text for analysis -- English Morphology Online Seminars

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Subject: text for analysis

Author:
Júnia

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Date Posted: 15:59:03 10/02/09 Fri

Activist Energy With a Light Touch

Known to many New Yorkers primarily for art exhibitions, Asia Society is a grander entity than its Park Avenue galleries might suggest. According to its press materials, the institution’s overarching mission is to “promote understanding among the people, leaders and institutions of Asia and the United States” and to generate new ideas in “the fields of policy, business, education, arts and culture.”
Are those fields listed in order of importance? If so, it might explain why the work in the society’s surveys of new art, like the current “Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art From Pakistan,” tends so often to be topical in content, market ready in format and didactic in delivery.

One of the first of the society’s big one-country shows, “Inside Out: New Chinese Art” in 1998, sold itself on the notion that the most significant work emerging from China was all by brash, young, implicitly democracy-loving rebels in thrall to the Western media and eager to break with their own cultural past. This profile was meant to win Western hearts, and it did. That many artists still produced ink-and-brush landscapes and calligraphy and were subtly but radically updating these traditions was barely acknowledged.

In 2005, “Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India” focused heavily on art that addressed current social issues like sectarian violence and the effects of a global market economy. Not represented was a range of new abstract or near-abstract art and sculpture from South Asia that doesn’t necessarily look “Indian” and that is personal, and only incidentally political, in content.

This exhibition of new art from Pakistan, with its references to war, religion and consumerism, largely conforms to the Asia Society model, except for its size. The Chinese show had more than 60 artists, the Indian survey more than 40. Both were spread over two New York City spaces. “Hanging Fire” has 15 artists and takes up just two Asia Society galleries, one very modest in scale.

So it doesn’t pretend to be a survey. It’s a closely edited group show drawn from a small pool of artists, most of whom attended the National College of Arts in Lahore. Given these restrictions, it’s surprising that the show has the variety it does.

Lahore had been a cultural hub for centuries by the time Pakistan was separated from India in 1947, and it has remained so. After partition, the National College of Arts was forged from an existing colonial institution, and schools were also established in other cities.

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