Indian artist Subodh Gupta displays his art at the Museum of Fine Arts

From April 3 through June 17, 2016, Hema Upadhyay and four other Indian artists will be featured in the historical exhibition Mega Cities Asia at the MFA in Boston, which examines the city as a spectacle. Newcomers Aditi Joshi and Asim Waqif were neighbors with the late geniuses Hema Upadhyay and Subodh Gupta. 

The kitchen is praised in Subodh Gupta's artwork, where shining goods are arranged on shelves to reflect the importance of cleanliness and orderliness in an Indian kitchen. Instead of simply being the result of made-up ideas and stoked wants, the urban works produced by all four Indian artists are rooted in reality. It would also suggest that every one of them finds the city to be breathtaking. But the aesthetics and chemistry of a slum and the hallmark of a life spent for survival are best captured in Hema Upadhyay's paintings. It is regrettable that the artist will not be there for the official opening of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston's greatest contemporary show.

 

The great Edmund Burke famously said, "Astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its processes are arrested, with some degree of horror." When this occurs, the mind gets so absorbed in the current activity that it is unable to contemplate any other ideas. The Megacities Asia presentation depicts this in detail. 

There are two pieces by Hema Upadhyay. The centerpiece of the exhibition is an 8 ft. by 12 ft. painting by Upadhyay from 2009 that was displayed at the Centre Pompidou in 2011. The handling of the current financial crisis, regionalization and urbanization, and modern and traditional values are all in conflict. The variety of perspectives challenges notions of a "typical" Asian city or a common Asian identity while giving Western audiences a fascinating glimpse of the changes taking place in Asian contemporary art and architecture. Hema made the decision to focus on metropolitan environments where individuals experience challenges, struggle, lose themselves, and try to build their own lives. 

Her personal experience of displacement after leaving her homeland of Baroda, where she completed her education at the MS University Faculty of Fine Arts, for Mumbai served as the inspiration for her research. Upadhyay's sculptures and photographs are greatly influenced by her concern for the underrepresented immigrant community. She finds inspiration in the experience of her own family's relocation from Pakistan to Gujarat, India. Her artwork sublimates the studied experience of displacement in the context of the city's power over its inhabitants. 

Waqif is a young installation genius in modern Indian art who creates beauty out of trash and decadence. Aditi Joshi creates urban art from plastic waste. Five Asian "megacities"—Beijing, Shanghai, Mumbai, Delhi, and Seoul—each with a population of at least 10 million—are shown in the exhibition's enormous sculptures and installations, each of which captures a unique aspect of its urban environment. Looking at the artwork of Indian painters while Ai Weiwei has a Beijing bicycle exhibit and a massive snake affixed to the Museum wall's roof is fascinating. 

Aditi Joshi likes the ambiguities of plastic. She gained attention after doing a solo exhibition at Mumbai's Gallery Maskara. She blurred the gap between form and substance in her first solo performance, which caught the attention of critics. Both the subjects and the components of the sculptures were made of plastic. She resurrected the notion of waste, especially plastic, from the trash heap because of the mess she saw in the city.

 

In order to elevate the unassuming plastic to islands of creative intensity, she interacted and experimented with her medium. The outcome was explosions of color and visual poetry. She accomplished this by combining perceptual restraint with spontaneous instinct. She implores viewers to study bygone and overlooked artefacts with fresh eyes by accentuating the sublime and evocative. She created her art, "Untitled," in 2016.