Wang began carving these animal sculptures in New York in early 2020, working outdoors in the city’s parks. When a monthlong trip to his native Dalian, China, for Lunar New Year turned into two years there under lockdown, the sculptures became a source of succor, the sweet scenes depicted in them a respite during a difficult time. A video he made at that time, Seven Star Road (2020), alternates between close-up shots of him carving the pieces in his apartment and views of the streets of Dalian from his window. The peaceful sculpting process is a stark contrast to the turmoil and distress in the city outside. Lockdown was still in place when Wang first unveiled the pieces, along with the video, in a virtual exhibition on 47 Canal’s website. Alongside them, he displayed poems he’d written that refer obliquely to the sculptures, and to the circumstances of their creation: “Outside the glass wall, on the lawn, on the ceiling,” one reads, “statues and art / Nothing to do with me.”

Like much of Wang’s work, the animal pieces are a way of confronting the history of classical figurative sculpture, a tradition Wang knows well, having been trained in realist sculpture at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing before earning an MFA at Columbia University. After Columbia, Wang returned to a historic quarry in China, recovered a couple of discarded sculptures of biblical figures, and re-carved their faces as portraits of the Chinese workers who made them. Those sculptures became embroiled in a controversy over the attempt of a Los Angeles arts nonprofit to place them in a public park in an area of the city that had once been white-dominated, but had become majority Asian; a staunch group of locals nixed the project. (The sculptures were eventually exhibited at LA’s Vincent Price Art Museum.)

In a 2019 show at 47 Canal, Wang showed a small-scale version of the Athena sculpture that currently stands in the park—a figure carved, ironically, in stone from the same Chinese quarry—along with a video documenting the aborted park project and, particularly, the local backlash. He is interested not just in artworks, but in their supply chains. He uses his own productions to challenge the lofty ideals of beauty, civilization, and human achievement often associated with stone sculpture. Instead, he unearths traces of what we tend to think of as comparatively minor quotidian themes: humor, cuteness, a sense of belonging, and, of course, kindness.

In some ways, Mujinga’s video aptly exercises what the Martinican writer and poet Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) called “the right to opacity.” In his final collection of essays, Philosophie de la relation (2009), Glissant described a stance intended to preserve all the nuances of one’s humanity amid forces, often colonial or imperialist, that seek to capture and flatten one’s subjectivity for easy legibility or categorization. Seeds for the idea began germinating some forty years earlier, when, in the late 1940s, Glissant was formulating an alternative to negritude, an idea spearheaded by his teacher Aimé Césaire, who posited a Pan-African identity encompassing all people of African descent, including those in the diaspora. Glissant argued instead for creolization, which favored a more heterogeneous sense of culture. Though he acknowledged the importance of coalition building, he wanted to hold space for difference and nuance, as opposed to a universal sense of culture. Glissant believed adamantly in a fluid sense of identity rather than a static one.

In Manthia Diawara’s film Un monde en relation (One World in Relation, 2009), Glissant remarks that he claimed the right to opacity as early as 1969 at a congress at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “As far as I’m concerned, a person has the right to be opaque,” he says in the film. Underscoring opacity’s importance, he adds that “a racist is someone who refuses what he doesn’t understand. I can accept what I don’t understand.” Still, for Glissant, opacity is distinct from complete incomprehensibility. “Let opacity . . . not close down in obscurantism or apartheid,” he wrote in Treatise on the Whole-World (1997). “Let it be a celebration, not a terror.” Opacity refers to preserving the right to not be understood on the terms of an oppressor. But it isn’t only a means of resistance: it is also a way to preserve “that which cannot be reduced,” a form of honoring the complex and untranslatable aspects of another culture.

Glissant’s theories first came to the attention of many in the art world in 2002, when the late curator Okwui Enwezor used his notion of “créolisation” as an organizing principle for Documenta 11. Seeking to deconstruct geographic hierarchies within global contemporary art, Enwezor used Glissant’s theory to provide an organic alternative to the then dominant “margins vs. center” model. Since then, Glissant has remained a mainstay of curatorial and artistic inspiration. He’s been cited by artists and thinkers as diverse and varied as Thomas Hirschhorn, the Otolith Group, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Diawara, Mujinga, and many others. Artists have interpreted his theory of opacity, both explicitly and implicitly, in various aesthetic gestures of refusal, redaction, abstraction, and obfuscation.

Kapwani Kiwanga: Glow #4, 2018, wood, stucco, acrylic, steel, and LEDs, 59 by 39 by 8 inches.

AS ART INSTITUTIONS increasingly wield the language of diversity and inclusion in pursuit of art by marginalized voices, Glissant’s strategy has become only more necessary and relevant. Many artists are wary of the easy tokenism, exoticism, and voyeurism that often go hand-in-hand with institutional inclusivity efforts, and so are turning to opacity as a method for protecting their various subjects, or for resisting pressure to make work legible to some “universal” audience, thereby forgoing nuance.

In art as in Photoshop, there are degrees of opacity. Glissant did not see opacity as utter illegibility, and similarly, for artists like Mujinga it does not entail a flat-out refusal. Many aesthetic translations are in fact something like a display of one’s refusal, rather than an actual refusal. At its best, opacity is not about refusing to speak to some hegemonic audience entirely, and is rather about resisting the many pressures to over-accommodate viewers’ limited assumptions and biases. Of course, artists involved in the aesthetics of opacity aren’t magically immune from institutional tokenism and exoticism. The pursuit of opacity is rife with paradoxes and contradictions. Mujinga, Kapwani Kiwanga, Simon Liu, and American Artist offer instructive examples of how artists today are grappling with this quandary.

Mujinga, who was born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and is based in Oslo and Berlin, dramatizes the pursuit of opacity through the metaphors of light and color. The sunlight that bathes the landscape of Worldview at first appears pleasant and warm, but it also threatens to expose the vulnerable. In response, Mujinga’s creatures have adopted strategies to evade detection and survive, such as “nocturnality, mutability and camouflage,” as the press release states. Worldview is a metaphor, a “meta” artwork about representation. Yet it’s easy to miss opacity as the video’s primary subject—the work might easily pass as a screensaver or landscape painting. The piece bears subtle traces of refusal that are perhaps more likely recognized by those who feel more kinship with the creatures than their predators.

A similar display of refusal characterizes one of American Artist’s online performances, aptly titled A Refusal (2015–16). For the project, Artist, who is based in New York, replaced all the images on their Facebook and Instagram profiles with solid blue rectangles; they used HTML to place black bars over words and phrases, as in a redacted document. The blue color is what Artist calls “New Glory Blue,” alluding to the blue of the American flag (aka Old Glory) and also a color used for signaling “error” in Microsoft systems. It’s also known as the “Blue Screen of Death,” because it signals when a gaming system requires a complete reboot. In American Artist’s hands, the color signifies a refusal to showcase one’s personal data, a kind of digital opacity. Of course, this is distinct from simply deleting one’s social media accounts. This is one of the main paradoxes plaguing artists dealing with opacity: when do you draw attention to what you are refusing, and when do you simply refuse it?

Screen grab from American Artist’s online performance A Refusal, 2015–16.

Screen grab from American Artist’s online performance A Refusal, 2015–16.

REPRESENTATION CAN BE SURVEILLANCE. This is the idea that powered “Safe Passage,” Paris-based Canadian artist Kiwanga’s 2019 exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, which featured a number of veiled freestanding and wall sculptures that evoke both Minimalist forms and architectural blockages. These works were inspired by colonial-era “lantern laws,” including a 1713 New York City policy that required any non white person to carry a lit candle after dark to help authorities identify them and track their movements. These policies will also inform her solo exhibition opening next month at the New Museum in New York. The laws’ strategic, forced visibility allowed any person who appeared not to be white and without a lantern at night, slave or not, to be stopped and questioned. Kiwanga presents visibility here as a tool of control by the state.

Kiwanga contended with this history in the exhibition through a series of sculptures called “Glow” (2019). Glow #3 is a freestanding black trapezoid with a stripe of light running the sculpture’s height, and a small light like a beacon at the top. Standing human height, the sculptures look like works by John McCracken or Robert Morris; they’re light-emitting Minimalist totems. In the gallery, they have a solemn, stately presence that could stand in for Black bodies referenced in the historical law, or they could be sentinels, ensuring the safe passage of those bodies. Their minimal forms refuse to be read in one particular way; they take on new meaning via the context Kiwanga provides.

View of the exhibition “Kapwani Kiwanga: Safe Passage,” 2019, at the MIT List Visual Arts Center.

While one approach to opacity involves using culturally specific language that is largely indecipherable to a white/Western audience and refusing to translate it, Kiwanga instead hides specific histories within the language of Minimalism, thereby challenging the movement’s pretense to universality. The works borrow Minimalist strategies to make viewers become aware of their perceiving bodies—Jalousie (2018), for instance, resembles a room divider that incorporates two-way mirrors, such that looking through it also involves looking back at oneself—but locates this kind of voyeurism in a specific political and historical context (if you read the accompanying wall text). As with Mujinga’s Worldview, it’s entirely possible to miss this context altogether. Kiwanga refuses to display the historical information she’s referencing; willing to run the risk of having viewers miss the point entirely, she chooses to refer to it obliquely.

Simon Liu: Signal 8, 2019, 16mm film, 14 minutes.

SIMON LIU CAREFULLY NAVIGATES the power dynamics that accompany displaying aspects of one particular culture to a global audience. The artist-filmmaker, born in Hong Kong and based in New York, circulates work in a global or multicultural setting, where the audience often comprises Western-trained art appreciators—this is especially true of those running arts institutions worldwide, even those who hail from non-Western regions. This has the effect of making many artists unwitting “ambassadors” for their culture, a kind of middlemen who are asked to be transparent. Liu is decidedly an ambivalent ambassador. Like the creatures in Mujinga’s Worldview, the subject of Liu’s six-channel film Devil’s Peak (2021) is hidden. Shown at the Shed in New York in a cacophonous installation, the video depicts things like an empty bus station, a pigeon above a crowded city square, neon lights reflected on mannequin faces, and time lapses of public transit, all rapidly cut between more abstract shots of car and nightclub lights. The soundtrack switches between mumbling, unintelligible speech, diegetic sound, and bits of songs in both English and Cantonese. The effect is disorienting and poetic.

Simon Liu: Signal 8, 2019, 16mm film, 14 minutes.

Liu’s films feel productively hard to define; apparently, they’re about a place, and documenting the feeling of a place, but they could just as easily be about texture and color, about a feeling of dread. Liu acknowledges there is no neutral or universal subject or maker or place, and at the same time refuses to translate specific references for “everyone” to understand. In Devil’s Peak, the flicker of a film camera imbues mundane images of mannequins, public transport in Hong Kong, and shots of the artist’s 500-year-old ancestral village with a stuttering, colorful quality. The overall effect is one of lulling disorientation, as if you’re transfixed inside a club, somehow immersed in the feeling of an entire city. Time seems to be passing rapidly, or standing still. Images transition associatively––from a streetlamp to a burning fire in an ancestral shrine to a tree near a temple. With some works that use opacity as a strategy, artists reveal somewhere—wall texts, interviews—that they are in fact being opaque, often designating at least some of what they are encoding or concealing. Other works, like Liu’s Devil’s Peak, relish the poetry of idiosyncrasy. And what is vague in one context might be crystal clear in another—Liu’s films might have a different resonance in his native Hong Kong.

Simon Liu: Devil’s Peak, 2021, 16mm film, 30 minutes.

Signal 8 (2019) seeks to convey the psychogeographic feel of Hong Kong before it erupted in protest by combining banal shots of markets, subways, and busy streets with ominous music and interludes of fireworks and curtained windows. The project was filmed before the 2019 extradition bill that instigated the demonstrations, then edited as the situation unfolded, so the footage has a searching quality, as if seeking to uncover the protests’ psychic seeds germinating in the lights and surfaces of the city. The film never depicts the rallies directly, preferring instead to convey the situation through the moods of what immediately preceded them.

Signal 8 has little recourse to cohesion, moving intuitively from clip to clip through visual, sonic, and personal connections. Liu’s soundtrack does a lot to convey a sense of dread, drawn from a mixture of mumbled words, song lyrics, blips, and scratches. Other times, the sound seems to be an interception of a radio transmission. The footage almost always feels furtive, as if captured in secret, the artist observing and surveilling people in the city, though without putting them on extended display. At about 8 minutes, the video spins rapidly, looking up at the city as a chorus sings a song, and we hear the voice of an English newscaster speaking about the emerging protests. Segments of the film are quasi-abstract: all you see are textures, light, and color, all nevertheless clearly recorded in the real world. Liu seems to want to show the unrest in Hong Kong while protecting those involved. This is a story we need to see, but his technique implies that there is potential violence in visibility, that representation sometimes goes hand in hand with surveillance. “A lot of political art throughout time has, by necessity, had to take on coded qualities. You would have to scramble your message, make an anagram for someone else to figure out,” Liu says in an interview in Hyperallergic.

Simon Liu: Devil’s Peak, 2021, 16mm film, 30 minutes.

Opaque artistic practices, despite their current upsurge, are extremely difficult to sustain. As queer performance studies scholar Joshua Chambers-Letson put it in his 2018 book, After the Party, “the production of minoritarian thought is a project set up to fail in majoritarian institutions.” Strategies of opacity—metaphorical allegories, performances of refusal, strategic withholding of information, and culturally specific references—in some way all attempt to create shadow spaces within more mainstream ones, speaking to specific audiences and remaining inaccessible to others. Yet there is always the paradoxical hope that feeling excluded will prompt viewers not only to empathize with those who have been marginalized but also to learn and care more about their cultures, or at least come to terms with the limits of their knowledge and the impossibility of universality. Recognizing that there is a code is the first step to solving it.

This article appears in the May 2022 issue, pp. 62–67.

If you take the stairs—climbing up past Rodney McMillian’s wonderfully homoerotic, eighty-foot-tall painting stretched over a column, titled shaft (2021-22)—the first thing you see on the fifth floor is Dyani White Hawk’s shimmery geometric composition, which she and her assistants made out of thousands of glass beads. Wopila | Lineage (2021) references a long-standing Lakota quillwork tradition. It also references Geometric Abstraction (Kenneth Noland and, later, Frank Stella, come to mind), but White Hawk seeks to show that abstraction has long been an integral part of Indigenous art and culture, even if art history was unable to recognize it as such. Installed on the back side of the armature that holds up the White Hawk work are a selection of photographs from Mónica Arreola’s ongoing series about Valle de San Pedro that depict hollow concrete buildings. They look like modernist cubes, yet they derive not from theory but from austerity—these are buildings in Tijuana, where the artist lives, that were left unfinished following the 2008 financial crisis. The pairing of Arreola and White Hawk initiates one of the exhibition’s central explorations, into how contemporary abstraction and politics feed into each other in novel ways. 

Ralph Lemon, Untitled, 2021, oil and acrylic on paper, 26 by 40 inches.

The works on the fifth floor compete with the architectural noise, and they don’t always win: majestic paintings by James Little and Ellen Gallagher look less grand than usual, more like stuff and less like portals. The only painter who seems to escape this fate is Leidy Churchman, who presents a delightful three-paneled interpretation of Monet’s water lilies, and that’s because it has been literally rolled to the far side of the gallery on its cute little clawed wheels. Artworks in other media seem more at home in this chaos, including Jason Rhoades’s scaffolding piece, Sutter’s Mill (2000), which is partly about misplaced construction work. Ralph Lemon seemed to be most in on this joke: his works, arts-and-crafts-like paintings of circles and other shapes, are irreverently affixed to the inside of his wall segment with push pins. He also embellished his museum label with one of his works, obscuring some of the text. This is performance studies’ revenge on the museum: the curators’ selections look like they are cosplaying as artworks, embarrassed to be discovered like this, hanging in a museum. 

If the exhibition design is the most controversial thing about this biennial, then the Whitney is likely breathing a sigh of relief. It’s not as if its other problems have evaporated: the museum union distributed pamphlets at the VIP opening, calling attention to their stalled negotiations, and we can still find objectionable figures on the museum board (a recent piece in Vanity Fair rounds up the remaining questionables). The curators don’t nod to those explicitly political issues, but, in a more elevated reference to politics, cite the “identity”-driven 1993 Biennial instead, even including five artists who were part of it. But few of the works on display this time reach the incendiary level of Daniel Joseph Martinez’s iconic project of that prior era, in which he remade the museum’s customary admission tags by replacing the Whitney acronym with snippets (and sometimes the whole) of the sentence, I CAN’T IMAGINE EVER WANTING TO BE WHITE. His work in the current biennial, like most other contributions, seems to have mellowed; Three Critiques . . . is an undated suite of photographs in which the artist has costumed himself—Hollywood prosthetics-style—as various science fiction characters, in an exploration of “post-human” futures, as if he swapped human politics for a more planetary outlook. 

Other works on the upper floor (in that funereal warren, to which your eyes have to adjust) concern themselves more explicitly with social justice. Alfredo Jaar’s video, 06.01.2020 18.39 (2022), is so cheesy I was almost embarrassed to watch it, but it is admittedly effective, if not authoritarian, in its mode of installation: black-and-white footage of protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death, in which helicopters circle overhead, runs in a black box where massive fans replicate that intense wind. Numerous nearby projections are offset by a prominently hung Cy Gavin painting, Untitled (Snag), 2022, which is stubbornly abstract, a quivering orange mass on the black wall. The pairing echoes that of White Hawk and Arreola, suggesting that some looming abstraction rests at the center of the videos’ social agitation. 

But abstraction. Is there a word more belabored in the history of art history? Abstraction is back . . . again, after a surfeit of figurative painting in recent years. It’s a bold assertion brokered on relatively traditional terms, though this time it is resuscitated by new practitioners, and revitalized by performance and Black studies. James Little’s 2021 Stella reduxes—from his series of “Black” paintings—are meant to trouble “figure/ground oppositional hierarchies of race,” as Zakiyyah Iman Jackson writes in the catalogue, which might have something to do with the way whiteness produces race as a “difference” against its “ground.” Denyse Thomasos’s startling cross-hatched canvases call to mind hot-button sites of the academic study of Blackness: prisons and the holds of slave ships. It’s abstraction, but in the service of rendering the histories and interiorities of marginalized subjects.

Which brings us back to the exhibition’s central abstraction: the design itself. A small dark room on the sixth floor that Edwards and Breslin call an antechamber is something like a climactic curatorial abstraction: a room of unattributed objects. Inside is, allegedly, Thomas Edison’s last breath, displayed as a test tube in a vitrine; a barely there soundtrack by Raven Chacon of what might be someone breathing; and Near silence, an unattributed black monochromatic relic, positioned high on the black wall opposite the Edison vial, which you have to strain your eyes to see. This last piece is presented without a wall label, an inarticulable center symbolizing grief or loss, in a bold and chaotic exhibition. 

A study of time via collage and sculpture, “Dreamsickle” is Kahlil Robert Irving and Lyndon Barrois Jr.’s first joint exhibition since 2017. The artists attempt to convey how the friction and overlap between, say, the timelines of American history books and the imagined time of cinema might prove generative in some regard—whether for social equity or personal dreams. The results are mixed. Many of the works (all 2021) capture the mundane experience of life on the internet (via memes, social media, headlines), but these feel dry, almost didactic, representing something that is rather self-evident—the internet is a cacophony. The more wistful works conjure a complex feeling of possibility tinged with unease that a title like “Dreamsickle” might have sought to capture.

View of “Dreamsickle,” 2021, at 47 Canal, showing Kahlil Robert Irving’s Sky_High (Low & fractured SMAERD) and Means_Angles_Integers (The weight of media) #8, and Lyndon Barrois Jr.’s Immortal Objects (I-IV) and Perpetual Dilation, all 2021.

Irving’s vinyl-on-aluminum collage Means_Angles_Integers (The weight of media) #8 is organized like a timeline. A series of headlines and article clippings is turned vertically to look like a sequence of scenes in video editing software, perhaps nodding to the cinematic feel of the “scroll” or “feed” organization of most websites. Irving’s other collage, Means_Angles_Integers (The weight of media) #7, juxtaposes advertisements for credit score reports, an image of Prince, posts on Twitter, and memes from Facebook. The clippings overlap and obscure each other, competing for the viewer’s attention and conveying how these disparate types of content are given the same priority on the internet. Irving’s selections here are not random. Many of them pertain to race relations over the past two years: the first few paragraphs of a USA Today article note the ridiculousness of Trump’s declaring that he “popularized” Juneteenth, and a few sentences from a Washington Post article announce the launch, via presidential executive order, of an FBI program to monitor the police’s use of force. This all constitutes only a sliver of one’s hypothetical daily internet intake, yet it conveys the way political, humorous, and aesthetic content all compete for one’s attention there. Still, the collage reads as less critical than diagnostic, less a call to action than a mirroring of chaos.

On my way to P·P·O·W’s new storefront gallery in Chinatown, coming out of the Canal Street J/Z subway, I walked past an imposing gray building that I later learned was the Manhattan Detention Complex. Known as “The Tombs,” it housed several hundred inmates before closing in November 2020. Turning off Walker Street, I passed a crowd waiting in front of the New York City Rescue Mission on Lafayette, and a woman asked if I could buy her lunch. I turned the corner on Broadway and walked into the gallery.

Martin Wong, Everything Must Go, 1983, acrylic on canvas with hand-painted frame, 48 by 60 inches.

In one particularly striking combination, Gilbert’s Empire State of Mind/Flaco 730 Broadway (2020) is paired with one of Wong’s most famous paintings, Everything Must Go (1983). The hanging emphasizes the artists’ shared motivators (grief, social documentation) as well as the differences in their approaches. Gilbert focuses on intimate scenes; Empire depicts two figures, seemingly mother and son, grieving in the street, perhaps from the effects of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Wong is more interested in the cosmic, architectural, and environmental; Everything juxtaposes the debris of a demolished Lower East Side building with a night sky constellation, gold-painted hands spelling out the work’s title in ASL, a rainbow gradient that may allude to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and a trompe l’oeil frame painted in deliberate, bento-box-like sections. Wong’s mysticism seems like a balm for Gilbert’s specific human dramas. The two canvases also illuminate each other’s historical and temporal scales, connecting two social and biological crises across time. And while the immense scale of Wong’s image-world does not lead the artist to neglect the minute—broken bricks stand in for societal conditions—Gilbert’s portraits use details to index the reality of a person or a larger narrative. The fallen health insurance card in Goddess Walks Among Us Now (2020), the parking ticket and energy bill tacked on the fridge in Love Still Good (2021), and the card on the dashboard of Summons (2020) depicting Babalú Ayé, the Yoruba spirit of healing, help render the lives of countless people subjected to forms of economic precarity, all of them glowing in fluorescent hues. His attention imbues these lives with all the symbolism and heft of a Renaissance painting.