But Can You Sit On It?

I suspect many, if not most, of the other artists featured in "Inspired by China" would share that sentiment to one extent or another. As lovely as they are, the stainless-steel forms of Chinese furniture maker Shi Jianmin's Chair and Stool hardly offer up inviting surfaces for one's bottom. These gleaming, seemingly amorphous creations seem to have suddenly gone from a molten to a frozen state; they hold the idea of furniture within them, even though that idea has been abstracted almost beyond recognition.

Another of the exhibition's most striking works similarly, if more subtly, manipulates the discrepancies between form and function. For his Screen #1, Tom Hucker fashions a six-panel folding screen from Swiss pearwood and English yew, but keeps the scale of the panels a relatively short (and more or less useless) three or so feet tall. He then tops the wood with cast-bronze twigs and branches that set up a range of dramatic tensions — between solidity and airiness, between the visual and the tactile, between natural and artificial.

Many of the remaining works are more conservative but rarely less than intriguing in their explorations of and experimentations with the themes. Even the items that don't quite rise to the level of fine art are mostly knockouts as furniture. And the entire exhibition has been put together with a great deal of care, down to the tapestries and other wall decorations that enliven the show's flow and the backdrops and dividing walls (beautifully built with minimalist flair by the museum's head in-house preparator, Freddy Jouwayed).

If there's a quibble to be had with "Inspired by China," it's that this is yet another object-based MOA exhibition. The museum has presented some excellent fine-art shows in the past few years, Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge and The Spectacle of Life: The Art of William Glackens being perhaps the most notable examples. But after Saint Peter and the Vatican: The Legacy of the Popes, Diana: A Celebration, Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs, Cradle of Christianity: Jewish and Christian Treasures from the Holy Land, and the current The Quilts of Gee's Bend, not to mention the upcoming The Great Age of American Automobiles, a lot of museumgoers are left hungry for more painting, sculpture, and other media. Is that an appetite MOA will leave unsatisfied?