New stars in Indian Highway

The global contemporary art boom of the past decade has produced substantial contemporary art scenes in the swiftly growing economies of India and China, and you can see survey shows of both these worlds in London at the moment — one at the Serpentine and one at the Saatchi Gallery. But what a difference a bit of curating can make! Everything that Saatchi gets wrong in his Chinese show, the Serpentine gets right in its Indian one. While the Duke of York’s Barracks show is a chart of the cheesiest Chinese auction-house hits, the Serpentine is a treasure trove of subtlety and surprise. If you will permit a bad joke referencing a racially-suspect Seventies sitcom, it ain’t half art, Mum.

In India, as in China, prices for a handful of artists have rocketed as biennale curators have uncovered new talents with exotic surnames while freshly minted local billionaires have spent their profits supporting homegrown artists. The Serpentine show takes a careful look at the Indian contemporary art scene, and instead of attempting an overarching survey, presents an essayistic tour of a handful of contrasting artists.

There are new history paintings from India’s 93-year-old Modernist master, a multi-screen documentary of cinematic quality about terrible violence against women, sculptures made from whistles and rotating microphones about sectarian division, and a wall drawing of super-sized technicolor bhindis.

Striking out admirably against the self-absorption of the contemporary art world, the curators have organised events outside the gallery which draw in Indian literature, film and music. The awful terrorist attacks in Mumbai have given more impetus to this politically thoughtful show, which is not just Indian, but is also about India.

Typical of the shrewd tack taken is the way the exhibition handles the two shooting stars of the Indian contemporary art boom, Jitish Kallat and Subodh Gupta. Kallat’s large portraits of impoverished Indians, painted in a colourful screen-printed style, with their turbans transformed into intricate urban scenes, have become must-haves for aspiring billionaire collectors. Nothing that predictable here, though. Instead we have a series of photographs of dilapidated urban India, often decorated with stencils of Hindu gods.

Cenotaph (A Deed of Transfer) of 2007 documents the demolition of slum homes. So far, so conventional documentary photography. But Kallat’s photographs are lenticular — that kind of 3-D photo with a fuzzy surface which takes on depth and reveals hidden details as one stands at an angle to it — a kind of photography you will know from souvenir postcards of tourist attractions, cartoon characters and Princess Diana. Kallat’s process turns a photojournalistic essay into not only an alluringly colourful spectacle but also a conceptual work which plays on where tourists find beauty in India and ennobles a popular visual idiom.

Subodh Gupta, meanwhile, is India’s best-known contemporary artist, whose trademark works are made out of Indian cooking utensils. He won early fame with a set of shelves with neat piles of stainless steel pots and pans, organised according to minimalism’s simple geometries. At Frieze this year, you may have seen his large skull in the sculpture garden and decorative free-standing loops at the Hauser & Wirth booth made out of the same materials.

At the Serpentine, however, there is not a trace of his kitchenware. Instead, he presents an evocative installation based on the interior of an Indian county court. There are worn wooden tables, half-broken chairs, ageing electronic typewriters and bundles of creased files. Rusting padlocked chains snake through the legs of the furniture — a security measure which prevents them being stolen in India, but which Subodh took as a readymade symbol of the oppressive nature of Indian justice.

So far, once again, this appears to be straightforward documentary work, but having established this filmic "set", Gupta brings these elements together into an evocative, ramshackle construction in the middle of the room — a wardrobe stuffed with mounds of files, some in old red cotton bags which would spill out across the floor were they not held in by an assortment of ropes and a crudely welded iron frame. It’s a great image of a creaking and overburdened legal system.

I had become rather disillusioned by all the repetitive pots-and-pans pieces I’d see by Gupta over the past few years, and I loathe the terrible spin-off photorealist paintings of the same kitchenware which have been on show in every auction preview. The new work shows what resources this artist can tap as long as he doesn’t pander to the tastes of his dimwitted market of millionaire collectors.