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Art Review - The Third Mind - American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989 - Gaze East and Dream, at the Guggenheim - NYTimes 7/13/09 2:01 PM

might also apply to the work of Tehching Hsieh, known for his year-long performances. For the one documented here, he punched a time clock every hour, one the hour, every day from April 11, 1980, to April 11, 1981.

Mr. Hsieh came to New York from Taiwan as a illegal immigrant in 1974 and is having a well-earned big moment now, with a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art. He says that his performances are not about endurance, or discipline, or spiritual conditions but about everyday life, which is made up of repetitive patterns. He isolates one pattern and focuses on it. And like th bell sounding in the museum's spiral, repetition turns in a kind of wake-up call: Pay attention to where you are, what you do, and what you are feeling right now.

Mr. Hsieh's piece is one of the least obviously "Asian" works in the show, which raises the question of what Asian means in this context, and in a global present when Asia is no longer the exotic "other" that it was a century, or even a generation, ago. The exhibition doesn't really deal with this. In fact the American take on Asia proposed here seems to have changed little, in it's essentials, since the 19th century.

This may account for some of the strangeness the show projects. Both in the New York City present and in the art historical present it feels a little ghostly, like a sleeping beauty waiting for the kiss of life. Post-1989 art might provide that life, art from a time hen Asian-American artists became, in a big way, the American artists contemplating Asia,and different perspectives kicked in. Still, te Guggenheim show is an event; and its strangeness, like its ambition, is both captivating and perplexing. Read the wall text, look around, go with the flow.

"The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia: 1860-1896" remains at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through April 19; 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th St., (212) 423-3587, guggenheim.org