Collecting Contemporary Asian Art

Vicki and Kent Logan
Dianne Perry Vanderlip

Vicki and Kent Logan's visit broke new and exciting ground for the Curator's Circle series by bringing together the museum's Asian and Modern & Contemporary Art Departments. The Logans' recent and extraordinarily generous gift includes 115 works of contemporary Asian art, and the high level of attendance to hear them in conversation with Ronald Otsuka and Dianne Perry Vanderlip is testimony to the enthusiasm that their gift has generated amongst contemporary art lovers and Asian art lovers alike.

Kent Logan explained that Asian works are an integral part of their collection, despite the fact that in some circles contemporary Asian art, and particularly contemporary Chinese art, is regarded as somewhat apart from the international mainstream. The many traumatic changes in Asia over the last fifty years have proved fertile ground for artists working in all media. The slides selected to accompany the conversation helped to show the particular Asian identity of much of the work and yet at the same time the artists' awareness of international themes. Nowhere is this more evident than in the works of Yasumasa Morimura with his sensual images of the artist digitally rendered into well-known icons of both East and West, or in Wei Dong's use of modern images juxtaposed with a classical Chinese landscape scroll. These are among the works that would be at home either with the contemporary collection or in the Asian Art galleries on the fifth floor.

In the workshop given by Modern & Contemporary Department Curator Dianne Perry Vanderlip, three works from the museum's current collection of contemporary Asian art were shown as representative of different Asian styles. These included a Morimura work that astounded everyone with its size and detail, an electronic work by Korean artist Nam Jun Paik, and a photo of the 1997 performance by Zhang Huan entitled To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond. Vanderlip demonstrated her immense teaching experience with a short discourse on the history of modernism and post-modernism and a selection of slides that showed how these works relate to Asian contemporary art today.

In response to a question put by Asian Art Department Curator Otsuka during the conversation, Vicki Logan said that her greatest collecting triumph was seeing visitors enjoying and discussing an exhibition of their works at the San Francisco MoMA. The lively reception they received at the Curator's Circle suggests that an equal or greater sense of triumph awaits them when their gift is installed in the Denver Art Museum.



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