BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS.- The Boston University Art Gallery presents Looking East, an exhibition that explores contemporary painters’ engagement with Chinese and Japanese art. Looking East features the work of Brice Marden, Michael Mazur, and Pat Steir. The exhibition runs through February 24.

According to John Stomberg, director of Boston University’s Art gallery, the arts of Japan and China have been intrinsic to the development of modernism. Looking East emphasizes the influence of these two traditions on Western art.

"Marden, Mazur and Steir exemplify the importance of the Eastern influence and prove that the modernist project was not exhausted in the 20th century," says Stomberg. "By presenting the work of these three internationally recognized artists, we begin to understand the imperative role that an art engaged with metaphysical or spiritual concerns plays in contemporary culture."

Considered a minimalist in the 1960s and 70s, Brice Marden was a master of the monochrome canvas. By the mid-1980s, he began to paint with twigs and branches from ailanthus trees, a technique that introduced curved, sketchy, intertwining lines into his work. Marden credits this change to a visit he made in 1984 to see an exhibition of Japanese calligraphy, an interest which eventually led him to pursue a study of Chinese poetry and Eastern philosophy.

In his recent paintings, Marden attempts to capture the spirituality and rhythm of calligraphy and recreate its forms without making direct references to specific Chinese characters. He wanted his paintings to transcend the meaning associated with the Chinese characters and poetry that had inspired them. Marden’s work reflects the Zen idea of emptying out meaning in order to gain a deeper, more universal understanding of life and art.

Pat Steir, a long-time friend of Marden’s, has long been interested in Asian art and its influences on Western artists. In her paintings, Steir often resembles an art historian, researching the various styles and subjects of painting’s history — both Eastern and Western —and pointing out relationships between them.

While working on her famous Brueghel Series: A Vanitas of Style (1982-84), Steir discovered the fundamental influence that Japanese art had on European modernism, a connection that became a primary theme in her subsequent wave and waterfall paintings. One panel from that series in the signature style of artist Franz Kline led her to explore the influence of Asian calligraphy on American painting in the 1950s.

Steir’s series of wave paintings in the mid-1980s mines the possibilities of combining Eastern and Western art. As she gradually transformed her wave paintings into waterfalls, this connection grew even stronger. In her 1990s waterfall paintings, Steir strokes or pours thinned paint onto the canvas and lets it stream down, forming a "waterfall" of paint. The reductive elegance of the paintings brings to mind the graceful beauty of Asian landscapes. The manner in which Steir throws the paint at the canvas is similar to the centuries-old Chinese and Japanese "flung-ink" tradition.

Michael Mazur’s paintings such as Mind Landscape-After Chao-Meng-fu (1994) and Islands (1997), reflect the profound impact of Chinese painting on his visual representations of nature. He made a trip to China in 1987 and then in 1993 began a study of Chao Meng-fu (1280-1368), a Yuan dynasty master of landscape.

Mazur holds a fascination for scroll paintings such as The Mind Landscape of Hsieh Yu-yu. He has almost abandoned linear mark-making in favor of swatches of color and layers of glazes that suggest an "imagined mind landscape." He considers his work a physical melding of hand and mind in which the act of articulating the surface is of consummate importance.

Looking East brings together three artists from distinctly different backgrounds, minimalism, postmodernism, and realism, who have all nevertheless discovered in Asian art a solution to modernism’s crisis of faith.