ART REVIEW : Raising Questions, Looking for Meaning

The planet seems to grow smaller, dislodging vast continents like great ships in shrinking seas. All passengers wonder about the intentions of The Others, worry about rough waters and looming collision.

Among the myriad minds separately focused on the situation are those of two Chinese artists, Dan Qing Chen and Xu Bing, expatriates living in New York. Their works are on view at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in exhibitions organized by Williamson Gallery director Stephen Nowlin.

All but unknown in these precincts, the artists nonetheless make work that appears initially familiar. Chen, 37, was successful in his homeland practicing the approved style of Socialist Realism. He has adapted that academic manner to a form of visual rumination that may put viewers in mind of the Russian expatriate team of Komar and Melamid. Bing, 39, tills the field of the large conceptual installation that has become a virtual lingua franca among Western artists attempting to remain avant-garde in a Neo-barbaric world.

What sets this work apart is a matter of attitude. Much Western contemporary art has adopted an irritating posture of wisecrack Yankee irony that always seems poised to disavow the seriousness of its own intentions.

By contrast, the work of Chen and Bing is both solemn and earnest. That may be because of Asia’s tradition of respect for cultural expression. It is certainly linked to the fact that both were traumatized by the Tian An Men Square crackdown of 1989. That ghastly event left no one in a flippant mood.

“Raise the Arms” typifies the triptych and diptych format of Chen’s half-dozen large paintings. The first panel copies that detail of David’s “The Battle of the Romans and the Sabines” in which a woman raises her arms heroically to stop the fighting. Her gesture echoes in the next panel--a copy of a black-and-white photograph of Western ballerinas dancing--and again in the final scene from the Beijing massacre. It is bound to remind Americans of Kent State and the news photo of the grieving girl that became its trademark.

Chen raises all the old questions about why we disavow violence while taking salacious pleasure in it, why we attend the ballet while others die, why sex and death so closely resemble each other. Why, why, why?

Had Chen adopted the present fashion of rendering such scenes with photo blowups, one might be inclined--out of frustration and despair--to dismiss them as just another sophomoric revival of the unanswerable. The fact that they are so lovingly and so well painted lends the images the gravity of a plea honestly put.

Bing’s piece is called “Cultural Negotiations” and takes up the entire central gallery. The scene appears to be a library room in the People’s Republic. Ten stiff chairs flank a table so immense that most of the 400 thick books it bears are out of reach. Lettered on the wall behind in oversize Big Brotherly letters is the standard library admonition, “QUIET.”

Here it means, “If you can manage to learn anything at all in this oppressive, unwelcoming place, keep your mouth shut about it.”

All this already qualifies the piece as a superior Conceptual one-liner. The experience takes on density in an examination of the thick tomes. It turns out there are only two. The rest are copies. One is made up of Chinese characters the artist invented and woodcarved himself. They hint at meaning but don’t really say anything. The second text, in English and titled “Post Testament,” is a random computer mix of the King James Bible and a contemporary American novel pursuing themes of sex, money and mayhem. Reading a bit like “Finnegans Wake,” it takes the idea of deconstruction back to the Tower of Babel. It wonders if meaning still means anything.

There is wisdom in this work.

* Art Center College of Design, 1700 Lida St., Pasadena; to May 15, closed Mondays and holidays; (818) 584-5052.