ArtAsiaPacific: Chinese Artists Fire Up The Armory

Contemporary Chinese art was the undisputed belle of the ball at this year’s Armory Show. The largest art fair in New York hosted 205 galleries from around the world, including 17 from the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong. The Armory’s “Focus” section, now in its fifth year, highlighted three decades of contemporary Chinese art, under the discerning eye of curator Philip Tinari, the Director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. Clustered along the corridor connecting the modern section of the fair to the contemporary one, fairgoers could not transition between the two periods without encountering the many facets of the Chinese art scene—which, as Tinari emphasized, is making its own inroads that are too often overlooked by Western audiences. The following are a selection of the fair’s highlights.

Photos by Claire Sabel for ArtAsiaPacific.

As part of the “Focus” section, Tianrenheyi Art Center, from Hangzhou, presented “Unrestricted Warfare” coupling Jin Feng’s portraits of Socialist dictators with a traditional Buddhist sculptural form composed of bondage tools by Xu Zhen.

Chen Hayan’s gloriously vibrant “Caterpillar” (2009) hangings on xuan paper brought something more joyous than the themes of scathing political critique and detached irony that were detectable in their surroundings.

Istanbul’s Dirimart Galeri found a home in a Belgian museum for When the justice properly works, then there is no room for compassion (2010), a set of pencils encased in a black display case, by Turkish artists Özlem Günyol and Mustafa Kunt.

Ahmed Mater’s enormous photograph of the ongoing construction in Mecca, entitled Metropolis (2013), on display at Armory first-timer Athr, from Saudi Arabia, was one of the most ogled pieces in the fair.

Another crowd pleaser was Yukata Stone’s Little Manhattan (2007–09), a scale model of the island of Manhattan carved in sumptuous marble with impeccable detail. Appearing at first a labor of love, the piece invites the contemplative gloom of a funeral monument, as the eye follows the shoreline south, where the carved marble seems to pool at its base.

A less remarked-upon highlight were the woven photographs of Dinh Q. Lê, who intertwines Vietnamese and American history, past and present. Stone and Lê are both represented by New York galleries, a reminder that there’s still plenty of the globe to discover locally.

Nadim Abbas’ Zone (1) (2014), comprising a robotic vacuum cleaner and concrete balls spilled out onto a rug, was on view at Gallery Exit from Hong Kong.

This year’s Armory Show took place March 5–8, 2014.

Claire Sabel is a writer based in New York.

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Mar 2014

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Chinese Artists Fire Up the Armory