Persian Parables

R ebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet: Contemporary Persians is the new exhibition at the Asia Society on Park Avenue and 70th Street in Manhattan. It’s a strikingly good show of contemporary Iranian art assembled by Mohammed Afkhami, a young, well-born Iranian whose family’s fortune and art collection were wiped out after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. With his own fortune made from investing, a passion for art still intact, and good taste, Afkhami gives us quite a treat. Twenty-three artists are represented in many media. The Asia Society is a classy, welcoming place, so I knew I’d see a quality show displayed in style.

The Afkhami collection is foundational for understanding the art of Iran, and presentation helps. The art’s arranged with a light, conversational touch and rhythm, and that’s the work of a good curator — in this case, Fereshteh Daftari — blessed with the Asia Society’s very nice galleries but also confident enough to let the art do its thing.

The art is mostly from the late 1990s through 2015. There’s wonderful painting in the show, ranging from Ali Banisadr’s dynamic, vigorous We Haven’t Landed on Earth Yet from 2012 to Memory (2005) by Shirazeh Houshiary. These two are a gallery away from each other, about the same size, and heavy on blue. They’re good companions. The latter is subtle and abstract, reminding me of Rothko, with two bands of white between which is a beguiling band of robin’s-egg blue. Memory suggests a serene ocean while the white bands above and below are cryptic. The artist calls them “immensity” and “the infinity of the unknowing.” It’s one of many works that are religious but not, in a Christian sense, narrative. It stays in the mind.

The striking We Haven’t Landed on Earth Yet, though very different from Memory, seems connected. Memory is a soul picture, a moment of personal, singular contemplation. Banisadr’s is a chaotic, big-picture, cast-of-thousands painting. Together, they tell us that Iranian art is diverse. They tell us Afkhami’s vision is gratifyingly catholic. Their placement tells us that the Asia Society has very good curators indeed.

The show has stainless-steel sculptures, ceramics, drawings, photography, and video, too. The wall labels are elegantly written, with content worth reading, style, and personality. They’re provocative when they need to be but always directive to the art. I hate leaden labels pitched to the lowest common denominator.

The show starts with Farhad Moshiri’s Flying Carpet from 2007. It’s a big, two-part sculpture, the first part a stack of 32 machine-made Persian carpets. A passage shaped like a bird was carved from each of them. Next to this stack is a stack of the carved-out textiles, which, it turns out, aren’t bird figures but fighter jets. The work proposes multiple Irans. It’s a culture that’s thousands of years old, known, in part, for brilliant textile design. It tried to modernize fast, too fast. The machine-made didn’t displace old-time craft, but the cult of the shiny and new proved hard to swallow. A revolution driven by old values led to a cult of a different kind of new and shiny.

Next to Moshiri’s sculpture is Shiva Ahmadi’s Oil Barrel #13 from 2010. It’s a conventional oil barrel, holding 42 gallons. Ahmadi covered it with another kind of oil, painting in oil a dense network of botehs, an ancient, asymmetrical, almond-shaped motif we see in Oriental carpets; here and there warring animals; and here and there a bullet hole.

Of course, I bring my own views to the exhibition. To me, this gallery evokes American stereotypes, foremost among them Iran’s fascist government controlled by a militarized mafia. The exhibit’s introductory panel irritated me at first by suggesting we put such stereotypes aside. It wouldn’t feed me raw, red meat about Iran as a terrorist state.

“How unfair,” I thought, but soon, though none of my views of Iran and terrorism changed, I found that these views needn’t rule my aesthetic judgments. The 23 artists in the show come from an enormous, complex country with a thriving contemporary art scene. Each has his or her own unique trajectory, most ungoverned by the Iran we read about in the news. The catalogue, which is attractive and accessible, has lots of good biographical material. Moshiri was born in Shiraz in 1963 but studied at Cal Arts. He went back to Iran and lives in Tehran. Ahmadi, born in 1976, left Iran with her family in 1988. Now, she’s American.

The work of both is about stereotypes of Iran but also about irony, subversion, and pathos. And poetry, humor, and religion. Some of the artists in the exhibition are dissidents, or, as the title proposes, rebels. Some, like the collector Afkhami, don’t live in Iran. Ahmadi isn’t alone in thinking that George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” rhetoric stigmatized the vast numbers of Iranians who hate their government but live their lives in strange, challenging times.

Sundown, a grisaille video by Hamed Sahihi, is a seascape shot at the Caspian Sea. There’s no sound other than waves hitting the shore. Children play and adults stroll, but the atmosphere is gauzy. Figures are mostly outlines. Amid all this ordinariness, something sinister happens. A young man on the beach ascends into the sky, slowly but surely. His body is limp, suggesting he might have been hanged. Only one figure on the beach, another young man, seems to notice. In Iran, public executions are in the news so often that people have become indifferent.

The exhibition is on two floors. Each gallery has half a dozen objects in it. This promotes contemplation. The arrangement of art in each gallery nicely juxtaposes flat art on the wall — sometimes, like Memory, featuring ethereal subjects — against stainless-steel sculptures by Shirazeh Houshiary or Timo Nasseri. The curatorial vision clearly calls for variations in media and texture in each gallery. Scale is carefully controlled so that the sculpture doesn’t overwhelm the paintings.

The youngest artist in the show is Alireza Dayani, born in 1982. A 13-foot-wide drawing of the creation of aquatic life is obsessively precise, scientific here and there, with a mermaid or two. I can’t say it’s the best thing in the exhibition because there’s so much good art there. But it’s the most impressive because of Dayani’s technical prowess, always central to me, and imagination. I wasn’t there as the oceans erupted with life millions of years ago. That said, his vision is persuasive.

I don’t mind that there’s nothing in the exhibition I’d call bleeding-edge. There’s nothing after 2015, and that’s fine, too. Afkhami is a careful collector and probably likes buying art that’s cured a bit. Time does indeed test a work of art’s quality. While I walked through the exhibition, I wanted to see work by artists in their 20s or 30s, but that’s another show. It’s not a criticism.

The Aga Khan Museum in Toronto organized the exhibition. It was at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston before it went to the Asia Society. The catalogue has two great essays. Fereshteh Daftari’s profiles the collector and the artists, while Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak’s situates them in Iran’s history since the 1979 revolution. The illustrations are nice.

The Asia Society is an essential museum experience. It promotes the aesthetics and scholarship of a vast part of the world about which most Americans know little, and it does so with elegance.