Luhring Augustine, Bushwick www.luhringaugustine.com
The tightly curated show, A Composite Leviathan, features 12 emerging artists from China at Luhring Augustine’s elegant Bushwick gallery. Curator James Elaine proposes that the title “can refer to anything of enormous proportions and formidable power, such as international corporations or totalitarian states and their vast bureaucracies. In Yang Jian’s sculpture, A Composite Leviathan, we see a relic of an intimidating yet tottering state system composed of distinct elements sourced from disparate public sculptures and spaces. It is a jigsaw puzzle of incongruous components that don’t fit together quite right, but beautifully reveal the twisted metal structure within. These ‘cracks’ in the armor represent the lines that have drawn this exhibition together.”
The exhibition features a wide array of media, however they are all drawn together by a somewhat detached and muted aesthetic. Although mostly abstract in their forms, one senses an undercurrent of urgency and suspense in the work. Liu Fujie, one of my favorite artists in the show, presents her sculpture Jungle Concealed Body which renders the human figure as a lumpy, arched line in space, which is intersected by a rectangular, hard edged brass support.
In a similar symbolic manner, Nabuqi references the weight and meaning of place in “The Doubtful Site” that questions the authoritarian nature of historic structures by creating a child sized amphitheater devoid of a specific geographic reference.
Throughout the show there is a lightness of touch; In particular the paintings of He Wei and Zhao Yang seem to almost have not been touched by a paint brush. The physicality of the work in this show vibrates with an emotional intensity that slowly creeps up on the viewer. The muted palate and deconstructed form further suggests that there are urgent matters we should be aware of and engaged in.
