Natvar Bhavsar

SUNDARAM TAGORE GALLERY
57-59 Hollywood Road,
February 24–March 28

Natvar Bhavsar, Akal I, 2008, pure pigment on canvas, 23 x 21".

Natvar Bhavsar continues to push the boundaries of what is possible with pure color pigment in his solo exhibition “Rang,” which consists of twenty-two paintings created during a twenty-year span, with many made in the past two years. Each piece comprises anywhere from eighty to two hundred layers of pigment sifted onto acrylic gel. The oldest work in the show is Veebha, 1989; its inclusion allows viewers to see how the artist’s technique has evolved over the years. Here, a textured swirl of red, yellow, and blue atop black pigment surrounds a luminous green center, giving the impression of an entire galaxy encapsulated on the canvas. The effect is a grand gesture, with broad strokes hinting at a vast number of ideas. Two smaller canvases from 2008, Akal I and Akal V, provide a counterpoint, narrowing the focus to the microscopic level without reducing the complexity in approach. Bhavsar’s mastery of color and light makes clear how he has broadened the scope of late 1960s Color Field painting. In these two paintings, for instance, the liberal use of acrylic gel gives the surfaces a smooth, glossy look, bringing attention to how subtle changes in the quantity of materials can completely alter the visual experience.

There is a need for the viewer to commit fully to the act of looking when viewing these paintings. The payoff is seeing how Bhavsar’s technique has become more refined and exacting over time—essentially, in this exhibition, we witness the history of an artistic practice unfold on canvases.

— Doretta Lau

“Dada South: Experimentation, Radicalism, Resistance”

SOUTH AFRICAN NATIONAL GALLERY OF IZIKO
Government Avenue, Gardens
December 12–February 28

View of “Dada South: Experimentation, Radicalism, Resistance,” 2009.

Dada has long exemplified the utopian transnationalism of the early avant-gardes. But such internationalism has rarely departed from Europe and the well-traveled trans-Atlantic route to the United States. This landmark exhibition relocates Dada south––way south––traveling past West Africa and down to the tip of the continent. From this unprecedented vantage, curators Roger van Wyk and Kathryn Smith uncover key points of contact between the European Dadaists and Africa, such as Sophie Taueber-Arp’s likely familiarity with Zulu beadwork and Richard Huelsenbeck’s book Afrika in Sicht (1928), for which John Heartfield created a photomontage of Table Mountain juxtaposed with a telescope. This last image, an iconic example of Africa seen through the narrow viewfinder of the European imagination, has finally cycled back south again, its meanings blasted open by its return to Cape Town.

The path through the exhibition itself rehearses a cyclical trajectory, walking the viewer back through time from contemporary South African Dada-inspired art to neo-Dada apartheid-era work. An impressive grouping of European Dada originals follows, culminating in “The Body of the Voice,” a hybrid gallery of text-based work and theatrical projects. The final room smartly underscores the parallels between the political repression of prewar Berlin and apartheid-era South Africa.

Even more remarkable than the light it sheds on historical Dada, the achievement of this exhibition is its profound rereading of apartheid-era South African art history. By highlighting the overlooked, neo-Dadaist strains of South African art––such as the fantastic Fook Island, an imaginary island that Walter Battiss created as a utopia of political liberation in 1972––“Dada South” illuminates the satiric bite and oppositional politics of such work. In so doing, it reframes resistance art not simply as a heavy-handed art of shaking fists but also as works of quiet absurdity and ludicrous whimsy that used the unbounded realm of fantasy to carve spaces of freedom in an era of censorship.

— Leora Maltz-Leca

“Make Over”

ORIENTAL VISTA GALLERY
19C Shaoxing lu, Website,
January 23–March 13

Christina Shmigel, The View in Fragments #2, Blue Windowed White Tile Building, 2009, mixed media, 8 x 11 x 5 1/2".

As Shanghai prepares for the World Expo, some corners of the art world have launched a critically reflective resistance similar to the actions of the Beijing underground during the Olympics two years ago. Though it does not reject recent transformations in the local urban fabric as aggressively as do certain less visible projects, this small group exhibition offers a range of useful perspectives on the evolution of an oddly situated metropolis; Shanghai, once half-colonized by foreign powers, now plays a crucial role in the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and control.

Arguably most successful in this regard is Qiu Anxiong’s Smoke, 2009–2010, which introduces a simple smoke bomb to the gallery space as a counterpoint to the jubilation of typical firecrackers set off during Chinese New Year celebrations and as a signifier of affect instilling fear, confusion, and violence. Also in this political register, Ji Wenyu’s History of the People’s Republic of China, 2009, collects historical propaganda slogans (from THE PEOPLE HAVE STOOD UP of 1949 to BETTER CITY, BETTER LIFE of the Expo) and layers them along a three-dimensional timeline as if together they constituted a traditional Chinese calendar, off which a sheet is torn each day. Of particular aesthetic interest, Christina Shmigel, for her series “The View in Fragments,” 2009, has constructed delicate models of forgotten vernacular architecture––a pigeon coop, a prefab dorm, bamboo scaffolding, a white-tiled municipal office––and placed them within tiny cases of mahogany and glass. This is a reminder, perhaps, of the China ignored by the invading urbanists and architects, of the joints and junctions between the celebrated monuments to an imagined past and those to a utopian future.

— Robin Peckham

“The Tell-Tale Heart”

JAMES COHAN GALLERY SHANGHAI 上海科恩画廊
1/F, Building 1, Lane 170 Yue Yang Rd., by Jian Guo Xi Rd., 岳阳路170弄1号楼1楼(近建国西路)
February 27–April 11

Cheng Ran, Rock Dove, 2009, still from a single-channel video, 5 minutes.

Very rarely does an exhibition that consists solely of video art succeed in convincing its audience to sit through each and every piece on display. “The Tell-Tale Heart,” however, does just that and works its magic through an allegorical reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s classic suspenseful short story. Housed in a darkened colonial mansion replete with historic painted moldings, the show insists on the paranormal as a communication strategy, enticing moving images into fruitful dialogues with one another across the gallery spaces.

The standout work here is the single-channel video Rock Dove, 2009, by emerging artist Cheng Ran, who, though often given to elaborate and somewhat obtuse visual fantasies, here presents a focused portrayal of doves roosting in an empty factory, echoing the composition of a musical score as the birds fly from one dimmed fluorescent light to the next. The piece reaches its climax when the lights are turned on in an awkward rhythm, forcing the birds into frenetic flight patterns that result in a visual experience somewhere between the poetic and the systematic. Also poignant is Li Ming’s captivating XX, 2009, in which two young men attempt to exchange shirts while maintaining skin-on-skin contact, approaching the strictures of unspoken roles through the raw sexual power of the body. The supernatural conversation opened between these two pieces alone is quite productive; strong surrealistic outings by Apichatpong Weerasthakul, Hiraki Sawa, and Martha Colburn add further stylistic dimensions to the concise survey.

— Robin Peckham

Teppei Kaneuji

SHUGOARTS
5th Floor, 1-3-2 Kiyosumi, Koto-ku
January 10–February 27

Teppei Kaneuji, The Eternal (Various Patterns), 2010, printed materials, wrapping paper, wallpaper, 100 x 118". Installation view.

Kyoto-born sculptor Teppei Kaneuji follows his 2009 solo show at the Yokohama Museum of Art with “Post-Something,” his first one-man exhibition at ShugoArts, which showcases his penchant for deliquescent forms that come across as simultaneously organic and synthetic. Splash and Flake (Pipeline #3), 2009, is a small wall-mounted constellation of driftwood and branches joined together by pipes, washers, and Scotch-tape holders. The result puts forth a gnarled vision of the natural world, carefully twisted, sutured, and pruned but also somehow prosthetically enhanced—propped up and boosted by discarded bits of detritus from our machine civilization.

Although the plastic figurines slathered with dripping white resin from his earlier work are gone, Kaneuji’s interest in soft and formless matter comes together in a different way in his two The Eternal (Pattern of Wood Grain) diptychs, both from 2010. These found “canvases” are held together and framed by squidges of paint, paste, foam, yogurt, and toothpaste cut out from magazine photos of cosmetics and other consumables—a parable, perhaps, of the decorative overlaying and plastering seen in the “fancy” wallpaper and wooden laminates of cheap Japanese apartments that have been treated elsewhere by artists like Yuichi Higashionna.

Kaneuji’s promiscuous surface play and kitsch ornamentation also toy with old ideas of representation in a visual culture flooded with endlessly syndicated images. The Eternal (Various Patterns), 2010, is a joyous, shambolic collage of pictures cut out from Thai books of English vocabulary for kids, similarly cartoonish graphics featuring Dick Bruna’s Miffy the Rabbit, and some truly awful wrapping paper. In the end, however, Kaneuji’s evident joy in recombining ready-made patterns, images, and photographed objects to form flat, two-dimensional collages wins out over the more sculptural possibilities that he might have pursued.

— Darryl Wee

Miwa Yanagi

RAT HOLE GALLERY
5-5-3-B1 Minami Aoyama Minato-ku,
January 29–March 21

Miwa Yanagi, Lullaby, 2010, still from a color video, 12 minutes.

A group of thirteen-foot-tall portraits of grotesque, half-naked giantesses, Miwa Yanagi’s works in the Japanese pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale may have been widely denounced by critics, but they also confirmed that the artist is unafraid to pursue her own distinctly weird vision. Her current solo exhibition serves as something of an epilogue to Venice.

In the main gallery, the twelve-minute video projection Lullaby, 2010, centers on two women, one dressed in a frumpy skirt, her face covered by a prosthetic mask creased with wrinkles, the other in lacy white pajamas and the mask of a young girl. The video begins inside an idealized dollhouse interior just big enough to fit the two adult actors, the “grandmother” humming softly while comforting the girl curled in her lap. Suddenly, the girl wrestles the grandmother to the ground, subdues her, and then assumes the role of comforter. The pair alternate in this way several times, the intensity of the struggle gradually increasing until they kick through the walls of the interior to reveal that they are on a stage constructed on an urban rooftop. Rearing up into mantislike wrestling poses, the two clash again; the grandmother body-slams the girl with a resounding thud, takes her into her lap, and then resumes her humming.

A canny mix of absurdity and abjection, the work invokes comedy as a means to formalize irrational states, the emotional and physical extremes of human relations. Also on display are four black-and-white photographs from Yanagi’s “Fairy Tale” series, 2004–2006, which references Japanese and European fables. Here, prepubescent girls play both adult and child roles, but their pixieish frames undermine the adult-size settings and dark scenarios. Considered alongside Lullaby and the Japanese pavilion, these works underscore the artist’s growing investment in a theater of scale, in which architecture expands and contracts in response to the narrative’s psychic dimensions.

— Andrew Maerkle

Vidha Saumya

GREY NOISE
26 A, KB Colony, Street 4,, Allama Iqbal Airport Road,
February 22–March 15

Vidha Saumya, Sole Sirens Quartet (detail), 2009, ink on wood-free paper, 10 x 34".

The women in Vidha Saumya’s drawings are depicted as feminine and flirty, seducing their male consorts (as well as viewers) with provocative poses and sexy red lingerie. What’s surprising about their playfully rendered silhouettes, however, is their size: Saumya’s “sirens” are universally fat—though rendered both in large scale and in miniature. Artists working and exhibiting in Pakistan regularly consider sexuality and nudity, so the implication of skin in this exhibition is not new. But Saumya’s humorous representations of obesity touch on social issues like the changing standards of beauty in South Asia, which have given rise to taboos that are relevant internationally. In this regard, leaving the sirens’ skin uncolored (in comparison to the darker tones drawn onto some of the males) raises certain questions that reach beyond the show’s lightheartedness, about whether these women are in fact “white” or are meant to seem universal.

The exhibition also marks a return to Lahore for the Mumbai-based Saumya, who studied in the city on an international exchange program at the esteemed Beaconhouse National University in 2007–2008. Though Pakistani artists are now regularly being shown in Indian galleries, the reverse exchange is still rare, and incorporating artists like Saumya into the fresh and edgy program at Grey Noise highlights its ambitious experimentation within Lahore’s developing art scene.

— Beth Citron

MeeNa Park

KUKJE GALLERY
Sokyuk-dong 59-1, Chongro-ku
March 3–April 4

MeeNa Park, noncccss, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 62 x 62".

“BCGKMRY,” MeeNa Park’s debut solo exhibition at this gallery, indexes the artist’s resolve to establish her own, nonarbitrary visual order. Consistent with her ongoing engagement of a playful, rule-bending encryption of colors and symbols, the title of the show is an alphabetized anagram of the four subtractive primary colors in commercial printing (cyan, magenta, yellow, and key black) and their secondaries (blue, green, and red). Here, and throughout the exhibition, Park follows her favored paradigm of laying bare the familiar to show its unreliability, then restructuring it into her own aesthetic code.

The exhibition opens with a dramatic group of six black paintings, which are Park’s contribution to the discourse of the monochrome: BK0, 2009, and BK1–BK5, 2010. In the latter group, the artist explores the differences among ostensibly similar pigments of major paint manufacturers by stenciling eleven varying sizes of blue, green, red, and yellow circles that add up to five clearly dissimilar blacks.

Next up are the so-called “Dingbat” paintings. These visualizations of dingbat symbols encode various combinations of letters, numerals, and punctuations, and create a signature universe that, while based on ready-made units, is thoroughly idiosyncratic. Park does not want to follow any given route, instead obsessively mapping out her own: The final segment of the show is an installation of two hundred chronologically and alphabetically ordered drawings, all set into children’s workbooks, all disobeying the prescribed directions. Like her dingbat paintings, these outwardly simplistic pictures are, in fact, furtively sophisticated probes into what constitutes imagemaking.

— Julia Friedman

Dor Guez

PETACH TIKVA MUSEUM
Museum Complex, Yad Labanim, 30 Arlozorov St., Pob 1,
November 11–February 27

Dor Guez, Lydd Ruins 10 (Market Square), 2009, color photograph, 47 1/4 x 59".

The ruins of history and the repression of memory—both personal recollections and collective experience—inform this solo exhibition by Dor Guez. Curated by Drorit Gur Arie, the show takes its title, “Georgiopolis,” from the ancient Christian name for the Israeli city of Lod (or Lydd). The main hall of the museum contains a highly evocative photographic series: silent images from which emerge fragments of an ancient city seemingly suspended outside time. The photographs are characterized by evanescent colors and by the theatrical use of a twilight luminosity that makes them extremely pictorial, magnifying their dramatic nature and encouraging the dimension of memory. The visual focus of the installation is a monumental projection of the Church of Saint George’s iconostasis, which emphasizes the general sense of alienation and, with the skillful lighting, imbues the entire space with a certain hieratic quality that brings to mind the sheer volume of a church interior.

The iconography of the dilapidated city landscape becomes a metaphor for the artist’s anxieties and desires and, at the same time, mirrors a society intent on confronting the abysses of its own consciousness, vividly explicated in the remainder of the exhibition. In a destabilizing synthesis of art and life, Guez exposes the Arab-Christian history of his own family, tied to the events of the city, from the 1948 Israeli occupation to the present. Four video interviews reveal a tale across three generations. The medium, shorn of any symbolic character—even in the intimacy of the autobiographical, sometimes confessional story—becomes documentary and political. It is an aesthetic strategy suitable for pointing out the “uncomfortable” situation of the Arab-Christian community, now Israeli although Palestinian in origin, a “minority within the minority” of the Muslim Arab community. The agonizing mosaic of diverse experiences torn from the private realm prompts reflection as it speaks of intolerance, of injustices large and small, of microhistories located at the intersection of multiple cultural, religious, and ethnic references.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Eugenio Viola

Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

QUEENSLAND ART GALLERY
Melbourne Street (south end of the Victoria Bridge)
December 5–April 5

Choe Yong Sun, The Construction Site, 2005, linocut on paper, 26 x 21".

When Queensland Art Gallery’s fifth Asia Pacific Triennial opened in 2005, it could not help but play second fiddle to the vast new Gallery of Modern Art it inaugurated, where it complemented QAG’s remarkable collection of contemporary work from the region. Its successor seems much more up for the game, occupying the entirety of the space (and then some) to provide a more concentrated and coherent installation that lives up to the event’s reputation for breaking new ground.

In this edition, established superstars like Subodh Gupta, Runa Islam, and Yoshitomo Nara sit alongside lesser-known contributors from countries making their first appearance in the triennial, most notably Iran, Myanmar, Tibet, and North Korea. This formula is repeated in the event’s extensive cinematheque program, where the work of Ang Lee and Takeshi Kitano is reconsidered amid a laudable retrospective of Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh and a historical survey of Iranian animation, while the cross-media approach extends to a performance program, listening post, and CD compilation of Pacific reggae artists.

For all the stunning individual pieces on offer—Islam’s gorgeous 16-mm films, say, and Kohei Nawa’s beguiling pixelated deer, and the row of Xinsheng houses salvaged by Chen Qiulin—it is collaborative production that emerges as the major theme within the exhibition. This idea of collective authorship encompasses Wit Pimkanchanapong’s cardboard fruit workshop, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s cooperation with Laotian art students, and Nara’s collaboration with graf media as YNG; it figures in Tin Wun Aung and Wah Nu’s poignant miniatures of inoffensive contemporary art exhibitions that would be impossible to realize in their home of Myanmar; while in Mansudae Art Studio’s stylized, state-sanctioned images of daily life in North Korea, it finds easily its most complicated and thought-provoking manifestation.

— Reuben Keehan