Past Exhibitions
[ Perspective Series | Other Past Exhibitions ]
Fiona Tan: Rise and Fall
September 25, 2010–January 16, 2011
Fiona Tan, who was born in Indonesia in 1966 and now lives in Amsterdam, explores individual and collective identity in a world increasingly shaped by global culture. Embedded in her films and videos is a fascination with the deceptive nature of representation and the play of memory across time and space. This exhibition brought together for the first time several of Tan’s video works with a selection of related drawings and photographs. As a group they offered insight into the development of her approach to the medium of the moving image. Rise and Fall was the first major presentation of Tan’s work in the United States and was organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and Aargauer Kunsthaus.
Moving Perspectives: Yeondoo Jung
November 21, 2009–March 14, 2010
Through photography and video, Yeondoo Jung (born Jinju, Korea, 1969) invites viewers into the dreams and memories of others. This exhibition presented two video works, including a multi-screen installation, in which anonymous strangers are filmed as they recall moments in their lives. While they share their stories of past loves, youthful ambitions, hardship, and lifelong secrets, a team of stagehands reconstructs the settings for these memories. Jung emphasizes the artifice of each scene by orchestrating clever set recreations and filming the process from beginning to end, or by manipulating camera angles and lighting effects in long outdoor sequences. Ultimately, these videos suggest that, when filtered through nostalgia and the passage of time, reality exists somewhere between truth and imagination.
Moving Perspectives: Shahzia Sikander/Sun Xun
July 18–November 8, 2009
Trained in Pakistan and in the United States, Shahzia Sikander (born 1969, Lahore, Pakistan) deftly reinterprets miniature painting by isolating and abstracting formal compositional elements often found in this densely layered and intricate art form. The dynamism of her paintings is set in motion in her video works, where the repetition of abstract forms becomes a buzzing hive, calligraphy whirls in and out of view, and imaginary curves morph into vivid landscapes. Similarly, Sun Xun (born 1980, Fuxin, China) creates hundreds of paintings and drawings by using old newspapers or entire blank walls. Filming his hand-drawn images, he transforms clocks, magicians, words, and insects into animated symbols that flicker across the screen in dark allegories on the nature of historical consciousness and the passage of time.
Moving Perspectives: Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba/Fiona Tan
March 14–July 5, 2009
The lush landscape of Laos is the setting for a series of performances by art students from Luang Prabang in The Ground, the Root, and the Air: The Passing of the Bodhi Tree (2007), a single-channel video by Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba. The work culminates in a dramatic moment that captures the younger generation’s struggle to reconcile a rich cultural and religious heritage with the rapid currents of global economic and social change. The endurance of ritual in contemporary society is a starting point in Fiona Tan’s stunning video installation Saint Sebastian. With careful attention to images and sound, Tan transports the viewer into a sensual experience of a centuries-old Japanese tradition that marks a woman’s coming-of-age. In so doing, she comments on the history of moving image and the role of the visual in shaping perceptions of “exotic” cultures.
Moving Perspectives: Lida Abdul/Dinh Q Lé
December 6, 2008–March 1, 2009
Lida Abdul from Kabul, Afghanistan, and Dinh Q Lé from Ha-Tien, Vietnam, use video to explore the shifting memory of trauma and the inevitable resilience of life. Drawing on recent histories of conflict and destruction, both artists returned to their native countries to explore societies in transition. After years of living in India and the West, Abdul returned to Kabul in 2001, where she created a series of short performance-based videos staged among the ruins of her homeland. Similarly, Dinh Q Lé returned to Vietnam to examine the war within the context of contemporary Vietnamese society. For Lé, who grew up in the United States, the Vietnam War is an amalgamation of distant childhood memories, documentary materials, and Hollywood films. In The Farmers and the Helicopters (2006), Lé juxtaposes contemporary interviews and images of the rural landscape with film footage to reveal more complex narratives surrounding memory in a changing postwar Vietnam.
Moving Perspectives: Yang Fudong, Cao Fei, and Ou Ning
September 6–November 30, 2008
Internationally renowned artist Yang Fudong expands upon Chinese painting and folklore to create dreamlike environments permeated with a sense of dislocation and loss. In Liu Lan (2003), a young man in a modern suit and a traditionally dressed woman meet while a female voice sings a plaintive folksong about separated lovers, creating an eloquent metaphor for the distance between the past and the pursuit of an uncertain future. This lyrical approach vividly contrasts with San Yuan Li (2003) by Cao Fei and Ou Ning. Its fast-paced montage, sharp camera angles, and pulsating sound underscore the rapid change, architectural density, and constant activity that are overtaking China’s urban landscape.
Hiroshi Sugimoto: History of History
April 1–July 30, 2006
Comprising more than 80 works, History of History juxtaposed Sugimoto’s own photographs—selected from the artist’s well-known series of seascapes, natural history dioramas, and wax museum figures—with an enormous range of geological specimens and traditional Japanese and ritual artifacts drawn from his private collection. His preoccupation with the passage of time and spirituality took on concrete, multiple forms as he placed his photographs in the contexts of the history of Japanese art, civilization, and ritual.
Kenro Izu: Sacred Sites Along the Silk Road
June 9, 2002–January 5, 2003
Japanese-born New York photographer Kenro Izu is best known for his photographs of the ancient Buddhist temples at Angkor, Cambodia; his still-life images of decaying flowers; and his sensuous nudes. This exhibition of large-format platinum prints focused on monasteries, royal tombs, ancient cities, and small personal shrines set amid the immense grandeur of the Himalayas or vast and desolate deserts in western China, Ladakh, and Tibet. Emphasizing both beauty and decay, these photographs serve as commentaries on the passage of time marked in a range of Buddhist achievements and expressions that spread across the Asian landscape.
Word Play: Contemporary Art by Xu Bing
October 21, 2001–May 12, 2002
A leader in the avant-garde movement that emerged in China between the end of the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square massacre, Xu Bing is recognized as one of the most important Chinese artists of the last 30 years. This was the first major exhibition of his work since 1991. It included A Book from the Sky (Tianshu), books and scrolls printed using two thousand unreadable imitation “Chinese characters” invented by the artist to express humankind’s struggle with communication. Other works on view—Square Word Calligraphy; The New English Calligraphy; and A,B,C—large landscripts (calligraphic landscapes), and a classroom demystified the art of calligraphy and addressed issues of communication.
Auto-focus: Raghubir Singh’s Way Into India
March 8–August 10, 2003
Raghubir Singh, celebrated for his visual essays on India and his role as a pioneer of color photography, drew inspiration from the work of the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and captured decisive moments that reveal the distinctive palette of India. In A Way into India, Singh focused on the Ambassador car in which he traveled as he documented the Indian landscape over a 30-year period. This exhibition featured 48 of these vibrant photographs that express “a life which is endowed with every shade of color from the peacock’s plume to the black of the elephant to the weathered landscape of the farmer’s face.”
Devi by Ravinder Reddy
November 4–March 17, 2002
By layering elements of traditional Hindu imagery and contemporary popular culture and using modern materials and traditional sculptural methods, Ravinder Reddy transforms an ordinary woman into a monumental, richly colored sculpture of the great goddess. On view in the Sackler pavilion, visitors were greeted by Devi, one of Reddy’s iconic heads with large, lotus-shaped eyes that recall images of Hindu deities and brightly colored South Indian temple gateways. His subjects are females of various classes—prostitutes, bonded laborers, untouchables, and women from tribal communities—whose images have been made precious through the use of gold and enlarged scale.
Constructing Identities: Recent Work by Jananne al-Ani
November 21, 1999–February 28, 2000
Using photography, Jananne Al-Ani explores the popularized image of the Near Eastern woman as a point of departure for examining identity across generations and cultures. Two pairs of large-format photographs, five pairs of transparencies, and a slideshow greeted visitors to the Gallery’s first presentation of contemporary works by an artist from the Islamic world. Addressing a topical issue—Orientalism, and in particular the Orientalist representation of women—the images seek to examine and deconstruct the stereotypes based on the “mystery and exoticism” that Westerners commonly associate with the veiled women of west Asia.
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