“Song Kun”
The Hammer Museum
Running through September 16
After hearing the concept for artist Song Kun’s latest installation at the UCLA Hammer Museum ““ that she came up with a small oil painting every day for a year to create a kind of visual diary of herself ““ she might appear a little self-involved.
And after discovering that Kun is part of a growing group of young Chinese painters who are forgoing the last generation’s political conversations for their own punked-out, teched-out counterculture, you might find yourself wondering why Kun didn’t just paint herself a MySpace page and leave it at that.
But a visit to the installation, organized by Hammer Museum curator James Elaine, reveals that Kun is up to much more than self-obsession. With a thoughtfully executed concept and a decisively curated show, the artist explores the fresh set of concerns held by China’s latest generation.
Kun’s work is part of a new school of Chinese artists, one whose parents tended to the wounds of the Cultural Revolution to create politically infused art, producing caricatures of Chairman Mao or warping propaganda posters. But Kun depicts the issues of a generation born after China’s political strife, more concerned with becoming comfortable with their own adulthood than the politics of the past.
In her 365 paintings, Kun does not blow up the life she depicts to be anything more than one person’s day-to-day life: dining out with friends, sitting on the toilet, portraits of punks, dolls on toy shelves, one woman’s death, another woman’s wedding.
Even intense moments find resolution once time passes, such as an image of blood from a slit wrist during a suicide attempt. A few paintings away, the same wrist is wrapped in white bandage, the hand idly toying with a piano.
Kun’s restraint turns the viewer from reluctant audience to captivated voyeur ““ instead of dragging us through a tired epic, the artist leaves us eager for a glance into her life.
In the compact space the museum sets aside for its Hammer Projects series for emerging artists, the paintings are lined up in columns that wrap around the gallery. What distinguishes this installation from previous shows is how the number of paintings rise and fall with every column, and how Kun chose not to display all 365 pictures.
The result is a modest and telling absence ““ modest in that Kun would rather give each work enough breathing room to speak than cram the gallery with her art. And the omission of some paintings is telling because incompleteness is mirrored in the pictures themselves. It’s the kind of incompleteness that one finds in a passing memory ““ the scene growing hazy through the mind’s eye, the details lost and uncertain.
Kun also avoids another conceptual booby trap. Considering the formula, it would be easy for her to paint whatever pops up that day, to the point where it reads like a blathering, disjointed blog of a person’s daily musings.
But like any page-turning diary you’d dig through, the juicy details lie in the developing relationships, the several cohesive story lines within the same piece.
Kun spreads vague references between the same images and people in her paintings, and viewers are left wondering how these relationships change over time: Is that guy eating at the restaurant the same guy posing nude in the sand? Are we at the same hospital where the grandmother died in before? Why are the same ripped fishnet stockings in one painting used to veil a woman’s face in another?
Adding to the uncertainty is Kun’s decision to keep many of her paintings unfinished. According to Elaine, the result is an installation that comes in waves, shifting from purely white-washed canvases when Kun chose not to paint that day, to rough sketches of cartoony creatures from her imagination, to fully developed and detailed scenes of life. With a final glance at the paintings, one is left wondering what details Kun chose not to divulge.
For the artist, a work that pulls from memory can only produce so much, and Kun reminds us that the full disclosure of a personal diary is not her goal. Instead, the end result is a piece that remains complete in its own incompletion, that despite the absence of detail, you have all you need to see.
““ John Guigayoma
E-mail Guigayoma at jguigayoma@media.ucla.edu.