My friend and I felt the need for a little bit of culture so
we headed over to the National Museum of Art in Osaka. Leaving Higobashi exit 3 (on the blue
Yotsubashi subway line) we followed a map directly outside the station to the
museum. The museum’s architecture is like some sort of shiny silver metallic
monstrosity, sort of like a prototype to China’s Olympic birdcage stadium;
interesting but frankly a bit odd. For some reason it reminded me of being back
home in Los Angeles heading over to the MOCA, or Museum of Contemporary Art,
which is what is housed in Osaka – rather contemporary pieces, pictures, and
installations.
Going inside and downstairs to buy tickets we headed into
the first exhibit – Avant-Garde China: 20 Years of Chinese Contemporary Art
including famous artists (and exhibitionists!) Huang Yong Ping, Fang Lijun,
Zhang Huan, and Ma Liuming. While I would like to have some witty and
insightful response to this exhibit I can frankly say that I left it a little
puzzled, actually. Some of the art was what I was expecting – a bit of Andy
Warhol, a bit of Dali and Magritte, a splash of this and a smidge of that – the
video installations by two particular artists left me a bit… lost.
First up was Ma Liuming where we see photos of him
cross-dressing as a pretty woman as he is rather androgynous to begin with. Ok,
cool. I can see this being avant-garde in Communist China. Walking past the
pictures into one of his two video rooms, I see the first video room offer him
up to the screen nude and cooking up some form of meat and just sort of hanging
out (in more ways than one). Ok, whatever floats his boat, I guess. The second
room was him taking off his clothes and then taking a shower. Did I mention
inside the shower there were these big fish hanging from hooks just gaping at
the camera as they slowly died a painful and suffocating death, being out of
water and hung from hooks!! I am sure this is some insightful commentary on China
at the time but I suppose I am just too obtuse to figure out what it might be.
The video room beside Ma Liuming showcased Zhang Huan, who
currently resides in New York, another nude video, this time of the artist
being hung from thick chains as an IV stuck in his arm dripped down onto a
pristine white container. It looked like there might have been something
heating the blood as it looked to be boiling with steam coming up. Um, watching
it was kind of gross, actually. His second video room showed him getting into a
river with a young boy on his shoulders as he navigates the water. There are
all these other men standing stock still in the waist-length water and he
passes them, stone-faced. Again, I was at a loss for the meaning of either
piece. Was the blood-dripping piece a commentary on Communist China sucking the
lifeblood out of people?! I don’t know. I suppose I should brush up on my
Chinese history a bit, though I suspect I will still be left in the dark on
these installations.
The second main exhibit was The Concrete Poetry of Seiichi
Niikuni: Between Poetry and Art, Collection 4 which was a rather interesting
take on the written form of roman lettering (usually in English or French) and kanji, or Chinese written
characters, as an art form. It looked like it could have been straight out of a
typography or graphic design class. What I really liked was that between my
friend and I we could figure out what the kanji meant so we could appreciate
the pictures more. For instance there could be a kanji about darkness and there
are other kanji similar to that floating around the picture sort of simulating
what darkness is. Or another one had the kanji for prisoner on it which is
basically made from two different symbols – person and mouth. But the person is
inside the mouth (which looks like a square so there is no way out) meaning it
is like a prison cell and the picture was a take on those three kanji – person,
mouth, prisoner. Really quite interesting if you know your Chinese characters.
I was quite fond of this exhibit actually.
So there went my 1,000 yen (~$10) and my two hours of time.
It was an interesting day and I’m glad I had the chance to check out these two
installations which are running until March 22, 2009. The great thing about the
Avant-Garde exhibition was that everything was both in Japanese and English – and
good museum-quality English at that (no Engrish here folks!) – so you can try
to read and understand (even if somewhat unsuccessfully) what you are seeing.
Well worth the trip if you are a contemporary art lover and have a little time
to spare inside a museum. While I can't say that I'm particularly a contemporary
art lover I must admit that do love spending time inside museums. You can check
out the museum as well or go to their homepage in English here: http://www.nmao.go.jp/english/home.html
Happy viewing!
