Groping toward the significant

Nearly 30 years after reform began in China, the new urban centers of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou are now edging confidently onto the world stage. With urbanity comes cultural restlessness. With power comes artistic prominence. The American Century is over, and the Chinese Century has begun.

At the San Diego Museum of Art, Chinese artists make up well over half those chosen for the new exhibition “Past in Reverse: Contemporary Art of East Asia.” The show is rather weak artistically, but its distinct fascination lies in a larger assessment of a cultural transformation that is well underway.

The show surveys work mostly made since 2000 by 22 artists and artist groups, all born after World War II and all but five born in the 1960s and 1970s. Six artists are from Japan and five from South Korea. (North Korea, of course, remains off-limits to the world.) The rest are from “the three Chinas” -- the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Together they hail from a region that has been the site of complex interactions, for good and ill, over hundreds of years.

The show’s three most compelling artists will be found among the Chinese participants: Yang Fudong, who lives in Shanghai; Wilson Shieh, who works in Hong Kong; and Cai Guo-Qiang -- the one artist here with a substantial international reputation -- who moved from Guangzhou to New York in 1995, after an eight-year stint in Japan.

These three might be said to represent larger tectonic shifts that are likely to characterize the unfolding Chinese Century. One lives on the mainland, one lives in a former European colony and a third has joined the diaspora.

It’s worth noting that Cai, 47, did not go to art school. Instead, he studied stage design at the Shanghai Drama Institute. His early formal training is ideal for the highly theatrical, festival orientation of today’s international art world. Coming from a culture where -- from the Ming dynasty to the Mao dynasty -- ceremonial pomp and ephemeral beauty are ancient leitmotifs, Cai knows how to make a spectacle with the best of them.

A waterfall, in theory

For San Diego, the artist envisioned a project that grabs the imagination and won’t let go. Each fall the Miramar Marine Corps Air Station sponsors an air show, which features military and civilian flight squads. Cai worked with the pilots of six T-34 skywriting planes. With propeller planes as his tools and vapor and air as his medium, he “painted” a mountain range pierced by a waterfall in the bright blue sky above San Diego. A more traditional subject for Chinese landscape painting is hard to imagine.

At least, that’s how it looks in the digital rendering Cai made to describe his proposal. As a crowd looks on from below, two airplanes create horizontal undulations that outline the mountain range, while four additional airplanes swoop down from a dip in the middle. They make the waterfall, before splitting off in pairs to the right and the left to draw a river or lake.

Unfortunately, reality didn’t quite match this thrilling digital drawing. A video in the exhibition shows that the sky over San Diego was glum and overcast when the fateful Saturday in October arrived for this year’s Miramar air show. Cai’s ambitious skywriting event was held, but fragile white vapor trails drawn against a blank white cloud layer don’t create a dramatic effect.

Such are the eternal vicissitudes of unpredictable nature -- which is, of course, one theme of traditional Chinese landscape painting. Cai’s work teases out the elemental intensity of stark militarism and giddy play that is at the heart of a modern air show. The Taoist philosophy of mystical unity between seemingly incompatible opposites is at the core of Cai’s art.

That vibrant harmony is evident in the monumental gunpowder drawing he made for the skywriting project, which dominates the exhibition’s main room. The landscape was drawn using gunpowder on paper, a medium first employed to good effect 30 years ago by Edward Ruscha. Cai, however, set his drawing in motion.

Before a crowd of onlookers in the museum’s sculpture garden, he laid large sheets of paper on the ground, distributed the gunpowder and covered it with what appears to be thick cardboard, before lighting the fuse. A loud blaze of dramatic fireworks burned an image of the mountain landscape into the paper. Gunpowder contains an inherent conflict between a potential for mischief and for fun. When its opposites erupt into dynamic interplay, the material becomes mesmerizing.

Fireworks have been an artistic medium in China for a thousand years. Cai is the first artist since Bernini who also makes them sing in a meaningful way for Western audiences. According to a 17th century eyewitness, at the conclusion of Bernini’s elaborate, half-hour fireworks display at Rome’s Piazza di Spagna to herald the birth of the French dauphin, son of the Sun King, “the common people became insane with merriment.” I suspect I would have felt much the same at the Miramar air show, had it not been overcast.

Wilson Shieh’s 14 exquisite small paintings on silk are at the opposite end of art’s material spectrum. But they too use traditional means to tease out complexities of modern experience. Selections from two series are included, and both use precise contour drawing, transparent colors and amorphous space to render a sense of ageless fragility.

One series shows vaguely androgynous nudes, who use their own and one another’s bodies as musical instruments. Social manipulation and the production of art are fused, disavowing the solitary independence we easily associate with modern art.

The other series links human bodies with ceramic vessels, putting that traditional connection to contemporary use. There’s a reason that the discrete parts of a ceramic vessel are described as the body, the neck and the foot. And the head and the hand? They belong to the ceramist.

In Shieh’s most beautiful painting, a swimmer has just emerged from an enormous blue-and-white bowl -- its surface is covered with a pattern of ocean waves -- and he idly hangs a towel on a rack. A crimson tattoo on his arm displays a ferocious dragon, symbol of the Chinese people as well as traits of adaptability and transformation. This modern man has stepped outside tradition, although his body is permanently marked.

Yang Fudong’s 14-minute film “Liu Lan” is a fastidious, sensual tone poem in black and white. Yang, who trained as a painter, dispenses with conventional narrative to compose an evocative sequence of visually exquisite scenes, backed by a gentle musical soundtrack. A young woman ferries a young man across a lake -- by their dress, she is a farm girl and he is a city boy -- as an old woman watches. Nothing else happens.

History witnesses the inexorable collision of cultures in “Liu Lan.” The scenic design mixes traditional screen and scroll paintings with Chinese films of the 1920s and 1930s. Without a precise story to follow, incidental detail and acutely aestheticized experience become the short film’s true narrative.

In a similarly allusive way, “Liu Lan” might take its name from Liu Hu Lan, a 1940s revolutionary from the pantheon of Communist heroes. (She was memorialized by Mao Tse-tung with the famous prescriptive slogan, “A great life, a glorious death.”) The film’s historical layers -- ancient scroll paintings, timeless melodrama, modern cinema, revolutionary poster paintings, avant-garde abstraction, etc. -- steadily pile up. These sediments of memory generate a strange sense of yearning.

In conceptual power and material skill, none of the remaining works in the San Diego show come close to those by these three artists. Indeed, “Past in Reverse” has something of the feel of a graduate school MFA show. Undigested influences are everywhere.

Michael Lin’s big, floral-painted platform outfitted with matching floral pillows, which visitors are invited to sprawl upon, is one part Jorge Pardo design object, one part Rikrit Tiravanija social sculpture. Lin, not surprisingly, graduated from Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design in 1993.

Wang Qinsong and Shizuka Yokomizo both make staged photographs that are meant to evoke classical paintings, in the manner of celebrated Conceptual photographers such as Eleanor Antin, Jeff Wall and Cindy Sherman. Perhaps their indebtedness is the result of an absence of a long-standing art photography tradition in East Asia.

Yokomizo’s portraits use photographic means to evoke the light in paintings by Vermeer, La Tour and other artists. Wang’s richly detailed scene shows three prosperous women, 16 small children and a dog cavorting around a peddler’s cart that overflows with Eastern knickknacks and Western tchotchkes. Thirteen feet wide, the photomural recalls a Tang or Song dynasty painted screen, except modern consumerism has replaced courtly pastimes.

Large-scale color photographs by Cao Fei mix modern advertising imagery with the type of traditional Chinese fables that once would have been the subjects for highly educated painters. In Cao’s pseudo-ads, experiences like sex, violence and desire are peddled as products.

In a related method, Hee-Jeong Jang paints traditional Korean flower-and-bird paintings on canvases made by piecing together fragments of machine-printed floral cloth. The artifice of one is meant to resonate against the naturalness of the other, and vice versa, but that conceit is rather tired.

A pale blue world map by Yiso Bahc (1957-2004) features landmasses painted as clumps of off-white Korean characters. The scheme owes much to the 1970s Arte Povera artist Alighiero e Boetti and the 1980s German installation artist Lothar Baumgarten, who both used signs as mapping devices.

Soun-gui Kim, who has lived in France for 30 years, is the oldest artist in the show (born 1946). A damaged hard drive in the computer used to make her 1997 video projection, “Alea,” causes intentional visual distortion. The stretched and twisted imagery underscores the abstraction inherent in mass media, in the manner of well-known video works by Nam June Paik.

Looking outward

Although “Past in Reverse” focuses on a specific region of the globe, its point of view is not regional. These and other artists in the show, which was organized by SDMA curator Betti-Sue Hertz and will begin a national tour after it closes in March, are clearly aiming to participate in an international conversation that has been proliferating for several decades. The art is cosmopolitan in attitude. The artists look outward to the larger world from their various East Asian perspectives, not inward to establish some fantasy of an East Asian ideal.

But most of the show feels academic too. Perhaps one way to express the dilemma is by referencing the powerful Chinese tradition of literati painters -- a tradition that happens to inform several works in the show. Among them is a quirky installation by the four artists who make up the Yiangjiang Calligraphy Group.

The artists have transformed a museum hallway into a burlesque garden -- complete with potted bamboo, pebble pathways and an arched wooden footbridge -- whose form is loosely based on literati traditions. Several elements, including a stream and a mountain, are built from mounds of crumpled sheets of calligraphy paper, covered in inky scrawls. Ugly, slapdash scrolls also line the walls.

A small table with a blood-pressure monitor is provided at the far end, presumably so you might check your level of outrage at this travesty of traditional Chinese calligraphy. (I used it to see if I still had a pulse.) These artists, however, are groping toward something significant.

Literati painters (and poets) emerged as an important counterweight to the proliferation of academic artists in Imperial China. Academics were pros, literati were amateurs. The academics were highly skilled, and their virtuoso works found a ready market among wealthy patrons and customers. The literati, by contrast, emphasized art as an embodiment of ethical character.

In a sense, that’s the curious predicament in which East Asian art currently seems to find itself. “Past in Reverse” features lots of academic artists and not enough literati. As the region moves further into the globalizing art world, expect those numbers to change.

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‘Past in Reverse: Contemporary Art of East Asia’

Where: San Diego Museum of Art, 1450 El Prado, Balboa Park

When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays and to 9 p.m. Thursdays; closed Mondays

Ends: March 6

Price: $4 to $9

Contact: (619) 232-7931, www.sdmart.org