For a few weeks ending on Nov. 7, Reagan Louie mounted an intriguing photographic exhibition in the Elaine L. Jacobs gallery at Old Main. It was titled “Asia on the Edge.” It could have easily gone unnoticed, except that the transparent walls themselves displayed the exhibit and beckoned you inside.
On the lower level, there was a life-sized photo facing the doorway of an aged woman. She sat cross-legged in a meditation pose, a lowly person of stately bearing. To me, she could have been the matriarch of any family. Looking up at her well-wrinkled features, I sensed that the photographer placed her in this prominent position to allow her graceful aura to preside over the exhibition.
The thing that first caught my eye, however, was the bright splash of brilliant fall color in the first photograph to the right. The typical wrap of a Tibetan monk and shaved head were on a person with a face with very feminine lines. Although I could not determine the gender, I could not ignore the strength of character radiating from that face.
There were several others that stand out in my memory. There was a small photograph of a soldier in ceremonial dress with a rifle beside his leg. His back is shown as he looks out at sea. Why choose this I wondered - no face, no sharp salute?
Perhaps the photographer wanted to capture the uncertainty of life, which hovers over every soldier, about where they might be posted and whether they will ever return home.
On the upper level above a lovely spiral staircase, the exhibit continued with many photographs which confirmed my view that Louie meant to show everything as naturally as possible. No abstracts could be found here. A tall building marked the skyline to a highway.
It could have been a skyscraper in any city. Four boys smiled, eager to prove photogenic, as their heads peeped out of an ivy-covered terrace. A girl in a little shop, with a bold facade of hieroglyphics I could not read, seemed ready to do business as a hairdresser, but the artist said she is a “betel nut vendor.”
Nearby, there is a woman seductively dressed in a white negligee, bare breasted and in scanty underwear. I thought she could be any woman dressed for bed, but she too was in business. The artist said she was a “hostess.”
As you round the curve to the ending wall of the exhibit, there are other contrasts. Two young girls sat on a bed with a lovely white bedspread. They were all dressed up and accessorized like adults, but not yet there. A real woman in a suit took a puff at a cigarette-busy professional on a nicotine break, I thought.
The last photograph upstairs was of a woman almost naked in a pose fit for the Playboy magazine’s cover. She was on a bed in a small cubicle-like room with no furniture except a deep blue vase. Not dressed much better than most museum sculptures, I think, but this one’s definitely business. Why did the photographer save her for last? Perhaps her lack of folds and her fine skin meant she was his best? He sure did lay it bare there.
Descending the stairs, I now notice to the left of the entry way a group in the traditional colorful dress of shorts and hats. Louie actually introduced his exhibition by portraying his Asian travels with this group. Sportsmen I wondered? No. The artist said “Maoists,” which I took to mean followers of Mao Tse-Tung. By coincidence, perhaps, you had to have looked left to see them.
Be the first to comment on this article!