New York’s Armory Show marks its 30th anniversary this weekend at the Javits Center, a sprawling, brain-melting smorgasbord or overstuffed hodgepodge, depending on your perspective. 235 exhibitors — the world’s premier contemporary art galleries — exhibit what is purported to be the bleeding edge of today’s emerging contemporary art. It’s hard to explain how something could be both overstuffed and underwhelming at the same time, yet this year’s Armory felt less like a sophisticated showcase and more of a trade show. Could it be that the Armory’s years are showing? 

For all of its talk of avant-garde, this is largely a painting-dominant show, though the direction of the painting definitely tilts in the direction of figurative abstraction — or rather imagery that plays with the hazy edge of representation and perception. Aside from a very handsome and ambitious video installation by Isaac Julien, “I Dream a World,” multimedia does not seem to dominate this year. Mixed media and craft, however, do appear to be making inroads. The theme is really liminality — the hazy dividing line between what appears to the eyes as sensation and object and what registers in the mind. 

The nearly 1,000 artists represented in this show reflect its fatigue-inducing sprawl. Like this year’s Venice Biennale, the emphasis is on new work of young artists from the global South, with a glut of new and promising artists from African, South and Central American, and Afro-Caribbean countries. The representation of China and Korea is also incredibly strong, signalling a global shift towards art with sensibilities from diverse corners of the globe. 

Among these, Harper’s gallery features Hyegeneong Choi, a South Korean painter who depicts dumpling-shaped figures frolicking in glens, the whole scene glazed in deep washes of color. It’s deeply weird in a way that feels unprecedented, which is hard to do in today’s art world. The compositions are so baroque and the colors so intense as to appear almost parodic. On closer inspection, however, they seem to be studies in vulnerability, explorations of the malleable inner world of a younger adult filtered through the unremitting fantasy-scape of social media.  

Marine Ibrahim gallery is presenting Japanese artist Yukimisa Ida, who explores semi-figurative abstraction in the form of monumental portraits. They are violent in their application of paint, slathering it on and smearing it about with a forcefulness that in no way diminishes the presence of the subjects. Even so, it’s hard to know if the faces are folding themselves into presence or melting away. There’s something in the fierceness of their coming into presence that recalls the similar brutalism of Lucian Freud, but with a much-updated, 21st-century feel. 

Miami’s Spinello Projects presents the standout hyper-realistic paintings of the very young Esai Alfredo, which all take place in a deep purplish twilight. They are desert dreamscapes populated by young men enacting unspoken cinematic dramas, while a red neon line, reminiscent of a glowstick, runs through the background. They call to mind the extremely precise and dream-like realism of Mark Tansey, but with a more boyish, queer focus. Another standout in terms of sheer visual pleasure and sophistication are the Persian-inflected modernist abstractions of Kamrooz Aram, represented by Nature Morte Gallery. As with all modernism, Aram has an eye for color and flowing shape that sets the eye and heart timelessly at ease. 

Na Chainkua Reindorf mixes not only media but historical eras, in a way that is very much in keeping with the new contemporary hybridity. Her woven and cut-out mixed media figures, with their bold graphic lines set against painted backgrounds, often with woven or textured elements, appear to quote the sensibility of Beardsley, or even Art Deco, as much as they reflect on current contemporary themes and African mythology. A repeated figure, a twin-headed siren who also recalls Josephine Baker and Yoruba goddesses, evokes the type of surreal and culturally jumbled sensibility that seemed to typify art of the 1990s. 

This sensibility extends in the Robyn Ferrell-curated platform section, which features the enormous hanging fabric piece “Valkyrie Liberty” by Brazilian sculptor Joana Vasconcelos. The piece combines the massive scale of Anish Kapoor with sumptuously detailed handcraft and embroidery. Amorphous but immediately eye-catching, it is supposed to embody the protective energy of a Valkyrie over a battlefield, a new kind of non-denominational spiritual talisman lending its playful blessing to the art space. It’s playful, but it’s also a head scratcher.

Which brings us to a sculpture most emblematic of the entire show, by Sanford Biggers. It’s a Hellenistic woman wearing an African mask, along with other culturally jarring and inconsistent elements. A jumble, in other words. Not necessarily a critique, but also not a non-critique either? What is it? Perhaps the contemporary art world is making a retreat into an oversaturated interiority, where all the discontents of our respective cultural identities are being churned into symbolic hash for an increasingly bloated art market. Contemporary indeed.