I have never followed a art history course unless you count two Covid impact zoom classes. Especially given the weight of everything I don’t know, dealing with old art can be a loaded task. It is full of tricks and tricks of the eye, and the holes in its wake are ripe for incorrect interpretation and, perhaps to a greater extent, imagination and new types of truth.
It is those possibilities of the unknown, who can lead paradoxically, what the most faithfulness of history can feel, who pulled me to Manhattan’s Asia Society and Museum for (Re) Generations: Rina Banerjee, Byron Kim and Howardena Pindell in the midst of the Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection. Three Luminary Artists have chosen pieces from the museum collection by hand to show in addition to their own work, and I wanted to know how they did it. How do you claim your place in an artistic descent without distorting it or romanticizing? Is that even possible?
About two galleries, (Er) generations it reflects the Young Museums African art program And other series that invite artists to show work that respond to collection items. All these initiatives are necessarily limited by their own framework; If the awkward title of this show is an indication, the collection itself should not be questioned. Yet, as neon-yellow marked sentences on several object labels reminded me, remembered me, (Er) generations is intended to force us to reconsider the scope of Asian art history itself, albeit To a variety of success. One label noted that Banerjee wanted to take ‘smaller figures to make visual contact with her smaller sculptures’, with a quote from her memory that ‘what my parents brought had an aura of valuability’, a tender feeling that most of us recognize in immigrant families. In the meantime, Kim painted “Mabyeong (Asia Society)” (2024) in response to the “inattentive color” of Goryeo Green Glaze adorn ceramic pieces in the museum collection. In the upper floor gallery, visionary American artist The work of Pindell reflects her time that lives in Japan and India, with collages hanging opposite old South Asian miniature paintings and a few screens in the Edo era that confuses the room. Certainly, her collage from 1984 “Autobiography: India (Lakshmi)” attracted my attention and transformed my namesake – whose regular iconograography drips with thin -veiled colorism and Casteism – in a prism so that the myth of a single, Solid South Asian art history can be remembered.
And if editing and beautifying objects from the past is a kind of poetry, Banerjee is the laureate. With sculptures and paintings that make tricks of the eye seem like child’s play, she brings her material sensitivity to two works created specifically for this show: The Towering quasi-monument near the show’s Entrance was fashioned from the Phile from the Philipp Small but no less exquisite figure sprouting from a repurposed megaphone wears rows of dangling, painted gourds. Some of the old vessels, sculptures and image shooting that were shown felt like a effective, especially those who made it difficult to carefully observe them and Kim’s work at the same time. But even the contemporary works that I was not so attracted to, like Kim’s walking Synecdoche Started in 1991, felt like a necessary part of the puzzle, making the idea of Asian art history itself unfinished and indefinite.
But not all these lines are neat family trees that are defined on those persistent wall labels, making them all the more forced. Kim is groundbreaking Abdominal painting Series from the 1990s connects the bottle of the Goryeo era of the collection that inspired him to the form of Banerjee’s Hooped Sculptures. Banerjee’s fortresses sculpture calls to Pindell’s Hole-Punch and Glitter works upstairs. I left the feeling confirmed in a piece of wisdom that can slide too easily into the banality: that the most so -called “authentic” identity is one that is inseparable from other traditions, places and visual languages. Just as with the threads of the sculptures of Banerjee and the archipelago references from Pindell to Japanese geography, unfinished edges are the point and fraying is an invitation to continue braids, weave and create.
(Re) Generations: Rina Banerjee, Byron Kim and Howardena Pindell in the midst of the Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection Continue in the Asia Society and Museum (725 Park Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) until 10 August. The exhibition was organized by the museum.
