From a bureaucratic perspective, the New York Academy of Fine Art and Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Art are poles apart: one is a independent downtown art school founded in 1982 by an assortment of celebrities and mavericks (Andy Warhol and Tom Wolfe amongst them) to revive beaux-arts techniques feared lost in the modern/postmodern maelstrom; the other, dating back to the early years of the People’s Republic, is the premier art school in China, once a powerhouse of “scientific socialist realism” and now a place where you can learn anything from bird-and-flower ink painting and calligraphy to cyber game design and city planning. But as NYAA plays host to more than two dozen faculty from CAFA’s School of Fine Art, striking stylistic and aesthetic commonalities emerge. The New York Academy defines itself as a place where traditional skills meet contemporary discourse: new wine in old skins, or the other way around, depending on how you like the results. Viewing the massive and impressive canvas by rising art star Yu Hong, The Ark, in which assorted characters culled from the Internet float on a gold ground in a kind of fête champêtre of contemporary leisure – a few dogs and a naked boy fare for themselves in a precarious vessel – one can’t help but think of the New York Academy’s celebrity instructor Eric Fischl’s decadent mariners on the choppy waves of the early 1980s. DAVID COHEN
Yu Hong, Ark, 2012. Acrylic on canvas, 250 x 600 cm. Courtesy of New York Academy of Art.
From Beijing continues until February 17 at 111 Franklin Street, between West Broadway and Church Street, 212 966 0300
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