Fortunately, we were able to encounter light and air even during our museum visit, as it turned out to be such a great place and the current exhibitions so good, that we ended up spending more than two and a half hours there. I was so impressed by one show in particular, called Crystal City: Contemporary Asian Artists, that I thought I'd share some of the ways that we experienced it.
Among many favorites was one I first stumbled into without reading the curation note on the wall. I pushed through a heavy black velvet curtain and found myself in a completely dark room. I waved my arms around, hoping to perhaps trigger a motion-sensor-driven installation, but nothing happened. I felt for a switch on the wall . . . .nothing. I noticed that across the space there was what appeared to be another black curtain, with a tiny shaft of light shining at its edge. I felt my way across the room, kicking my feet out in front of me in case of anything on the floor, and made it to the other side and out. Once there, while looking for light switches on the outside of the doorway, I finally noticed the following.
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| Ah, the dark room is explained! |
Strangely enough, I had just run upstairs realizing that I had left our camera sitting on the couch where I'd been watching Ari construct a marble run with another little boy, as if I'd somehow known it would be important for the exhibit. Or maybe not -- I have just had more than one close call with the camera, including leaving it on a ferry boat in Sydney Harbor and having to run across town to meet the ferry at its next stop - a story I'll save for some other time. So I re-entered the dark room and starting pointing and shooting away at the black walls. This is what I saw in the split-second light flares from the camera's flash. Already I knew that my interaction with the exhibit was going to involve another dimension -- viewing the content of the photographs at home on my computer. Unlike the artist, I of course had some idea of what I was shooting, as at least the brief flashes and the camera's "immediate playback" function gave me a quick glimpse of what was in front of me.
Soon enough Ari and Evan came downstairs to the exhibit, and I was able to share the experience with Ari. Now we had another dimension. "Blind" eyes seeing unknown objects, plus a moving, interactive spectator. Ari posed in many different spaces in the room, so we then had a series of photos of Ari with the artwork. His final pose shows him imitating the artist. In front of the things being photographed, but unable to see them at all.
Another room in the exhibit showed a video by artist Hye Rim Lee, a swirling dance of glass pieces euphemistically described as "fantasy toys" (dildos I believe?) in front of which a dragon and a Barbie-like figure interact while being occasionally interrupted by a bunny-shaped pacifier. City of dildos? Couple being interrupted by something related to baby? Hmm.
Here is Ari investigating another Pak Sheung Chuen work in which various sayings are printed on a gallery's walls. Among other suggestions are to "use your body to measure the city" or this one "listen to other people's dialogue on the street and copy it down meticulously." A couple of the suggestions are illustrated by other works in the show, including one about collecting all of your breaths in plastic bags.
In a speeded up video, we see the artist filling an apartment with bags of his exhaled breath. By the end, he has filled every space. This video, as well as the instruction to "find the air from different countries while shopping in a supermarket" or something similar, got me thinking about the idea of air from one country being experienced when opening a container from that place - is there Japanese air inside a tightly sealed package of udon noodles? Does India come out of the foil pouch of Dal Makani?
I guess it's time for a digression about our connections with the world via the air we breathe. Here's an excerpt (from the Barnes & Noble website) of a passage from David Suzuki's book You Are the Earth: Know Your World So You Can Help Make It Better
You’re Breathing Dinosaur Breath.
Did you know that the next breath you take will contain dinosaur breath? It sounds weird, but it’s true. Here’s how it works. Air is really a mixture of several gases. A gas is a light, invisible substance that floats freely in the air—steam, for example. Two of these gases, nitrogen and oxygen, make up almost all of the air.
There is only a small amount of the gas argon in the air. Yet each breath you breathe out, or exhale, contains about 30,000,000,000,000,000,000 (you can call that 30 zillion) atoms of argon. In a few minutes, the atoms you’ve exhaled in that one breath will travel right through your neighborhood. In a year, they will have spread all around the Earth, and about 15 of them will be right back where they started—in your nose.
Argon is always in you and around you. And not just in you but also in your best friend, your favorite pop star, the birds, snakes, flowers, trees, and worms. All of us air breathers are sharing in that same “pool” of argon atoms.So here’s where the dinosaurs come in. An interesting thing about argon atoms is that they never change or die—they stay around forever. That means that thousands of years ago, an Egyptian slave building the pyramids breathed some of the same argon atoms that later Joan of Arc, Napoleon, and Napoleon’s horse breathed. And some of those were argon atoms exhaled by dinosaurs that lived 70 million years ago. They all breathed out argon atoms into the air—ready for you to breathe in as you read this sentence. And when you exhale your next 30 zillion argon atoms, some of them will one day find their way into the noses of babies not yet born.What’s true of argon is true of air in general. Air joins together all of Earth’s creatures—past, present, and future.
How about that? OK, so back to the Dowse.
After we'd explored more of Pak Sheung Chuen's ideas, including photographs illustrating the poetic instruction we'd seen earlier printed on the wall to "find a building you like. stay up watching it as long as it takes until everyone in the building goes to sleep," we moved on to a funny video by Cheng Ta Yu from Taiwan, in which he filmed actors around various well known locations in Wellington, only at midnight, reading free online translations of entries about the city in guidebooks written in English and Mandarin. The text of the translations are also shown in Mandarin and English on screen, as appropriate, and in both languages, the final product is often wildly inaccurate and extremely humorous. It's a great way to comment on the problems of communicating across cultures, especially as the tour itself is highly subjective, showing us only particular vantage points in particularly dim circumstances, despite the bright lighting used for the midnight video clips.
Following the theme of How We See Things, Ari then took the camera and photographed the exhibit his way. I included a few of his shots, because it's interesting to me to see the difference in the way art looks if it is essentially above your normal viewing height. 
A tree filled with wooden wind chimes that had been decorated by museum-goers at a gallery in Wellington (a related show) and then brought to the Dowse was just over my head, but didn't leave me space to get under the tree.For Ari, it was high enough that he could walk under the tree and see the wind chimes from the bottom, which was actually more in line with the exhibit we had seen when we walked in of a courtyard of painted wooden windchimes all blowing about above our heads.
Ari also captured the work of Jin Jiangbo whose work explored the relationship of contemporary digital technology to traditional Chinese custom. In one piece, video images on a screen that looked like a traditional painting scroll moved in response to the viewer's playing on the Guqin, a traditional instrument. In this series of photos, Ari also manages to insert himself as artist, with his shadow image on the screen in the last shot.
