Mariah Joyce
A&E Editor
The College of Wooster Art Museum (CWAM) currently has two installations running concurrently, both in keeping with this year’s forum theme of East Asia.
The first installation, “The Jay Gates Collection: Art of China and Japan,” is installed in the Burton D. Morgan Gallery in Ebert Art Center and will run until Sept. 28. The exhibition consists of delicate examples of pottery and cast bronze vessels; some date back to the Early Historic Period, which began more than 4,000 years ago. The exhibit, which was donated by Jay Gates ’68, also contains examples of earthenware and bronze from the Han and Qing Dynasties, stretching from 206 BCE-220 CE and 1644-1911 CE, respectively.
The true treasure currently housed in CWAM is in the Sussel Gallery, however. “Selections from PROJECT 35 VOLUMES 1 & 2” features three videos, all by East Asian artists. PROJECT 35 is an ongoing collaboration between curators and artists where 35 international curators each select one video from a contemporary artist to include in the project. In the Sussel Gallery, one can see Moment from Vol. 1, and Flying and Morning! from Vol. 2.
Morning! is a distinctly postmodern film by Chinese artist Chen Zhou. Zhou depicts the rigid morning routine of a man in grayscale with the assistance of a narrator in the background. The film feels uncomfortable, and the man struggles with a perception that “everything has been pre-arranged” as he reads his morning paper. The narrator’s voice corroborates his lack of agency, and shortly before the film’s end, the camera pans out to reveal a film set as sounds of an audience applauding and laughing become audible and then overwhelming. However, whether this is a reality or a depiction of the man’s skewed perception is left ambiguous; the film leaves one feeling unsettled and slightly helpless.
South Korean artist Park Chang Kyon’s film Flying has a more historical bent, focusing on the artist’s feelings about the division between North and South Korea. The film is punctuated by footage of parades and shrill, mournful music by Isang Yun, a South Korean composer.
Moment, a film depicting thousands of snapshots from Japanese artist Yukihiro Taguchi’s installation project in Berlin, is the star of the show. The film is primarily silent, and depicts the artist’s installation of wooden planks taken from his studio in various parts of the city. Initially, Taguchi merely installs the planks creatively inside the studio, creating sunbeams, tangled webs, a forest, a dining room, a stage, a discotheque and even a tennis court with the gray planks. Different arrangements of the same planks substantially change the environment, mood and function of the same space.
The project continues to develop, however, and eventually the planks set out to explore the city. First snaking along the sidewalk and then setting up camp under a bridge, at a bus stop and even in a park in the guise of a volleyball court, the planks become a living thing in a way they never were inside the four walls of the artists’ studio. The film ends with footage of the artist painstakingly ripping up the floorboards at the very beginning stages of the two-year project; this is the only part of the film with sound, and it shows the enormous amount of work that went into what is a visually effortless project.
Both the Jay Gates collection and PROJECT 35 can be seen in CWAM on Tuesday through Friday from 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and on Saturday and Sunday from 1-5 p.m., and the exhibitions are free and open to the public.