Portals

As I left my apartment for San Francisco’s First Thursday art night of November, I texted one of my best friends who was born in Tehran and asked her if she was Asian. She’s an actress who is typecast as “ethnic,” so I didn’t know what she was, so maybe I was totally wrong that I was going to an Asian exhibition. I was on my way to Hadi Tabatabai’s Portals at Brian Gross Fine Art. Tabatabai was born in Iran in 1964. By the time I got to the gallery and stood in front of one of his paintings, my friend texted me back, “Technically yes, but really whatever my agent wants me to be,” but it didn’t matter because I had already become aware of the cultural nuances within the artwork.

Lines of thread are everywhere—vertical gray strings perfectly spaced a few millimeters apart and floating above a black panel, and horizontal words in the titles, like Thread Painting #36 (2010). When I stepped back from the symmetrical diptych Thread Painting 2011-9 (2011), the right angles of the black-and-white color fields reminded me of the capital Fs of the Fendi logo on cheap handbags sold in New York City’s Chinatown. Tabatabai’s paintings rival the intricate construction of designer knockoffs made by the hands of Chinese workers competing in the luxury market. Those hands also performed in the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing. Tabatabai’s surfaces of thread after thread after thread are like the matrix of the 2,008 synchronized Fou drummers that initiated the opening ceremony. In her graduate course Global Perspectives on Modernity, Robin Balliger (the current chair of Urban Studies at San Francisco Art Institute, Tabatabai’s alma mater) referred to that spectacular event as the end of modern Western hegemony. 

Hadi Tabatabai. Thread Painting 2011-9, 2011; thread, acrylic paint and wood on Dibond panel; 17.13 x 33.5 x .94 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Brian Gross Fine Art, San Francisco.

Are Tabatabai’s paintings an expression of Iran’s emerging position as a contemporary global power?

I had jumped through Tabatabai’s portal to a space that he defines in the exhibition statement as “empty space,” he writes. “It’s not this or that.” With only a square piece of black wood enveloped by a bare loom of string to inspect, a subtle form of hypnosis takes hold and there is permission to meditate. I drifted right into the complicated nature of Asian identity and I hadn’t even had any wine yet. Rather than get drunk and say something possibly racist to someone in the gallery (though I’m technically Filipino so I have some kind of inherent hall pass), I turned on my “Assembled in China” iPod and my “Assembled in China” Bose headphones and listened to some electronic dance music as I walked out of the gallery wondering if Tabatabai even knew what Fendi was or if his agent wanted him to be Asian for the night.

Portals is on view at Brian Gross Fine Art, in San Francisco, through December 23, 2011.

Jeffrey Augustine Songco is a New Jersey–born artist based in San Francisco. He holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and an MFA from San Francisco Art institute. He would like to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale 2023. He is a finalist for the ACAC Writing Fellowship.