My Favorite Paintings at Tate Modern Gallery in London

The transformation from a former power plant to a one of the flashest galleries in the world, Tate Modern Gallery, along with d'Orsay in Paris, set forth an example of how to re-juvenile a blighted institution and a neighborhood.

The vast space was well utilized to showcase many huge sculptures and installations.  However, the works intrigued me most are paintings - one was Image of the Fish God (1956) by Alan Davie (born 1920) and the other one was Large Black Landscape (1946) by Jean Dubuffet (1901‑1985).

Scottish painter and printmaker Davie's Fish God (below) was a bold statement - it was both symmetrical unsymmetrical, and  simultaneously beautiful and ominous.  The imposing black block could be seen as a figure, and the white block on the left was some sort of monument or totemic symbol, and the diamond shape in middle stared at us like an all-seeing accusing eye.  Very mysterious and disturbing.


Image of the Fish God, 1956, Alan Davie (born 1920), Oil on Board, 1530 x 1219 mm

According to Tate Modern, Large Black Landscape (below) was the culminating work of a series of landscapes which Dubuffet executed in Paris between July and September 1946. 

Large Black Landscape, 1946, Jean Dubuffet (1901‑1985), Oil on Board, support: 1551 x 1186 mm frame: 1575 x 1210 x 57 mm

Despite the overwhelmingly dark shades on the board, my reaction to this painting was a quiet smile - it was very enchanting in its subtle and whimsical way.  The lovely pale sky, the flying object looking like a cross with four rounded ends, which also echoed the round sun sitting on the top of a mountain and the onion dome of a tall building.  Sliding my eye down, I found such correlations and echoes covered entire board and the beige colored lines, scraped and gouged, gave us the full gallery of daily life and fantasy.  Against the dark background, they glowed, and they were positive, comforting and was deceptively simple and beautiful.

I am not familiar with this French painter, sculptor, lithographer and writer.  Tate Modern informed the viewers that he

Moved to Paris in 1918 to study painting. Doubting the value of art and culture, stopped painting altogether 1924-33 and entered the wine trade. Made a second abortive attempt at painting 1933-7, also making masks and puppets. Began painting again in 1942 and had his first one-man exhibition at the Galerie René Drouin, Paris, in 1944. Made paintings of Parisian street scenes, people in the Metro, jazz musicians, portraits of friends, etc., with humorous, ironic imagery executed in a grotesque style akin to naive graffiti...

 The more I learn, the less I know.


My Favorite Museum Collection Series

>> My Favorite Museum Collection Series 48: My Favorite Paintings at Tate Britain, London
<< My Favorite Museum Collection Series 46: My Favorite Paintings in the Courtauld Gallery at Somerset House, London

List of My Favorite Artworks in the Museums I've Visited

Sunflower Seeds by Ai Weiwei at Tate Modern, London

Chinese conceptual artist Ai Weiwei brought over 100,000,000 sunflower seeds to Tate Modern in London. In the past, Mr. Ai has produced installations, photographs, furniture, paintings, books, and films. He served as artistic consultant on the Beijing's Olympic Stadium - the Bird Nest.  After the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, he took on exposing construction problems of Sichuan schools and the follow up mal-treatments towards anyone raised issues by Chinese government.  He was also in the center of a protest by artists whose studios were seized by local government and developers without due process and he suffered a major injury and had to had a surgery performed on him in Germany.

Like many contemporary Chinese artists, Ai concentrated his energy on the trauma of the political upheavals in last several decades in China and for better or for worse, they seem obsessed with the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath.  Ai is more critical than most, when many seem hold a nostalgic view of Mao's era. His activists efforts, if distracted him from art making, seemed have deepened his thinking. His artwork has always been large scaled and now it gets even bigger. The 100 million tiny sculptures of sunflower seeds were made out of porcelain and hand-painted by skilled artisans in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen. According to Ai that he had painted three and were rejected because they were too "ugly".

Independent report that "The tiny works of art, each hand-painted in porcelain and different from all the others, are collectively called Sunflower Seeds, which is what they have been made to look like. For Ai, their maker – or, at least, the man who had them made – these have a specific significance. During the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao, like Louis XIV before him, had himself depicted as the sun, the faces of his 900 million sunflower people turned inexorably to his heliotropic face. At the same time, recalls Ai in an accompanying film, sunflower seeds were the one foodstuff you could be sure of finding during the frequent hungers of Mao’s reign, a token not just of survival but of sociability.

On a political level, the seeds were a symbol of repression; on a human one, they offered a rare opportunity for kindness, the sharing of a tiny plenty. In Ai's art – an art heartily disliked by the current government of the People's Republic of China, whose police have censored his work and arrested and beaten Ai himself – these two opposing sunflowers resolve into one. Sunflower Seeds is both almost pervertedly grand – 150 tons of handcrafted ceramics, covering 1,000 square metres of Tate Modern's floor to a depth of 10cm – and irreducibly simple. Each seed offers a kind of hope – of food, of kindness – and yet each is like a minute (and inedible) stone monument, so that the work is at once both lively and deathly. In those contradictions of massive numbers and individuality, of humility and grandeur, happiness and pain, Sunflower Seeds is like China itself."

Visitors are invited to walk across the surface of the work. It's a sensory and immersive installation, which visitors can touch, walk on and listen to as the seeds shift beneath their feet.  But due to health concern over ceramic dust, visitors are not allowed to walk on these sunflower seeds any more, unfortunately.