23 October 2024

Global art exhibitions are often described as sites of cross-cultural encounter, where bridges between geographically scattered and even ideologically opposed communities can start to be built. Yet it is only in the recent past that the Western-dominated terms for these encounters have been questioned and even more recently that they’ve been reviewed and subject to revision. Magiciens de la Terre, the first contemporary art exhibition to include an equal number of living artists from the West and from the non-West, opened in Paris only 35 years ago, in 1989. A Venice Biennale organized by a southern hemisphere-based curator had not existed until this year, 2024. While Western hegemony in the artworld is still alive, however, it’s heartening how far exhibitions have come in just decades in turning a radical proposition of parity into action and, in some cases, turning action into habit, nuancing and deepening the very notion of cultural exchange and what can result from it.

Kathy Huang, independent curator and Managing Director, Art Advisory and Special Projects at Jeffrey Deitch, is one of Untitled Art’s guest co-curators at this year’s Miami Beach edition. In preparation for the December fair, whose theme is “East Meets West,” Huang has been thinking about strategies for fostering cultural dialogues that reconfigure power in the artworld, shifting it beyond traditional centers and calcified binaries. “I think a lot of people want to explore the conversation around ‘East and West’ beyond the dichotomy,” she told me. “Travel is easier now than it was in the past, and people have become interested in international art.” Even for those who do not visit the world’s established and emerging art capitals on a regular basis, interest in expanding one’s horizons through art can be piqued just as easily—if not more rapidly—on social media. For Huang, being able to see images online of, say, the work of a local artist in the Philippines next to that of a Latin American artist, is making a difference in moving the conversation forward.

At Untitled Art, the East, which the organizers define as inclusive of Eastern Europe, the Asia–Pacific, the Middle East, and the Asian diaspora, is represented not as a set of discrete entities juxtaposed with or against the West. Rather, East and West appear to mingle in the visuals of many of the works on view. Take, for example, the paintings by New Delhi-based artist Tarini Sethi that Rajiv Menon Contemporary will display. Titled Passages of Power (2024), Sethi’s series features figures that equally incorporate Indian miniature and folk idioms, the sexual freedom of Japanese shunga, and Cubist fragmentation. Meanwhile, one can see in Seoul-based artist Seong Jin Jeong’s sculpture Counter Gadget (2024), presented by L.U.P.O. Lorenzelli Projects, body parts belonging to gods of various ancient cultures. From one angle, it appears as if the torso of the Hindu deity Shiva wears the head of the Greek Olympian Hephaestus. The statue holds the former’s trident in one hand and the latter’s hammer in the other, the two symbols counterbalancing one another and doubling the potency of the figure’s divine power.

In the past, art enthusiasts in the West may have only encountered non-Western perspectives in the form of diplomatic gifts, looted artifacts, and modernist appropriations. Exhibitions like “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, which opened at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984, attempted to highlight similarities between art from African, Oceanic, and Indigenous American cultures and the creative output of Europeans like Picasso and Gauguin. Instead, it reinforced the hierarchies inherent in art history by framing the two hundred non-Western works on view as inspiration for the one hundred and fifty Western works. Americans who visited the show in New York or when it traveled through Dallas and Detroit would likely have come away without a critical understanding of the non-Western objects in their own right. Non-Western audiences similarly lacked a full view of all the art the world had to offer: In 1985, while“Primitivism” was touring the US, American artist Robert Rauschenberg became the first Westerner to exhibit in Communist China, where artistic production faced severe censorship. His show ROCI CHINA at the National Art Museum of China inspired a group of emerging Chinese artists who later became associated with a movement called the ’85 New Wave. In both cases, the exhibition organizers wielded a form of soft power, or the ability to build understanding between groups in lieu of coercion and direct conflict. They served as facilitators of cultural contact and were thus, for better or worse, responsible for the education of the viewing public.

Now we are seeing an explosion of contact points as some artists travel the world to exhibit and participate in residencies while others make work examining their subject positions as migrants, refugees, and the children of immigrants. A time of day when the phone rings (2022), an acrylic painting on fiberboard by New York-based Korean American artist Christina Yuna Ko, presented by Selenas Mountain, distills the dizzying idea of East meeting West in today’s digitized, globalized world into a calming square of pink. A sprightly sprig of green bamboo peeks out from the painting’s bottom edge, next to the top of an open silver flip phone. They form a strange pair but ultimately make sense together: Both items are vaguely associated with Asia but, at the same time, ubiquitous throughout the world.

“You can’t deny the power that Asia has had on the world in the last decade,” Huang said, “with China’s economic power and Korean culture—like K-pop—spreading all over the world. These economic and cultural shifts in themselves, I think, really influence everybody.” In this dissemination of culture is the potential for art from the East to face less exoticization than it once did. “I think there is still this problem of fetishization and othering,” Huang said, “but I think that the needle is moving.”

It occurs to me, while speaking to Huang, that art exhibitions that acknowledge the interconnectedness and mutual dependence of cultures around the world have the power not only to facilitate exchange between the so-called “East” and “West,” or the Global North and Global South, but also to start tough but necessary conversations about inequality and exclusion within marginalized communities themselves. To that end, Untitled has taken care to be inclusive and mindful of hierarchies among Asian groups that arise from geographic and economic disparities, caste, colorism, and more. “During the gallery submission review process,” Huang explained, “the Untitled team was very conscious of making sure that, in terms of Asian galleries, it wasn’t primarily Chinese galleries or Hong Kong galleries. We were encouraged to invite galleries to apply, and I also made an effort to invite ones that focus on Southeast Asian or South Asian artists or are based in Southeast Asia or South Asia.” Gender parity is another goal that notable exhibitions of the past have either overlooked or fallen short in achieving. Thinking back to Inside-Out: New Chinese Art, a 1998 show at the Asia Society in New York, in which women made up less than ten percent of the featured artists, I realized that Huang is particularly well-positioned to co-curated “East Meets West” due to her track record of organizing exhibitions in which discussions of race and ethnicity intersect with notions of gender and power. In 2022, she curated Wonder Women, a group exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch that featured forty Asian diasporic women and non-binary artists working in figuration, among them Tammy Nguyen, Jiab Prachakul, and Nadia Waheed.

As for how Huang juggles her multiple artworld responsibilities, as a mediator as well as an advocate, she said, “I have this unique position of being sometimes an independent curator but then also working at a gallery.” Sensitive to the fact that different viewers require different forms of communication, Huang strives to meet audiences where they are and, from there, to nuance their understandings of social and political issues. As a curator, Huang is passionate about putting on shows that aren’t “just for the art world.” When I asked her what art can do in a world that seems to be fluctuating wildly between states of tolerance and intolerance, I was struck by the confidence of her response. “As a curator, I feel responsible for how culture shifts and politics shift,” she said. “Soft power is real.”

Image: Tarini Sethi, Passages of Power II (2024). Courtesy of Rajiv Menon Contemporary.