At Asia Society’s Inaugural Triennial, Artists Consider the Role of Borders in a Global Society

By Harley Wong

The Asia Society’s inaugural triennial, “We Do Not Dream Alone,” opens with a pair of nearly identical sculptures of Venus, but in the place of her head is an inverted statue of a male figure. The work of the prominent Chinese artist Xu Zhen, Eternity—Male Figure, Statue of Venus Genetrix (2019–20), was cast from replicas of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s Statue of Venus Genetrix (2nd century A.D.) and the 11th-century Male Figure in the Asia Society Museum Collection. Essentially, the artist combined the Western art canon’s symbol of idealized female beauty with a non-Western ideal of male beauty.

Xu lays bare the stark differences in style between the ancient Roman and Cambodian sculptures, while forefronting the Eurocentric hierarchies that persist throughout the art world—from academia to the art market—that the triennial’s curators seek to disrupt. “The number of Asia-focus art exhibitions in New York remained modest. This is perplexing, as New York is supposed to be a global and cosmopolitan arts centre,” Boon Hui Tan, the triennial’s co-curator and former artistic director, recently told Orientations Magazine. “The majority of artists selected for the [triennial] either have not shown in New York or have not had substantial presentations for a long time—it was our way of trying to shift the needle.”

Xu Zhen®, Eternity—Male Figure, Statue of Venus Genetrix, 2019–20. Courtesy of XU ZHEN® and James Cohan, New York.

“We Do Not Dream Alone” is the result of a five-year collaboration between Tan, former director of the Asia Society Museum and vice president for global artistic programs at the Asia Society, and his successor Michelle Yun ​Mapplethorpe, formerly senior curator of Asian contemporary art at the Asia Society Museum. It’s a difficult and ambitious endeavor to mount an exhibition on the artistic production of a continent as disparate and sprawling as Asia. Even defining the boundaries of Asia, how far it stretches west or into the Pacific, feels uncertain. The inclusion of artists of the diaspora—a reflection of our current globalized condition, as well as histories of migration from war and civil unrest—further expands the possibilities of what can and should be seen as contemporary Asian art...READ MORE

Cover Image: Installation view of “We Do Not Dream Alone” at Asia Society Museum, New York, October 27, 2020–June 27, 2021.Photo by Bruce M. White. Courtesy of Asia Society Museum.