ART: Allure of Matter: Material Art From China @ LACMA

The new exhibition at LACMA “The Allure of Matter: Material Art From China” showcases a wealth of creativity from Chinese artists working in a variety of materials from porcelain and wood to tobacco, ash, and human hair. It seems audacious to try to make a sculpture of a spreading fire, but that’s what Liu Jianhua has done in “Black Flame”, working in porcelain to make eight thousand black “tongues” of flame of varying height placed around the floor of the first gallery I entered as if the room were on fire. Crossing the room with these black flames on both sides reminded me of the videos of people last summer fleeing Paradise, California with flames on both sides of the road. On one wall of this room were three large white rectangles entitled “Blank Paper”, which looked like just that except that they too were made of porcelain. These two works filled the room, in an interesting conversation between black and white, dynamic and static, timeless and fleeting. The center of another large room was mostly occupied with a very large orange-and-white “tiger skin” shag rug, though when I approached, I did a double-take to realize that artist Xu Bing had created this “rug” from carefully arranging thousands of cigarettes. “1st Class” not only creates a fascinating play of color as you look at it from different angles, seeing alternately the white and orange cigarette paper or the darker tobacco seen from “head on”, but it also suggests a conceptual play of consumerism (a mansion-size rug nominally made of possibly endangered animal pelts) as a carcinogen. A couple of other works by Xu also feature tobacoo, including a traditional Chinese scroll painting of a village and river, with a single forty-foot long cigarette running down the middle of it with the end having burnt and stained the painting. Chen Zhen, an artist battling cancer, perhaps inspired by chemotherapy or ancient Chinese medicine, crafted some beautiful crystal sculptures that turned out to be internal organs, an anatomy textbook rendered in sparkling transparent crystal. Song Dong’s “Traceless Stele”, a blank metallic slab monument equipped with water and paintbrushes invites its viewers to engage with it, dipping the paintbrushes into water and drawing or writing inscriptions on the monument which last only a moment before the water evaporates, as you contemplate the nature of temporal existence. One artist has collected human hair from all over the world to weave it into a flag symbolizing multi-cultural harmony, while another artist has collected ash from burnt incense in a temple and painstakingly sorted it by color and coarseness in order to create “paintings” on canvas from it. Yet another artist collected roof tiles from traditional homes that were being demolished in Beijing, and attached to each a black and white photo of a scene from the site where each tile was collected, to create a kind of concrete quilt memorializing neighborhoods that no longer exist. Some of these works could be understood just by looking at them, while others were more conceptual, requiring reading the description to understand the significance of the materials and the process. So many of them were fascinating. I found myself raptly engaged in several of them, and revisited a few. (As so often, a hat tip to KCRW's Edward Goldman for the recommendation.)