State of the Art: Beef Suits, Japanese Voyeurs, and Junkyard Labyrinths

Zhang Huan
The ever-growing contemporary Chinese art scene goes institutional with the Asia Society’s first retrospective of a living artist. Zhang Huan’s most recognizable piece among American audiences is the arresting photograph To Raise the Water Level in a Fish Pond, in which nine men stand chest deep in water, arms at their sides, resolutely facing the camera. Huan, a child of the Cultural Revolution in China, first became known in Beijing for his radical, reactionary performance work. While the photographs, To Raise the Water Level amongst them, will be featured in the retrospective, they manage to convey the energy and defiance of the live events. In different images, the artist struts in a suit made from beef, riffs on Rubens, and treads on the American flag. The force of his message is emphasized by the large crowds he often includes in performances and his larger-than-life ash sculptural pieces that are assembled with the aid of around 100 staff members.

Art Parade
The third annual art parade, presented by Paper Magazine and Creative Time, takes off on West Broadway this Saturday at 4 p.m. Artists, designers, and performers have been invited to create “floats, placards, portable sculptures, kites, performances and street spectacles.” In 2006, the parade featured nude float performances by the Dazzle Dancers, a corps of “Whore Cops” presented by Julie Atlas Muz, Abby Manock’s Broadway showdown, Annie vs. Grease Soundtrack War, and a solemn contribution from Yoko Ono. Move over, Macy’s.

A Psychic Vacuum
Lately, everyone has been talking about Mike Nelson and his new, major installation piece A Psychic Vacuum. This Saturday, if you feel like braving the crowds that inevitably follow a major New York Times write-up, you’ll have a chance to weigh the real thing against the hype. Nelson, using materials salvaged from local junk yards and wreckage, has constructed an entirely new environment in the gutted interior of the Essex Street Market on the Lower East Side. Creative Time describes the space as “a parallel universe” constructed of “deeply believable and disquieting architectural spaces.” Perhaps Nelson expects the droves of over-excited New Yorkers to heighten the “active ... sometimes anxious experience” of this urban labyrinth.

Jamie Isenstein
Columbia School of Arts alumnus Jamie Isenstein has a new show at Andrew Kreps that is comprised of the kind of performance art pieces that only announce themselves when the performance stops. Channeling Magritte, Isenstein performs armchairs that have human legs and arms, gold sconces made of hands, and live, oval-framed portraits of various body parts. Isenstein’s physical presence in the pieces seems utterly organic—until she steps away from her post. The small “Will Return” signs that you might remember from the nurses office in elementary school grant the pieces their own tragicomic life cycles: an armchair slumps to the ground waiting to be re-animated; a lightbulb scampers away from its sconce for a fiver.

Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba
Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, opening this weekend at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, makes serious, socially conscious video art that isn’t hard to swallow. His well-known piece, the deceptively whimsical film Ho! Ho! Ho! Merry Christmas: Battle of Easel Point, in which two scuba divers race to complete underwater portraits, is part of the larger Memorial Project, which takes on the Vietnam War. His latest work, The Ground, the Root, and the Air: The Passing of the Bodhi, takes on youth culture and shifting definitions of success. Though this film takes place above-water, Nguyen-Hatsushiba captures the turbulent move away from traditional values in shimmering footage that maintains the slow, meditative quality of his earlier works.

In the Park
Ever wonder what happens in the park after dark? In In The Park, now on display at the Yossi Milo Gallery, Kohei Yoshiyuki’s appropriately black-and-white photographs reveal various clandestine goings-on after hours in Tokyo’s Shinjuku, Yoyogi, and Aoyama parks. Taken in the 1970s with a 35 mm camera, infrared film, and a flash, the photographs document the sexual exploits and acts of voyeurism of those who convened there for nocturnal trysts and those who watched from nearby bushes. Yoshiyuki’s images often show only the backsides and flailing limbs of his subjects, sometimes eerily including the crouched figures of spectators emerging from the grass to glimpse—or even participate in—the encounters. Their unprocessed, snapshot-like quality conveys with a sense of immediacy the sort of urban alienation that can only be relieved by retreating, as it were, into the woods.