Raggedy Ann's Foot: Beijing Travelogue: Land and Body at Today Museum + Goloudajie, Second Ring

Beautiful painting--sketchy and light, like an ink drawing, at Land and Body, Today Museum, Beijing (linked above)

A wall of these delicate paintings at Land and Body, Today Museum, Beijing

More from Land and Body, Today Museum, Beijing

Back from two weeks in Beijing. In two short years I forgot how magical China is, but was quickly reminded my first day back with the ornate and textured sidewalks that are such a pleasure to stroll. Having brought only an iPhone, brush pens and sketcbhook, images of the trip are few but there will be more posts on China forthcoming.

When there, I saw some wonderful shows. These include the rotating permanent collection at the Palace Museum in Forbidden City, where a seriesof Ma Yuan water paintings held sway. Dubbed "One Corner Ma" for his assymetrical compositions, Ma pursued studies of water idioms that are spellbinding in a group of 20 in the Palace Museum. With their intervals and overlaps, Ma's water studies invite a Taoist approach to composition.

Ma Yuan, The Waving Surface of the Autumn Flood, from a series of paintings of water

中文: 水圖卷﹝局部, ns 26.8 × 41.6 cm (10.6 × 16.4 in), ink on silk
Palace Museum, Beijing, China

The dazzling Land and Body exhibition at Today Museum (link and images above) opened the day we were there. We arrived late, so there was little chance to do more besides snap these pictures and hope the pure visual power of the work would somehow transmit. What a followup to the Grey Gallery's seminal 2009 exhibition, Icons of the Desert! While that show featured bark paintings, this show presented fabric substrates for the complex yet freely applied markings that notate pathways through the land.

In addition to the paintings the installation includes a hand-painted time line of events that contextualizes the journeys in them. Oh, for an extra day to spend reading the wall inscriptions! I hope the catalogue will be published, as it wasn't at the opening, and makes its way to the US. Also at Today: the Martell Prize Winners exhibition and a very strong, contemporary Permanent Collection that surveys work from the Beijing scene, including a painting by new friend Yang Qian (http://www.artnet.com/artists/yang%20qian/). I thought it would be great shown in tandem with New York painter Alyssa Monks, as they both consider wet surfaces as a veil between our gaze and the figures they paint.


Alyssa Monks (from her website)

Yang, in addition to having a most beautiful studio in Fejiacun where one views his oeuvre of black light paintings, water images and newer collage works, has impeccable taste in Chinese cuisine. Trained in the States and a native of China, he is a genial host and respected artist.

In Beijing hailing cabs is competitive sport, more so than New York. Renumeration is low so cabdrivers decline fares often, despite the fact it's illegal. Knowing this en route to Today from Sanlitun, I sat resolutely in the back of a cab while expatriates, local Chinese and the cabdriver argued in passionate Mandarin about the existence of a Today Museum, and what it would take to get a waiguoren there.After some contretemps he started the car, and off we went.

In the past, Feijiacun and Songzhuang were my local neighborhoods but this trip was pure Second Ring: Line 2, Goloudajie stop, Soluxe Courtyard Hotel. What aesthetic delight to experience the low-slung, humanly scaled hutongs and their nearby restaurants, plentiful public toilets, convenient subway system and beautifully planted trees, textures and colors. That said the best parts of the trip remain undocumented, as I suppose they always must: dusk-light rambles past generations of family members spoiling crowing babies in narrow alleys, motorbikes whizzing past and many drinking pijio, China's delicious, light beer. Or red lanterns hanging in "Ghost Street," creating a sense of celebration in front of the storefronts that by day are business as usual. The compression of places that are thousands of years old with new developments stimulate the senses at every turn. It's as if occupying the singular but dense spaces in the aboriginal journeys at Today Museum were layered with five more sheets of similar density.