When I was a child, I hated contemporary and surrealist art. I became aware of the genre primarily via artists such as Yayoi Kusama and Salvador Dalí, whose artwork seemed nightmarish, vivid, and oddly psychological. The pumpkins and infinity rooms; the melting clocks and elongated figures, all of it felt like a dream I had not asked to have. It was too close to the way my own head worked when I was tired.
In particular, I remember paintings such as The Lovers by René Magritte and The Two Fridas by Frida Kahlo impacting me in their depiction of physicality, love, and social dynamics. Magritte's cloth-shrouded faces reaching for one another; Kahlo's twin selves, wired together at the heart. These were not paintings that behaved politely. They asked questions the room could not answer.
Years later, I revisited their artworks with new eyes, interested in surrealism and the expression and symbolism of ideas. What had unsettled me as a child now looked like precision, like each image had been assembled from the exact minimum of parts needed to say something otherwise unsayable. Though I had a new appreciation for the artworks and the people who had made them, I focused primarily on established European artists, who tend to create artwork that focuses around Western religious iconography and whose power and social structures I was most familiar with. That was where my education, formal and informal, kept steering me.
Finally, I came to understand and appreciate artists of various cultures and backgrounds in their creation of contemporary or surrealist art, including Ai Weiwei, Yoko Ono, Shilpa Gupta, and Louise Bourgeois. Weiwei's political weight sitting inside a room full of porcelain sunflower seeds; Ono's instruction pieces that hand the artwork back to the audience; Gupta's threads and gates and installations that make national borders feel like the arbitrary things they are; Bourgeois's enormous spiders standing for a mother and for grief, both at once.
Though I have not learned everything yet, I understand with more clarity the importance of performance and contemporary art in challenging our beliefs around expression and in allowing us to touch a raw part of ourselves where words cannot find footing. I appreciate such work more and more every day.
Some art meets you where you are. Some art waits for you to grow into a room where it makes sense. This whole category of work turned out to be the second kind, and the wait was worth it.
