|
Not surprisingly, exhibitions devoted to members of an ethnic or national group almost always are about identity. And what else, when the reason for being exhibited is identity?
The problem with such shows is they often reduce to a few essential grievances, usually of the postcolonial kind. Still, identity is a fungible commodity these days. The processes of cultural flow, the movements of media and people across borders both mental and physical, have shaped a polyglot culture that allows us to trade identities in and up. And your niche is your refuge, where you might nourish a proper sense of alienation now and then.
To its credit, Across the Divide, a traveling exhibition of works by Chinese-American collegiate art teachers, skips the victim pose. It looks at the complexities of mixing native and immigrant ideas, and of adapting to the cross-cultural barrage of images that threatens to make the notion of national identity ridiculous.
Curator Yu Ji, who teaches at California State College at Long Beach, observes in a text panel that most of the artists in the survey started studio work in Asia and completed their studies in the U.S. Thus their aesthetic maturity has been marked by "Cold War politics," and one supposes this applies to immigrants from Taiwan as well as those from the People's Republic.
But politics play little overt roles in the work here. The most obvious display of political intent is Linxia Jiang's "Chinese Flag No. 1," an oil painting that depicts a fist raising a finger that extends into the flag, or into a trompe l'oeil slit in the flag. It is an image of more intellectual ambiguity than its rugged realism suggests. Even Yu's "Into the Oblivions No. 14," which shows the vestiges of a Mao mural among crumbling bricks, reads more as a reflection on time's ravages—in both politics and culture—than as a swipe at Maoism.
Xiaoze Xie looks at this from another perspective, by photographing stacks of folded newspapers. A silkscreen from this series, "January-April 2004 M.N.," finds two separate images of injured persons on medical gurneys, each lapping over a fold. Elsewhere, you can read part of a news story: "... outskirts of the city raged with ... moment's respite for the weary ..." The piece serves as a reminder of how a low-tech communication device serves as an index of history, while instant messages come and go. Perhaps a past in a culture that treasures the past steered Xiaoze to this visual idea.
Others in the show concentrate on visual ideas and how they shift or adapt. Amy Cheng's "Discovery After Fact," oil and wax on paper, shows a traditional Chinese baby figure, a good luck symbol, half-obscured by a sash of sorts, a band of abstract, decorative patterns. Xiaohong Zhang's cut-paper pieces also derive from traditional Chinese folk imagery, but if you look closely enough you can see that they have goofy, Western-cartoon aspects, too.
In the monoprint/drawing "Roots" series, Hui-Chu Ying installs various traditional images, including outlines of Buddhist hand-signs, in an abstract, figure-ground exercise. These ghostlike apparitions seem to harass the modernist floating blobs, but they, too, are figures seeking their levels in a void. Yida Wang carries this idea a step further in "Pandemoniac House," by drawing an intricate mythological figure, then canceling it with a glistening black smear.
But the response to these cultural collisions need not be ominous. "Grafted Hybrid IX," by Lawrence Yun, is an elegant watercolor of a tree, hewn at the bottom, seemingly shaped into a shrub, which then sprouts something like irises. Yun acknowledges the ordeal, even the absurdity, of cultural adaptation, but represents the result as not all that bad, if a little strange. And some work here discloses no obvious cultural references but merely sets about being interesting art, such as Josh Yu's orderly collages of random ink patterns, applied to painted backgrounds that resemble cracked ivory. One obvious and overlooked category of cultural adaptation are works that are about other things.
Fortunately, the works that take on the issue here are canny rather than caustic. Xiaowen Chen's inkjet-on-handmade-paper (is that a cultural collision in itself?) color photographs of bicycle seats are an example. Bound, taped, wrapped, each is a human image in its way. Both of the mass and set apart from it, unique and anonymous. And "Anonymous," an ink-on-rice-paper drawing by Baochi Zhang, implies something similar. You cannot get far enough away from "Anonymous" to make its tiny Chinese ideograms resolve into a human face. You can only really grasp the idea of one. Yet that face has a story written all over it.