banner of abstraction caused much wailing and gnashing of teeth within the Chinese art community; only after the opening did the project begin to make more sense. The second thing to know about the exhibition is that it is very much a product of its situation, motivated by a consistent desire on the part of Osage Gallery to prove its worth as a serious institution transcending commercial or curatorial aims. As such, this show feels much more like an attempt at a comprehensive survey of a certain genre of painting rather than a focused aesthetic program, intending to educate more than anything else. These museum aspirations, however, are tempered more than ever by the concurrent necessity of commercial viability, and here the two gallery stable artists included seem set apart from or even at odds with the remainder of the exhibition.
These two reservations aside, this is an important exhibition, comparing a variety of pseudo-representational methods from Hong Kong, Singapore, mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan. Interestingly enough, very few works on view emerge from the Western tradition of modernist abstraction, with the potential exceptions of Chen Jie, who paints row upon row of brightly colored pixels within graphite grids that admit to no logic or pattern, and Masato Kobayashi, whose sculptural silver canvases easily steal the show through a play of light, space, and gaze. Another curatorial triumph comes with a room juxtaposing a work each from Ding Yi, Yang Jiechang, and Liu Wei (the younger, born 1972). Yang Jiechang’s “maximalist” darkness sits menacingly across from the neon cyberpunk cityscape of Liu Wei, while Ding Yi’s eternally repeating crosses seem to mediate between the other two in a play of inscrutability. A similarly comparative hanging of Gong Jian, Jane Lee, and Milenko Prvacki seems rather less inspired, giving play to more collage-based forms of abstract composition. A final room consisting of Lee Kit, Michael Lin, Zhao Zhao, and more Liu Wei also suffers from an uneven selection of works, thoroughly dominated by Liu Wei’s “Yes, That’s All!” (2009) series based on television static. This space, which also contained Michael Lin’s blown-up and aestheticized vernacular cloth paintings and Zhao Zhao’s colorized rat droppings, contributes to a fascinating understanding of abstraction based on the play of scale, such that figurative representations painted at either extreme of the rubric of size automatically fall under the category of the abstract. Only Lee Kit, whose Rauschenberg-like cardboard foldings of brand names are somewhat ignominiously wedged between these more colorful works, might disagree: his latest series develops a process in which the tablecloths found in images of picnicking families and other social events downloaded randomly from the internet are rather literally “abstracted.” The patterns of the cloths are subsequently repainted onto the artist’s own trademark cloth, then mounted on board as if they were themselves two-dimensional paintings. This, perhaps, is a resolutely un-abstract artist’s rejoinder to the question of flatness.