a dream of haptic realism

ying li. recent paintings.

new york studio school 

8 w 8th street

new york, ny 10011

june 6, 2013 - july 20, 2013

confession: i have a b.a. in art, but i never received a proper art education until college. because my mother was a fairly abstract painter and sculptor while i was growing up, the idea of getting a "formal training" rarely pressed me with great urgency, even though she had undergone traditional art curriculi. i drew mostly black and white cartoons and caricatures. i was an attentive observer of the world around me, but what i put down on paper were shapes resulting from my own heavy-duty imaginative filtering process. i owned my medium of expression--or felt my skills sufficient enough. i did not deem it necessary to know about the rules of proportion and perspective.

when i took an actual (the real deal!) painting class in college, i thought it one of the most difficult things i had ever done. i could sketch out a cartoon rendering of a scene or person in a few seconds, but paint would not do what i wanted it to do. this was incredibly frustrating to a person who was used to expressing herself visually. i was at the mercy of paint: i knew what i was trying to paint, but the mysterious mess of my canvas often resembled puddles of decomposed restaurant waste. to avoid muddying my colors, i spent lengths of time just standing before the easel. seeing my timid and trembling brush, my professor came up to me and told me not to be afraid of the canvas. easier said than done, i thought. but when i saw her paint a landscape for the first time, i finally understood what she had meant.

ying (we called her by her first name) and painting have been friends for decades. just like any old friends, they know each other very well--maybe too much. they share stories and laughter; they also fight. "be physical!" she used to tell us. for her, their time together appeared to oscillate between violent disputes and sessions of lovemaking. her land- and seascapes reflect the deep and complicated relationship between them and more.

the richness of her paintings stem from the two having gone to and seen these places together. she breathed the salty breeze of an island shore through the medium of painting. she heaved a bittersweet sigh under a shower of fiery maple leaves through the medium of painting. their memories cross paths but they also diverge. her paintings display a constant negotiation between their shared experience--a tumultuous love evolving as they journey through scenic adventures in nature.

photographic reproductions can never do justice to her work. her paintings are three-dimensional (like tree bark, she has said in an interview); a photograph inevitably flattens her strikingly haptic interaction with her medium. ying sculpts paint: she piles it up, smooths it over, twists, builds, carves paths. though small, her beautifully colorful paintings compete with the immersive experiences of large abstract paintings by pollock or rothko. 

each canvas submerges the viewer in a stream of hazy dreams that dramatically unfold with time. when we dream, our vision is blurry and the details of the scene slip from our memory, but the emotional experience feels more real than in real life. when we awake, the feelings linger, though we cannot recall exactly what we have dreamt. ying gives equal weight to every aspect of being present somewhere. she is a painter, but sight is only one gateway to the mysterious world of dreams, feelings, memories, and thoughts. we feel as we recall. we smell as we reminisce. a landscape may alter very little, but it begins to evolve in our (un)conscious as soon as we leave it. 

ying's paintings faithfully convey how we experience places as they change over time--as we change. we look back at photographs of the past to remind ourselves of things beyond what they contain within their frames. ying's work is her collaboration with her friend and love in their attempts to recreate the visceral, those things beyond the frames. as i stand before each, i willingly stand in awful surrender to how their memories unfold together. i can only dream of such romance between myself and writing.

ruins of yesterday/tomorrow

Leonardo Drew at Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
Sept 6 - Oct. 12, 2012

Here is a man who loves making things. So much so that he created an entire world out of them. And this must be what people mean when they say art has the potential to envision an alternate reality: Leonardo Drew, at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., has paved a window into a strange civilization that bears an uncanny resemblance to our own.

I use the word civilization because his massive constructions (both standing or wall-mounted) manifest undeniable traces of human industry and skill. A quick glance might suggest an impression of an arbitrary assemblage of found material (especially the charred and painted barricade), but a second look definitively rejects this initial impression to one’s embarrassment: his work is the result of such careful and painstaking labor that it appears almost neurotically obsessive. One can imagine Drew’s eyes burning up in pain as he sits in his studio for weeks, months, years, diligently cutting plywood into hundreds of perfectly two-by-two squares or one-inch-long splinters, then placing each piece, anointed with a dash of glue, into their own spot part of one giant, densely packed sculpture. I think of Yayoi Kusama hypnotically carving out circles on her canvases for days, or your grandma sewing away at another one of her quilts.

The installations also exude a kind of ghostly grandeur of ancient ruins. The striking element is the work’s pastness: this extinct community no longer exists, but there is no doubt that they did. One can perceive their mark not only through the pure scale of the remnants (the space of the gallery barely provides adequate room to contemplate the entirety of a given work from a distance), but also through the confident assertion of their power: imposing barricades tower over the viewer, phallic forms raise their manes and roar at the passerby, the intricacy of the work indicate discipline and pride of the maker’s own craft. The viewer navigates the space of the gallery with the fascination of exploring The Natural History Museum and their display of artifacts, perhaps from our own lineage. The wall sculptures’ intrusions into our space excite us like an encounter with the (fake) giant whale or a shark’s head: their presence is awe-inspiring but we constantly affirm that the immobile structures pose no actual threat. We can still regard them from the safety of our own positions.

But it is our imagination that causes the most tension: who were these people and what happened to them? They had a magnificent respect for the natural world—barely altered tree trunks and roots twist and turn out of their fixed spots, the man-made splinter pieces assume pulsating organic forms—yet it was a time after plywood’s invention and the sure signs of industry, such as the bolted pieces constructed from exact measurements (Number 159, 2012 is starkly aluminum). Some wall pieces, made mostly of flat rectangular or square cuts of plywood, read like blueprints of a city to be built or reconstructions of existed sites. In Number 162, 2012, for example, pieces of thick, hand-made paper provide a base for a gridded city bordered by a monstrous black forest; outside of the human habitation lie suggestions of water (smeared blue paint) and hills, along with neat groupings of rusted cotton and solidified mud. The city grid is a tactic employed to maximize space for a large population; yet these people leave untouched the gnarling forest—clawing its way into the viewer’s space—that seems capable of swallowing up the city itself.

Drew’s work is full of such strange juxtapositions: the dichotomies of our contemporary world—nature vs. industry—exist side by side, a condition that is increasingly difficult for us to imagine. In purely formal elements, too: from a distance, his large splinter pieces give the illusion of being plush and even inviting (starfish/flower-like Number 160, 2012), but an examination of the actual materials proves otherwise, not to mention the violently perpendicular eruptions of longer pieces from the wall. We live in an age of the modern globalized city, where nature is clearly marked off (parks, gardens, potted plants) from central human activity. Dichotomies exist almost like a necessity.

But there is another layer of strangeness. This civilization seems to have been built using remnants of a people that have existed prior to it; the materials could have been the discarded or destroyed materials of another begone age. For example, a substantial portion of Number 161, 2012 utilizes visibly broken wood that have not been cut into perfect measurements like many of his other works. Yet this site, too, is what remains as an evidence of its own past, abandoned in middle of construction. At the end of its trajectory into the inner gallery space, the structure seeks the support of a wall while the large beams that might have provided that role lean against another. The result is a double removal of time: we see both a corpse and the ghost that haunted it. But that ghost—could it have been from somewhere in our time? The attempt to assign Drew’s people to a specific point in our known history consistently fails us; ultimately, we only end up in exhaustion after fruitlessly spinning around and around, chasing our own tails.

But there is a way to accept this world: by rejecting a linear history. Drew allows us to escape the rigid structure of cause and effect—where we know all that’s been said and done—into a floating concept of time, where anything could be said and done, and perhaps has been already.

FOIL

 

The Ungovernables, 2012 New Museum Triennial at 235 Bowery
Feb 15 - April 22, 2012
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If the crowded and stiff (and overrated?) biennial at the Whitney uptown somehow adheres to a tame and sophisticated art-world sensibility, The Ungovernables, New Museum’s 2012 triennial resists it: much of the work in the exhibition—by a total of 34 artists, groups, and collectives—are political in nature in one form or another. All floors of an entire museum dedicated mostly to political art can prove a risky endeavor; political art, by definition, suggests taking a specific stance on a topic in debate, with which every viewer may or may not agree. However, the range of subjects and forms that the curator, Eungie Joo, and her assistant, Ryan Inouye, have chosen provide an excitingly new perspective on a variety of political views that demonstrate a powerful dynamic between each assembled under the same roof.

Of course, such a large number of works cannot agree to everyone’s taste, including mine, and some I found to be absurdly unappealing. For example, a corner on the second floor was densely occupied by a series of objects and diagrams/drawings that were part of the Times Exchange series by José Antonio Vega Macotela. The Mexican-born artist’s working method essentially consists of exchanging favors with the inmates of a prison in Santa Martha Acatitla. Since the artist is able to move freely around the outside world, the prisoners ask the artist to teach a daughter how to read, beg a father for forgiveness, etc., while they do what Macotela asks, such as record their movements within the prison throughout the day, let the artist take a fingernail sample from each, etc. The results on display are mundane keepsakes: densely collaged cigarette butts, clothes preserved in wax, and so on. Macotela’s project, sure, is noble; but from an artistic point of view, the work strikes me more like a scrapbook from a Peace Corps expedition than art that can stand firmly on its own. The only element that adds any interest to this series is his philanthropic gesture; unfortunately, the actual objects themselves show nothing of this elaborate back story.

Some works did stand out, one of which is Dark Day, 2012, by New York-based artist, Abigail DeVille, a piece that is installed halfway down the John S. Wotowicz Stairs, which connect the third and fourth floors of the museum. Almost as soon as I set foot on the first step, the persistent murmur of the visitors’ chatter ceased, replaced by what sounded like construction noise heard through a closed apartment window that acted like a prelude to what I was about to see. I could still hear these sounds as I walked down the isolated staircase then paused in front of an old, zip-locked copy of The Stargazer Handbook that had been stuffed into a rectangular hollow of the same size in the wall as if to stop a leak. I laughed as I recalled the prints from Lutz Bacher’s The Celestial Handbook scattered throughout each floor of the Whitney that were neatly framed. This recollection proved to become a large influence in my experience of the main installation, located a few steps lower, that looked like Beetle Juice’s demolished and abandoned closet in the projects at some ghetto-ized borough of New York City.

An opening had been carved out of the wall opposite the window side and the space inside was a complete dump, where most of the surfaces were painted in crisscrossing as well as parallel black and white lines. A torn piece of a wall leaned against one side, behind which was a collection of about 35 empty vodka bottles, a heap of a wooden fence-like structure leaned across a corner, parts of what remained of a spring bed mattress with other pieces of destroyed furniture hung helplessly from a broken ceiling, and a ray of uncannily warm domestic light shone down from what would be the floor above. This sight (site), familiar to those who pass by any run-down neighborhoods, still exists on the periphery, just like the way in which urban housing issues are pushed to the side by city councils in favor of more “pressing” ones; after all, the work doesn’t even get an actual floor for display, but the artist had to dig out and create a space for it. However, through its contextualization within an art exhibition as well as the painted lines that force the viewer’s attention to an otherwise common trash hole, DeVille’s installation demands serious inquiry into why and how such sights/sites exist. Then a pristinely intact painting of a woman holding a small rabbit also positions the work within an art-historical context: art is always a product of its societal conditions.

Once I made it to Brazilian artist, Cinthia Marcelle and Tiago Mata Machato’s, O Seculo (The Century), 2011, I realized that the noise I heard in the staircase was not from DeVille’s work. The 9:37-minute video begins with a view of a run-down but still empty section of a street. The camera remains fixed there, while for about five minutes, various objects—ceramic bowls, florescent lights, chairs—are thrown furiously into the frame and smashed to pieces by invisible hands from the right. Later, smoke appears from the same side, while the fixed frame still does not allow the viewer to see its source. The loop ends when its blank canvas becomes filled with chaos.

Another: London artist, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s 2011 portrait series is something of a rare specimen in the midst of new-media-installation art that fills most of the triennial. The initial impression of its out-of-placeness immediately gives way to the beauty of each painting; hiding in a fairly monochrome palette of brown, black, and other dark tones, the faces peer out at us, each eye reflecting that striking glimmer of titanium white. As if only the presence of whiteness can mark the existence of otherwise dark bodies, her larger canvases also leave small areas of the blank canvas exposed.

Overall, The Ungovernables offers a solid and diverse selection of works, without leaning heavily toward any singular political position. There is something for everyone, that is, unless you still believe in the concept of a pure and autonomous art. That said, The New Museum’s triennial is not for the naïve art-lover: be prepared to come face to face with difficult questions.