"Sugar and Spice"
By James Kalm
Beijing to Burma, two photographic self portrait investigations from China
"The power of the marginal" is how Brooklyn is described on its own web site. Recently it seems Brooklyn is moving from the margins into the spotlight. Williamsburg, as most of us in the New York scene know, has been a hot house for cutting-edge art action for at least a decade now. The Brooklyn Museum recently unveiled its new $60 million dollar entrance featuring glass sheathing and a dancing fountain. Coinciding with the museum’s completion of the grand entrance stairway is the largest Brooklyn based exhibition of contemporary art ever attempted by this august establishment.
"Open House: Working in Brooklyn," features over two hundred local artists. Curated by longtime Chair of the Department of Contemporary Art, Charlotta Kotik, and Assistant Curator, Tumelo Mosaka, this massive display, with its handsome catalogue, may say more about Brooklyn’s true artist presence by its omissions than by its inclusions, an unfortunate but inevitable case of institutional blindness. Admittedly, when you attempt to select an exhibition from what has been referred to as "the largest artist’s community in the United States, maybe the world," you can’t possibly hope to make everyone happy. An attempt to dazzle with snazz and fashionable trendiness, rather than with the established and historically relevant, resulted in many glaring vacancies in the line-up and left many long-time residents stinging. In any case, one must salute the museum’s effort to reach out to the art community and its attempt at "diversity", as that’s the essence of this borough.
Meanwhile, Red Hook has been touted occasionally as the next "it" neighborhood. Van Brunt Street may be a ways south of the Williamsburg waterfront, but the zone for advanced art, especially in Brooklyn, seems to have no boundaries. The Kentler International Drawing Center has enlivened this stretch of the "Hook", for years, and perhaps with its showy new restaurants and it’s the noteable Diesel Gallery, this could be the beginning of a new gallery strip.
Diesel Gallery introduces the work of two photographers from China. This exhibit presents a dialectical view of these women’s feminism as well as their practice of photography. Placing any art in its proper context within the art world is a nearly impossible task. With this duo show, the works’ relationship to one another helps locate and articulate each artist’s vision through comparison. Here, the classic female nude is appropriated once again. Feminist art has dealt with the patriarchal glance, and its burden on women’s self-image, but nude self-portraits by female artists poses a provocative and confounding logic of imagery that, in this show, is a pleasure to ponder.
The old nursery rhyme alleges that little girls are made of "sugar, and spice, and everything nice." The sugar on this occasion is the photography of Sun Guojuan. Guojuan hails from southern China and there’s a sense of warmth and light in the pictures, but the substance that caught my eye was her use of sugar, actually coating her subject (including her naked self) with thick crystalline layers of the stuff. In her two largest photos, Guojuan lounges on a hilltop with a bay and coastline far below. In one work, she reclines on a rock, hair and body covered with crystals, and appearing like a ceremonial priestess, or a sacrificial offering, candied and displayed in the most appetizing way for a deity with a serious sweet tooth. Other portraits are elongated ovals focusing on her face and eyes, the clusters of sugar crystals lending a mineral like quality to the visage. Two still-life photos depict a vanity table coated in sugar as if by an ice storm. The mirror obscured, the plastic bottles of perfume and cosmetics hidden under half an inch of sweet snow create an odd whiff of desperation, as if to allude to the ability of makeup to sweeten the image, a haunting statement of saccharine desires.
Shi Emi would be the spice in our photographic rhyme. She lives and works in Beijing and the temper of the work is less conceptual and more graphic. These photos are straight black and white prints measuring 14 x 11 inches, with a dramatic use of rich shadow to design the compositions. Shi Emi presents herself as an erotic temptress, smoking, relaxing, showering, and wearing various costumes. Shi is obviously proud of her beautiful bare breasts, and flaunts them seductively in several photos where she uses lighting, cropping, and other framing devices to accentuate and focus on them. In one picture, Shi appears to have just come out of the shower, her head wrapped in a towel, she crouches in a shallow space against a wall parallel to the picture edge, her small dog accompanying her in the lower left corner. In another, she leans in a doorway, her head and face obscured by shadows, while her upper torso is captured in a pool of light.
The comparisons are instructive; Sun Guojuan presents her nudity with the un-self-consciousness of a sage or shaman, a holy confection. Shi Emi’s presentation uses the erotic and mysterious as the attracting force of the vamp. Together they represent a diverse study in strategic feminine ways of creating pictorial desire.
