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Behind the Masks
John Haberin New York City
Gauri Gill and Kenneth Tam
Zhang Huan and Li Binyuan
To assert a contemporary Asian art, is it enough to take pride in one's origins? For Gauri Gill, tradition is itself only a mask.
Gill photographs India and its masks, but they become less a ritual than a collaboration. She offers them the chance to put on a show. She is, at the same time, an outsider turning her lens on her own country, much like westerners past and present—even as her subjects hide their faces. Out at the Queens Museum, Kenneth Tam remembers Chinese Americans building the American West and American culture today, at the expense of forced labor and America's toxic masculinity. Last, back at MoMA PS1, two artists from China find tradition and the land vanishing before their eyes. Zhang Huan and Li Binyuan take it personally at that, in video and performance. 
The sacred and the profane
You might not trust a snake behind the counter to offer your fair share, especially with both his hands on the scale. Try not to worry, though. His snake oil amounts to ordinary dry goods, and his reptilian countenance is only a mask. It is hard to say which is more charming at that—the shopkeeper or his cobra disguise. Gauri Gill calls them both "Acts of Appearance." And that only makes sense, for she invites her sitters to join her in the act.
She has been doing so since 1999, and the show mixes in some earlier work in black and white, in no particular depth and in no particular order. For each series, Gill set up shop in rural India, allowed locals a role in choosing their pose, and rewarded them with a print. They become at once colleagues and strangers, even without a mask—and the show's acknowledgments run to dozens of names. Those early photos also capture storefronts or other signs in a script that, for most Americans, will be its own mask. They imply that someone is welcome while someone else is inside. Still, her work becomes more vivid after 2015, in color.
The Adivasi in coastal India are known for their papier-mâché masks, as marks of the sacred. Not that one would know it from the scenes at hand. A seated couple looks perfectly down to earth, give or take its identification with the sun and moon. Others ride a motorcycle, catch a bus, do their homework, or just hang out. Every so often the masks seem to express superiority or discomfort, like that of a man lying on his back or a child reprimanded at school. Still others, like the folk art of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, make a point of the disjunction between the mask and the everyday.
Either way, the photographs are acts of appearance, like those of masked Cubans for Manuel Mendive or Indian myth for Mrinalini Mukherjee, leaving open who is acting and what is mere appearance. They could show people in casual dress taking on the part of animals and gods—or animals and gods taking on the part of people. They could be Instagram stories about vanishing customs or selfies from the great behind. Either way, they gain as much from the comedy of modern life as from tradition. If anything, Gill errs on the side of the mundane. Her subjects seem far from the crowded India of Raghubir Singh, although the Adivasi live in Maharashtra, with Mumbai as its capital. Even the cobra looks far less disconcerting than street life for Diane Arbus or Garry Winogrand.
India interests Gill for its difference and diversity. Elsewhere, too, MoMA PS1 bends over backward on behalf of native peoples, with mixed results. Fernando Palma Rodríguez dedicates his installation to them, with cardboard horses and coyotes in beds of sand. One would hardly know that they have much to do with the territory surrounding Mexico City—or that the makeshift contraptions have much to do with, as Rodríguez promises, advanced robotics and dancing. Michael E. Smith runs a laser pointer back and forth between a taxidermy macaw and empty space. Try hard to think of this as about endangered species, whether New World parrots or a gentrifying neighborhood in Queens.
Gill is more memorable, because her modesty is intentional, and so is the comedy. Smith also inflates a black sweatshirt every few moments with a smoke machine, but barely, giving new meaning to an empty suit. Gill's masks are more colorful, and their inhabitants are alive as sacred or profane. The photos may still feel like a cheap stunt, and I can only wonder what will come next, but they gain for now from their familiarity. Impoverished communities in India can get together for a group portrait, too, just like small-town America for Sharon Lockhart or Grant Wood. Folks can enjoy looking out the window or holding hands. They can engage the viewer from behind a mask.
Tunnel of love
Kenneth Tam has issues. He has issues with America and its history. He has issues with the expectations for a male in America today. As an Asian American artist all too aware of both, he also has issues with himself. Art for him is a chance at last to articulate them, but the installation is his Silent Spikes at the Queens Museum, which he shares with Asif Mian. He cannot have planned around a spike in violence against Asian Americans, but anyone who cares about justice will be having issues, too.
What connects the issues? For Tam, it is Chinese American labor on the Transcontinental Railroad, following the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862. His title refers to spikes fixing the rails in place, and a golden spike celebrated their completion seven years later—joining east and west in Promontory, Utah. Speaking of masculinity, it was hard labor, and the workers braved a strike in 1867. It lasted all of a week, as the overseers cut off food. Failure and hunger must have hammered home the helplessness and grueling conditions all along. Now the workers were reduced to silence, too.
Not that Tam is ever at loss for words. He brings to life that awful history in a two-channel video, with first-person narration. An unseen worker speaks of a railroad tunnel as a birth canal, while the image depicts a dark passage into depth. He imagines it as his birth, into a new country and an American West where he can fully belong, and he claims that as his birthright as well. Sure enough, the tunnel's exit broadens into a pool of light. And yet the video is not at an end, and neither is history.
Before and after the darkness, four men against a white backdrop try to look duly masculine and western in jeans and a cowboy hat. One or two could easily be white, and Tam must intend the ambiguity as a blow against stereotype. In no time, they have trouble holding the pose. The scene shifts outdoors, to an alley where a lone man, perhaps the artist, has his own suitably masculine posture without dressing up. The alley could be his liberation or confinement, and he also rolls not so happily on the ground. In another scene, his face appears on camera, comparing it all to a love affair with too many loose ends.
You may balk at the metaphors of birth and birthright as a mere play on words—and at the analogy to love as so unclear that I have probably botched the retelling. You may not even buy the shift from cattle country to the railroad. Eloquence comes at the expense of coherence, but it is no less eloquent for that. And the best part takes place firmly in the present. The installation lies in an uninviting passage off the lobby, broadening on its way to the entrance to that marvelous model of New York City left over and updated regularly from the 1964 New York World's Fair. Then, too, it is within walking distance of the vital Asian American community in Flushing, in a museum with a commitment to art of the borough.
Besides the video, the passage also holds two standing figures consisting of the same jeans and leather boots, with saddles for arms and torsos. The saddles could pass for modern sculpture in polished wood by Constantin Brancusi or Isamu Noguchi, whose garden museum is also in Queens (and I revisit this very summer for Isamu Noguchi and his memorials to the atomic dead). Saddles can also look rather flimsy for upper bodies, but then the clothing is weathered, too, compared to proper museum pieces. Together, they play out between Western art and popular culture, as alternative versions of the male gaze. Last I looked, the museum does not so much as mention the show online, and you could easily overlook it. Still, Tam's history is worth repeating, and his most provocative quarrel is with himself.
Exercises in futility
In age Zhang Huan and Li Binyuan are a generation apart, but they have at least one thing in common: their art is an exercise in futility. Zhang himself used the word futile to sum up his best-known work. To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain in 1995 brought together nine artists, Zhang included, but for once not even art could add to nature for long or lend it a name. They could only return themselves to nature—stripping naked and waiting patiently in line to lie face down in a pyramid, upon one another and the anonymous mountain. And then they and the addition were gone.
What is an artist to do when art itself is futile? He could only make more of it, with the passing act of performance recorded on video. Some twenty years later, Li joins right in, and MoMA PS1 exhibits them together. The show puts the younger artist at its very center, leaping forward again and again before splashing down hard in the mud. He also concludes the show with Testing, climbing bamboo as the shoot sags under his weight. And then he falls and tries again two more times, to the point of exhaustion.
Sound futile? No doubt, but together they establish something like a Chinese tradition, albeit one far from calligraphy and brushwork. Like so much contemporary Asian art, as in "One Hand Clapping" at the Guggenheim or "Asian Underworlds" and the Harold J. Newman collection at Asia Society, it has to do with both the displaced and the landscape. More precisely, it has to do with landscape as the site of the body and the body politic. The three come together for Zhang to the point of a sex act. For Nine Holes, he and his artist friends first drilled holes in the earth and then placed their private parts, according to their gender, directly atop or within.
Zhang did raise the level of discourse and the level of the mountain, if only briefly. He also helped to create a community of artists, as Beijing East Village—a pointed successor to New York's East Village art. His feats of abjection and endurance, like smearing his body with bait for worms and flies, have a predecessor in such Americans as Chris Burden as well. His encounters with more lasting media include the found remains of Buddhist monuments, but also the antiquities of Rome. Futility, too, has a clear precedent in the West, with Samuel Beckett and the Theater of the Absurd. Albert Camus found the myth of Sisyphus downright uplifting.
Zhang is interested in collective memory and action. He raised the planet's surface again, but this time the water level in a fishpond, in a park in Beijing. There he employed rural workers, much like the countless others who have suffered from forced collectivization and relocation to the city. Other work not in the show spoke on behalf of abortion rights. As Beckett would say about the individual and a broader culture alike, "I can't go on. I'll go on."
Li's work is easy to mistake for Zhang's, but it is less collective than self-involved, like Jeff Koons, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Tom Sachs, and other bad boys. He might be just one more young man indifferent to the risks when he stands inches away from a circular saw or leaps from pillar to pillar across an active roadway. When he splashes in the mud, he is reclaiming the landscape, but this time his father's estate and for himself. He is also more confrontational, dragging around a crucifix or careering through an office in a spinning chair. The change over time from one artist to the other says a lot about the level of discourse of art today. Still, both are testing the waters and themselves.
Gauri Gill and Fernando Palma Rodríguez ran at MoMA PS1 through September 10, 2018, Michael E. Smith through May 7, and Zhang Huan and Li Binyuan through September 3. Kenneth Tam ran at the Queens Museum through June 23, 2021.