Adventurous Art With an Asian Flair

By Jorgio Castro

July 13 marked the last day of the nearly 3 month-long exhibition entitled "Time After Time: Asia and Our Moment." Held in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in downtown San Francisco, the event coincided with the reopening of the Asian Art Museum (also located in downtown San Francisco) and sparked a renewed and ever-increasing interest in Asian art. Created over 9 years ago by Pritzker Prize winning architect Fumihiko Maki, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts opened with a promise that "the Center would include, respect, and celebrate the people and ideas that energize our myriad communities." Since then this modern facility has seen a tremendous reception in the art community of the Bay Area.

Perhaps the most surprising note about the exhibit is that "Time After Time is emphatically not about Asia…the exhibition is a considered program that addresses the subject of time that, like Asia, exists with the weight and elusiveness of an idea." The art focused on different themes of time, and the permanent truth that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

The separate displays varied greatly in both style and presentation. In the first gallery, large landscape photographs of Mount Fuji in Japan covered the walls. Compiled by Noguchi Rika, these atmospheric pictures conveyed a profound sense of eternal time and space - a man walks through thick fog in the distance, seemingly coming from and going nowhere and everywhere at once.

Another display in the third gallery used a striking image to convey a different view. "A Walk," by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook of Thailand, was a somewhat disturbing but wholly engrossing video of the artist walking amongst a sea of bodies in a mortuary. She inscribed "a continuous path within the space to evoke ideas of continuity, transition, and the infinite."

In the gallery adjacent, Peng Hung Chih used dogs as a means of relating ideas about the state of his native Taiwan. Chih's aim is to delve into the "ambiguous perspective that has emerged from Taiwan's complex historical relationship to mainland China, and its close economic and cultural ties with the West." One video entitled "One Black, One White" showed a dominant/submissive relationship between two dogs eating from two separate bowls, with one dog periodically taking the food from the other dog, thus also creating the feel of a metronome exactly marking time.

While some works contained material of more gravity, others were simultaneously entertaining and substantive. Apichatpong Weerasethakul's "Haunted House" captured normal Thai villagers acting in place of their favorite soap opera stars in a plot worthy of "Days of Our Lives." The video "considers the fascination with celebrity (as) ordinary people morph into ambiguous entities, at once real people and fictional characters." Such imaginative compilations were littered throughout the Center, each as thought-provoking as the last.

Many other unique works of art were on display throughout the gallery and screening room, including works by Kim Beom, Wang Guofeng, and Zhu Jia just to name a few. "Time After Time" showcased many promising Asian artists on the cutting edge as well as mid-career visionaries, all with different views and comments on "our moment" in time.

For more information, visit www.yerbabueanarts.org or stop by the Center, located at 701 Mission Street in the heart of Downtown San Francisco.

July 18, 2003