ASIA: THE LAND, THE MEN, THE GODS | 2nd edition

Versão em inglês | English version

ASIA: THE LAND, THE MEN, THE GODS 2nd edition

Buddha in the Abhayamudra posture China Northern Bei Dynasty (550-577) Stone (granite) with traces of polychrome and gilding

The conquest of the Asian art collection, donated by diplomat Fausto Godoy, elevated the Oscar Niemeyer Museum (MON) to the level of great international museums. Almost two years after its inauguration, the exhibition “Asia: the land, the men, the gods�, conceived from a section of this collection, counted a visiting audience of over 540 thousand people.

The exhibition is now renewing itself and a good part of the exhibited works will be replaced, with the objective of reaching an even larger audience, increasingly democratizing access to this very rich collection.

Disputed by other institutions in Brazil and by collectors from abroad, the Asian collection consists of more than 3 thousand pieces of art and, when it arrived at MON, it provoked a discussion about the definition of a new curatorial line by the Museum’s cultural council. Then, space was opened in the collection, with an emphasis also on Asian, African and Latin American arts, in line with the great museums of the world, making it distinct from the Eurocentric trend that dominates Western culture.

A museum exists from its collection, but it is from the interaction between the public and its works that culture and knowledge are disseminated, goods that make us more human. Offering the visitor the possibility to get closer, to look closely, to seek the meanings, the strangeness and the familiar that sharpens the perception, the discernment and the understanding of our world - this is the goal of MON. Art and culture are essential segments for the development of peoples. Through them, individuals express themselves, identify themselves, position themselves before the other and contribute to the collective good. This is perhaps the most important symbolic heritage of humanity.

The support of Itaipu as a partner in the realization of this exhibition was fundamental, a company that understands the purpose of MON and the importance of sponsoring initiatives that offer the public exciting and aggrandizing experiences.

Juliana Vellozo Almeida Vosnika Chief Executive Officer Museu Oscar Niemeyer

The Oscar Niemeyer Museum (MON) presents the second edition of the exhibition “Asia: the land, the men, the gods”. Inaugurated in March 2018, the exhibition takes on a new dimension in 2020, with the replacement of most of the works on display.

The second edition of the exhibition has the same impact as the previous one and introduces visitors to other aspects of the grand collection. Among the highlights is the 18th century canopy bed from the Hyderabad region in India. The unusual piece was made in jacaranda wood from Bahia and has a strong Portuguese influence to it.

The public will also be able to see up close small glass unguentaria from the 1st century B.C., rare pieces with very few specimens still on display in the world.

Another highlight of the second edition is the exhibition of a Japanese stone lantern from the Meiji Period (1868-1912).

Ambassador Fausto Godoy acquired the Asian art collection while serving as a diplomat in Asian countries such as India, China, Japan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Taiwan, Iraq, Bangladesh, Kazakhstan, and Myanmar. In total, about 3,000 works were donated to MON. Facing more than 3,500 Brazilian museums, what made Godoy choose the Oscar Niemeyer Museum to safeguard his collection were the building’s infrastructure for housing the works, the important architectural project and its vocation as a cosmopolitan and plural institution, with an ongoing work of collection acquisition.

The collection is in line with the guidelines of the referential framework for the constitution of the Museum’s collection, defined by the Cultural and Higher Councils. MON is dedicated to Brazilian art, with an emphasis on Paranaense art, architecture and design, as well as Asian, African and Latin American arts, which distinguishes it from the Eurocentric trend that is prevalent in many museums.

With the donation, MON now has around 7,000 works in its collection and one of the most significant Asian collections in South America.

Unguentarium Eastern Roman Empire 1st century BC - V.C. Glass Unguentarium Formato Oinochoe Eastern Mediterranean Century: II-I before Christ Glass

a testimony India had “deconstructed” and reconstructed me, to the point that I’ve decided that my life and career would take place, from then on, in the East. But not the East stereotyped by the West, full of labels and clichés. An almost impossible mission, considering the density of those civilizations and my lack of preparation to deal with the utmost relativism — without passing judgment — and having to live alongside an “exotic” otherness. But that was an invitation for adventure I couldn’t refuse and that ended up being very profound. I was lucky to have a master, professor José Leal Ferreira, Brazilian diplomat compulsorily retired in the times of the Institutional Act 5. He was a scholar of Portuguese language and Brazilian civilization in the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, a man of deep knowledge and immense generosity, to whom I pay my tribute here.

From India, I followed my itinerary through Asia and ended up serving almost 16 years in 11 posts in the continent: I followed through China, Japan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Taiwan (which is not a country according to the Brazilian government), Mumbai (India, again), Jordan/Iraq, Kazakhstan and Myanmar.

Other than that, I’ve only served, accepting an invitation, in our Embassy in Washington: it was a “hiatus” I couldn’t refuse.

This choice certainly seemed unusual for most of my colleagues. But I took it as a “mission”. Which one? To bring Asia to Brazil. An extremely ambitious project, again, and certainly above my abilities and strength, but necessary, I though, in the sense that the continent is showing itself as the main driving force on our geo-economy and, almost as result of such, on this century’s geo-politics.

Like the sphynxian Sheherazade, Asia has layers of civilizations and ancient cultures that make the continent almost undecipherable.

The hole is always deeper: one subject leads

to another, that opens to so many others, and so on. But it’s fascinating, especially in the contemporary world, where it reigns, globalized and globalizing.

The cultural “contamination”, or in other words, the penetration of “foreign” cultural references in the daily life of the urban individual nowadays, be it on the West, be it on the East, makes us reconsider values and perceptions, either through assimilation — sushi in barbecue places, yoga in gyms, on this side, or Louis Vuitton bags in Japan or China, McDonald’s all over Asia, for instance — trying to get to know them, and, for the more generous and intellectually motivated, to understand them. And the mass migrations rewrite human cartography on a planetary scale. We’re no longer islands, or rather; the

Boat (tomb object) China, Han Dynasty (206 B.C. - 220 A.D.) Terracotta The term “Mingqi” refers to objects found in tombs during antiquity mostly in Imperial China.

Constituting simulacra of human figures, animals and material goods linked to the buried, they were buried so that they could perform a ritual function in the afterlife, representing horses, soldiers, servants and other symbols of power. These objects reveal details of the customs of historical periods, the figure of a boat may indicate a connection between the dead and the naval trade, for example, or a camel may represent trade in the deserts of the Silk Road.

islands are now part of a global continent.

Welcome to the reconstructed Pangaea.

That’s the certainty that has driven my project, and that’s what the collection is: the search for understanding these civilizations that stimulate the propagation of knowledge through these works. I can assure you it was the sole reason. Along them are over 2,500 books, CDs and DVDs on the subject of Asia.

A necessary project, I’m sure. We, Brazilians, really need this “shower of universalism” that can broaden our horizons beyond the known West. Let’s recreate the navigators’ routes!

In this quest, art was the way I found to try to understand this complex multiple realities.

However, ART, in its holistic sense, doesn’t have any distinction between the so-called noble — fine arts — and the “minor” ones (the applied arts), in the Asian continent. The Asian

perceive the world and inserts himself in it as a whole. There aren’t also temporal boundaries: the contemporary lives alongside the ancient, showing that art does not have an “expiration date”. If Confucius wasn’t Chinese…

I’m transferring, already in my seventies, the effort of a lifetime to Museu Oscar Niemeyer, and, through it, to all of those who are willing to follow this route. We, Brazilians, have a great quality, I believe: our generous and friendly character which allows us — at least for now, and hopefully this’ll remain forever — to look with a lesser simplistic resistance to the other side of the mirror, of the world.

Fausto Godoy

Curator of the exhibition and collection donor

the gesture and the detail This exhibition, a snapshot of Fausto Godoy Collection, is a world in itself. Another world.

This world is still another world, a world that is in more than one sense different from what is called the western world. And, as always, when we enter a strange world, the first feeling we get is chaos and lack of order. Objects and figures look like an indistinct mess. Form, in our first glance, is void.

But this world soon starts suggesting its own order, its sense. The first marker of this order is the gesture: the visible gesture — the open hand pointing upwards next to another pointing downwards; fingers of a same hand composing a figure whose meaning is fleeting but which is impossible not to notice at the same time. The gesture is everywhere — because the body is everywhere.

And there is also the invisible gesture, the underlying gesture that is the cause of the explicit gesture. This other gesture is embedded in the fabrics handmade on loom; in the embroidery; in the curvature imposed onto a bamboo wire in such a way that it acquires the forms of these magnetic Myanmar lacquer pieces; in the grooves in chairs and chests; in the inscribed text (at the same time, the painted text) of Japanese calligraphy.

And then there emerges, unexpected, the meaning of visiting this other world: it’s about understanding “our” world, the Western world — a better understanding of this Western art from which the gesture has been removed little by little. In Western art’s iconography there is a unique gesture: the hand of God, the fingers of God stretching out, trying to touch Adam’s fingertip, a magnificent and eternal Michelangelo gesture which has created a world apart. This

patent gesture that still persists in Leonardo slowly disappears from Western Art: it’s almost absent in impressionism, it’s rendered unnecessary on cubism, inexistent and empty on abstractionism. Some implicit gesture remains, such as in Pollock’s action painting.

The patent gesture, however, was halted. It has been removed from architecture after art nouveau, has disappeared from furniture (and not only because it became too expensive).

However, it exists and persists in the East.

The second marker of this other universe’s order is detail. This is the universe of detail, which stems from gesture. Everything is made of detail: the Gestalt apprehension of the whole doesn’t allow a total understanding of what is shown, one has to scan the details with one’s eyes — even if the price to pay is the impossibility of reworking all those details in a complete picture and give them a meaning that does not exist outside every single detail. Once again, seeing this world means to have an enhanced view of “our” world, of “our” art at least, the Western art from which detail was removed, just like gesture: impressionism is the realm of wholeness, and in cubism, abstractionism and conceptualism, detail has no role to play. But in this imaginary territory that is Asia and its art, nothing exists outside detail.

And detail becomes ornament, and everything is ornament next to ornament, everything is ornament of another ornament.

The “Western” people who live in a stylized world, a reduced and simplified and nowadays impoverished world — from architecture to design objects — is no longer used to detail and ornament.

In this exhibition’s universe, it all comes from a combination of gesture and detail, which provides a different idea of beauty, usually translated (and denied) in the label of bad

taste that sticks to everything Asian. There are so many details, and each one is more excessive than the other. But to understand them, and to understand the Asian taste one has to consider that these objects don’t look for any kind of asceticism, transcendence, idealism: that which exists, exists on the visible gesture, on the visible detail. “Good taste” is only possible when one seeks to escape what exists. This is not about championing “Eastern values” and despising “Western values” (inadequately referred to as so, both of them): each one is different and we must understand what each can offer and why. When one is not searching for asceticism, purification, depuration, the scale of taste is different. Quite different.

Nothing, however, is trivial; nothing is casual — because nothing here stems from improvisation or lack of purpose.

The first guide the visitor can be offered, therefore, is this one: notice the gesture, the detail; realize that every visible object is intentionally and perennially linked to something that exists in this world even if it points to something outside it (such as deities). Earth, mankind and gods form one coherent figure whose pleasure scale, that defines taste, is different.

Two or three additional lines can improve the understanding of what it means to visit this exhibition. Here you see old pieces, some very ancient (5.000 B.C.) and others that belong to this time, today. The reason why the latter are also shown here is because there is no gap between old and new in the Asian world, only continuity. The new is made like the old, not for lack of originality (an “Western value”) but because the main idea is permanence. The authentically “ancient”, the “old”, might have a bigger financial value in an auction; that’s not the value that matters. The main value in this

exhibition is the symbol efficacy: if something was made according to the rules, if it fits in a system, it’s valuable. Likewise, the ideas of originality and copy are not the same as in the Western universe. In this Asian universe there are gestures that stand out, such as Hiroshige’s in engraving; the idea of fake, of forgery in opposition to the authentic, remains. But to do like it was made before does not carry the original sin typical of Western art.

One more question: what is shown here is art or the subject of ethnology? Maybe the right question is: how could the western eye stop seeing this as art? “Art”, in the specific sense the word has on this side of the world, is a recent idea, an idea that didn’t always exist and that probably won’t exist forever — or it will acquire another meaning. The distance between the notion of art and other artistic expressions, such as craft, is much smaller in the East, so that both concepts, art and craft (like art and life) can fuse into one another. So, yes: art is what one sees here.

This is an exhibition of what is ancient, of the past. Asia today is much more than this: the large Chinese 21st century cities, such as Shenzhen, the Japanese hypermodern urban centers (such as Tokyo’s city hall designed

by Kenzo Tange), India’s new urban reality, all include many traces of modern world capitalism, of the ascent of western standards, of the future as a technical reality happening right now. But Asia still keeps the kind of connection with the past that can be seen in this exhibition: the founding gesture of this past remains active.

Teixeira Coelho

Curator of the exhibition

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Cover (detail): Harihara | Madhya Pradesh, India | Chandela Dynasty (900-1139) | Stone (limestone) | Harihara is a representation of hybrid iconography that symbolizes the unity of the Hindu tradition of the gods Vishnu (Hari) and Shiva (Hara). The elements associated with each one are distributed separately in the two halves of the sculpture composition.

Fotografia photography Cadi Busatto patrocinadores / sponsors

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