"Conversations with Traditions". (Exhibition notes).(miniature paintings, Asia Society, New York, New York)

Shahzia Sikander in II "Conversations with Traditions" at Asia Society, New York. November 17, 2001-February 17, 2002

Virtually every "advanced" artist today-those who regularly turn up in biennials and mid-career retrospectives--works in a pluralistic, though recognizable, international style, generally installations or certain types of less-than-heartfelt paintings or short, impenetrable art films and videos. It makes no difference whether they be German, Brazilian, Chinese, French, or American-their style is a rehashing of Western successes from the last forty-odd years. And so it is with a pleasure akin to exhaling after holding one's breath for a long time that I recommend Shahzia Sikander, a contributor to the 1997 Whitney Biennial and one of twenty-one artists profiled in the recent PBS program "Art: 21."

Born in Pakistan and trained there in traditional Indian and Persian miniature painting, the thirty-two-year-old Sikander, who also holds a master's degree from the Rhode Island School of Design, now lives in the United States. Unlike her taste-following contemporaries, who, at least in practice, tend to scorn traditions more aged than themselves, Sikander operates with a much older and certainly older-fashioned notion of originality--the extension of an ancient tradition. In her most arresting efforts, she paints miniatures, employing timeworn techniques and materials, combining conventional Persian and Indian iconography with modern imagery and updated narratives. Indeed, her entire output to date can be summed up as a series of variations on the balance and confrontation between tradition and actuality, Western and Eastern, the recent and the remote. That said, she rarely allows extra-artistic concerns to undermine the aesthetic force of her work. "For me," she writes, "art is not a conduit to politics, feminism, or religion. It is a ticket to experience." Her cowboy-boot mandalas and airplanes flying over Hindu goddesses are neither strident calls for political reform nor pleas for some hazy multicultural utopia; rather they are icons of her experience, episodes in delightfully lighthearted, whimsical stories.

Dominating the small showing of works on paper at the Asia Society is Sikander's The Scroll (1991-92), a narrative masterpiece in vegetable color, dry pigments, watercolor, and tea on hand-prepared wasli paper, of approximately 13 x 64 inches. Scenes of life in what must be a Pakistani home unfold across a paper divided by several borders--a single blue line, a wider strip marbled in tan and light brown, and a geometric pattern of interlocking triangles in white and gray. Roofs and trees break through above and below, so that the imagery seems to thrust out beyond the picture plane. A ghostly, ...