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The First Skyscraper
John Haberin New York City
The 2021 Asia Society Triennial
Maybe the Tower of Babel was not such a bad idea after all. It looked to heaven, and it anticipated that towering achievement of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, skyscrapers. Even when God struck it down, it peopled the earth with distinct languages and that mantra of art and culture today, diversity.
That could be why Kevork Mourad brought a replica to the Asia Society on a brisk October day for the first half of its very first triennial. The second half followed in March. Both feature coordinated events around New York, including works from the permanent collection at the New-York Historical Society. Performances take place there as well. I did not see Daniel Crooks on a billboard in Times Square, but I might had I returned a minute or two before midnight, and why not? Someone had better make up for the dearth of crowds in a pandemic. 
The Society compensates for its limited galleries with barely forty artists in its two installments, plus Huang Ruo as composer in residence. They bring Asian and Asian American art to the unending display of biennials and triennials, with a diversity in themselves. Mourad alone knows the plight of refugees from a fallen landmark, from a childhood in Syria and Armenia. Just as notably, contributors move easily between the culture of their birthplace and the culture of others, and they are not just cheerleaders for either one. They take past and present as equally an opportunity and a burden. God, they must know, may already have struck them down.
A constant distance
Kevork Mourad has Muslim roots, but he leans here on Western art and the Hebrew Bible. You will recognize the Tower of Babel instantly, from its representation by Pieter Bruegel. It has those setbacks as it rises, like a much-loved surviving tower, the Empire State Building. Mourad creates them from cylinders that one could mistake for a great tradition in Asian art, ink on paper, with a delight in their overlapping arches. He works, though, in acrylic on Egyptian cotton, whether to assert his background in the Middle East or to point to the fragile state of a doomed tower. As his title has it, he is Seeing Through Babel.
You may be sick of biennials and triennials. You may dread the looming 2021 Whitney Biennial, delayed from 2020 by Covid-19, or another "Open Call" at The Shed. You may distrust the hype for emerging artists in shows from "Fore" to "Fictions" at the Studio Museum in Harlem, "Greater New York" at MoMA PS1, and the coming New Museum Triennial. You may disdain a wider shift to contemporary art among guardians of the past. That shift cost the Met its director, the Met Breuer, and a sound financial footing. You may see a surrender to markets, that of perpetual art fairs, here as well.
No question but the Asia Society is guilty as charged. It has had only a limited presence with its shows of contemporary Asian art, and yet it plunges ahead. Quite apart from the triennial, it devotes its lobby and stairwell to recent new media, like a handwritten "excuse me" by Xu Bing. Who now is left to make excuses? Still, it can claim to have led the way with a healthy dialogue between past and present. It has had shows of Sarah Sze, Chen Chieh-Jen, Nam June Paik, and "Iran Modern."
Its triennial continues the dialogue, with work from as far back as Asian art in 1989 by Arpita Singh and Shahzia Sikander. It includes the Neo-Bengal art of Nandalal Bose, who died in 1966. Mostly, though, it concerns a dialogue between older traditions and today. Bose's nature studies show the influence of ink washes from East Asia and Indian miniatures. Sikander populates Indian and Persian miniatures with mundane home life. Singh's crusty realism in oil leaves it less clear whether to feel at home. Her cast looks calm enough, but lost in the demands of labor, gender, and fields of paint.
Others can be as bold in their borrowings as Natee Utarit, who emulates colonial-era Thai art as The Dream of Siamese Monks. Are they sweet dreams or nightmares? The six panels, more than six feet across, show guests, tourists, and other intrusions at a grand estate in the mountains. A small steamboat paddles its way through a garden fountain, as an enormous red flower rises to the scale of trees. A monk duly enters, but what must he think of a decorative nude rising from the fountain as well? The British had it all too easy.
Just as often, the whole point is to transform borrowings. Christine Ay Tjoe emulates screen paintings but as abstract art, much as Abstract Expressionism brought attention to Asian art. She derives her sheen from lithographic crayon on aluminum and her tension from scratches and scrawls against white. Like the triennial as a whole, it is Always Floating in a Constant Distance. Lao Tongli seems closer still to older paintings, in ink and mineral colors on silk. He thinks of his weave, though, as blood vessels, and he calls it Desire of Libido, for the blood runs hot.
The pride and the losses
Diversity in the 2021 Asia Society Triennial goes well beyond nations and influences, for the influences cut across nations, much as with El Museo del Barrio coming up for its La Trienal 2024. Ay Tjoe is not Chinese but Indonesian, and Xu Zhen now designates himself a product line, with a registered trademark. His sculpture out front perches Cambodian statuary upside down on the shoulders of an ancient Roman Venus, while he is from Shanghai. Minouk Lim in South Korea alludes to an experimental Soviet film of the same name when she sculpts Man with a Camera. More striking still is a refusal to reduce diversity to pride in identity. The artists are critical of themselves, their times, and their influences.
It runs against everything in art and culture these days, which keeps crying out for positive role models. (See, say, the resolutely upbeat African American portraits of "The Glamour Project," the Dean collection, and Kehinde Wiley.) Anne Sat asks to Follow Your Heart Wholeheartedly, with intricate wall reliefs between totems and fashion lines, but most are less certain where their heart lies. Xu Bing preserves the Analects of Confucius in silk, as if eaten away by silkworms. A Confucian monk shivers in the cold on a folding screen by Sun Xun, while a scowling Lady Liberty sinks into a swamp. His closeness to landscape art before the Cultural Revolution is unquestioned, but his faith in that art cannot survive intact.
Chandeliers dart across black in tapestry by Kyungah Hamin in Korea, as What You See Is Unseen. Yet her materials, she says, include smuggling, bribery, anxiety, and censorship. Religion for Nasum Nasr is all about coping with anxiety, but with little hope of relief. Six monitors rest on the floor facing a seventh, where a man in immaculate white fingers his prayer beads obsessively. Upstairs, the seven hands search for comfort in the blackness of a single monitor and in the person of a woman. Ghiora Aharoni thanks God for making her a woman, in letters across the shoulders of antique women's clothing. She knows that Orthodox men learn to thank God for not making them women.
Aharoni is herself multicultural when it comes to words. An Israeli, she writes in languages of her own making. In defiance of the fall of the Tower of Babel, she has her hybrid of Hindi and Urdu as Hindru and of Hebrew and Arabic as Hebrabic. How nice, then, that she shares the room with a Palestinian, Jordan Nassar. And how strange, then, that his embroidery makes no reference to conflict, apart from the abrupt shifts in its abstract patterns. He could stand for one last theme of the triennial—a resistance to outright statements concerning peoples, politics, and art. Kimsooja has a lovely video fading from one flag to another of despised or unrecognized nations, but it makes no distinction between lost causes and North Korea.
One can feel the pride and the losses in faces by Hamra Abbas, but not hear their voices. I have no idea why Ken and Julia Yonetani feel the need to return to the 1964 World's Fair, for Walt Disney's homage to atomic energy. I have even less of an idea why that entails bell jars with cute little things inside. And Singapore for Jason Wee is literally a puzzle—a jigsaw puzzle. Still, the show's focus distinguishes it from the terrible march of triennials, as does the sheer breadth of Asia. Ambition, too, counts for something, even at the Tower of Babel.
Quieting Babel
The first installment of the first Asia Society Triennial opened with a model of the Tower of Babel, on the way to a mighty babble of voices. How could it not, to survey so large a continent in a globalized world? How could it not, too, for emerging Asian and Asian American artists in New York, with shifting influences and unstable identities? For the 2001 triennial's second half, the voices have quieted, but they still insist on being heard. They still speak, too, about the competing pull of East and West, ancient arts and new media. Allow me to go a bit faster on this half as I wrap things up, at the risk of shortchanging some worthy contributors.
Still small enough to give most of them a room apiece, the triennial itself does not shortchange them one bit—many with art all about silences. Melati Suryodarm bases her sound art on REM sleep, while Song-Ming Ang sets text and calligraphy on music stands as his score. Cheuk Wing Nam searches for equivalents to isolation during a pandemic, with ghostly computer-generated masked heads and an old phone that has outlived its use. Their title speaks to unceasing but unheard music, with its command to take it from the top, or Da Capo al Fine. One can hear the silence, too, in a wall of clay hammers without gongs by anGie seah—or paintings on partitions by Abir Karmakar that evoke the walls and shelves of an apartment, with icons that no one is present to worship. Ancient voices can be muffled as well, like the Analects of Confucius still covered in silk by Xu Bing.
These artists may relish the silence, for whatever comfort it can bring to a mad world. seah calls her installation From Shadow to Shaman. Wall text in relief asks you to "be your own shaman." Hands on video by Joyce Ho tear at an unappetizing fruit, and a stack of white shirts looks like little more than an unread manuscript, but (a sign promises) "help is on the way." They could both be right at that, for nothing in the show feels less than energetic. A knife slices into continents in a photo by Vibha Galhotra, but it is literally icing on the cake—for a party to celebrate its exclusive guests and their stake in globalization.
Awareness of a changing world may underlie an unusual emphasis on new media, with again an eye to the past. Lu Yang calls his high-tech dance video Hello World, after the output of a primitive computer program. A wall from the Mountain River Jump! collective (in real life, Huang Shan) looks like a Zoom meeting in progress, but it depicts a Chinese art of divination, with an artificial eternal flame on the floor. The pressure to remember and to adapt all but excludes anything between ancient and postmodern. Dinh Q. Lê relies on four-channel video for the closest thing here to abstract painting, its colored verticals an allusion to the World Trade Center and 9/11. Trauma is still the order of the day, even for a Vietnamese artist like him or Tuan Andrew Nguyen half a world away.
More often, the worlds in collision are textbook art worlds. Galhotra steps back to see her cake at the center of a long table, with diners at the ends posed after The Last Supper. She has too many disciples for Leonardo da Vinci, but then gentrification has left a shortage of affordable places to go. The painting appears again in a copy, behind video lectures on art history, dignifying their awful cuteness. Mina Cheon smuggled them into North Korea on USB drives. Prabhavathi Meppayil turns to jeweler's molds for her low relief, so that its minimalist diamond shape may not even register.
Reza Aramesh seeks a deeper past, in vases after ancient Greece with the outlines of bodies in motion. The Iranian artist works in England, but these are his Cultural Artefacts, too. As in the triennial's first half, Xu Zhen has more than one deep past to call his own. Male statues after Cambodian tradition once again rest upside down on the shoulders of female statues after a Venus from second-century Rome—viewed then as the founding mother of the imperial family. They have lost their heads, but could this be a meeting of the minds? Whether the demand for biennials and triennials leaves any room for thought is another matter.
The 2021 Asia Society Triennial ran in two parts, through February 7 and June 27.