Art: Utopia now

Even the research and travel behind "Brave New Worlds," the multimedia exhibit that opened last week at Walker Art Center, is daunting. Taking occasional leave from other responsibilities during the past 18 months, two Walker curators -- Yasmil Raymond and Doryun Chong -- roamed the globe in search of new art and artists whose work would be "a barometer of our time," as Raymond put it.

Individually or together, they flew to South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Romania, Turkey, Austria, the Netherlands and France, among other places. They met artists and scholars, art dealers and friends from graduate school. They gathered names and tromped off to artists' studios, ate late-night dinners, browsed local markets and tested the ever-shifting political winds of countries that have often testy relationships with the United States.

Gradually, they settled on 70 works -- videos, films, paintings, drawings, photos, installations -- by 24 artists from 17 countries. All of the art, they believe, responds to the fundamental questions: How do we know the world? How do we experience the world? How do we dream or imagine the world?

"All three questions fit under the umbrella of political consciousness that is critical to artmaking today," Chong said. "But by political, we don't mean partisan. The show is not meant to be a lecture. We just start with the premise that serious artmakers these days are responsive to the world itself."

In other words, this is art with content, art that reveals at least an awareness of issues as diverse as labor and working conditions, political freedom or absence of it, environmental beauty or degradation, war, poverty, homelessness, hunger, housing, happiness, hope. Some of the artists work in a quasi-documentary fashion, while others invent metaphorical fantasies reflecting utopian dreams.

A stroll in the conceptual garden

Viewers enter along a gravel path winding through a kind of conceptual garden designed by Zheng Guogu, a 37-year-old Chinese artist. Three large quasi-autobiographical images define the space -- a photo of the laughing artist crouching in the street with another man, a photorealist painting derived from a snapshot that Guogu took at a Museum of Modern Art soiree, and a painting of a waterfall. A forest of pedestals supports brass-casts of common Chinese commodities -- shampoo bottles, cans of beer and potato chips.

Although Guogu is a hot property among the international art set and was featured recently in Germany's Documenta art fair, he is not well known in the United States, Chong said. Like that of many contemporary artists, his work "blurs the line between life and art," the curators said, noting his autobiographical footnotes and the similarities between his cast-commodities and the early beer-can sculptures of Jasper Johns.

At the center of the gallery, Korean artist Haegue Yang constructed a sensory-overload chamber in which visitors are momentarily bombarded by gentle blasts of heat, cold, humidity, light and scent. In an alcove, Romanian artist Lia Perjovschi displays portions of her "Knowledge Museum," an amorphous collection of memorabilia ranging from packages of freeze-dried strawberries to postcards and inflatable globes. A curious compendium of contemporary commodities, her "museum" also offers a sly parody of today's art.

Nearby, three 15-minute videos by Polish artist Artur Zmijewski document 24 hours in the lives of three European women employed respectively in a vodka distillery, a supermarket and a coin laundry. By following their every move, from awakening, through assembly-line tedium, to bathing their children at day's end, the videos offer "a full portrait of the new Europe, which is not so different from the proletarian old Europe," Chong said.

Another video, by Israeli artist Yael Bartana, poses a metaphoric response to divisive nationalism. Called "A Declaration," the video shows a young man, perhaps a contemporary Ulysses, rowing a small boat to a rocky outcropping near Tel Aviv, where he removes an Israeli flag and replaces it with an olive sapling.

"This piece is a really poetic moment of reconciliation, a little miracle," said Raymond.

Elsewhere the show features, among other things, hand-drawn versions of international "Food for Peace" literature from the 1950s, documentary-style photos of South African workers and people sleeping in parks in Tangiers, quasi-documentary records of militia violence in Lebanon, reimagined maps of the world and poetic photos of ocean depths.

The show's title, "Brave New Worlds," obviously alludes to Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel about a monolithic state. By emphasizing the plurality of art today, Raymond and Chong offer snapshots of a world in flux. Or, as Chong put it, "This is a show about particular places that might have universal resonance."

Mary Abbe • 612-673-4431

Mary Abbe • mabbe@startribune.com