Natvar Bhavsar

SUNDARAM TAGORE GALLERY
57-59 Hollywood Road,
February 24–March 28

Natvar Bhavsar, Akal I, 2008, pure pigment on canvas, 23 x 21".

Natvar Bhavsar continues to push the boundaries of what is possible with pure color pigment in his solo exhibition “Rang,” which consists of twenty-two paintings created during a twenty-year span, with many made in the past two years. Each piece comprises anywhere from eighty to two hundred layers of pigment sifted onto acrylic gel. The oldest work in the show is Veebha, 1989; its inclusion allows viewers to see how the artist’s technique has evolved over the years. Here, a textured swirl of red, yellow, and blue atop black pigment surrounds a luminous green center, giving the impression of an entire galaxy encapsulated on the canvas. The effect is a grand gesture, with broad strokes hinting at a vast number of ideas. Two smaller canvases from 2008, Akal I and Akal V, provide a counterpoint, narrowing the focus to the microscopic level without reducing the complexity in approach. Bhavsar’s mastery of color and light makes clear how he has broadened the scope of late 1960s Color Field painting. In these two paintings, for instance, the liberal use of acrylic gel gives the surfaces a smooth, glossy look, bringing attention to how subtle changes in the quantity of materials can completely alter the visual experience.

There is a need for the viewer to commit fully to the act of looking when viewing these paintings. The payoff is seeing how Bhavsar’s technique has become more refined and exacting over time—essentially, in this exhibition, we witness the history of an artistic practice unfold on canvases.

— Doretta Lau

“The Tell-Tale Heart”

JAMES COHAN GALLERY SHANGHAI 上海科恩画廊
1/F, Building 1, Lane 170 Yue Yang Rd., by Jian Guo Xi Rd., 岳阳路170弄1号楼1楼(近建国西路)
February 27–April 11

Cheng Ran, Rock Dove, 2009, still from a single-channel video, 5 minutes.

Very rarely does an exhibition that consists solely of video art succeed in convincing its audience to sit through each and every piece on display. “The Tell-Tale Heart,” however, does just that and works its magic through an allegorical reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s classic suspenseful short story. Housed in a darkened colonial mansion replete with historic painted moldings, the show insists on the paranormal as a communication strategy, enticing moving images into fruitful dialogues with one another across the gallery spaces.

The standout work here is the single-channel video Rock Dove, 2009, by emerging artist Cheng Ran, who, though often given to elaborate and somewhat obtuse visual fantasies, here presents a focused portrayal of doves roosting in an empty factory, echoing the composition of a musical score as the birds fly from one dimmed fluorescent light to the next. The piece reaches its climax when the lights are turned on in an awkward rhythm, forcing the birds into frenetic flight patterns that result in a visual experience somewhere between the poetic and the systematic. Also poignant is Li Ming’s captivating XX, 2009, in which two young men attempt to exchange shirts while maintaining skin-on-skin contact, approaching the strictures of unspoken roles through the raw sexual power of the body. The supernatural conversation opened between these two pieces alone is quite productive; strong surrealistic outings by Apichatpong Weerasthakul, Hiraki Sawa, and Martha Colburn add further stylistic dimensions to the concise survey.

— Robin Peckham

Miwa Yanagi

RAT HOLE GALLERY
5-5-3-B1 Minami Aoyama Minato-ku,
January 29–March 21

Miwa Yanagi, Lullaby, 2010, still from a color video, 12 minutes.

A group of thirteen-foot-tall portraits of grotesque, half-naked giantesses, Miwa Yanagi’s works in the Japanese pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale may have been widely denounced by critics, but they also confirmed that the artist is unafraid to pursue her own distinctly weird vision. Her current solo exhibition serves as something of an epilogue to Venice.

In the main gallery, the twelve-minute video projection Lullaby, 2010, centers on two women, one dressed in a frumpy skirt, her face covered by a prosthetic mask creased with wrinkles, the other in lacy white pajamas and the mask of a young girl. The video begins inside an idealized dollhouse interior just big enough to fit the two adult actors, the “grandmother” humming softly while comforting the girl curled in her lap. Suddenly, the girl wrestles the grandmother to the ground, subdues her, and then assumes the role of comforter. The pair alternate in this way several times, the intensity of the struggle gradually increasing until they kick through the walls of the interior to reveal that they are on a stage constructed on an urban rooftop. Rearing up into mantislike wrestling poses, the two clash again; the grandmother body-slams the girl with a resounding thud, takes her into her lap, and then resumes her humming.

A canny mix of absurdity and abjection, the work invokes comedy as a means to formalize irrational states, the emotional and physical extremes of human relations. Also on display are four black-and-white photographs from Yanagi’s “Fairy Tale” series, 2004–2006, which references Japanese and European fables. Here, prepubescent girls play both adult and child roles, but their pixieish frames undermine the adult-size settings and dark scenarios. Considered alongside Lullaby and the Japanese pavilion, these works underscore the artist’s growing investment in a theater of scale, in which architecture expands and contracts in response to the narrative’s psychic dimensions.

— Andrew Maerkle

MeeNa Park

KUKJE GALLERY
Sokyuk-dong 59-1, Chongro-ku
March 3–April 4

MeeNa Park, noncccss, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 62 x 62".

“BCGKMRY,” MeeNa Park’s debut solo exhibition at this gallery, indexes the artist’s resolve to establish her own, nonarbitrary visual order. Consistent with her ongoing engagement of a playful, rule-bending encryption of colors and symbols, the title of the show is an alphabetized anagram of the four subtractive primary colors in commercial printing (cyan, magenta, yellow, and key black) and their secondaries (blue, green, and red). Here, and throughout the exhibition, Park follows her favored paradigm of laying bare the familiar to show its unreliability, then restructuring it into her own aesthetic code.

The exhibition opens with a dramatic group of six black paintings, which are Park’s contribution to the discourse of the monochrome: BK0, 2009, and BK1–BK5, 2010. In the latter group, the artist explores the differences among ostensibly similar pigments of major paint manufacturers by stenciling eleven varying sizes of blue, green, red, and yellow circles that add up to five clearly dissimilar blacks.

Next up are the so-called “Dingbat” paintings. These visualizations of dingbat symbols encode various combinations of letters, numerals, and punctuations, and create a signature universe that, while based on ready-made units, is thoroughly idiosyncratic. Park does not want to follow any given route, instead obsessively mapping out her own: The final segment of the show is an installation of two hundred chronologically and alphabetically ordered drawings, all set into children’s workbooks, all disobeying the prescribed directions. Like her dingbat paintings, these outwardly simplistic pictures are, in fact, furtively sophisticated probes into what constitutes imagemaking.

— Julia Friedman

Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

QUEENSLAND ART GALLERY
Melbourne Street (south end of the Victoria Bridge)
December 5–April 5

Choe Yong Sun, The Construction Site, 2005, linocut on paper, 26 x 21".

When Queensland Art Gallery’s fifth Asia Pacific Triennial opened in 2005, it could not help but play second fiddle to the vast new Gallery of Modern Art it inaugurated, where it complemented QAG’s remarkable collection of contemporary work from the region. Its successor seems much more up for the game, occupying the entirety of the space (and then some) to provide a more concentrated and coherent installation that lives up to the event’s reputation for breaking new ground.

In this edition, established superstars like Subodh Gupta, Runa Islam, and Yoshitomo Nara sit alongside lesser-known contributors from countries making their first appearance in the triennial, most notably Iran, Myanmar, Tibet, and North Korea. This formula is repeated in the event’s extensive cinematheque program, where the work of Ang Lee and Takeshi Kitano is reconsidered amid a laudable retrospective of Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh and a historical survey of Iranian animation, while the cross-media approach extends to a performance program, listening post, and CD compilation of Pacific reggae artists.

For all the stunning individual pieces on offer—Islam’s gorgeous 16-mm films, say, and Kohei Nawa’s beguiling pixelated deer, and the row of Xinsheng houses salvaged by Chen Qiulin—it is collaborative production that emerges as the major theme within the exhibition. This idea of collective authorship encompasses Wit Pimkanchanapong’s cardboard fruit workshop, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s cooperation with Laotian art students, and Nara’s collaboration with graf media as YNG; it figures in Tin Wun Aung and Wah Nu’s poignant miniatures of inoffensive contemporary art exhibitions that would be impossible to realize in their home of Myanmar; while in Mansudae Art Studio’s stylized, state-sanctioned images of daily life in North Korea, it finds easily its most complicated and thought-provoking manifestation.

— Reuben Keehan