Xu Bing, The Song of Wandering Aengus by William Butler Years (1999), pair of hanging scrolls; ink on paper, (left) 63-3/16″ x 51-1/2″, (right) 63-1/2″ x 51-7/8″
Among the arbiters of artistic quality, few are as thorough, merciless, and true as time. Sure, it’s committed some slights, but over the long haul—and we’re talking hundreds of years—time has proven fairly impeccable in sorting out the great from the godawful. What history will make of the contemporary scene is anyone’s guess, but one thing is certain: none of us will live to see it. Should, however, Google prove successful in discovering a cure for death—no, really, the folks at the inestimable search engine are hard at work—some of us will take a lively interest in seeing how twenty-first-century art pans out. What will be gleaned from its jumble of grandiose theories, incessant politicizing, fashionable strategies, absurd auction prices, rampaging globalism, and general overabundance? Such thoughts came to mind while visiting “Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China,” the Met’s first foray into contemporary Chinese art.
Granted, a casual afternoon spent trawling this-or-that art neighborhood will prompt similar puzzlements. But the currency of Chinese art, as both indicator of national identity and as an international phenomenon, is uppermost in the curatorial mindset of “Ink Art.” The subtitle makes that plain, as does the decision to install the exhibition in the permanent galleries of the Met’s Asian wing. Interspersing Crying Landscape(2002), an array of banners by Yang