A week ago Sunday, the walls and floors of the Institute of Contemporary Art vibrated as improvisational percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani drew hypnotic and exhilarating sounds from a room-sized artwork, creating a symphony of tones from the work itself and incorporating sounds made from a large gong (played with a bow), two cymbals, and a group of small metal bowls arranged on the floor like an offering at a Buddhist temple. The sounds escalated as Nakatani brought his enthusiastic audience into the piece, handing out sticks and batons while keeping the rhythm firm and the energy high.
The participatory noise level promises to be high at the ICA every alternate Sunday afternoon this fall, since experimental musicians from around the globe have been invited to drop by and play Shanghai-born artist Chen Zhens massive sculptural installation/percussion instrument Jue Chang (Fifty Strokes to Each), which fills the museums entire downstairs gallery. Created in 1998, this work is the point of departure for the ICAs compelling new Chen Zhen: Inner Body Landscapes. It comprises dozens of beat-up-looking chairs and stools and immense Chinese-style beds, some ornately carved, some plain, collected from all over the world. To make the piece, the artist replaced the mattress of each bed and the seat of each chair with a tightly stretched animal skin; he then used rope to suspend this parade of furniture from a wooden frame built to form the shape of a Chinese character (one best read, I would suppose, from a great height). Old sticks and batons dangle from hooks looped through lengths of the same rope. The whole thing has an organic smell; its traveled quite a bit, and theres even a small dandelion stuck in some of the twine. Like us, it has a front and a back. The front presents a combination of flea-market jumble with the repeated taut skin seats. The back is a wonderful rope spine, like a fish skeleton beneath its skin.
Created for the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Jue Chang was the artists response to the clash of cultures and the violence in the Middle East its made to function as an enormous drum set for viewers to bang on, to get hostile with, to make music with, to come together around. Even on a quiet day at the museum, participation is welcome, and though the work alone is magnificent and thought-provoking as it speaks in its own way about language, travel, conflict, and harmony, it really comes to life when visitors take down those sticks and start banging away an act that breaks lots of taboos and takes some getting used to. Were being encouraged to be noisy in the museum, to interact with strangers in public, and generally to be aggressive, assertive, primal, joyous.
Powerful life forces and the structures that contain them are a recurring theme in Chen Zhens art. Our houses, our bodies, our gardens, our beds, and our musical instruments are among the vessels and chambers through which qi (pronounced chee) flows. This is the vital force believed by Taoism and other forms of Chinese thought to be inherent in all things. Traditional Chinese medicine holds that a balance of qis negative and positive forms in the body are essential to good health.
If that sounds a bit new-agey, just take a deep breath and stay with it. In what feels like an ever shrinking world, our life is looking and tasting increasingly international: we eat kimchi, drink Sapporo, drive Volkswagen, and practice Ashtanga yoga. Still, crossing cultural and philosophical boundaries is not a simple act, and Chens life and art delve into that difficulty. Chen Zhen: Inner Body Landscapes is the first exhibition organized by ICA assistant curator Gilbert Vicario, who has made a balanced and varied selection of work from the last three years of the artists career (he died in 2000 of a rare blood disorder from which he suffered throughout his life). Chens work reflects the world of his experience in an open-ended way, inviting us to interact and contribute to his vision.
Born to a family of doctors in Shanghai in 1955, Chen Zhen grew up during Chinas Cultural Revolution (1966-1977), a time of intense political and cultural tumult. He was an art student during this period, and so his training was limited to arts, including cabinet making and engraving, that were not considered decadent or bourgeois. With the end of the Cultural Revolution, attitudes toward Western avant-garde art forms became more tolerant, and Chen became interested in combining traditional Chinese philosophy (which had been forbidden under Mao) with modern Western notions like abstraction and the found object. In 1986, his brother received a scholarship to study medicine in Paris and Chen followed, earning money to make and study art in Paris by doing sidewalk portraits of tourists.
The concepts of home and travel, belonging and not belonging, and interior and exterior space pervade the works at the ICA. In one, three child-sized chairs hang side by side on the wall. Upon the seat of each chair sits a colorful structure built from candles, which are used like irregular Lincoln Logs to make up bright, melty houses reminiscent of childhood tree forts and Buddhist temples. The piece is called Autel de lumire (Altar of Light) (2000), and its part of a larger project, Un village sans frontires (A Village Without Frontiers) (2000), in which the artist worked with street children in Brazil to create an entire imaginary city of candle houses. In the engrossing accompanying video, you can watch Chen working with the children, introducing them to the architecture of their own city by taking them around to all kinds of different houses and buildings, and then helping them to build the homes of their dreams from candles. This is one more instance of the artists bringing together ideas from several cultures, searching for common language, and using his own foreignness as a Chinese man in Brazil to experience the culture that these children live among but are themselves foreign to, through their eyes as well as through his own.
The video, which runs continuously downstairs, was produced by Branka Bogdanov from documentary footage interspersed with images from the ICA show. It puts Chens work into historical and artistic context via interviews with curators, artists, and his articulate widow, Xu Min, who was instrumental in getting the posthumous installation of these tricky pieces just right.
Other works here explore Chens powerful concern with the body, and with how different cultures approach understanding and healing our physical forms. In Crystal Ball (1999), a sensual, vessel-shaped chamber created from a Chinese abacus and Buddhist rosary beads combines ancient expressions of science and hope to form a permeable wall around a rounded laboratory beaker filled with clear fluid. In Black Broom (2000), an oversized broom straight out of the Sorcerers Apprentice episode of Fantasia, with bristles created from long strings of black medical tubing that ends in syringes, evokes the lure of a womans hair or a rounded body but also the horror of medical intervention into our bodies. Made from alabaster and pierced by outsized surgical instruments, Zen Garden (2000), a maquette of traditional raked stones and extremely untraditional enormous internal organs, offers meditative calm along with overwhelming view of our vulnerability. Chinese and Western medicine were both of great interest to the artist. As an artist, my dream is to become a doctor, he once said. Making art is all about looking at oneself, examining oneself and somehow seeing the world. Toward the end of his life, he began a course of study in order to become a traditional Chinese doctor.
Drawings for the Inner Landscape of Body, a large sculpture of internal organs and candles constructed on a spindly iron table, provide insight into the numerous forms Chen gave to internal organs, and to his artistic and philosophical relationship with the body. Project Mental Inner Body Landscape (2000) combines drawn images with a profusion of the artists own notes and other texts written in Chinese, English, and French. With regard to the organs he planned to construct from candles, he noted, The organic forms shouldnt really resemble the human organ, but an imagination. Organs, houses, chairs, and beds they contain our energy, are shaped by it, and form its outer appearance. The vitality of the spirit, its interaction with the forms that contain it, constrain, it, and enable it to flow, take myriad, imaginative forms in this show.
In conjunction with the Boston Creative Music Alliance, the following percussionists are scheduled to activate Chen Zhens Jue Chang (Fifty Strokes to Each) with gallery goers: Masashi Harada on October 20, Elaine Fong on November 3, Luther Gray on November 17, and Ken Winokur, Terry Donohue, and Larry Dersch, formerly of the Concussion Ensemble, on December 1. All performances will begin at 3 p.m. and will be preceded by a curatorial lecture at 2:30. Call (617)-266-5152.
The flow of qi