Two new shows at the Henry Art Gallery join the ongoing Maya Lin exhibit to offer summer visitors an eclectic experience in contemporary art. From the massive Lin installations to the small color panels by Byron Kim, there's enough here to raise myriad questions about the nature of art in today's America.
The first show to greet the visitor is "Akio Takamori: The Laughing Monks." Takamori, a lauded University of Washington ceramicist, offers four new ceramic sculptures which he has paired with a collection of vessels and works on paper taken from the Henry's collection.
In one room, the two laughing monks of the show's title are sitting on a high platform that extends across much of the gallery. Facing toward each other, they survey the collection of 20 bottles and vases. Judging from the fulfilled look on the monks' faces, there's sake in those containers and they have sampled just a bit too much.
The monks are characters who have long been part of Chinese and Japanese Zen Buddhist traditions. They are happy fellows who accept life as it is. They delight in the world around them. Maybe they're a bit simpleminded, or maybe they are terribly wise. They are certainly perceptive. Takamori fuses Japanese-style ink art with his clay works to capture all of these characteristics in his portrayals of these fat-bellied, bald companions.
In the exhibit's other gallery, the two monks stand facing away from each other. Here they are looking at the photographs, drawings and wood-block prints that line the walls. Every image is of children, in scenes that are playful as well as frightening.
Standing and sitting, facing in and out, these baby-faced, pudgy monks are adults with childish features. They seem innocent yet knowledgeable as they revel in their drink and observe the array of children's behaviors. Takamori's monks and the objects he carefully selected from the Henry's collection have a purpose that goes beyond their aesthetic qualities. Takamori wants us to look beyond our existing knowledge and preconceptions. The artist suggests that we learn from the monks, that we let them show us what they see. Not a bad idea.
"Threshold: Byron Kim 1990-2004" is an exhibit that causes one to ask what exactly is the potential for subject matter in abstract painting? Story or subject matter is intrinsic to most of Kim's minimalist pieces. Yet, to fully appreciate what Kim is up to, one needs the art equivalent of CliffsNotes. That is to say, his compositions are too visually subtle to tell stories that are better understood via words; the visitor needs a guide, written or aural.
The 30-odd works on display represent the past 15 years of Kim's career. For the most part, it has been a vocation devoted to story telling through color - monochromes, color contrasts, color as memory, color as social commentary.
Typical of his monochromes are four canvases each in a different shade of green. Called "Koryô Green Glaze # 1, 2, 4, 10," the grouping is a paean to the celadon pottery of Kim's Korean ancestors. For those who prefer red to green, there's "Belly Painting (Red)." In this work, the artist tested the ability of linen to absorb and contain a molten, colored wax.
Painting with molten, colored wax is an ancient process known as encaustic. It was used during Roman times in Egypt to create portraits that were bound into the head wrapping of the deceased as part of their mummification. Kim's small panel onto which the infused linen encaustic is affixed is a three-dimensional solid red piece with no image, just a shape. It resembles a woman in her eighth month of pregnancy, and she's "carrying low."
"Miss Mushinski (First Big Crush)" is a small canvas of blue and green stripes. This is a color-as-memory piece, immortalizing Kim's first-grade teacher who once commented that she liked his blue-and-green-striped shirt. Another memory piece is a large panel of horizontal pink stripes. It evokes, for his family, the house they lived in when the artist was growing up.
Kim's most lauded piece, "Synecdoche," is art as social commentary. Comprising up to 394 imageless panels, each 10 by 8 inches and each in a single shade of brown, cream, ivory, peach or tan, the entire composition is a statement about racial diversity. The artist created each panel as a "portrait" made from a sitting model.
The most recent pieces in the exhibit are photomontages. These are further explorations of memory, but presented as Digital C-prints. In these large photos, he assembles fragments of pictures taken of his kitchen, his back yard and on a vacation trip. The photos are pieced together in the style that David Hockney explored 20 years ago. Like Hockney's work, these are saturated with color and are nicely composed.
The Kim exhibit provides a viewer with the opportunity to look at modern interpretations of previous art styles. In addition to the Hockney-like photomontages, there are cloud paintings that pay homage to J.M.W. Turner, and color studies that make one think of Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko and the other colorists of the 1960s. Old ideas recreated, but not advanced. For me it wasn't enough. Even the lessons of those laughing monks didn't help in this part of the current Henry offerings.
Takamori's "Laughing Monks" through Oct. 22; Byron Kim "Threshold" through Sept. 17
[[In-content Ad]]
