Neither Coming Nor Going

Drawing takes many forms. In the two shows highlighted here, lines are monumental, lush, encompassing and more. Zhang Huan makes prints of animals and landscapes that can reach 10 feet high and Sun Xun animates drawings based on a melding of chinese and western drawing practices. If you have time, (and feel like braving the cold), walk up to Anthony McCall’s exhibition of drawings that utilize smoke machines and light projections.

Zhang Huan
Neither Coming Nor Going
Pace Wildenstein – 545 West 22nd
until January 30, 2010

Sun Xun
Animals
Max Protetch Gallery — 511 West 22nd Street
until January 30, 2010 

Anthony McCall
Leaving (with two minute silence)
Sean Kelly Gallery — 528 West 29th
until January 30, 2010 

1. Zhang Huan — Neither Coming Nor Going

Walking into the gallery, you are greeted by a monumental Buddha sculpture with smoke coming from it’s head. The head seems to break through the ceiling (it pokes up near the recessed skylight) and one hand, and fingers from the other hand, lay at the buddha’s feet, as if he is waiting to be assembled. It’s an odd sight and you feel that perhaps you’ve entered a museum or a temple that is under construction. 

Experience it…

The sculpture is covered with ash, and small human skulls appear in different places along with broken offering vessels, figurines, incense sticks, red-wrappers and more. Far from being meditative, the sculpture seems overwhelmed with trash and produces anxiety. Has it been rescued from catastrophe — unlike the giant buddha’s in Afghanistan that were blown up a decade ago? Is it a relic from thousands of years ago stoically withstanding the years? 

Think about it…

The artist has different ideas in mind — but take a moment to reflect on what this image of the buddha means to you. What is your first reaction to it, how do you relate to it — as a religious symbol? An interesting story? Heroic in his action or cowardly in his passivity? 

“People always carry these to the temple to wish for more money,” says Zhang Huan, pointing to a fake gold offering dish that’s affixed to the palm of the Buddha’s severed hand. “I wish they replaced all the gold Buddhas in the temples with something like this. This piece represents the strong passion for people in China to get rich, change their lives, catch up with America, and have power—and how they pay a lot to do so.”(1)

The buddha is 18 feet tall and was put together with the help of twenty assistants. Central to Huan’s most recent work is a cultural shift that has occurred in China in the past century — the rise of  a middle class that pays less and less attention to its heritage and traditions (1). In the work here, he plays the cultural critic, using subject matter symbolically to represent the trade off. Buddha reached enlightenment through a renunciation of all earthly riches, and now people pray to the image of the buddha for those riches.

Ironic, none-too-subtle, but an amazing sculpture. On the day I visited, the gallery director was discussing the work with a small group of people who wanted to see what the inside of the sculpture looked like. There’s a door in the back that let’s a person enter the cavity inside and light the incense that burns all day. 

The prints that line the gallery walls are much more obscure and so I spent my time looking at them and simply enjoying the size and the ink and the feathers. They are so beautifully produced — the images are carved out of the floorboards of a house (!) and retain their texture. Attached to them are beautiful and iridescent feathers that add to this complicated texture. 

Overall, the images are difficult to read — two deer embracing, a crow sitting atop a mountain, a tiger in a cage. Perhaps symbolic but they seemed a bit shallow in meaning until I heard about the source material for the images: 

In the 7th century, a book called Tui Bei Tu made predictions for China’s future and includes 60 prophetic poems and 60 surreal drawings. The artist has taken the drawings from this book and turned them into large-scale prints. Changing the size of a found image a technique that artists have used for the past hundred years, and to good effect here. 

“In my subject matter, the most important part is that this is connected to my memories, in terms of daily life in China.”– Huan

More on Zhang Huan:

Chuck Close and Zhang Huan conversation

Art in America review

I-Ching: images from Tui Bei Tu

2. Sun Xun — Animals

Experience it… 

The title-wall facing the street shows a stretching tiger drawn in ink and represented realistically. The ink drips down the wall, however, and the immediacy of the act brings the image to life. Walking inside, you notice that the gallery is filled with this kind of drawing and inside is a whole menagerie with skeletons and transformations. On small oval shelves are accordion books of drawings rendered in a gorgeous ink line that bring to mind centuries-old scrolls,  vases, and more from China. 

Where Zhang Huan’s concerns were about the power of collective desires, Sun Xun focuses on the the politics of the few. Inspired by the book Animal Farm, Sun Xun highlights the 7th Commandment of the philosophy called Animalism in the book:

“All animals are equal.”

However, in the book, the dominant party (a group of pigs) pervert the saying to their own power: “but some animals are more equal than others”. Looking at the works in the show, one begins to wonder how the images reflect the story, but they are so richly detailed and evocative that the story goes out the window and smaller moments of ascendency, reflection and dominion are created: a human-hand-sized mosquito rests on a human hand as a blotch of ink sinks down into it; a silhouette of a bird stands next to an animal skull on the floorboards of a house; a chicken stands atop an abandoned (or autopsied?) heart surrounded by a group of butterflies.

Each image in this exhibition seems loaded with meaning, which is surprising since there are so many. The exhibition has been organized in a viewer-friendly way — the wall drawings share space with more intimate pieces of cut-out and collaged works.  

Compare it…

How does the work by Sun Xun relate to that of Zhang Huan? Both analyze the aspects of human nature that are sometimes troublesome — the desire for fortune and power. On an everyday level, though, we perhaps don’t notice these instincts or we ignore them. By placing the argument in the realm of metaphor, do we feel comfortable enough to dissect these feelings? Or does it become too abstract?  

3. Anthony McCall — Leaving (with two minute silence)

This exhibition is located 7 blocks north of the first two, but worth the trip if you’ve never experienced his work. The best parts of the show are the projections in which an entire room is filled with the haze of a smoke machine and white lines are projected onto a wall. The lines are just flat, however, they create a geometric space in the middle of the gallery that you can inhabit and break. 

Below is an interview with the artist that sheds light on his practice.