Asia Society Museum, New York
Through March 25
“Sarah Sze’s sculptures are a museum guard’s nightmare,” said Ariella Budick in the Financial Times. Sprawled across floors and shooting from walls, the artist’s ephemeral structures—3-D mosaics made from such everyday detritus as pen caps, matchbooks, and discarded boarding passes—practically beg to be jostled, torn, or stepped on. The fragility has a point, however. This midcareer show acts as “a kind of travelogue,” inviting us into its constructed landscapes and demanding that we “think hard about how we experience a place” and preserve it in memory. The “ultraordinary” objects Sze assembles and repurposes begin to “behave like jeweled tessarae”: They evoke the marvelous little bits of life “we didn’t know we had forgotten.”
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Sze is “not at her best” here, said Karen Rosenberg in The New York Times. The drawings that the Asia Society has hung in a separate room “find her in doodle mode” mostly, and her installations are better when she has a more interesting space to play off of. One idea the show does get across is that she is “a more nuanced, intellectual, and worldly artist” than her junk aesthetic and “gee-whiz structural ingenuity” previously suggested. A Yale graduate and 2003 MacArthur “genius grant” winner, she’s so conscious of how her juxtapositions of objects mimic the mixed perspective of Chinese painting that she seems less an American original than “an architect of ancient traditions.” Still, you can see her continuing to stretch. In one installation, Sze’s version of a Japanese rock garden starts inside the gallery and continues through a window to the small patio beyond. Unfortunately, that’s not enough of a stretch to rescue the show.
