A master revisited

When is a copy of a work of art not just a copy but a work of art itself? And when is copying not merely an exercise in imitation or homage but an act of creativity and self-awareness?

These are among the tricky questions raised in “Through Masters’ Eyes” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. LACMA commissioned Lee Mingwei, a Taiwan-born conceptual artist now based in Berkeley and New York, to come up with a project that would showcase contemporary Asian art. The result is an aesthetic version of the children’s game “Telephone” in which 11 artists have created works derived from a single 17th century Chinese landscape painting and their immediate predecessor.

“Often there’s a very heated argument between classical and contemporary departments at museums about what art is,” Lee says by telephone from New York. Whereas traditional art is largely defined by materials and presentation, he says, “contemporary art is very much about process, experience, memory, concept.”

The artist’s work often involves interaction with viewers. For example, in his “Sleeping Project” at the 2003 Venice Biennale, the artist invited visitors to sign up to spend the night with him -- in a separate bed -- in the pavilion.

Stephanie Barron, LACMA’s chief curator of the Center for Modern and Contemporary Art, had seen Lee’s work at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and in Venice. Last spring, she approached Lee about doing a project she and J. Keith Wilson, her counterpart in the museum’s Center for Asian Art, would curate.

The artist came to L.A. to meet with the curators at LACMA, where he discovered a treasure that would become the focal point for the show: an album of small landscapes by Shitao (1642-1707), one of the most celebrated Chinese literati painters. “This is one of the best-known Shitao works outside the National Palace Museum in Taipei. I had no idea it was at the museum,” Lee says. “It was an overwhelming experience for me, because I’d only seen these paintings in reproduction,”

The album contained eight brush paintings that Shitao had created as a gift for a friend. One image in particular struck a chord with Lee. In it, Shitao depicts a steep mountain path descending the peaks of Huang Shan, a famous mountain in Anhui province. Nearly monochromatic, with hints of ocher and blue, it was painted in 1694. The mountain, Lee explains, “is iconic. Poets and painters go there to be inspired.”

This, he decided, would be the starting point for a collaborative project. “For two or three years I’ve wanted to do a project on creative emulation,” says Lee, whose plan echoes the tradition of Chinese classical painting in which students learn technique by copying the calligraphy and paintings of their teachers.

He decided to have a group of artists in Taiwan and a group in the West work simultaneously on parallel assignments. With the help of assistants in Taiwan and in New York, he chose 11 artists. “Some haven’t been shown much at all, a few are extremely well known,” he says. While all of the Taiwan artists have some training in Chinese brush painting, the Western artists work in mediums ranging from oil painting to multimedia.

The first set of two artists received a high-quality copy of the Shitao painting to work from, the second set got a copy of the Shitao painting and the original of the previous artist’s work, the third a copy of the Shitao painting and the second artist’s work, and so on. Each artist had about a week to complete his or her portion of the project.

In Taiwan, Victoria Lu, an artist with classical ink-brush training, was the first to tackle the project. Her work emulates the composition of Shitao’s work but softens it. She also eliminated the people going up and down the path in the original and painted her own lyrical rendition of a stream trickling over rocks on the lower left.

The second Taiwan iteration, by Yuan Jai, further simplified and stylized the image, with the upper mountains depicted as triangular shapes, while a stream in the lower left corner flows over candy-colored squares.

Taking liberties

On the Western side, Lee chose Arnold Chang, a New York-based artist steeped in classical Chinese painting, to do the first iteration. Even though he had only a week, Chang says, he spent a lot of time thinking through the project before putting brush to paper.

His logic was that if he had made a close copy, “I would make the same thing but not as good -- so what’s the point of that?” Instead, he says, “I came into it with my own ideas.”

Still, Chang kept in mind the history of Chinese art. He took the theme of mountains shrouded in mist but changed the path into a meandering waterfall. His painting is more monochromatic than the Shitao, to adhere to the traditional emphasis on tonalities and to make the work identifiably Arnold Chang’s. “Who says originality is the goal?” he says. “The point is to look deeper.”

Subsequent artists took further liberties. Mexican American artist Sergio Teran, the artist following Chang, decided to present his “creative emulation” as an oil painting, adding a cozy hut to the side of the mountain. Su-Mei Tse, a prize-winning multimedia artist from Luxembourg, created an embossed landscape that is perceived by touching the surface. Others used photo collage, video and animation for their Shitao-inspired work.

The LACMA exhibition will display all eight leaves of Shitao’s album -- rarely shown in its entirety -- in one case. The works of 11 modern artists will also be displayed in their original form as well as in facsimile in a bound album. This allows one or two visitors at a time to see and handle the creations -- simulating the traditional way a Shitao album would be viewed.

What visitors won’t see is any physical object by Lee, who serves only as the conceptual mastermind of the installation. “Lee has taken the format to a contemporary environment,” Wilson says. “It’s a serial format, it’s a format that involves an additive viewing experience.”

For her part, Barron came to realize how deliberate each component of a Chinese painting is. “Every single mark means something, every centimeter carries meaning,” she says. “It demands incredibly close-looking. To find the nuances and differences that each iteration produces, I find that fascinating.”

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Lee Mingwei

Call it “creative emulation.” For the Los Angeles County Museum of Art show, a progression of works by contemporary artists stemmed from a 1694 Chinese landscape painting.

What: “Contemporary Projects 8: Lee Mingwei’s ‘Through Masters’ Eyes’ ”

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles

When: Opens Saturday. Regular hours Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, noon to 8 p.m.; Fridays, noon to 9 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Ends: Aug. 1

Price: $5-$9

Contact: (323) 857-6000