NOW ON DISPLAY
The dozen large-scale color photographs that make up "Zhang Huan: Seeds of Hamburg," now at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, document a 2002 performance piece by the young Chinese artist, and they pack quite a wallop for such a small show. Zhang's subject matter, almost to the exclusion of everything else, is the human body, usually his own. Here, he enacts a ritual involving a large cage, honey and birdseeds (applied to his body), and 28 doves for a ruminative narrative evoking confinement and escape, captivity and freedom, barrenness and fertility, life and death, rebirth and rejuvenation. Take in Zhang's work as well as "In Pursuit of Mists and Clouds: Masterworks of Chinese Painting," elsewhere at the Norton and you'll get a good general sense of Chinese art past and present. ("Seeds of Change" is on display through February 20; "In Pursuit of Mists and Clouds" is on display through January 9. Both are at the Norton Museum of Art, 1451 S. Olive Ave., West Palm Beach, 561-832-5196.)
Roman Vishniac was more storyteller than photographer. In his photographs, currently tucked into a tiny gallery at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, one sees picture after picture of the haunted eyes and bundled, hunched figures of poor Jewish people living in Eastern Europe, taken from 1933 to 1938. For some, the photos were likely the last ever taken; a year after Vishniac finished his project, the Nazis occupied Poland, and soon after began the systematic extermination of Jews. The photos in "Images of a Vanished World" are not always artistically perfect. Some are blurred or just out of focus, or the composition is faulty. But Vishniac, conscious of both anti-Semites and Orthodox Jews who were fearful of having their picture taken, hid his camera in his coat, with the lens peeking out of a buttonhole. Despite the shaky quality of the photos, they are searing. There's a man who, having been evicted from his own shop, returns every day to sit on its stoop, from either habit or faith that the shop will be restored. There's an old woman sitting in front of a synagogue that has fallen into disrepair. (Through January 16 at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, Mizner Park, 501 Plaza Rd., Boca Raton, 561-392-2500, www.bocamuseum.org.)