East as Eden
The Guggenheim Museum, which
in recent years has earned a reputation for expansionist sprawl, has mounted a
surprisingly intimate exhibition in its New York headquarters. The show has a
sprawling title, "China: 5,000 Years--Innovation and Transformation in the
Arts," and the temptation must have been great to fill every corner of New York
with Chinese things, as the museum did with its Robert Rauschenberg show last
year. The China show has two venues, but one is really a footnote to the other.
The "traditional" section--what most people mean by Chinese art, and by far the
most rewarding of the two parts--is housed in Frank Lloyd Wright's uptown
snail, while post-1850 paintings and prints are crammed into the museum's SoHo
branch.
One
curator's taste and concept shaped the "traditional" exhibition. Sherman Lee,
longtime director of the Cleveland Museum of Art and the foremost American
scholar of Chinese art, selected the treasures on view from collections in
China. Many of these objects, including those culled from recent archaeological
finds, have never been shown in the United States before. Lee tried to choose
objects that demonstrated innovation and experimentation; he has a particular
interest in the relationship between technological advances--in ceramic and
bronze production, for example--and creative ferment.
The result is a surprisingly old-fashioned exhibition, low
on social and historical context and high in the pleasures of simply looking.
One feels that Wright, who was passionate about Asian art, would have enjoyed a
slow walk up his spiraling ramp, stopping here and there to admire the stunning
objects in generously spaced glass cases. The objects are grouped according to
material--jade, bronze, low- and high-fired ceramic, lacquer, stone
sculpture--rather than period. This means that improvements in glaze quality
and metallurgy become clear, but the viewer must grope for what links an
austere, octagonal Tang vase to a theatrically rearing, gilded bronze dragon
from the same era.
In the
absence of an overarching narrative of dynastic progression or decline, one's
attention shifts to small marvels. Several objects in the show reflect a dry
sense of humor. The ancient bronzes are covered with metamorphosing animal
shapes--an elephant whose trunk has turned into a dragon, and whose legs are
incised with tigers ("stucco'd with quadrupeds and birds all over," as Whitman
wrote of himself). Then there's a little toy cart with moving wheels supporting
a treasure chest with swinging doors. A one-legged guardian holds the door in
one hand, a crutch in the other. Why one leg? So he can't run away with the
treasure. This ingenious toy dates, incredibly, from circa 1100-771 B.C.
The Guggenheim show is particularly rich in
three-dimensional objects. One turn of the ramp and you can get a pretty good
education in the origins of porcelain. The perfection of that translucent and
acoustically resonant pottery, a thousand years before the West discovered its
secret recipe, gave the name "china" to fine dinnerware in Europe. As you reach
the top of the show, you come across a parade of twenty or so placid Buddhas
meditating under Wright's sky-lit dome. Is it an illusion that they seem to be
putting on weight? It is not: "In the latter Tang dynasty," says the wall
panel, "Buddhist images tended to become more ponderous, fleshy, and overly
ornate, completely departing from the slender and ethereal beauty
characteristic of many sixth-century sculptures."
The
paintings are hidden down discreetly marked passageways in darkened galleries.
The well-known scholar James Cahill, who wrote the essay on painting for the
exhibition catalog, tells of taking a Chinese connoisseur through the European
painting collection of the National Gallery in Washington. "Very nice,"
commented the visitor, "but they all look alike." Cahill is at pains to show
the differences among Chinese landscape paintings, which, to an untrained
Western eye, can blur together. He notes that Chinese painters mastered
verisimilitude early on--by the 10 th or 11 th century--and
spent the next few centuries developing Expressionist departures from it. In
the West, a comparable moment occurs with the advent of modernism early in this
century.
Two masterpieces hanging side by side show how two
different painters responded to similar social pressures. Wang Meng and Ni Zan
worked during the Yuan period (1279-1368), when Mongol invaders had seized
control of southern China. Wang served the Mongol rulers just as he had the
earlier regime. Ni chose exile instead, adopting a nomadic life--he traveled
around in a little boat--and painting to pay his keep.
Wang's
famous painting of the Dwelling in the Qingbian Mountains (1366)
explodes the myth of the artist's peaceful retreat in the hills. These hills
have a cascading fury to them, and the dwelling seems to be under siege.
Indeed, two factions striving to succeed the Mongol rulers were warring nearby
when Wang painted this commotion in the natural realm. Ni, by contrast, paints
six gaunt trees by the riverside and calls the picture Six Gentlemen
(1345). It is a potent image of alienation and disengagement, a stark visual
rebuff to Wang's life of chameleonic compromise. An art whose expressive
conventions can survive a century of alien occupation must be as flexible and
deeply rooted as Ni's disheveled trees.
If the din of history is held at bay in the uptown section
of "China: 5,000 Years," it is everywhere audible downtown, in the SoHo
installation of post-1850 work. Ren Xiong, a Shanghai artist who died of
tuberculosis in 1857 at age 34, tries to balance Chinese tradition with the
inroads of Western art in his unsettling self-portrait. His bare body and long
fingernails slip out, diva-like, from jaggedly stylized clothes. His intent
face is rendered according to European naturalistic conventions. It's as though
he is shedding his Chinese accoutrements, and warily embracing a Westernized
future.
The embrace was brief and
traumatic. The woodcut revival of the 1920s occurred just in time to record the
horrors of the Japanese invasion; stark images of torture recall Goya's
Disasters of War , which detailed Spanish suffering under Napoleonic
rule. Upstairs are a couple of rooms of Socialist Realism, with ubiquitous
Maos--first, youthfully slender in front of a traditionally rendered mountain,
then putting on weight just like those Buddhas. Five thousand years of Chinese
art, and you end up staring at a painting of a cluster of peasants grinning in
front of Tiananmen Palace, below the visage of Mao. The year is 1964 and all
seems well, notwithstanding the recent Great Famine, perhaps the most severe in
human history and almost entirely Mao's fault. Everything in these rooms is
superficial and forced--a depressing departure from the confident traditions of
wit and invention that China had nourished in the previous 50 centuries, and is
nourishing even now, albeit by marginalized artists who were given no place in
this show. The very existence of the Guggenheim exhibition signals yet another
experiment in opening China to the West. But it's hard not to see in these
smiling peasants a warning of what such openings can bring in their wake.
