The Rise and Rise of Asian Art

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There is still a lot of spadework to do before Americans are as familiar with Hindu goddess figures and Mongol textiles as they are with Impressionist oils. Two weeks ago, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts opened the first full survey in the U.S. of the history of Japanese photography. It's a superb show full of work that will mostly be new to Americans, proceeding from lustrous 19th century geisha portraits to the post-Modernist shenanigans of Yasumasa Morimura, who makes heavily stage-managed pictures of himself decked out as Western icons of both sexes — sort of the Japanese Cindy Sherman. Anne Wilkes Tucker, the Houston MFA's influential chief photo curator, says she decided to organize the show when she realized how little Americans knew about the field. "What interests me is what we don't know," says Tucker. "Japanese photography is a whole tradition of which we are totally ignorant."

Is there any way to generalize about Asian art? Not usefully, which the Houston show makes clear. There's no master key to both Kuichi Uchida's stately Portrait of the Empress, from 1872, and Daido Moriyama's feral Stray Dog, from 99 years later. The sheer multitude of Asian sensibilities is the first lesson that the explosion of Asian art has to teach. Perhaps because they come from traditionalist cultures, even many younger Asian artists produce work that, like Chen's, acknowledges the history and long-standing cultural practices of their homelands. But preconceptions about the Japanese gift for wabi — refined simplicity — will get you nowhere with the dancing cartoon mushrooms of the post-Pop artist Takashi Murakami. A very visible figure on the international art circuit, Murakami decked out Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal last year with giant balloons covered with eyeballs that owed more to the Japanese obsession with cartoon animation than to tea ceremonies and lacquered trays.

Back in Queens, in the enclosed gravel courtyard outside P.S. 1, there is a large work by Yoko Ono. Yes, that Yoko Ono. Freight Train, 1999, consists of an actual railway freight car on a short length of track, pocked all over with what look like bullet holes. Hidden speakers emit strange ululations, clicks and keenings, sounds that approach the haunted music of Noh plays but fall short of melody as Westerners customarily think of it.

The piece is overexplained by a title card from Ono that calls it, among other things, an "atonement" for the sufferings of the 20th century, a syntactical slipknot that implies that she inflicted them. Never mind — she's not the first person to remind you that the sentimentality of the hip New York City art world can make Norman Rockwell look like Voltaire. What matters is that this bullet-riddled freight car has a rough force. With its big steel undercarriage and its wounded sides, it has the injured presence of a Spanish bull. Its weeping tonnage can speak for all kinds of grief.

Is this art? Spend a minute with it, put aside any reservations about Ono's overstated explanations, and you have to say yes. Is this Asian art? It's enough to say it belongs to all of us. Does all of this mean that the future is a place where the U.S. finally opens itself to what Asia has to give? Bring it on.