Art, Artful Affairs, Features, Upcoming Exhibit Highlights

Morono Kiang Gallery: Portal To New Chinese Art

Even after the Olympics, eyes remain fixed on China – that is, on the Chinese art scene. Over the past several years the floodgates have opened, and even as the international art world keeps penetrating this potentially vast, recently affluent market, a concomitant rush of new art is making its way out of the once-closed society. Chinese artists have actually been striving for decades to catch up with and participate in the world’s artistic discourse; finally, the world has been reciprocating, with mounting - and sometimes irrational – enthusiasm. Chinese artists now rattle the cages of the art world the way British artists did in the 90s: everybody wants a piece of them, although not everybody is sure what pieces to want.

Oddly, new Chinese art has less of a presence in Los Angeles than in almost any other international art center. One can surmise why, but that’s the facts. There have been few exhibitions, commercial or institutional, of Chinese work in these parts. Marc Richards was the first gallerist to introduce the work here, as part of his dealing in all forms of Chinese art; but he has chosen to merchandise rather than program contemporary Chinese art (except when working with IKON Gallery in Bergamot Station – which happens to have a show of Chinese print editions, “China Wakes,” on view through October). Only two contemporary galleries in town specialize in exhibiting Chinese artists. Happily, the two present complementary programs, DF2 in West Hollywood specializing in more established, more imagistic work and Morono Kiang downtown oriented more to younger artists and conceptual modalities. DF2 has a branch in Beijing; Morono Kiang has only a residence there – one which long preceded the gallery’s existence.

In fact, when Karen Morono and Eliot Kiang moved to Beijing from Los Angeles in August 2001, knowing pretty much no one there, they had no intention of creating a gallery, or doing anything but checking out the art scene in their newly adopted home. They were in China to be in China, nothing more or less. Within two years they had worked on a book documenting the building at the heart of the local art scene, “Beijing 798,” an abandoned factory with a fascinating back story that had filled up with artists, and then galleries. The book helped stave off imminent demolition, partly by diverting the increasing stream of Beijing’s art visitors into 798’s doors. From that point on, Kiang and Morono were fixtures in the local art world, and made sure their connections kept leading them to smart, gifted younger artists – the ones being overlooked by the high rollers from New York and Berlin.

Morono and Kiang went bi-continental in 2006, returning to Los Angeles without giving up their Beijing flat. They opened their gallery in May of last year, after one of their more devoted clients revealed himself the owner of several buildings in the emerging Old Bank arts district. One of these is the Bradbury Building, a landmark famed for its elaborate interior. Morono Kiang’s storefront space on 3rd Street doesn’t provide access to the building’s fabled lobby, but it does situate the gallery in a handsome, high-ceilinged space near the epicenter of the quickly artsifying neighborhood. In their first year and change, Morono Kiang have presented a tightly curated sequence of solo and thematic group shows, revealing a cerebral generation of Chinese artists – most from Beijing and the new-media center of Hangzhou – responsive to social and even political events, ideas about language and image, and the relationship of traditional artistic practice to our newly mediated world.

Hong Hao, Bottom No. 1, 67 x 114 inches, collected by Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2008. Morono Kiang Gallery

Hong Hao, About Him No. 1, type-C print, 39 x 78 inches, 2005. Morono Kiang Gallery

“The thing that struck me about contemporary Chinese art when I first started looking at it,” muses gallery co-owner Eliot Kiang, “was how un-Chinese it was.” This was not what they expected to find when they moved to Beijing. Instead of so many traditional scroll painters and calligraphers and leftover Socialist Realists, offset by a small cadre of post-neo-expressionists maintaining a beachhead of partly understood internationalism, they found a lively and complex discourse maintaining on many levels, with groups of artists constantly taking on new ideas and new topics. “A new generation of artists,” Kiang observes, “emerges every five years.” What unites these generations, whose experiences in such a fast changing society are notably different from one another, is their awareness of and responsivity to international ideas and to recent western art history – and their urgent need to make themselves part of that history and those ideas while making those ideas and that history their own. By “un-Chinese” Kiang doesn’t mean anonymously international, but liberated from the constraints of national tradition and cliché.

Of course, that tradition is still available, allowing an artist such as Liu Qinghe to expand upon Chinese watercolor technique and still seem contemporary. Hong Hao’s use of old maps and textbook pages is also redolent of a past that goes back beyond the years under Mao. But Hao’s project is also intellectually hip in its investigation of language and identity, and the majority of Morono Kiang’s artists are as likely to resort to a camera as to a brush (or scissors) to conduct similar investigations. The gallery in effect has put its best foot forward this month, not in its own space but out in Riverside, where UC Riverside’s downtown Sweeney Gallery has a carefully selected display of Morono Kiang artists called “Absurd Recreation”. The selection is heavy on the photo- and video-documentation, often of situations set up by the artists themselves; Chen Wei’s Countless Unpredictable Stands, for instance, posit the lone individual in absurd urban situations. Some of the most striking work is sculptural or painterly, notably Xu Ruotao’s dense linear webs rendered in acrylic, seemingly abstract but clearly derived from some sort of digital input.

Nine artists comprise the roster of “Absurd Recreation.” Kiang, Morono, and their gallery director Sonia Mak will be the first to tell you that the selection shows but a sliver off the tip of the iceberg, even of the kind of heady, socially aware Chinese art their gallery champions. But it’s a good place to start. UCLA’s Hammer Museum sometimes shows projects by new Chinese artists, so it’s a good idea to keep tabs on their program over in Westwood. And hopefully the San Francisco gallery Limn will mount yet another of its own group shows of Chinese art down here (around the time of the January art fairs, if patterns persist). Finally, however, until the local market broadens and/or more curators get with the program, repeated visits to Morono Kiang, counterbalanced with equally regular check-ins at DF2, will keep you in touch with the real McCoy, not just the reproductions and breathless prose of the art magazines and sites. A whole new world - art world and world of thought – is looking at us out of China, and we really should look right back.

Hong Hao, About Him No. 1, type-C print, 39 x 78 inches, 2005. Morono Kiang Gallery

Hong Hao, Bottom No. 1, 67 x 114 inches, collected by Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2008. Morono Kiang Gallery

Gallery Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 12 to 6
Address: 218 West 3rd Street, Bradbury Building, Los Angeles CA 90013
Contact: 213.628-8208
Website: moronokiang.com