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Can there have been a first Aboriginal work of art? Yes and no, and Asia Society gives it a room to itself, but against a backdrop of churning waters projected on the walls. These are ancestral waters, and painting itself has a history without a beginning, in ancestral practices—and, an exhibition explains, in “patterns of the ancestral land itself.”

That conjunction, of practices known only to clan and community but there for all to see, guides “Madayin,” eighty years of Aboriginal Australian bark painting, through January 5. The title means both the sacred and the beautiful, which is to say both a ritual and (oh, dear) fine art—and that 1935 point of origins has a back story as well as a backdrop. A white investigator had taken up the cause of four men in prison for murder, and Wongu Munuŋgur thanked him with a painting. Aboriginal painting had long worked in sand and on bare skin, but now it became reddish-brown pigment on eucalyptus bark. It became, too, the conjunction of the timeless and timely. Painters have been asking just how much to call it theirs ever since.

They live in Yirrkala, about halfway along Australia’s remote northern coast, and Asia Society supplies a map. The Yolŋu “knowledge holders” who curated the show were not entirely comfortable with that. To them, what a scientist might call a reference frame or a colonizer a navigational aid is a betrayal. The Yolŋu themselves had no written language, just a multiplicity of spoken languages, until Europeans showed up. To this day, artists refuse to adopt the patterns of other clans—not, they insist, out of scorn but out of respect. If all this “primitive art” starts to look the same, do bear that in mind.

If it still looks much the same, it will always take the long view. That opening work rests on the floor like Native American tapestry, while other work hangs vertically with dominant vertical fields. They afford space for ancestral beings, including snakes, sharks and men. Fish might be swimming upward as if swimming upstream. They might also be swimming into a trap, part of the myths and patterns at play, too. Layered on top in thicker pigments, often white, are rocks and clouds.

These are sacred spaces, and they articulate gurrutu, or kinship. More precisely, they picture a kinship system, encompassing art, country, and the environment—or lands, stories, and fire. Short diagonals dart back and forth against the verticals. Everything runs freely, supplying points of unrest and stability. These artists could not draw a straight line with a ruler if they tried. But then that would be mapping.

Museums have made a point these days of hanging long-past art beside contemporaries, like the Met with Japan, Korea, and Tibet. Contemporary art sells, and board members are collectors. It makes sense, though, when a people refuses a time line or a map. Asia Society draws on the show’s partners, the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia and the Buku-Larrngay Mulka Centre in Australia, along with new commissions. It also starts all over again one floor up.

The restart introduces women. They began to paint in the 1930s, too. Forms in their hands become larger and more prominent, like a starlit sky for Nyapanyapa Yunupinu. (Could this be the Yolŋu Starry Night?) They show humans as active today or all but eliminate them on the way to abstraction. And then comes one last room for half a dozen contemporaries.

They recall another beginning nearly eighty years ago, in the United States. Carlene West looks to the Surrealism that Jackson Pollock once had to leave behind, Riko Rennie and others to geometry and color. They may send you back to the rest of the exhibition to see what, if anything, has changed as Aboriginal art enters the mainstream. From the start, one motive for painting on bark was to swap with outsiders for food and provisions, and now it has earned its place in New York. Besides, there is always one problem with seeing the world as a system: the more it grows, the more it can fall apart.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

To pick up from last time on “Coal + Ice at Asia Society, photographs out front document each step in the narrative, from coal to ice. Geng Yunsheng photographs Chinese miners dragging their burden across dry hills and at rest underground, with no certainty that they will ever see the light of day.

Camille Seaman has icebergs from both the earth’s poles, her photos saturated in blood red and ice blue. Gideon Mendel adds the consequences of climate change for India, where flooding has left homeowners literally underwater. Yet he means to show not despair but a return home. One man has begun to ladle out the water with a steel tub.

Is it a good start or a sadly comic ending? Such is the dilemma of climate change. A man in water up to his neck recalls a young black male popping up from a manhole in a classic photo (now in the Dean collection) by Gordon Parks, with much the same mix of comedy and fear. Parks himself puts in an appearance, with his own photographs of miners, as do Lewis Hines and Bruce Davidson, while shots of factory towers include Bernd and Hilla Becher. And here, too, something may sound all wrong. What is one to make of a group show of nearly forty artists, some who have never set foot in Asia?

A step inside provides a breathtaking answer. Credit the enormous photo and video collage to the curators, Susan Meiselas (a Magnum photographer in her own right, now on view at the International Center of Photography) and Jeroen de Vries. Identifying the contributors for each image is next to impossible, even with a plastic card just outside. If the show is flawed, it is less by dogmatism than by just that cinematic flash. As a poster upstairs asks, “What good is the house on the hill when the valley is on fire?” Here not just the landscape is fiery.

That poster belongs to one of a handful of special projects, which are immersive in a very different way: they serve as hopes for the future and actions for you, in the present. They can be as modest as a poem, by Jane Hirshfield, or as extravagant as a vision of New York in 2050, by Superflux. Make that two visions, of shortness of breath and long relief. They open with dark skyscrapers consumed in a deep red mist. And then a second chamber imagines a greener, wetter New York, with every boulevard now a waterway or a beach.

Both chambers place you at their center, facing your own reflection in a mirror. It can be a proud or embarrassing encounter, and it is not the show’s final demand. Jake Barton sets out postcards with still more fiery, futuristic images—not just for your enjoyment, but for your signature on the back and an invitation to “chat with your future self.” Pull out your phone, text “The Accelerator,” and read what you can do in reply. Maya Lin is more welcoming still, with an interactive Web site for global climate information. Lin, whose credentials as an Asian American include her architecture for New York’s Museum of Chinese in America, has been committed to the intersection of art and climate change for some time.

Their technology leaves what once were “new media,” in Asian video and photographs, in the dust. Still, for all their optimism, the projects raise their own doubts for the future. Has New York in 2050 converted automobile traffic into a day at the beach, or has it made the best of rising seas? Jamey Stillings takes his video camera to renewable energy, but the windmills look eerily close to white crosses in the mega-video a floor below. Clifford Ross, whose questions about climate line the stairs, headed straight for the New York coast for a hurricane—a seeming tidal wave aimed at him. “Coal + Ice” wants to supply an antidote to fire and despair, but neither is all that far away.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Climate change is simply breathtaking. So it is at Asia Society—not just coal dust and flames choking the air, but an epic multimedia experience that the Star Wars or Marvel universe would envy.

“Coal + Ice” should have anyone taking a deep breath at what climate change means for the very near future, through August 11. It may humanize the apocalypse, almost to the exclusion of policy and politics, but the human stories at its heart hit home, and so for all my qualms does the visual overkill. Is this the future of planet earth? It must seem so, in a show that ranges from video to texting. Yet it is rooted in photography from the last century, when the costs had already begun to hit home. Separating the past from the future, it wants to say, is up to you—and I work this together with an earlier report on sustainable architecture as a longer review and my latest upload.

“Coal + Ice” must sound like a mistake. Surely the proper pairing is “Fire and Ice,” as in a poem of that name by Robert Frost. For Frost, they were metaphors of how the world will end, in desire or hatred. For Asia Society, they are fact and visceral sensation. Coal dust is what blackens the face of a miner in a photo by Song Chao, the worker already sinister and laden with chains. Ice is what is in retreat, even as it still cloaks Everest, in a flight over the Himalayas by David Breashears.

Fire is spreading, too, in video of wildfires by Noah Berger and of drought in California’s Central Valley by Matt Black. Like melting ice, these are consequences of climate change, with burning coal its most potent contributor. They and more fill a single large room as a sweeping immersive experience. Photos and video by dozens of artists play out on monitors and museum walls, from floor to ceiling. While one end of the room has coal and the other ice, with fire in between, there is no set entry or exit. Things, they seem to say, will continue without end until people say otherwise, starting now.

All this can be fact or overkill, and this review is necessrily getting long. Allow me to wrap it up next time.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.