First Look: Collecting Contemporary at the Asian

The popularity of Asian contemporary art has grown significantly since the 1990s. This, in turn, has brought international recognition to a wide range of artists showcasing a great diversity of styles and influences. This abundance, however, presents a challenge when attempting to shape any type of survey representing a region that is home to nearly two-thirds of the world’s population.

First Look: Collecting Contemporary at the Asian, an exhibition currently on view at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, addresses and resolves this situation masterfully. Adopting the thesis that traditions become embodied in materials, the exhibition provides a framework for examining contemporary works through the perspective of long-established themes and mediums, as informed by the museum’s outstanding collection of more than 18,000 classic treasures.

Organized by guest curator Allison Harding, the exhibition highlights both recent and earlier acquisitions, and features more than 40 artworks. These include drawings, photography, animation and video, as well as contemporary ceramics and ink paintings, among other media.

Korean ceramics artist Kim Yik-yung provides early insight into the exhibition’s direction with three unadorned porcelain pieces: Bowl, Faceted bowl with lid, and Vase. Drawing inspiration from the pure white baekja (white porcelain) of Korea’s Joseon dynasty (late 14th to late 19th century), Kim infuses present-day sensibilities of form and function to reconceptualize the traditional. Interestingly, Joseon baekja itself represented modernity during its time, being among the first artistic ceramics to be used in daily life.

Further along, husband and wife team, RongRong and Inri, consider classical representations of love and attachment with the photograph Untitled, No. 25. Part of the artists’ 2008 Untitled series, the image shows the couple in immaculate surroundings, their long hair inextricably braided together. Signifying an unbreakable union, the image nonetheless calls into question the modern day nature of tangled relationships which, while seemingly intricate and complex, stand to be violently unravelled through a single, decisive action.

Printmaker and installation artist Xu Bing, meanwhile, presents the most entertaining piece of the show with his five-channel animated video The Character of Characters. Commissioned by the Asian Art Museum in 2012 for a calligraphy exhibition of the same name, Xu Bing’s room-sized installation explores the origin and role of language through a series of thought-provoking and amusing metaphors. The 15 minute animation, featuring more than 10,000 hand-drawn images, is simultaneously playful and engaging.

Yang Yongliang, in contrast, uses four-channel video and sound to examine the inherent tensions between the historic and the modern in The Night of Perpetual Day. Informed by traditional Chinese painting, Yang almost imperceptibly enmeshes digital animation to produce a fairytale-like landscape that questions some of the more obvious premises and assumptions of China’s rapid urban and industrial development.

Finally, in Ahmed Mater’s striking diptych Illumination Waqf, we are invited to address the sometimes uneasy relationship between the technological and the spiritual. Presented as facing pages with gilded borders—as one might expect to see in a classic Islamic manuscript—text and verse are replaced by torso-length human X-rays, positioned as if engaged in debate. Corporeality, conviction and, ultimately, mortality all come into question, possibly remaining unsettled forever.

First Look is the second contemporary art exhibition at the Asian Art Museum this year, following 28 Chinese which was on view from early June to mid-August. But in some ways, First Look offers a more insightful experience. “To truly understand the contemporary, you must understand the tradition from which it emerged,” noted curator Allison Harding. “First Look embodies how tradition can inspire new works in the present and continue to impact contemporary life.”

Admission

General Admission: FREE for museum members, $15 for adults, $10 for seniors (65+), college students with ID, and youths (13–17). FREE for children under 12 and SFUSD students with ID.

General admission on Thursdays after 5pm is $5 for all visitors (except those under 12, SFUSD students, and museum members, who are always admitted FREE).

General admission is FREE to all on Target First Free Sundays (the first Sunday of every month).