The Art Scene: Transcultural Dialogues

   There’s no longer a reason to make a strenuous case for abstraction in the arts. Where once it suggested a radical assault on established conventions and, after a period of debate, a new orthodoxy, abstraction is now universally regarded as a legitimate option, even at a moment like our own, when representation and realism are again dominant in precincts of the art scene. A number of the best artists are now committed to an aesthetic that combines aspects of abstraction and representation, maintaining a tension that many of us learned to celebrate decades ago when in the heyday of abstract expressionism an artist like Willem deKooning challenged the then new orthodoxy with a series of wildly provocative paintings devoted to “Women.” Though some observers complain that representation is bound to be aesthetically reactionary and “merely illustrative,” while others complain that abstraction is inevitably a retreat from content and robust political engagement, such noisy disputes seem to many of us incidental to the real questions that ought to govern our interest in painting. What kinds of “real questions”? Questions about artistic idiom and texture, invention and innovation, simplicity and complexity, tradition and what T.S. Eliot called “the individual talent.”

I don’t often expect to find genuinely mind-and spirit-altering exhibitions in the dog days of a New York City summer, but a show at Hollis Taggart Gallery on 26th street in Chelsea moved me in mid-August to think freshly about abstraction and to sing the praises of several artists and artworks new to me. The show is called “Asian-American Abstraction: Historic to Contemporary,” and the catalogue of the exhibition recommends a visit to a small uptown gallery, Fu Qiumeng, on East 80th street, which mounted a concurrent, much smaller show devoted to “Transcultural Dialogues: The Journey of East Asian Art to the West.” “Transcultural” is one of those conceptual terms that I’ve come to mistrust and, where possible, to avoid, but here there is no doubt that the term has legitimate work to do. Both exhibitions are committed to tracking, in a loose and suggestive way, the influence of Asian art on western abstract art. Both raise questions about what is and is not transferrable as artists from one culture deploy practices long associated with another culture and, in so doing, interrogate the conflict between tradition and innovation.

The larger show, at Hollis Taggart Gallery, is in many ways the more challenging of the exhibitions, and the catalogue produced to direct our responses to the eighty works on display is itself a rich and challenging supplement. An initial walk through the galleries is enough to tell us that we are in the presence of first-rate work by artists most of whom we’ve not encountered before: artists with names like Kelly Wang (born 1992), Steve Wada (born 1917), Yuming Sun (born 1963) and Tetsuo Ochikubo (born 1923). Along our initial walk-through we note that there are works by artists like Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Adolph Gottlieb and other blue-chip western artists obviously influenced in decisive ways by Asian art—if not by the Asian art displayed in these galleries, then by the artworks we see on a visit to any standard collection of Asian screens and scrolls hung in the Asian wing of the MET and in major museums all over the world.

One question apt to occur to us on our walk-through has to do with the Asian-ness of the work we encounter. Is there a characteristic idiom or sentiment that marks the paintings by a wide range of Asian artists? Does the fact that the works on display are abstract determine that they must resemble one another and inspire in us the sense that there is an informing idiom or at least an unmistakable “look” that marks them as “Asian”? The two authors of catalogue essays for the exhibition raise what is at least a version of this question, and of course it is tempting to think that we must always know what we mean when we refer to Asian art. Tempting, for example, to believe that the art of calligraphy is bound to shape or at least figure in Asian artworks, which are in fact often gestural and do much of the time call to mind a kind of script which may or may not be read as if actual letters and words were inscribed.

But then it’s tempting also to feel that in the art we are looking at there is a spiritual, or devotional, or metaphysical dimension we would not think to find in most western paintings, even when we discern in them marks of Asian influence. The Japanese artist Makoto Fujimura writes in A Theology of Making that “I now consider what I do in the studio to be theological work as much as aesthetic work,” and when we look at his “Interior Castle: Night”—one of the most impressive pieces in the Taggart exhibition—we are not moved to dispute what he says, no more than we would dispute a comparable impression when we stand before a tiny, black ink on paper semi-abstract landscape by Sal Siruga. In one of the catalogue essays, Jeffrey Wechsler cites the “mysterious agency of ch’i or spirit,” which “has a crucial role in East Asian art.” How would we pick up or connect with this “mysterious agency”? It “can perhaps best be visualized through abstraction based on gesture, energized brushwork, and calligraphic motifs,” Wechsler writes, but it must also be marked by a seeming effortlessness and delicacy. All of these elements, or characteristic features, are apt, presumably, to suggest to most of us that we are in the presence of an authentically Asian artwork.

And yet a good many of the paintings in the Taggart exhibition by no means strike us as indisputably Asian, not because they lack delicacy, or energized brushwork, but because the ostensibly essential spiritual dimension, or ch’i, does not seem at all to figure in the impact of the work. Of course, when you say that you’re looking for a “mysterious agency” you can’t quite be sure that it doesn’t in fact inform the work. What looks to me, on repeated viewings, over several visits to the gallery, like a brilliantly accomplished and beautiful painting (“Coralscape”) by Ralph Iwamoto clearly accomplishes its ambitions without any trace of mysterious agency, calligraphic brushstrokes or—another characteristic feature of Asian art according to Wechsler—“apparent spontaneity.” Quite the contrary, the Iwamoto painting is marked by intricately orchestrated, almost geometric forms, deftly juxtaposed so as to create a surface immediately pleasing and quietly playful while apparently belonging to the idiom of a tradition far removed from gestural abstraction and metaphysical intent. Again, like a good many other paintings in the exhibition, it is by no means obviously “Asian,” no more than the works by Walasse Ting or James Suzuki, or Emi Sisk or Marlene Tseng Yu.

Though the essays included in the exhibition catalogue would have us believe that Asianness is invariably discernible in the works by Asian artists, my own sense is that the case for “transcultural dialogue” does not in any significant way depend on any such insistence. After all, if we contend that works by Motherwell and Kline and Gottlieb indisputably betray the influence of Asian artworks, that a certain look or aesthetic inspired these and other Western artists, we need not also contend that every painting by an Asian artist shared that look or subscribed to that aesthetic. When I look at the paintings by artists like Chuang Che or Jennifer Jean Okimura in the Taggart exhibition, I am certain that such works would not at all have moved the American abstractionists to make the powerfully Asian-inflected paintings we associate with them. Such works have none of the gestural focus and simplicity of the more characteristically Asian paintings on display. They do not at all call to mind the observation that less can be more, that a decisive calligraphic linearism may well provide, even to a riotously colorful surface, the definition and thrust of the work. This is again only to note that though the transcultural dialogue is often in play in the juxtapositions we observe, the Asian or Asian-American paintings are not invariably notable for their Asianness. By contrast, older works by Bada Shanren (born 1626) and Qi Baishi (born 1864)—works in the uptown gallery show, marked by their simplicity, their gestural reserve and the open spaces they indulge—are more characteristically Asian, and their influence is felt not only in paintings by the American abstractionists but in the contemporary paintings by Asian artists working within their own traditions.

We can all remember that modernism was marked by an ongoing polemic associated with the words “make it new.” The critic Clement Greenberg was not alone among writers of his generation for arguing that abstraction was in effect the inevitable and beneficial fate of an artform intrinsically driven by “the material and nature of painting itself.” The works of modernist artists like Jackson Pollock and others of Greenberg’s generation recommended themselves to us not only by their inherent quality but by their radical newness, their departure from the merely well-made representational paintings of generations past. But the Taggart exhibition would seem to make the case for rather a different understanding of western abstraction, suggesting that the most characteristic features of Asian art are everywhere discernible in the modernist paintings that inspired a writer like the New Yorker art critic Harold Rosenberg to speak of “the tradition of the new,” and to wonder at the appetite for breakthroughs that bespoke a rupture with the art of the past.

The case is sharply captured in a passage from the catalogue essay by Jeffrey Wechsler: Greenberg, he writes, “lauded Color Field painting, and in particular its refinement in ‘stained’ painting, in which the pigment soaks into the canvas surface, integrating color and surface. However, East-Asian art, with its emphasis on water-based pigments and ink, has essentially been creating stain painting for centuries, even millennia. The colors applied onto silk or paper of such art fully suffuse into the surface, with color and support becoming one. Indeed, the waywardness of highly liquid media—spreading and puddling or dispersing in waves or runnels—encouraged the acceptance of accidental effects as a parallel to the randomness, effulgence, and essentially uncontrollable spirit of nature appreciated by Eastern artists.”

Of course such a view of the transcultural dialogue, persuasive as it is, necessarily sets to the side questions bearing upon abstraction itself. The Taggart exhibition, if it does nothing else, surely confirms for us that we can be thrilled and surprised by artworks with no content or message or attempt at so-called relevance. Some of the paintings, like Gabrielle Yi-Wen Mar’s “North Blossoms” (2024), or Arnold Chang’s “Corona Landscape” (2020), are merely delicious, in this case all-over representations of blossoming branches that have no reason for being other than their beauty. Conventional, perhaps, but who cares—though if there was nothing more to the exhibition we’d have to wonder about its purpose. More striking by far are paintings like Don Ahn’s “Dragon With Red” (1999), a sumptuously colored abstraction with an indisputably mysterious yet palpable Asian character that employs energetic black brushwork to impart thrust and tension to a surface that would otherwise be merely lovely.

Equally compelling, though subtler in its effects and economy, is Tetsuo Ochikubo’s “Untitled” (1960), a sizeable work with a cloudy grey surface, lightly painted geometric forms strangely set back to endow the space with at least a semblance of definition, and a surprisingly gorgeous though scrupulously pale blue sphere in the foreground, dominating the surface and imparting to it something like a mystic dimension. Equally telling and important, inscribed across the top portion of the painting, a delightful sequence of miniature, dancing black brushstrokes which might almost be read like the traces of Japanese words, or letters, deployed to establish the Asian character of the work without in any way limiting its impact. The lightness of touch and apparently improvisatory aspect of the work make it one of the most striking pieces in the exhibition, striking in the sense that it is at once traditional in its minimal means and elementary design while at the same time fresh and inviting.

In one of the catalogue essays, Emily Chun worries that the works will collapse into a stew of “knowable ideas” about Asianness, reducible to the standard “visual characteristics or indexes” associated with Asian art. But really it’s hard to imagine that any attentive visitor to the exhibition could conceivably succumb to a “totalizing” or reductive view of the work. Abstraction here comes in an almost dizzying variety of forms and formats. To be sure, we might well see, in much of the work, a characteristic tension between what Chun calls “visibility and invisibility.” In much of the work we register how images or color clusters are evoked with what can seem like a control that is ever about to slip away or disperse. To say that such elements define the work is suggestive, though it is misleading to say that any given work is inevitably marked by such tensions. What emerges here is a sense of abstraction as a set of practices infinitely combustible and various. As we might expect, the best of the works in the exhibition are powerfully centered and scrupulously self-sufficient. They do not purport or strive to blind us with spurious illumination. They engage us here in what Seamus Heaney once called “tenebrous thickets” of color and gesture, or there in swells and swirls signifying nothing less than everything.