Chim↑Pom at Yamanoto Gendai

The following posting is by Anna Sakagawa, my guest blogger. (I am presently away from Tokyo, and will resume posting in mid-January).

Chim↑Pom latest group exhibition “Good to Be a Mummy” features three of their favorite artists. This exhibition could be seen as a spin-off to their previous solo show, “Good to Be Human,” that presented a “Kurukuru Party,” an installation reproducing a drunken night, and “Making of Sokushibutsu,” in which Motomu Inaoka, a member of Chim↑Pom, imitated the traditional Buddhist practice of Sokushibutsu, or “living Buddha.” The “Good to Be Human” exhibition was based on a paradox, clashing asceticism and gluttony.

This time around Chim↑Pom invited Yasuyuki Nishio, Sachiko Kazama, and Yoshimitsu Umekawa, askeding them to create something that is Chim↑Pom-inspired. In the artist talk that inagurated the exhibition, the leader of Chim↑Pom, Ryuta Ushiro explained that the group chose these three artists because they all share a common interest in Japanese monsters, and because they all understand the very purpose of Chim↑Pom’s art: “to play joke as seriously as possible.”

When the viewers enter the gallery they are confronted by a jaw-droppingly realistic sculpture of a “living Buddha” created by Nishio. The green-grey color of skin tissue resembles zombies or the undead from a Hollywood horror movie, yet the facial expression of the sculpture is very calm, even serene, as if to claim that he has attained the true Buddhist enlightenment that is far from the secular world. Nishio explained that he had attempted to create something that is neither dead nor alive, because it is the process of dying that truly fascinates him.

On the wall of the room, is a tapestry like painting of a Japanese soldier by Kazama. The posture of the figure in the painting and his skinny body clearly are inspired by Chim↑Pom’s “Making of Sokushibutsu.” The framing part of the tapestry, Kazama explained, is made of “the real cloth used in WWII as the uniform of Japanese military,” which she bought on Yahoo Auction for 1500yen. She said, laughing, that she was too scared to even touch the cloth, as it may well be possessed with a fallen spirit of the war, until she realized that the deadline for this artwork was coming soon, and she just had to cut it to make the frame for the tapestry. The expression of the figure in the painting is very graceful and proud, which was a common quality of Japanese soldiers in WWII. According to Kazama, the work is also inspired by the actual Japanese soldiers who chose to die from starvation instead of fighting to survive.

Next to Kazama’s painting is a triptych of three photos of Inaoka taken by Umekawa. Umekawa decided to shoot Inaoka as a “meditating monk,” “gangsta rapper,” (who he works with as a professional photographer) and “Miminashi-Hoichi” (a famous character in a Japanese monster mythology, who learned the sacred Buddhist Sutra to repel the monsters, and wrote the Sutra all over his body only to have his ears eaten by the monsters because he had forgotten to write the Sutra on his ears.) Ushiro introduced Umekawa as a photographer “who takes everything as it looks in the real life,” to which Inaoka added: “But I did try to make my waist look as thin as possible during the photo shoot.”

The underlining principle shared by all three works was to treat very lightly the otherwise-deadly-serious subject matter, such as the Buddhist practice of “living Buddha.” In their last show Chim↑Pom remains faithful to its practice of shocking the viewers. By presenting very serious matters in a way that undermines their gravity, they force the viewers into considering life and death through laughter—an effect guaranteed to provoke a strong reaction.

P.S. For an even stronger effect, at the time of the first artist talk on December 18th the opening night crowd was treated to popcorn and Big Macs just as they looked at the icons of emaciation.

—Anna Sakagawa

Yamanoto Gendai, Dec. 18–22

Fantasies and Fairy Tales at Kagurazaka

Saori Miyake, "flood, curtain," 2009, gelatine silver print, 45.7x 56 cm

Courtesy of Yuka Sashahara Gallery

Saori Miyake's current exhibition Constellation 2 is a sequel to her earlier solo show at the Yuka Sashahara's Gallery. Almost all the pieces on view are "photograms"—images made directly on film by taking advantage its light sensitive properties. Miyake's poetic recollections of childhood (her subjects are young girls) work remarkably well with her chosen media that suggests as much as it actually shows. The black and white images trace the outlines of the objects and the subjects revealing just enough detail to trigger associations, yet not enough to make her dreamscapes tedious. The show is on though December 26th, after that the gallery will be relocating to Kanda.

One floor below, at the Ohshima Fine Art, Yuko Mori's oil paintings portray a fantasy world borne of color. Her works immediately bring to mind Wassily Kandinsky's Motley Life (1907), which is not that unusual considering Mori's engagement with the relationships of color and space, and her emphasis on the importance of the initial encounter with the painting. She sees it as a crucial moment when the sensory input of the artist aligns with that of the viewer. On view through December 18th.

The Creatures

Installation view at the Foil Gallery

Risa Sato's multimedia installation at the Foil Gallery is all about her "Kohachi" creatures. Sato invented them some ten years ago, gradually building an entire cosmology around these little but "immeasurably fierce" characters. In the current exhibition, the artist's second solo showing at the Foil after a five year hiatus, Konachi are made to face the light, that symbolizes life, and the darkness, that symbolizes death. All the while their blank and expressionless faces hide the force and intensity within. The impersonal (no evidence of the brushwork) surfaces of the Konachi paintings jibe with Sato's presentation of the creatures as impersonal on the surface (their deceptively smooth and round physique), but strong on the inside. This strength must be due to their numbers: even if there is only one creature in a given work we sense many more lurking just around the edge.

Sachiko Miki. Muffler, 2009, FRP, acrylic, iron, H 880xW 420xD 440mm

More humanoids could be seen just a short walk from the Foil, at the CASHI gallery. The CASHI is holding a solo show of Sachiko Miki, a sculptor based in Kanagawa. Miki's creatures are quite different from Sato's Konachi, even when large in scale (the biggest object in the exhibition is 182 cm tall), they have preciousness and gentility to them. Instead of the matt and impersonal surface that conceals Konachi's fierceness, the creatures at CASHI are infant-like. They have big heads and translucent skin with warm pink patches and see-though veins. Their entire presence screams vulnerability. Miki works with FRP and acrylic which allows her to achieve weightlessness in motion, letting her creatures leap and extend all the way without breaking under their own weight.

"Medicine and Art: Imaging a Future for Life and Love"

View of the video installation by Magnus Wallin (Excercise Parade, 2001, double backprojection, 3-D animated video). Image courtesy Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin

Despite its generic sounding title the Mori Art Museum’s current show insightfully combines the old (Leonardo da Vinci) and the new (Damien Hirst), medical equipment and art, Nihonga painting and contemporary installations. The common tissue here, literally, is the human body—its make-up, its existence and functions, its alteration and deterioration.

The exhibition is immensely enjoyable as it presents more than a mere glimpse into the ways artists see humans and humanity. Their approaches, that run a gamut from admiration to pity, from curiosity to detachment, inevitably provoke a similar range of emotions in the visitors to the show. Many instances that cause such poignant reactions, not surprisingly, involve death, children and premature aging: Walter Schels’ sullen photographs of an 18 month-old shortly before and immediately after her death (2004) and Patricia Piccinini’s prematurely aged Game Boys (2002) are just two examples. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Gilles Barbier's cheeky installation of the aged superheroes (L'Hospice, 2002), featuring saggy and wrinkly Wonderwoman, prone Captan America fit with an i.v., Superman supported by a walker and the Catwoman, catnapping in front of the turned off television.

Because the three sections of the show emphasize primarily the subject matter of the works, those who come in hopes of unadulterated aesthetic experiences from the art featured alongside various tomes on anatomy and scores of prosthetic limbs might end up disappointed. To be sure, looking through the medical artifacts (most of them from the Wellcome Trust collection) requires a different mode of seeing from that suitable for conceptual art, pen drawings by Leonardo, or Nihonga painting. The show’s visual schmorgesborg of art and manufactured articles forces the viewers to arbitrate continuously between their thinking and their emotions. Ironically, it is our very humanity that hinders our perception. The emotional stakes make it next to impossible to step back and allow for a duly museum detachment.

A tip: when you make it to Lee Byung Ho’s 2009 Vanitas Bust in the room before last (right next to the Game Boys), take your time looking at the bust. The show is on through February 28, 2010.

Mario García Torres, "Unspoken Dailies"

Mario Garcia Torres, “Unspoken Dailies”, 2003-2009, 16mm black and white film, 66 min. Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery

Torres' feature length movie contains no words. Nor does it need to. This tribute to the enigmatic Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader who is as well known for his work on celluloid as for his mysterious disappearance in the aftermath of an attempted crossing of the Atlantic in a 12 foot boat tackles memory and time. The 16mm movie recalls Ader's on-camera falls and introvert close-ups, but it goes a step further, taking the viewers into the realms of the unsaid and the undone.

The movie, shot in real time, features Mexican actor Diego Luna well-known from his mainstream works (Y tu mama también, 2001, Milk, 2008). In a simulation of a prolonged screen test Luna was handed a script (based on Torres' academic paper "Around Bas Jan Ader" presented at a conference in 2004) and is placed in a sparsely furnished space with only a table, a chair, a plant, a wall clock (the very one installed in the galleries, featured in the photo above), and a glass of water. The paper is now a script, and the actor has been instructed to read it, silently, for the first time, as the camera rolled. While it might not seem as a premise for the most exciting 66 minutes ever spent, the movie proves otherwise. Punctuated with Luna's subtle expressions, the inevitable yet titillating advancement of the clock's hands, and an original score by Alejandro Ross, it makes for a very engaged viewing. Shot by Alexis Zabé. I suggest that before going to see the feature you check out some of Bas Jas Ader's work here.

This is Torres's second solo show in Japan, but this young conceptual artist had already made a reputation for himself both in Europe and the US. A graduate of the California Institute of the Arts (2005), Torres lists Jeu de Paume (2009), Kunsthalle Zurich (2008) and Stedelijk Museum (2007) among others on the list of solo exhibition venues.

On through December 12 at the Taka Ishii gallery. Screenings at 13:00, 15:00 and 18:00 daily.

Shinro Ohtake Review/Artforum

Beach 8
2009
Oil, oilstick, acrylic, printed matter, color copy, sticker, sand, seeds, varnish, metal and acrylic board in custom frame
42.8 x 35.3 cm

Courtesy of Take Ninagawa and the artist

My review of Shinro Ohtake's "Shell & Occupy 4" is now up on the Artforum page.

Openings: Kiyosumi and Shirokane Art Complexes

Another night of openings in the Kiyosumi and Shirokane art complexes. Tomio Koyama Gallery presented video works of the Daiwa Foundation Art Prize winner Marcus Coates. His video work Dawn Chorus (2007) is a set up of several screens that show people in their natural habitat lipsynching bird songs recorded in the woodlands of Northern England.

One floor below hiromiyoshii gallery inaugurated an exhibition of Takehito Koganezawa's planetary photography and sculptures, with a separate little room devoted to his earlier drawings and sketches.

The Kodama Gallery showed Kenji Nohara's painting, sculpture and 3D objects. My favorite was a souvenir mask he brought back from Mexico. The gimpish-looking silver mask, lined with pieces of mirror fragments, was suspended on the little clothing rack.

Nanzuka Underground had a selection of large and colorful canvas by the veteran artist Keiichi Tanaami. The story depicted in the paintings was inspired by traditional Chinese narratives and history.

On the opposite end of the visual scale were Etsuko Fukaya's minutely detailed prints at the Yamomoto Gendai gallery.

Most shows will be on through the first week of December. Please refer to galleries' sites for details.

Haruki Ogawa’s “Irritated Figures”

Ogawa’s first solo show at the Frantic Gallery (formerly known as art project frantic) is an impressive start for the twenty four year old artist. His painting thrives on clashing the opposites: dense, clustered fragments and open spaces, impasto brushwork and mirror-smooth varnished surfaces, figuration and rhythmical patches of color.

The largest work in the exhibition “Emphasizing the One Who is Absent” (2009) is positioned, both physically and metaphorically, as a portal into the Ogawa's meta-spaces. This painting-within-a-painting shows an empty white chair set against the background of another canvas that is in the process of falling apart. Pigments explode, smudge off, lift away and the three-dimensional space around the chair is taken over by a barrage of color and action. Juxtoposing the trompe l’oil of the chair with the representations of painterly markings, shapes and traces, Ogawa constructs his own pictorial space, and a temperamental one at that.

For as long as you look at the paintings they challenge and engage, not allowing a moment of the prerequisite calm that would make them into passive objects of your gaze. Practically all the pieces in the exhibition give the impression that the action inside and outside the canvas’ transpires regardless of the viewer's presence. This is most visible in the series of works where animals (rabbits, tigers, frogs) are shown as they escape the confines of their respective paintings only to look back so they can tease the now barren canvas.

Irritated Figures is curated by Rodion Trofimchenko whose dynamic interpretation of Ogawa’s work goes beyond simply framing the art, and functions as a parallel text of sorts, at once obfuscating and enlightening. As Trofimchenko explains, the irritated images square the artist against both Japanese pop culture and Japanese contemporary art. I must agree that Ogawa’s work for all his incorporation of the traditional Japanese technique and design, at least as they appear in the final product, is rooted in Conceptual art. The best example of this is the stunning silk screen/painting “Play on his own” that contains the artist’s likeness from some twenty two years before and, hovering above his head, a cluster of objects and color markings, an intense vision of a memory (or a premonition) fully unfolded in the pendant painting the “Accumulation of Rhythms” (both 2009).

The works in the exhibition show a clear progression from the earlier pieces that engage mid-career Francis Bacon, to the later spatial gymnastics in “Emphasizing the one who is absent” and the “Accumulation of Rhythms.” Here, of course, fingers could point to Wassily Kandinsky’s experiments circa 1915, but Ogawa’s formalist conceptualism so evident in the 2009 “Floating Rhythm” puts his exploding colors and irritated figures into a category of their own. Ogawa is certainly one young artist to watch.

On view through November 21, 2009.

Images: Emphasizing the one, who is absent/不在者は主張する, 2009, oil/alkyd/watercolor on canvas, 145.5x145.5 (top), Floating Rythm/浮遊するリズム 2009, watercolor/oil/alkyd/pencil on canvas, 80.8x80.8 (middle); Runaway/脱走者, 2009, silkscreen/alkyd/oil on canvas, 112x162 (bottom). Images courtesy of the gallery.

Art and Beer: Kunst Oktoberfest

Halloween was the perfect day to hop on the bus (two buses, to be precise) that were circling the Chuo-ku and Ginza galleries, and see a whole lots of art in a very short time. Twenty six galleries in all, ranging from the more established Galerie Sho Contemporary, nichido contemporary and Koyanagi, to name a few, to the younger Frantic, Wada and CASHI hosted a stream of art and beer lovers. The buses, as it could be expected, ran right on schedule, stopping at each gallery every twenty minutes to give just enough time to skim an exhibition, or allowing to stay longer if the show was bigger or particularly interesting. Due to a trick-or-treating appointment later in the evening I was only able to take advantage of the south route and see about half of the galleries. Here is my short report.

The sculpture of the girl holding a goose by its paws is among several humorous fairy tale fantasies by Hiroshi Ohashi, his works could be seen at Wada Fine Arts in Tsukiji. A disturbing twist on the fairy tale motif is offered by Ryu Ebato's Emotion works shown at the ART★AIGA in Hachibori. The gallery website describes her paintings as "comical, cute, [and] a little frighten[ed]." The work featured on the Aiga homepage shows Ebato's protagonist activating the glowing charcoals of her eyes and her agape mouth by a twofold pull on the tresses, thus hitting a hollow note amplified by the transparent layer of acrylic set on unprimed canvas.

On the other end of the visual/sensory spectrum is Ren Jing's solo exhibition. The young Chinese artist, whose first show in Japan is hosted by Unseal Contemporary, mixes vestiges of Communism (red kerchiefs around girls' necks) with pain and violence (red eyes, blood smears on girls' faces). His very accomplished red paintings bring to mind Filip Maliavin's visions in red, only here the color, rather ominously, links political and sexual bondage.

A floor above Unseal Contemporary is the Frantic Gallery (formerly Art Project Frantic), whose first showing of Haruki Ogawa's Irritated Figures will be the subject of a separate blog entry. This show will be on through November 21st—a definite must-see.

Some very interesting figurative works were in the group show of Clara Desire, Masako and Motoko Otsuki at Galerie Sho Contemporary. Taguchi fine art was featuring Simon Morley's word paintings, and Arataniurano presented Izumi Keiji's wood and epoxy sculptures of figures with fantastic(al) nature-themed outgrowths (now waterfalls, now trees, now rocks) in all sorts of places. The Taguchi and Arataniurano exhibitions will only be on for another week, through October 7th.

Art-filled and fun-filled day indeed, my only wish it could be spread over the whole weekend to keep the aesthetic fatigue at bay.

ULTRA002 is now open!

Last night's opening reception for the Emerging Directors' Art Fair inaugurated a six-day long artfair where 50 young curators (some with proper gallery spaces, some without) show their artists' work.

Art and Fashion

The designer shows of the Japan Fashion Week ranged from Yukii Torii’s über-conservative society wares, to GalaabenD’s androgynous militarized chick, to Yoshikazu Yamagata’s Old Testament couture. In every case the audience, many dressed by the presenting designer, reinforced the brand’s message. There was no confusing the manicured luxury brands-clad crowd at Yukii Torii with the artists and the hipsters at Mikiosakabe or writtenafterwards, much like there was no way of confusing the halls of Tokyo Midtown with a modernist school building of the Taito Designers Village that hosted the last day shows of the JFW.

The three brands that showed on the last day were Mikiosakabe (designers Mikio Sakabe and Shueh Jen-Fang), Akira Naka and writtenafterwards (designer Yoshikazu Yamagata). The fact that the shows were held in a separate (and an artsy) venue went along with the avant-garde aspiration of the designers. In the opening show Mikiosakabe made ample use of the gymnasium location, enhancing its “real life” effects of the scuffed-up wooden floors on the basketball court by the dispersed low lighting and what appeared to be dry ice. Like GalaabenD the day before, Mikiosakabe traded a straight catwalk for something more like a track where the models passed the screen background to continue along the perimeter of the room with the single interruption of three large black cubical steps they had to clime. The official JFW photos show the screen shots, but the oblique view of the cubes was at least as good, if not better.

The performative aspect was further developed in a series of installations and exhibitions bundled with the day’s shows. Among them were a mini retrospective of Yoshikazu Yamagata’s creative forays. It contained the works from the first and the third collections, but the highlight was Yamagata’s introduction to his new collection “The fashion show of the Gods.” Along the axis of the long and narrow room run a display table covered with carbon pieces upon which were arranged small statuettes of various animals, according to an accompanying tag “sleeping animals with the gods.”

A much larger room two doors down the hall housed two installations by the group of performance artists known as Chim↑Pom. One on the objects on display is their SUPER☆RAT that incorporates common variety rats painted in "super" yellow. The Shibuya rat traces the progress of the Superrat that symbolizes, among other things, our own rat-like existence. A simultaneous video installation documented the confrontation between real rats and the rodent-hating Tokyoites.

The second work was a performance of a sand-covered member of the group next to a female mannequin, also covered in sand.

As the specks crumbled off the real person who made slight but disturbingly noticeable shifts in position ever thirty seconds or so, another member of the group came to the rescue with a spray can of adhesive and more sand.

Two more rooms were devoted to Ichiro Endo’s live painting and Yuima Nakazato’s shoe art.

Design Festa 30

The Design Festa that took place in Odaiba’s Big Sight complex over the weekend also happened to be the 15^th anniversary of the project. It offered a mind-numbing array of displays containing all possible drawing and painting media, design items and performances. As far as art was concerned, my two picks were Fukao Atsushi’s grim naturalistic fantasies and Eun Kyung Kim’s textile prints.

Eun Kyung Kim is a Professor at the Department of Fashion Coordination at Korea’s Yeoju Institute of Technology. His well-coordinated booth looked more like a gallery installation than a regular arts’ fair display. The works, all originally designed, were women’s coats featuring silkscreen prints of monochrome industrial landscapes and garish pink flowers.

Fukao Atsushi is a Tokyo-based illustrator and a graphic designer. The works on display included small format illustrations and CD covers, a medium-size reproduction tagged “Domestic animal party,” and a large digital print of a composition shown on Atsushi’s webpage.

The next Design Festa will be held in May (15–16).

Shinro Ohtake: "Shell & Occupy 4"

Memory of Color 3/Geronimo

2008

Oil, printed matter, photographs, film, silk screen, rice paper, vinyl, cotton cloth, cotton yarn, plant matter, varnish, wood and acrylic in custom frame

47 x 34.5 cm

Image courtesy of the Take Ninagawa and the artist

This is the fourth installment of Shinro Ohtake's scrapbook art at Take Ninagawa. The exhibition presents a series of assemblages containing spliced magazine pages, stickers, script excerpts, and old photographs topped of with impasto touch-ups in oil. The resulting effect, simultaneously gritty and sleek, is quite remarkable. Ohtake is one of Japan's pioneers of post-figurative art, his first solo show dating back to 1982. When you visit the exhibit you can pick up a catalogue of all the previously shown Shell & Occupy works; it also contains a well-written and informative essay on Ohtake by Arndrew Maerkle (¥2100). On view through November 28.

Seiji Aruga at Rontgenwerke AG/Artforum

You have until October 31 to check out the artist's punched and layered paper constructions that take the exploration of white to a completely new level. My review of the show is posted on the Artforum site.

Photograph by Hideto NAGATSUKA, courtesy of Rontenwerke AG

Kiyosumi galleries—new exhibits

The night of October 10 was rather busy with new shows opening in five of the Kiyosumi-Shirakawa art complex galleries. Atsushi Suwa's hyper realist works on view at Kido Press Inc. challenge any preconceived media boundaries. Hiromiyoshii is hosting its first solo exhibits for two artists: the American T.J. Wilcox, showing his engrossing film narratives and multimedia montages; and the Okinawan born, New York based Futoshi Miyagi whose repositories of personal ephemera take shape of finely crafted paper mosaics set against the background of several small installations. Taka Ishii Gallery is presenting ten works (photographs and sculptures) by Yuki Kimura, tracing her preoccupation with visual memory and the notion of framing. Do not miss an interesting curatorial touch: an opaque life-size image of black Plexiglass opens the show making you second guess the meaning of other partially obscured found images from some seventy years ago. Next door, ShugoArts is holding its third exhibit of Leiko Ikemura's tempera on jute paintings in which formal transparency (the weave of the support shows through) echoes content shifts between the imaginary and the real. Yutaka Watanabe's work, including six new paintings where objects move in and out of focus are on view at the Tomio Koyama Gallery. One floor up, also at Tomio Koyama, award-winning Chinese artist Wei Jia is having his first Japanese show. Jia's introspective canvases tackle the mysteries of imagination with their intermingling of awe and fear. Dimmed lights of the galleries add to the effect, giving just the perfect amount of exposure to the works' acrylic impasto. All shows will be up through the end of the month, Ikemura is on view through November 21.

Ai WeiWei at the Mori

Curated by Mami Kataoka. If you have not seen this show yet, it will be on through November 8. I post my review below.

Ai Weiwei: According to What? expertly showcases Ai’s flipping’em-all-meets-exemplary-social-consciousness attitude; it propels viewers out of the sterility of museum experience by the evocation of dead schoolchildren and on-camera destruction of an ancient artifact. Yet the exhibition is not at all a forum for a politicized conceptual artist rebelling against totalitarian oppression or aesthetic colonialism. The work on view at the Mori Art Museum is too subtle, diverse and sophisticated to be read as straightforward visual declaration of political views.

Not that politics should be ignored. Last August Ai was among twelve people detained by Chinese police in order to prevent them from attending the trial of a dissident, Tan Zuoren. Tan is an activist whose writings on the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising and the investigations of schoolchildren’s deaths in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake landed him in jail on charges of subversion. The Sichuan tragedy was exacerbated by the shabby construction of local schools where many children were buried alive while nearby government offices, built to a higher standard, remained standing. Without much regard for his own personal safety Ai Weiwei became a vocal critic of the government that, in the aftermath of the quake, was making no effort to release the names of the young victims. Ai set up a blog, and through a network of volunteers began to gather the information, publishing children’s names and vital statistics for the world to see. When some expressed their surprise at Ai’s altruistic social activism, he made it clear that it was his responsibility as an artist to act on behalf of those who so needed it.

The objects in the Mori galleries are about the past and present of Ai’s motherland as much as they are about his impressive knowledge of the recent and not so recent history of Western art. His 2006 wooden sculpture Untitled is a truncated icosahedron based on Leonardo da Vinci’s exploration of pure geometry published in Luca Pacioli’s 1509 De Divina Proportione. But the object’s architectural scale and its execution, using traditional Chinese joinery, suggest for it a distinct space somewhere between minimalist and the Arts and Crafts. At the same time, Ai’s painstaking searching out the right materials for the right objects—freshwater pearls, rare woods, blocs of pressed tea—makes him a rightful heir of Russian Constructivism mediated by way of minimalist experimentation (although much of his work would certainly be too metaphorical for Donald Judd). Historical reference also lurks in the antique jar with Coca-Cola label painted on it (Coca-Cola Vase, 1997) and in various liquor bottles encapsulating Tang Dynasty figurines (1993–1994). These provide a tongue-in-cheek conjuring up of Pop as they pointedly question the value of authenticity in art, whether modern or antique.

Equally witty is the 2003 Forever, an assemblage of 42 not quite functional bicycles (all missing steering bars and pedals), linked into a multi-tier circular construction. This comment on the formerly ubiquitous, now endangered, mode of transportation for the Chinese bears an ironically eternal brand name of the Forever Company—a popular bicycle manufacturer from Shanghai. The work successfully combines social/spatial metaphors with minimalist specificity. Of course, for contemporary art a bicycle in museum context is anything but a neutral object: here, Alexander Dumas’ advice on finding the culprit can be appropriately paraphrased into “cherchez Duchamp.” Ai’s use of pre-fabricated, non-art objects such as bottles, furniture and bicycle parts inevitably relates him to Duchamp, perhaps, again via minimalist adaptations of objects meant for uses other than museum display. As the artist himself wittily pointed out during the eight-hour marathon symposium held in conjunction with his exhibition: “Culture is a readymade,” and much of what is shown at the Mori runs the spectrum from specific objects to meta-comments on culture(s), all serving to get his message across.

So what is Ai’s message? The Mori show is all about breaking apart and putting together. Among the objects on display are the 1995 Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn— a photographic triptych that documents the artist’s notoriously iconoclastic act, and his 2008 Snake Ceiling,—a site-specific installation that alludes to a different kind of destruction—largely preventable deaths of schoolchildren in the Sichuan earthquake. The familiar Chinese snake is actually composed of the students’ backpacks, small ones used by preschoolers and the adult-sized ones made for the older kids. A photographic series called Provisional Landscape (2002–2008) is a deconstruction of a cityscape that changes over the period of six years as the government destroys, empties and rebuilds a neighborhood; the Map of China (2006) is a 3-D depiction of the country assembled in rare wood. In all of that building and compiling Ai relies on conceptual games of proportion, scale and multiplicity. His 2004 Chan’an Boulevard tracks the relationship of time and space as the artist filmed a minute of tape every 50 meters along the mammoth forty-five kilometer boulevard. The Bowl of Pearls (2006) is a pair of bulky bowls, each one meter in diameter, full of fresh-water pearls—their minute size emphasizing the discrepancy with their enormous quantity. Kippe (2006) is an elaborate construction of tightly laid pieces of wood from demolished temples stacked in between a set of parallel bars; the Ton of Tea (2006) is a cubic meter block of pressed Yunnan Province tea, its compressed weight measuring exactly one ton. With great humor and humility, the artist breaks down actual and visual matter into the smallest units in order to construct it anew, creating objects full of references to geopolitics and aesthetics. Still, it is not all for the eye and the brain. Ai’s Mori Museum exhibition also gratifies visitors by its multi-sensory quality. Many of the rooms first draw in the viewers through their smell—pu’er tea, exotic wood—only then revealing Ai’s mental gymnastics of scale and multiplicity, his social metaphors and his cultural palimpsests.