CLOUDS AND CHAOS

Crow Museum of Asian Art 2019

Clouds have played a variety of roles as a visual element in the arts of Asia across time. As a stylized motif, clouds have often functioned as a framing device, an interstitial motif, or compositional boundary in paintings. A cloud could conjure anything from a celestial Daoist realm to lingzhi, medicinal mushrooms of immortality once believed to revive the dead. The generative and auspicious potential of clouds has long existed in the history of art. The amorphous nature of mist in dialogue with the tangible and rigid has long inspired the work of artists, designers, and architects, from Fujiko Nakaya’s cloud paintings and fog sculptures, to Diller and Scofidio’s Blur Building in Lake Neuchâtel. In today’s era of big data, clouds have also come to represent the negligibly small, where modular bits of information are now amassed into infinitely scalable systems that function at a distance, removed from sight but still lingering overhead.

ON VIEW: September 28, 2018 to April 7, 2019