Dragon Veins — which could be subtitled Postmodernity and Its Discontents — is a group show of 12 artists inspired by a variety of East Asian art traditions, some more explicitly than others.
Drawn from traditional Chinese painting, the term "dragon veins" describes an invisible structure uniting elements in a landscape. A stronger bond than artistic heritage for these works, however, is the vigor with which they deconstruct the East/West dichotomy, creating hybrid forms with abandon.
To illustrate the metaphor, University of South Florida art professors Elisabeth Condon and Mernet Larsen have pulled together over three dozen prints and paintings from artists throughout the United States as well as China, Japan, South Korea and Germany.
The thought-provoking exhibit poses questions about personal and cultural identity — as well as perception of time and space — but bold colors and forms with a strong pop influence make it equally enjoyable as eye candy.
Landscape is the lingua franca for a number of the artists.
The paintings of Zhang Hongtu are best appreciated in person. Reproductions on the exhibit invitation and website rendered them as traditional Chinese landscapes to the unknowing eye. In terms of marketing the exhibit, the choice was unfortunate. In person, however, Zhang's brushwork and color trigger a powerful sense of déjà vu. A peek at the painting titles reveals the reason why. Iconic landscapes by the genre's masters — Dong Qichang, Wang Meng and Zhao Mengfu — have been transcribed in the style of European painters Cezanne, van Gogh and Monet.
"Wang Meng-van Gogh #2" is the most delightful, with its turbulent sky and golden highlights. The Dutch artist's style via "Starry Night" and "Sunflowers" belongs to the visual vocabulary of every Westerner. Making the connection here is like unexpectedly running into an old friend.
Along the same wall, Condon's own warm vistas swirl in bubble-gum pinks and oranges, their jazzy, freeform tempo punctuated by cliffs and trees. The placement of elements in space suggests Chinese painting but the atmospheric density recalls Florida in August.
In contrast, David Brody creates obsessive labyrinths with sparing use of color. A wall drawing by the artist, commissioned for the gallery by USF, traces a pattern with mathematical precision. A maze of thick black and white strokes covers another canvas. Both encourage meditation.
So do Emily Cheng's lustrous canvases. She paints a trompe l'oeil-like frame of vivid folds and symbolic objects, creating a sense of deep space and a glimpse into nirvana.
Lush, cool forest scenes by German artist Susanne Kühn evoke a unity of nature and subconscious. Deep blues and greens envelop the viewer in a trance-like state, as rushing water slices through space and suggests subterranean tensions. The paintings aspire to the sublime by creating a stillness threatened by natural catastrophe, but the environment is so soothing — who cares if the end is imminent?
Though inspired by woodblock prints, the smooth curves and jagged edges in Kühn's oil paintings are just as evocative of vector paths and shapes. "Waterfall" in particular, with its layers of transparency and perfectly round bubbles, seems fundamentally digital.
Anxiety and ennui as secondary themes are perhaps unsurprising in a context where traditional values and rules are called into question. In the work of Chie Fueki and Takashi Murakami, the hyper-cuteness stereotypically associated with Asian pop culture takes on a morbid twist.
In Fueki's paintings, potentially threatening elements are neutralized, or fetishized, with a dose of shimmering sparkle. The artist uses textured craft paper in dark colors and glitter to create surfaces that wink at you from their depths.
A cube neatly encloses each uncontrollable object: Mt. Fuji belching out a plume of flowers; a pair of skulls anchoring a giant clock; an imperialist eagle reaching for a coveted jewel.
Murakami's slick anime-inspired characters manage to seem both innocent and sinister at the same time. One canvas illustrates the artist's alter ego, a demonic creature named Mr. DOB who has sprouted a truly disconcerting number of eyes — windows into a schizoid soul.
In a trio of offset prints, three portholes filled with disembodied eyes perform an eerie surveillance on visitors, cartoon cuteness only emphasizing their inhumanity.
iona rozeal brown's figures stare back with the same empty gaze. Referencing 19th-century Ukiyo-e portraiture, brown caricatures the contemporary popularity of hip-hop culture among Japanese youth by historicizing the relationship. In one painting, a samurai figure with a platinum-capped grimace shows off a fortune in bling. In another, a young woman wearing a kimono with a camouflage obi paints on blackface.
Surrounding her figures with the accessories of hip-hop culture — itself a mix of diverse black cultural traditions — brown draws attention to the evolution of identity as commodity.
The conversation about originality and identity takes place between as well as within individual works here. The Ukiyo-e woodblock prints whose imagery brown appropriates provided a decisive influence on European painters of the time, including van Gogh and Monet. That these artists are in turn cited as quintessential Westerners in Zhang's paintings raises the question of identity as a function of perspective rather than essence. The path of mutual influence turns into a Möbius strip.
In contrast to the more vibrant works, one artist seems to fade into the background. Yun-Fei Ji, whose delicate prints and drawings resonate with stinging criticism of the Chinese government, feels isolated and diminished in the gallery's bright entrance area. Both intellectually and aesthetically, his closest ties within the exhibit are to Zhang — both riff on the form of traditional painting, both are Chinese men who have been critical of their country's bureaucrats.
The awkward location deposits Ji's works near the small reading room located inside the gallery. Take the opportunity to browse through a catalogue of his other works and read about the events that inspired them — a river dam project that displaced thousands of citizens, for example. Of all the art here, Ji's would be helped most by the contextualization.
This article appears in Mar 1-7, 2006.