Art Review: Chinese artist's work comes 'From My Hand' at Berger gallery
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Interest in contemporary Chinese art has been growing in recent decades, as the Internet opened global communication and as artists migrated to Western art centers such as New York and Berlin.
Fang Lijun's "The Nature Series," on display at the Michael Berger Gallery, comprises 14 figures, each a hairless head with hands and feet emerging from a bed of soil.
Click photo for larger image.
One of the first of these artists to be seen in Pittsburgh was Xu Bing, who in 1998 was invited by Wood Street Galleries curator Murray Horne to exhibit an installation of live pigs stamped with Chinese characters in the Downtown space. Since then, Xu has exhibited in the University of Pittsburgh's University Art Gallery and has lectured on campus.
Xu was given a solo exhibition by the Smithsonian's Sackler Gallery, Washington, D.C., in 2001. Later, Xu and gallery staff re-created a site-specific work from that show for permanent display in the museum, the first time the Smithsonian had worked directly with a contemporary artist to build an artwork.
Cai Guo-Qiang, whose gunpowder explosion project "Light Cycle" marked Central Park's 150th anniversary in 2003, will create this summer's Metropolitan Museum of Art Roof Garden installation.
Of late, attention has moved beyond theorists and museums to the art market.
The recently concluded Asia Week in New York saw "unprecedented quantities" of contemporary Korean, Japanese and Chinese art, according to The New York Times. And the first New York auction of Asian contemporary art, conducted March 31 by Sotheby's, brought total sales of $13.2 million, surpassing its high estimate of $8 million, the Times reported. Xu's "The Living Word" was estimated at $250,000-$300,000 and sold for $408,000.
Gallery owner Michael Berger has been observing these artists for a number of years and has twice traveled to China, in 2004 and 2005.
In Beijing, he visited the studio of Fang Lijun, whose painting drew $273,000 at Sotheby's, far beyond its estimated $60,000-$80,000. (Another of the artists Berger represents, Zhang Xiaogang, drew the auction's highest price, nearly $1 million, more than double its high estimate.)
Last year the entry walk to Fang's spare studio was lined with a series of cast bronze figures that appeared to be pushing up out of the earth. Seven of Fang's woodcuts and a set of those bronze sculptures may be seen in "From My Hand," a fine exhibition at the Michael Berger Gallery, which was relocated last summer to Point Breeze. While I was at the gallery, callers from across and outside the country inquiring about the work confirmed its desirability to collectors.
Fang's aesthetic is spare and rough (but not unpolished, because it is certainly technically accomplished), having a stripped-down existential rawness. Think of the tortured emaciation of Giacometti, the sensibility of Japanese Butoh dance troupes or the howling of Francis Bacon.
Still, it's impossible to specify Fang's intentions without speaking with him, particularly given the East-West cultural gap.
The woodcuts, all untitled, are monochromatic -- grays, black, white -- and large. Some, at 4 by 8 feet, tower over the viewer, drawing him or her fully into the work's tense drama. Fang's aggressive approach to the woodblock results in ragged white patches of line that resemble the torn edges of collage. The subjects exhibited are, in the main, highly charged faces, their features elemental, somewhat bleak. Abstracted to concentrate their intense emotive states, they're more powerful because they are silent -- frozen, as it were, by stultification, repression or despair.
Does the group of figures in the woodcut at the entry, for example, represent urban political activists whose idealism has been crushed, or village peasants protesting a more local and pragmatic grievance? Are all of the subjects male, as they appear to be, and how does that relate to the artist's intent or to larger issues in Chinese society?
Sculpture is a relatively new direction for Fang, gallerist Joy Deborah Robison says, and the 14 figures that comprise "The Nature Series" are similarly reductive in detail but powerful in expression. Each is essentially a hairless head, its features voluptuously highlighted, poised on the edge of communicating something lively or even profound. Some barely emerge from the bed of soil they're displayed upon, like inflating golden puddles, all face and hands. Others have "sprouted," gnome-like, and show the beginnings of a trunk and feet.
Robison sees them as "everyman" and "more hopeful" than the woodcut figures. The read that they are rising and developing, rather than constricting and shrinking, is another example of the varied interpretation the viewer may bring to this work.
Fang has produced eight editions of this 2005 sculpture set, and Berger is showing the only one to be offered as individual units. Already four have sold and another is on hold -- impressive, considering that the exhibition opened only on March 25.
Preeminent scholar and curator Minglu Gao will give a free gallery talk on Fang's work and its place within contemporary Chinese expression at 1:30 p.m. April 22, followed by questions. Gao, a native of China who earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Harvard, is author of four books on the Chinese avant-garde. (Reservations are suggested as space is limited.)
The exhibition continues through July 30 at 415 Gettysburg St. (which converges with Reynolds Street near Beechwood Boulevard), Point Breeze. Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays and 2 to 4 p.m. Sundays. The gallery will be closed this Friday and Sunday for the holidays. Call 412-441-4282 or visit www.MichaelBergerGallery.com.
First Published April 12, 2006 12:00 am
