Mori Museum is the Space in the air that is quickly becoming the local centrifugal Capital of Confucianism: a glowing symbol of Art in Japan and the around, worth visiting. Zoom zoom.

"The Elegance of Silence: Contemporary Art From East Asia" is a show of art focusing entirely on those artists born in East Asia: China, Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. Many of the exhibitors already have a strong international presence (just mentioning the names Suda, Nara, or Xu Bing almost anywhere in a museum equipped world would get a nod), though the interest here is to take these artists out of that internationalism and present them as operators in and from a specific region. Some, such as Nara or Bing, are already art-stars; others are more regional, more, still, maybe, immerging figures. Commonly, sensibly, despite the mix of international and domestic acclaim at disposal, each artist would have to have some foot in the door of silence to participate; not to mention a jig-a-gig on the traditional--, as the title mentions, elegantly so.

For me, what stands out is how very responsive each artist is to his or her particular cultural heritage. It's the initial smack. Everything in view seems to be looking back. Also it's the most Asian looking show I have seen to date. Yet, what gives the exhibition its edge is very much the happy-go-lucky embrace with the forward, which often still confounds international critics. There is no angst. But also there are few utopias to speak of (I guess these are western things), thus often nothing exists concrete to preach. Instead signs of serenity mix harmoniously with ambiguity, often the flimsy, along with the impish, plain funny, and the sparse. Sure, there is the elegance of space, though not so much the physical--the inner instead. And, OK, there is calm--much work partakes in some kind of communion: pointing to craft or domestic rehearsal. There is, also, the occasional roar into silence.

Despite too many landscapes in the landscape section [San Sui], and too many structures that represent interiors in the interior or dwelling department, [Feng Shui wind, water], you could still navigate a way. I was drawn to the tiny letters or words visiting Yoo Seung-Ho's micro-view not caring what they configured at the stand back. That these tiny writing traces formed a landscape seemed by the way, because no matter where I stood there was always another sky, a new mountain, or twisting river, in another rendition, by someone else too close-by. Seung-Ho's ancient facsimiles could have provided us with the full force of the absurd, accentuating an experience of loss, adding their even greater pathos to landscape, if more physical space were left to the gaze.

I was more at ease looking out the window of Wu Chi-Tsung's grey and wet cityscape on a monitor display, where I was able to lose many moments in 'some' inside while looking out, simply because not much was anywhere. Mesmerized by the digital mechanics of rain on a window-pane forced one beyond the surface of trance into the two-way action relaying backwards and forwards the tiny upfront drops and the hardly distinguishable background mundane world.
This offered relief from having to pick and distinguish another artist’s anterior sensibility that worked too short in physical or idea space between wind and water, structures, or interiors—Nara Yoshitomo's snappy new crate pieces were perhaps the weakest in the show, because I could 'get it' within the time it took to move from one peek-hole to the next. Song Dong perhaps was not the strongest but successfully created an eudaimonia: chopsticks moved food around to create shifting landscapes that, fantastically, mindlessly, stayed in and bent.

Xu Bing and Shon Jeung-Eun's soaring word-to-bird over a gigantic river were the most synthetic and distant from MAN and nature, but also because of this, for me, worked very well. Bing's beautifully articulated voice reflected marvellously below in Shon Jeung-Eun's clear plastic cup river (when you employed full imagination). Suh Do-Ho's gigantic see-through veneer of a temple wall that supported, or didn't, a massive husk of a roof structure manifested the stately, thus successfully joined forces with Jeung-Eun and Bing despite the wonky shifts in scale. The roar, then, was almost too close to nature. If the combination were left alone surely the sound would have crushed all resistance.

The silent and gentle behind the mass-made in Yamaguchi Akira's smaller-than-life-size tearoom, which you could never enter, left the pure untouchable: the mind having to search deep to fill something in. His tearoom was constructed from what could only be aptly described as a 'Tokyu Hands' shopping outing, which when the ready items are put together recreate an almost authentic tea room with its quiet goings on inside. Outside on the floor flat painted steppingstones authenticated the experience. There was more to Yamaguchi's work but I didn't, at the time, have the catalog.

There wasn’t much painting, but Iba Yasuko's and Maruyama Naofumi’s if closer to each other may have had the chance to talk something through.

Not all things are meant to be great. And more than one work impresses not enough infusion with either elegance or silence: It may be that my communication lines were too short, or that the work spins too curled or too long, or that elegance has a difficult time expressing itself especially via the jingly. But these are small quibbles.

Kim Sunhee, the principle curator of the exhibition, quotes in the catalog text,

an example of Confucius's thinking found in Chapter 2 of the Analects, a chronicle of sayings and acts that his students put together around 500 B.C.

"When I was 15 years old, I became serious about my studies. When I was 30, I was established in my career. When I was 40, I was no longer uncertain about right and wrong. When I was 50, I understood the will of heaven (Tian-ming). At 60, my ear was attuned to the truth, and at 70, I could do whatever my heart desired without overstepping the bounds of decorum."

Clearly, tradition/freedom is this something earned and learned through diligence. Elegance may not always be synonymous with silence though certainly can be developed through it--or read differently, we can take it how it comes.
Time tunnels up the rezone on the 53rd floor offering the serious, the established, the not uncertain, and the attuned. And finally what flies through the walls of Mori Art Museum, the highest possible accolade bestowed, is the 'whatever', though not always sagely sped.

The Elegance of Silence: Contemporary Art From East Asia is at the Mori Art Museum and runs from 29 March ~ 19 June 2005

text credits brent hallard 2004~05