Krakow. The Manggha Museum blends in gently into its setting on the Vistula River embankment, not far from the center of Krakow. The institution, built in the mid-1990s, has two fathers. One was Feliks Jasieński, nicknamed Manggha by his contemporaries, an art critic, collector, and the foremost enthusiast for Japanese culture in fin de siècle Poland. The second was film director Andrzej Wajda, who saw some pieces from Jasieński’s massive collection for the first time as a teenager. The year was 1944 and the show was organized by the Nazi occupational authorities.
Now, more than two decades after the museum created on the initiative of Wajda and named in Jasieński’s honor opened, it is a rather undistinguished address on Krakow’s institutional landscape. Most of the time, the wavy concrete pavilion designed by the 2019 Pritzker Prize winner Arata Isozaki is filled with historical exhibitions showcasing rather straightforward collections of artifacts such as Edo-era woodcuts, theater dolls, kimonos, and so on. One of the few attempts to open up the museum to broader issues and contemporary art was undertaken by Vienna-based curator Goschka Gawlik.
The Culture Collider: Post-Exotic Art may sound like a contemporary, ghostly follow-up to unintentionally orientalist exhibitions of the late 1980s, such as MoMA’s Primitives and the Centre Pompidou’s Magiciens de la Terre, but even at first glance the show already reveals one major difference. The curator did not dwell on so-called tribal works – here, the term “post-exotic” refers only to artists and pieces from the very heart of the global art world. This is the postcolonial one percent, the chosen ones from both East and West, Global North and Global South.
Surprising as it may be in case of an exhibition presented in the “former East,” the selection of artists, including Danh Vō, Sung Tieu, Georg Baselitz, and Paulina Ołowska, makes a significant statement. On the one hand, the arrangement itself feels like a nod to the museum’s origins, like the parlor of a contemporary “post-exotic” art collector. With walls painted blue on one floor and black on the other – like a skyline in the Japanese woodcut convention – the installation is further transformed into a picture separated from the outside realm. Like the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, which Gawlik is referring to in the title of her show, this is an isolated testing ground. With individual works as specimens, the curator focuses on the aesthetic factor in her search for post-exotic art.
The result may be politically ambiguous in some cases – for example in Jakub Julian Ziółkowski’s pieces, which are not very “post-,” but pretty “exotic,” or rather exoticizing. The burning dollar bills in Ziółkowski’s painting may be conceived as a critique of consumerism, but given the artist’s well-established position, this is not really that different from rappers burning money in their video clips just to show off their wealth. Especially if the painting with “burning” dollars can soon be sold for a much greater sum. To top it all off, Ziółkowski himself went on a journey to Vietnam some time ago to seek spiritual guidance, similar to the trips taken by some early modernists in the nineteenth century.
Within the exhibition’s collider, there is a piece that contradicts Ziółkowski’s Gauguin-like spiritual exploration. Danh Vō’s Last letter of Saint Theophane Venard to his father before he was decapitated, one of the artist’s works featuring calligraphy by his father, reproduces the last letter written by a beheaded French missionary word for word, copied out by Phung Vō – who does not speak French – over and over again until he is dead. Vō’s piece is part of a broader oeuvre dedicated to the deconstruction of historical and geopolitical forces that shaped his identity and is the most obviously political piece in the show.
For the most part, however, aesthetics is politics in the works on view in The Culture Collider. It is interesting to compare this show to one curated by Maurizio Cattelan at the Yuz Museum in Shanghai at roughly the same time. One might say that Cattelan focuses on “post-exotic” reality as well, but through a lens of appropriation. Even the title of his show is appropriated – The Artist Is Present. Showcasing works by Richard Prince along with countless copies of Van Gogh made in Dafen and his own miniature Sistine Chapel, Cattelan focuses on the possibilities of copying to question the Western notion of the original by pointing to Chinese tradition. To copy, in this case, is to improve.
In Krakow, Goschka Gawlik focuses on the lure of the singular object. Here the notion of originality is questioned not through performative multiplication but rather within the artwork itself. Sung Tieu for instance works with fake perfumes and designer clothes made from cheap but sturdy nylon bags, known under different names depending on the region. In Germany, these Chinese bags are called “Turkish suitcases.”
This alchemy of products shifting their value meets the entanglement of pictorial conventions that seem incommensurate. Baselitz’s exuberant upside-down paintings draw from the tranquility of Hokusai’s pictures, Yan Pei-Ming turns motifs resembling traditional Chinese paintings into almost abstract and monochromatic compositions painted with loose brushstrokes and thick impasto, and Imran Qureshi blends together Eastern miniature painting with the rampant gestures of an Abstract Expressionist. There are some more subtle contradictions as well. Paulina Ołowska painted a series of portraits of Japanese women in different work uniforms, based on photographs. Most of the subjects smile at the camera and yet stand in a restrained, “professional” pose. In the end, Ołowska’s paintings look like a strange mixture of Socialist Realist images of workers and photos from fashion catalogues.
And therein lies the main question raised by Gawlik’s show. If the art of the Cold War era engaged with the cultural conflict of East versus West – Socialist Realism as a direct representation of the USSR’s agenda and abstract art in the West as a seemingly apolitical expression of individual freedom – what is the role of art today? As we witness a plague of nationalist politicians rising to power, as well as economic wars between China and the USA, what is the place of art in this new reality? And can post-exotic cultural collision help to overcome growing political tensions? We can at least be sure of one thing, especially in a place like the Manggha Museum. As the story of young Wajda risking his life sneaking in to see the Japanese exhibition in Nazi-occupied Krakow shows, a collection of what seem to be just trinkets can hold surprising power.