Ching Ho Cheng: The Five Elements at Shepherd Gallery
April 7th through May 9th, 2015
58 East 79th Street (between Madison and Park avenues)
New York, 212 861 4050

Likely the first American artist to prominently feature the selfie, Tseng Kwong Chi has already become an important figure in the history of contemporary American photography and performance history, even though he died of AIDS in 1990. His work is on view at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery. And Ching Ho Cheng, not quite as well known in New York art circles, deserves equal status and recognition for his remarkable psychedelic paintings and torn-paper collages, which maintain a startling contemporaneity — this despite the fact that Cheng, too, died during the AIDS crisis in 1989. His work is currently being shown at Shepherd Gallery, on the Upper East Side.

The two shows demonstrate the fact that, early on, the art of Chinese expatriates in New York was not fully recognized, but this failure was not because of a lack of accomplishment. Indeed, Tseng and Cheng formed a nucleus of a small, but remarkable group of Chinese artists working here during the 1980s, including sculptor Ming Fay and multimedia artist and author Mary Ting. Their activities, begun well before the mania for Chinese art arrived, reflected the budding realities of being an Asian artist in the city’s varied cultural context.

Of the two, Tseng has received the most publicity as an originating participant among the Asian-American avant-garde. He also successfully connected with the downtown scene in the 1980s, becoming a close friend of graffiti artist Keith Haring. His black-and-white photographic art, in which he poses in a Mao suit alongside bohemian comrades or the world’s wonders, is a much a performance event as it is a documentary record.

In New York, New York (Brooklyn Bridge) (1979), Tseng offers a startlingly forceful image: he is seen jumping straight up into the air, towering over the graceful if slightly worn lines of the Brooklyn Bridge, one of the great icons of New York City. As usual, Tseng wears his Mao jacket and dark sunglasses, His left hand, clenched into a fist, is raised high above the bridge — or so it seems, given the low perspective he uses in shooting the photograph. At the same time, he holds in his right hand the shutter-release cable that enables him to photograph himself.

As a picture, New York, New York (Brooklyn Bridge) is a visionary romance invoking the city and bridge, but it also announces the extent of Tseng’s ambition. It is clear here, and in Hollywood Hills, California (1979), in which the artist assumes a smart pose, looking upward on the left and wearing reflective sunglasses, with the famous Hollywood Sign in the background at right. Not only was Tseng posing as a prophetic tourist, he also was asserting the right of a Chinese immigrant to participate in the exclusive, fully American rite of passage through the appropriation of historical icons.

The situation for Cheng is comparable, but also different. In the late 1960s, he made psychedelic paintings: highly detailed and patterned works that feel like suspended music, more or less inspired by the great rock melodies, and the great guitar solos, of the period. One work in gouache and ink on rag board, Queenie Study (1968), feels like a spiral slowing moving downward, away from the viewer. The descent is accomplished through circles of red and black bands — dotted with myriad spermatozoa — which ring more and more tightly as the imagery moves toward the center of the composition.

One untitled work from 1987 consists of torn rag paper colored with iron oxide. A leaf-like piece of torn paper, coppery and regularly dotted with depressions that resemble craters, is placed upon another copper-colored sheet whose angle of placement can only be seen at the bottom of the composition. Cheng commits himself to imagery of more or less uncontestable beauty.

Cheng’s determination to create something memorable, even something exquisite, resonates in profound ways. An untitled canvas from 1988, created with iron and copper oxide, as well as acrylic paint, is stunning in its range of colors from gray to black to a fiery copper hue. On the upper left is a black egg-shape, done with acrylic; it balances the differing background colors, which are not directly legible as imagery.

A much earlier work, from 1979, is a very subtle study of a window’s shadow on the wall. Painted with gouache, it marvelously suggests impermanence. The windowpanes are rendered as being on an angle, with a single band or bar separating the two sheets of glass. The band and background are painted a gray-blue, and as a study, the painting is wonderfully satisfying, a kind of image we often see and remark upon, but never capture because of the mercurial nature of daylight shadows.

If Tseng and Cheng were merely pioneers as Chinese artists during a time of remarkable cultural change, their work would be less valuable even as it documented, both abstractly and figuratively, the spirit of that time. But these artists are highly intelligent; moreover, they are technically accomplished in their chosen mediums. Tseng’s photos are memorable in formal terms, just as Cheng’s paintings and torn-paper collages remain in the thoughts of his viewers at least partially for their excellent execution. One hopes that the lives of these two men will remain secondary in interest when the actual works are looked at and read for what they are: sophisticated artworks that hold the viewer’s attention.

In fact, Muna Tseng, sister of the artist, has remarked that writers may focus “too much” on her brother’s death; the same might be true of Cheng as well. This makes sense, as death played no role in her brother’s art, or in Cheng’s. Both men celebrated life. Tragically, both men were stricken young. That doesn’t mean, however, that their work is immature, or that they produced only small bodies of work. Now, Tseng and Cheng are carefully presented to the public by their sisters (Muna and Sybao Cheng-Wilson), who do their best to increase awareness of each artist’s achievements. Time will determine whether the work will be considered major; it is this writer’s belief that Tseng and Cheng will be included among the very best artists of their time.

The post Visionaries and Visions: Retrospectives of Tseng Kwong Chi and Ching Ho Cheng appeared first on artcritical.

January 29 to February 28, 2015
958 Madison Avenue (at 75th Street)
New York, 212 628 4000

New York veteran Lisa Bradley’s abstract paintings communicate feeling above all else. Often looking like cloudscapes, and usually occurring in a dark, midnight blue, Bradley’s pictures summon visions of endlessness on a cosmic spiritual level. Her work is open to contemplation and deeply felt experience; the paintings are mystical in nature and suggest the sky, the ocean — places where one finds and retrieves the self in heightened circumstances. Because the paintings are so resolutely abstract, it is hard to pin them down to a particular place; Bradley’s audience must imagine both the emotion and its provenance in processing the inchoate intensity of her art. Championed early in her career by the famous dealer Betty Parsons, Bradley can claim kinship with major New York School artists such as Rothko and Pollock; however, her independence as a painter is notable, in large part because she is so determined to present an undertow of feeling and force through abstraction alone. Interestingly, though, the radical self-containment of Bradley’s paintings often opens up to sweeping vistas that relate to the infinite. So the works have the tendency to switch back and forth between closed and open states. Thus, Bradley’s broad horizons issue forth from a relatively narrow spectrum of expression; the paintings are closely related, and their cumulative effect on the viewer is striking.

How does Bradley’s art compare now, when seen in the light of rising artists? The start of her career belongs to a different time in New York, when painting was of primary importance in the hierarchy of contemporary art. Things have changed — there are many kinds of art vying for our attention — but abstraction has never died out here, where the romance and legacy of major New York nonobjective artists continues to make a pronounced impact. Bradley consequently looks like a painter who has continued in her own fashion as she follows her creativity in subtle ways. Her style, large and voluminous, is found in sequences of related imagery. One moves from work to work and gains appreciation of the dense color and mysterious patches of light, which heighten the sense that something is about to happen. The feeling one has on seeing the paintings is that of silent imminence; it proves hard to explain them with words.

Indeed, intellectual readings fail to explain the meaning of Bradley’s art. In the fine painting Passing (2011), we look at a dark-blue background, against which passages and spots of white contrast in luminous fashion. Although it is not a large painting, Passing presents a spectacle indicative of imminent change — we can ask what it is we are passing through, or if the changing sky or currents of the sea are about to engage in another transformation. The title of the painting, a single word, hints at the occurrence of something reshaping; it is an idea supported by the abrupt contrast between light and dark in the painting itself. As Bradley’s viewers, we are struck by the intense flux of elements caught in a particular moment, just before everything alters. Another painting, Through This (2012), feels like a study of the deep sea. Like Passing, it is painted a dark blue with bits of white color rising from underneath the surface. The title suggests a meaning, but it is hard to say exactly what it is; the image is an intuitive experience.

The oceanic feeling of Bradley’s pictures, both in a literal and figurative context, never goes away. Indeed, the grandness of the pictures is what sustains them. Larger than life, they display a ready familiarity with sublime feeling. Nothing Lost (2012) could nearly be the background sky in one of El Greco’s more melancholic paintings; instead of blue, Bradley’s work brings forth a few blurs of light in a nearly black setting. The implications of the picture’s title are as mystical and incipient as the art we see. At times Bradley’s enterprise can become unclear by her refusal to explain or define her motives. But Bradley is a painter who believes in large philosophies. Because she is working with nearly a boundless sense of form, particulars give way to large insights. So Bradley’s art reminds us of the formless attractions of color alone, and the pleasures of meditating on the infinite. She leaves us room for thought.

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December 12, 2014 through January 25, 2015
56 Bogart St (between Harrison Place and Grattan Street)
Brooklyn, 718 473 0819

Deanna Lee makes paintings and drawings that reference several influences: the biology slides she looked at while growing up (her mother is a scientist), the actual pattern of the grain of the wood she paints on, her heritage as a Chinese-American artist who has copied reproductions of Asian paintings. These experiences and conditions have resulted in very good art; her paintings demonstrate a fascination with the cusp between abstraction and figuration. The latter is evident in Lee’s treatment of her imagery, which can suggest topological maps or, in her ink drawings, some of the Chinese landscapes she is familiar with or the jagged images of an artist like Clyfford Still — one painting is directly inspired by the American painter. Lee shows us how a miscellany of influences can enrich and deepen our experience of painting, especially in New York City, where so many artists come from different backgrounds. We are by now quite used to the various reports of artists with different experiences from our own. It is clear that this has been the strength of New York as a cultural capital, which remains a center for artists who want to work out relations between American culture and their own new — or in Lee’s case, relatively new — history of immigration.

Lee’s art evokes feelings of nostalgia for lost ways of seeing. But she regularly contemporizes her perceptions by seeking unusual sources for her art. In clfrd (2014), clearly a reference to AbEx painter Clyfford Still’s style, Lee also constructs an elegant gouache-and-acrylic composition that builds off the lines of wood grain on the face of her panel support. These lines occupy large passages in the picture, particularly the vertical body of light purple on the left side of the work. In the middle, viewers find a ragged vertical of yellow that cuts into the purple hue seen on either side of it. Some deep red, mostly enclosed by the purple, shows through toward the edges of clfrd; the origins of the painting’s beauty derive from a tradition well understood in America, where Still’s legacy is well known. Lee’s reading of the past shows us how a painter can find a dimension of change in the idiom she works with.

In AWGP 3 (2013), Lee works on a smaller scale; the painting’s dimensions are nine by twelve inches. Repetitive light-blue lines, again a reflection of the wood grain beneath, look a bit like a mountainous Chinese landscape. They occur on a background that changes from a purple below to olive green above, with a curling mauve strip dividing the two areas. The work leans toward the decorative, but not in a negative way; one is reminded of the high hills and broad mists of Asian painting traditions. There is a point where Western abstraction and Asian traditional art meet, for the latter’s painterly effects can be isolated and turned into something non-objective. AWGP 2 (2013), another small painting, works in a similar way. The picture, which presents regular horizontal lines of dark purple repeating above two equally divided green grounds (one a dark forest color and the other an acid green), could be the detail of a contour map. Its thin strips begin with a lake-like image inserted at the bottom of the composition. Here the feeling is that of an oasis, a point of reference dictated by harmony. It resides in what could be an actual place, one very nicely detailed by the painter.

Eagle Street 1 (2014), one of six ink works on vellum put up in the show, continues with the notion of a repeated outline, in this case showcasing the closely patterned cracks of her studio wall. Looking a lot like the skin of an onion, the painting has several thin lines that edge out of the body of the bulging image. One of the best things about Lee’s art is the multiplicity of its references, which in this instance range from landscape to abstraction to the rendering of a particular thing. Her work’s ability to bring up several allusions at once is one of its greatest strengths. As a painter, Lee offers us a language that is more widespread in its inspiration than it seems. Moreover, the specificity of its structure — the studio wall pattern — allows Lee to work from a reference that is culturally neutral, even if the image’s material — ink — looks to a Chinese past. As a method, this is extremely interesting, for it supposes that the means of inspiration can be as specific and local as the place where one makes art, as the title of the piece indicates. In general, Lee’s paintings remind us that today’s artists often explore, more than kind of, cultural effect; Lee does this extremely well.

The post The Pictorial: Deanna Lee on the Cusp of Figuration and Abstraction appeared first on artcritical.

Inspired by meeting John Cage in New York in the 1990s, after pursuing cello studies at the Oberlin Conservatory, Theresa Chong’s early work incorporated chance/random aesthetics and musical notation into elaborate and elegant ink painting. Now, midcareer, Chong returns to an abstraction that skirts Asian traditions in ways that are deeply original: small marks on exquisite paper hold their own between highly worked, nearly textural embellishments and a fine sense of overall composition. The small paintings, usually with top and bottom bands framing the composition, occupy that hybrid, Asian-Western territory that after the length of a generation has now reached the point where bridging two distant cultures has become a critical cliché. This does not mean that Chong’s efforts in this area are to be faulted; instead, it seems that the practice of appropriation has become so widespread as to lack the visual punch it once had.

But Chong’s double reality has little to do with the theft of one style or the other. Instead, in her work we come face to face with a stylized treatment of abstraction built upon gouache brushstrokes and colored-pencil markmaking. Areas are constructed from darker and lighter shades of black and gray, so that the lighter domains feel very much like islands in a dark sea. While the first impression of the artist’s efforts is that they are primarily abstract, over time they take on the suggestion of natural effects — of what exactly, we are not sure, but they do seem to imitate nature. The realms are not tied to a classic grid pattern; instead, they are resolutely organic in both small forms and the overall expanse of the composition. Chong points out a general direction for interpretation by naming her works according to entries in the I Ching, the ancient Chinese manual for the practice of divination. Titles such as Following or Gathering Together form a visual commentary on a literary text with a weighted philosophical orientation.

The patterns in the works correspond to rubbings of Chinese stone markers, as Lilly Wei points out in her catalog essay. The myriad small, fine lines represent duration, the passing of time, while the lighter sections of the drawings correspond to passages in which the stone has dwindled, the result of weathering. No matter the specific cause of the image, these drawings are resolutely beautiful, confirming a generally Asian perception of the artist’s hand as it faces nature. But Chong does not necessarily stop there — it is important to realize that despite the static nature of drawing and painting, her works embody the notion of change over time. In K’UN (Earth) (2014), horizontal rows of very small vertical lines mass into two darkly painted organic shapes that look like lakes surrounded by a land mass. Two black bands, on top and below, frame the composition. The feeling is one of earthen weight — the image corresponds nicely to its title. And despite the small size, the feeling of density is very much alive in this piece, likely the result of the intricacies of the drawing’s surface. The delicacy and large number of the short lines shows how a small surface can be loaded with weight thanks to the technical prowess of the artist.

The feeling of an imagined landscape is taken up in Lu (Walking Carefully) (2014), although nothing specifically belongs to a rendering of nature. A high number of lighter areas complicates the painting and gives it a variable density. These areas range from quite small to relatively large within the composition, which is nearly 12 inches square. Two broad black bands of paint contain this small scene, at once abstract and figurative in its suggestions. Huan (Dispension) (2104) consists of a large, relatively white light area of crosshatching, with miniature points of white. Three smaller islands, composed of the small, darker lines, drift in the open sea of cross hatching, while a rough, dark triangular area dominates the upper right of the picture. The feeling is that of a still pulled from a film.

Collectively, these drawings of consummate skill and precision form a sequence that will remind Chong’s audience of an album of Chinese ink paintings. While they lean toward abstraction and, as their titles imply, the portrayal of ideas, the pictures also abound with natural themes. Chong’s combination of approaches indicates that nothing is entirely abstract or completely figurative. Discerning the similarities and the differences is a source of compelling pleasure.

The post Imagined Landscape: Theresa Chong at Danese/Corey appeared first on artcritical.

Locations:
534 West 21st Street
521 West 21st Street
197 Tenth Avenue

192 Books:
190 Tenth Avenue

David Cohen on Christian Marclay, 2011
The Review Panel, November 2010
David Cohen on Mark di Suvero, 2010
Deven Golden on Robert Grosvenor, 2010
The Review Panel, March 2008
Jonathan Goodman on Jackie Winsor, 2008
The Review Panel, February 2006
David Cohen on Carl Andre, 2004
David Cohen on Mark di Suvero, 2003

More information can be found at Paula Cooper.

Full index entry for “Paula Cooper” at artcritical

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Milton Resnick deserves recognition greater than what he has received until now. This large show of work covering his entire career, presented in immaculate galleries at the epic-sized Mana Contemporary arts complex in Jersey City, goes a considerable distance to recognizing Resnick’s contributions. From the start to the end, he was a painter of high courage and integrity — someone who belonged to the first generation of Abstract Expressionists but who never quite found the validation he is worthy of. At this fine show we have much of his oeuvre in a single place, where his contribution can be assessed from the vista of his entire career for the first time. Photos of his pictures cannot do justice to the rough but exquisite surfaces he came to paint over the decades of his efforts; there exists within the body of Resnick’s art a vision that promises to be seen not as tangential but rather central to the New York School’s early history. In fact, the Mana show makes it clear that we have missed integrating Resnick’s art into the accomplishments of the New York School’s first generation. His gifts, from the early colorful efforts to the final depressive, but marvelously rough paintings accompanied by simple figures, clearly need to be organized within a revised understanding of the art of his time.

It is surprising to see Resnick as a somewhat neglected painter, in large part because he was so much in the thick of things in New York. Born in 1917 in Bratslav, Ukraine, Resnick immigrated to New York in 1922 with his parents, where the family took up residence in Brooklyn. He took art classes at Hebrew Technical Institute, Pratt and the American Artist’s School between 1929 and 1934. Unfortunately, his father disapproved of his studies in art and forced him to leave the family’s home. He began a relationship with Elaine Fried around 1935, but she left him for Willem de Kooning in 1938. During the Depression he worked for the WPA and he served in the US Army during the Second World War. Afterward, he became a founding member of the Artist’s Club and was friendly with Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky and de Kooning himself.

In 1948, Resnick met and later married Pat Passlof, a fellow painter, and traveled to Europe, but he was unable to paint there due to emotional difficulties. He returned to New York and in 1951 he helped organize the noted “Ninth Street Show.” At the beginning of the 1970s, Passlof and Resnick separated, with Resnick living in the upstate New York town Rifton. Max Hutchison Galley began showing his work in 1972, and continued to through the early ‘80s. In 1975, he and Passlof reconciled. In 1984, after decades of abstraction, he started to incorporate figurative imagery in his work. By 2000, Resnick had begun suffering from arthritis, which made it impossible for him to stand and paint, though he continued to work on paper. Then, in March 2004, distressed over his illness and his difficulties working, he took his life at home in New York. Resnick was recognized by the New York art world, but never to the extent to which his contemporaries gained fame.

Resnick’s art realized a considerable amount, both graphically in the overall gestalt of the painting and, as he developed, texturally in the surface of his art. Even early paintings by Resnick display great perspicacity. An untitled oil on board from 1946 nicely demonstrates how sophisticated a painter he was even before turning 30. In this small work, we see some of de Kooning’s influence, his organic forms echoed in Resnick’s work of this time. Biomorphic yellow, purple, black and red forms, along with two small, green squares, embellish an off-white ground, communicating a lyric experience to Resnick’s audience. This poetic tone never entirely leaves; it remains even when he starts to paint according to a darker vision.

Resnick’s art throughout evinces a thorough interest in surface; and this becomes clearer as time goes on. During the 1970s and ‘80s he began making exceptionally rough, striated exteriors, nearly minimal in appearance. In a very large (more than 10 feet long), untitled work of 1975, the application of paint is deliriously thick, building up and off the canvas to the point of low relief. The color of this horizontal painting, an olive green with hints of yellow underneath, shows us that his gifts included experimentation with color in highly original ways. Here Resnick exhibits his talent for understated color, as well as his penchant for an impasto surface. Melancholy in feeling, the painting’s muted hues bear an ongoing, and deeply moving, emotional stance. Straws in the Wind II (1981), another big, horizontal painting, continues the artist’s interest in a heavy build-up in paint; its color, a dark charcoal listing toward black, is dense with excrescences, adds a heightened tangibility to its roughened surface.

One finds these works embracing gloominess in the 1980s, and the emotional register of his work remains substantially the same for the rest of his career, being oriented toward a dark, emotional palette. The show also makes it clear that the figure entered into Resnick’s paintings late in his career. In one 30-by-40-inch canvas from 1989 we see him playing with imagistic art: two dark, blue and flesh-colored figurative forms occupy the middle of the painting. However, they could equally be read as abstractions in the midst of a highly original, sharply idiosyncratic black ground. One seeks, mostly unsuccessfully, an outlet enabling escape from the gravitas of the picture, which offers a relentless surface and small room for egress. The painting’s bleak mood would be repeated again and again in the late paintings Resnick made.

Likely the most pertinent fact about Resnick is his emotional intensity. But even as his pictures communicate his drift into depression, you can see him working hard on a tangible surface that remains a statement about art rather than a personal treatment of his psychology. The paintings, both early and late, are so consistently high in their achievement, they must be seen as representative of a major artist.

One hesitates to ascribe too much of a psychological reading on seeing a body of work by a man whose tragic end is difficult to accept; however, such an interpretation might well describe the general tenor of his output, difficult as it is. One has to weigh the melancholy of these final paintings against the tragedy of Resnick’s suicide. Clearly, they communicate a more and more isolated psychological state; the artist’s viewers are reminded throughout of his death to come as they contemplate his morose art. Resnick lived his artistic life under the shadow of more famous painters, but that fact should not be allowed to diminish his ambition and his reach. Indeed, his accomplishments are not to be denied; his paintings expand the spectrum of the Abstract Expressionists who used paint as a physical entity, artists such as Pollock and de Kooning. In the thicket of his surfaces, we see the AbEx demand that we look at paint simply as paint, so that the surface is neither given to narration nor to intellectual content. It is what it is. At the same time, we do not do justice to Resnick if we walk away from some sense of a personal presence in his pictures. The emotional depth of his abstraction is highly impressive, and must be seen that way. In a way, he survives because his art communicates negative feeling in magisterial ways — a bit of a contradiction, perhaps, but one that asserts the truth of his career.

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