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With “Made in Mexico,” UCLA Hammer Museum’s latest art exhibition, curator Gilbert Vicario poses the question “What Makes Art Mexican?” with no clear-cut answer in mind.

The exhibition, which was on display at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, defies audiences’ conceptions and expectations of Mexican art by downplaying issues of death and sacrifice and abandoning symbols such as the Catholic and pre-Columbian image of the bleeding heart. Instead, it features a diverse collection of works by 20 contemporary artists, only eight of whom are Mexican.

“(The exhibition) is an attempt at putting together a survey of art that was being created in Mexico City, mostly within the last five or six years … (to) give people an idea of the range of artists and the range of work that was being made down there, and to let people know it’s not just about Mexican artists creating contemporary art, but about a sort of creative exchange that happens in a particular geographic and cultural location,” said Vicario.

Vicario is in part suggesting that what makes art Mexican has little to do with the artist being Mexican. Erik Göngrich of Germany represents a handful of artists in the exhibition who have been inspired by Mexico.

“I’m personally happy that I’m in a show where finally Mexican artists are combined with international artists,” said Göngrich. “You have to rethink the (traditional Mexican) themes of exhibitions.”

The exhibition even includes an artist who has never been to Mexico – Japan’s Yasumasa Morimura. His intense fascination with and respect for Frida Kahlo has resulted in a series of identity-blending, gender-bending photos of himself as Kahlo.

“The reason to arrange any given group of artists together, hang their work together, and show them together is because theoretically, their work is in some kind of conversation or dialogue with each other, and sometimes that can be a positive thing,” said Saloni Mathur, an assistant professor of art history at UCLA.

Vicario believes this exchange of ideas is made possible by the growing globalization of the past 10 years, and identifies “globalism,” with a slight conceptual twist, as one of the show’s themes.

“In the art world, the issue of globalization has been used kind of as a framework for certain group exhibitions that look at a particular x, y and z in art and give examples from maybe 20 different countries,” explained Vicario. “I was thinking it would be interesting to do that, but invert that exhibition paradigm by showing how artists from many different countries work in a very specific country, showing how there has been a leap in accessibility of information around the world, enabling more people to be more interested and want to go to Mexico.”

“Made in Mexico,” according to Vicario, was a response to exhibitions that concentrate on a single nation, all the while making assumptions about an entire country.

“That was one notion that I was trying to take apart. … Here in Boston, I got a lot of resistance,” said Vicario. “People who spoke to me about it, who happen to be Mexican, were very kind of ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe they’re doing this exhibition.’ They came with a certain prejudice about what their expectations were. When they went through the exhibition, it completely changed their minds. It’s not another Mexico show.”