Dear readers, you are nearly out of time to see Gan Yu’s Footprints Across The Ocean: From Social Realism to Visual Realism at the Schmucker Gallery at Gettysburg College. The exhibit closes on Dec. 6, so don’t dawdle. It is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am to 4 pm. Although every building on campus is listed as 300 N Washington, Schmucker is the building directly across the street from 211 and 215 N Washington St.
Under the direction of Professor of Art History Yan Sun and Gallery Director Sarah Kate Gillespie, Westley Rathbun ’27, wrote the main catalogue essay and provided interpretive labels, and Md Nafisul Hasan Sami ’27, created a digital version of Yu’s piece A Moving Mountain: Dow Jones’ first Decade of the 21st Century.
Gan Yu was born in Shanghai and currently lives and makes art in New York. He is interested in the dichotomies and intersections of Eastern and Western art. This exhibition also focuses on global financial systems and their impacts on both the powerful and the economically disadvantaged. Upon entering the gallery, the visitor is confronted with realistic charcoal and acrylic portraits of poor Chinese peasants painted in 1983 and 2012, which show that despite China’s soaring industry and GDP during the interim between those dates, the lives of rural people had in most cases not improved much. Their placement in the show contrasts brilliantly with the portraits right next to them; disturbingly cartoonish yet painterly giant portraits of Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, and George Soros overlaid with plastic sheeting printed with numbers sourced from stock market data from the time period of 2009 – 2011. We all remember what happened in 2008, and this is your chance to be retraumatized.
My favorite piece in the show is The Dow Moments, a grid of hand-torn mat boards shaped to resemble traditional Chinese ink paintings of mountains and cliffs. The apparent landscapes are in fact sourced not from nature, but from graphs of trading patterns. Remember those big downward slopes in line graphs during the crisis and then the gradual popping up and up of peaks after, and then boom, back down again during the pandemic? Yep, those graphs. The reference to mountain and stream landscape painting is poignant because in seeing the tiny people sometimes depicted in the valleys of such landscapes, one is left to wonder how they will possibly get up the precipitous mountain.
An interesting aspect of this exhibition is that very specific moments in time are referenced in many pieces, such as The Dow Moments. I wondered if one of the “landscapes” which resembled a cliff with a sharp decline depicted the time between when I filed the forms to cash in my retirement early to have capital to start working for myself and when my former HR rep finally submitted the paperwork to TIAA (damn her!), but then I noticed it was labeled 3:34 pm, 3/16/2012.
This approach of creating art about a particular moment in time while it is happening or immediately after reminds me of the work of Gettysburg’s own Tim Smith, who can often be found drawing both on Capitol Hill and around downtown Gettysburg about what is currently happening in politics. If you would like to see more of his work find him on Instagram at @artbytimsmith or talk to him on the square. He’s the guy with the long brown beard drawing on a large board.
Featured image caption: Gan Yu: Dow Moments
