The Sackler Museum on campus has an interesting exhibition up right now (which, unfortunately, ends in 4 days). The title of the exhibit is “Tradition Redefined,” an appropriate but rather flat description for what are essentially paintings that defy categorization. A note on the wall of the exhibit explains:

In their inscriptions, older artists note their determined adherence to traditions of expression that go unappreciated in their present surroundings. Younger artists, who have lived and worked for most of their lives in transition between cultural spheres, exhibit a more detached, even ironic view of their place in the world. Past definitions of ethnic or geopolitical identity yield their influence to technology, art markets, and globalization. The customary division between two schools–Chinese and foreign–no longer holds.

The paintings are Chinese not just in the trivial sense of having been made by Chinese artists, but also in the way they make conspicuous use of Chinese artistic techniques, all the while displaying the distinctly non-traditional (read: Western) styles that have made their influence in post-Cultural Revolution China. Of course, whether the results are really a “redefinition” of traditional aesthetics is a matter of debate. All the paintings clearly combine Asian and Western influences, but not all of them use the combination as a way to achieve something novel or meaningful in itself.

A good example of the “globalized” Chinese painting was a still life of tofu in watercolor, which despite being a (more or less) Western medium has obvious parallels with Asian watercolor painting. I liked the painting because unlike many of the others in the collection, it did not consciously try to blend Western and Asian styles. Instead, the synthesis took place in the artist’s own life. I also liked the work because it shows, as the museum puts it, the Chinese “cultural obsession with food.”

Some of the most striking paintings played with the formal and technical possibilities of Chinese ink painting itself. These artists practiced the art as it was taught to them essentially unchanged for centuries, but then introduced elements they picked up from Western art such as perspective, abstraction, use of color, etc. I took a few pictures to put above.

The first thing that I thought when I saw these was how graphical the paintings look, almost as if they belonged as a wall decoration somewhere. Then I realized that I grew up with paintings like these on the walls of houses of family friends. Besides maintaining an uneasy tension between East and West, these paintings also seem to straddle the line between profound and decorative, high brow and kitsch. As a case in point, I googled one of the artists after coming home from the exhibit, and the first result took me to his booming poster merchandising operation of his art. I guess his mastery of Western techniques extends beyond just painting.

Unfortunately I couldn’t get pictures of some of the really innovative works, but if you’re in the Cambridge area, definitely head over to the Sackler and take a look for yourself.