Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese artist famous for immersive dot motifs and infinity installations, is the rare Asian female abstract artist whose name enjoys instant recognition.
Lack of other recognizable names is not an indictment of the quality and volume of abstract art made by women over the past century. It’s rather a consequence of gender bias in the art world, which has historically ignored or forgotten the contributions of women.
A new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) wants to change that. The Herstory of Abstraction in East Asia is a rare all-female group show, bringing together 13 abstract artists from Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, and spans the 1950s to the present.
Photo courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Speaking at the opening on Friday, curators Wang Pin-hua (王品驊) and Moon Jung-hee (from Taiwan and South Korea respectively) described the exhibition as an attempt to pluralize abstract art by departing from the genre’s traditionally male-centered history and following its transformation as it journeyed East.
When it comes to art made outside the Western male-dominated canon, there’s always a danger of expecting the works to comment only on the artists’ oppression. That’s like saying art by black artists can only be about racism, and art by women can only be about feminism.
Herstory avoids reducing its artists to such one-dimensional experiences. Within the very specific nexus of identities occupied by East Asian female abstract artists, what’s striking is that not one of them seems to be saying the same thing. A variety of expressions, ideas and personalities are on view, demonstrating conclusively that female artists are not interchangeable.
Photo courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum
That’s a call to embrace diverse representation in art institutions and art historical research. Credit must be given to Wang and Moon for assembling a strong collection capable of making that statement.
THE WORK
Kusama is represented in the show by two works made half a century apart: Infinity Nets (E.T.A.) (2000), a luminous web of gold brushstrokes on an expansive red canvas; and Accumulation of the Corpses (Prisoner Surrounded by the Curtain of Depersonalization) (1950), which eschews the pop art-adjacent style of her later works for a bleaker composition on the ravages of war.
Photo courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum
She is undoubtedly the biggest name in the line-up. Yet the fact that Kusama does not overshadow her colleagues proves that conceptual and technical prowess have always lurked in the works of other, lesser-known women artists.
Take for example Atsuko Tanaka, a contemporary of Kusama and influential member of Japan’s Gutai Group — the post-World War II avant-garde art collective whose works anticipated later developments in performance and contemporary art.
Tanaka’s best-known work is Electric Dress (1956), a sculpture of glowing lights and cables that pulsed as she wore it, in a visceral encounter between the female form and industrialized technology. She is represented here by a series of paintings that draw upon that landmark work. Colorful circles joined by tangled lines echo the shapes of her garment, as well as the throbbing, amorphous biological systems of the human body.
Photo courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Those looking to see how East Asian aesthetics interact with Western abstraction will be gratified by the imaginative use of calligraphy and traditional materials in some works. Yang Kwang-ja combines Korean and German script in dynamic movement in Korean Writing (1968–1969), and experiments with Korean paper in her more recent Installation series.
Works by Korean artist Ahn Mi-ja and Taiwanese artist Yang Shih-chih (楊世芝) explore the potential of ink. Applying ink on cotton, Ahn creates meditative pieces in which she expertly controls shades of intense and radiant blacks. Yang makes extempore marks on paper with black ink, which she then tears and reassembles into collages, producing an intriguing blend of improvisation and premeditation.
EAST MEETS WEST
Photo courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Interwoven histories of East and West meet in content as well as form. Korean artist Chang Sang-eui’s monumental yet personal My Story (1989) is an abstract scroll depicting her birth in North Korea, her family’s migration to South Korea and their experiences in the Korean War and democratization of the 1980s.
In her address at the exhibition’s opening, museum director Lin Ping (林平) reminded guests that the last time TFAM put on a survey of East Asian works was some 20 years ago. The medium of choice then was oil paintings.
With the exception of a few textile works, only paintings are exhibited in Herstory. Given the curators’ objective of rewriting the history of abstract art, going back to fundamentals is an understandable choice. It’s also an opportunity to show how female artists have played around with the form, dispensing of the notion that risk-taking in art is a male pursuit.
Yukie Ishikawa’s checkered canvases layer rich jewel tones with neon grid patterns, creating pieces that could simultaneously pass for digital graphics or woven blankets. The Japanese artist further pushes the materiality of paint by incorporating uneven textures, like wrinkles and subterranean grooves, into her works.
In The Sky is a Sphere, the Earth is a Square (天圓地方, 1994), Taiwanese artist Chen Hsing-wan (陳幸婉) pieces cut cloth together to form an emblem that could be an essential or primitive map of heaven and earth. Her compatriot Hung I-chen (洪藝真) uses baked paint and fiber-reinforced plastic to transform color field paintings into sculptural objects that seem to emit their own glow.
Herstory is overdue recognition by the doyens of art that works by female artists deserve dedicated and critical retrospectives.
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