Spring Pavillion, 2004, Acrylic, ink, pastel, graphite, on silk-applied paper
My review of the two-woman show “Transformations”, more or less as it appears in this week’s Ithaca Times.
Local abstract artist Syau-Cheng Lai is having a good year. For a week back in early February, her mixed-media on paper installation Visualizing for Bunita Marcus spanned the walls of Cornell’s Olive Tjaden gallery. Executed on four long sheets with a bewildering array of drawing and painting media, it was pinned directly to the wall. It effectively interwove moments of sparseness with those of almost dizzying density. It was a definite highlight for local art. Lai is also a noted pianist. Accompanying the installation was her performance of modernist composer Morton Feldman’s solo piano piece For Bunita Marcus.
Currently on view at the Upstairs Gallery is a selection of smaller, framed work by Lai. Its an impressive body of work, although nothing quite matches up to her Tjaden installation. In particular, I miss the interplay between its epic length and the close-up intimacy of her mark-making. Nevertheless, their combination of exoticism, playfullness, and rigor is exemplary. Characteristically, most feature a dense layering of eclectic textures—drawn, painted and even carved. A few are more minimal. She is joined by out of town ceramicist Ann Johnston Miller. Although not as diverse or quite as compelling, Miller’s work betrays a compatible fascination with her materials.
Evocative of Visualizing—albeit on a much more compact scale—are a series of thin, scroll-like pieces. Due in part perhaps to this compactness, their quality is somewhat uneven. Hung either in an upright, vertical manner or horizontally, they are matted so as to expose the rough edges of the paper sheets. Like the Tjaden piece, looking at these pieces can be akin to reading or listening to music, with a definite if not overpowering feeling of linear sequence.
An upright Shattering Sky features a mottled background of gold and dark brown. Hanging from the upper-right corner are wavy strands suggesting knotted rope or hair. These have been forcefully carved into the paper, revealing white below. In the lower right corner sits a jumble of hard-edged shapes reminiscent of the Louise Nevelson’s wood-scrap assemblages – although not for its wide range of hues. Standing beside Sky is Before Sunset. Divided into an intricate arrangement of wavery Klee-like horizontal and vertical bands, the predominantly red, yellow and blue piece has a textile-like quality. Pieces like Upload, Ski Jump and Watermill combine paper-white backgrounds with tighter, more rigidly geometric lines and shapes. These seem overly fussy, as if the artist was trying to make too much happen.
Lai’s smaller, more conventionally proportioned pieces have a more immediate impact. They compensate for their lack of breadth with their intensive layering. Her backgrounds are predominantly white, black, gray, red, pink, or gold over-painted with dark brown (the latter are scratched into revealing the color beneath). She often uses vertical and/or horizontal bands—hard edged or soft, thick or thin, visibly layered or opaque—to break up her compositions. Recurring motifs include illegible cursive script (running up and down in columns), Cy Twombly-like scribbles and erasures, dots and dashes, and suggestions of landscape elements such as horizon lines, waves, boats and crescent moons.
Deep Spring is particularly successful. Its horizontal bands of white, greenish yellow, warm brown and red have been extensively worked over with drawn and carved scrawls and loops, small impasto dashes and a blue arrow pointing offstage to the left.
Most of Johnston Miller’s pieces combine ceramic vessels with attached nest-like enclosures of grapevine (or in the case of Goddess Eye 3, copper wire). In Transformation, a smooth shiny orb glazed light green is placed inside the opening of a larger matte black blob. The small sphere is insulated with cattail seeds. Drawing – In and Open – Out are simpler: They are light green spheres in their vine enclosures. The long ceramic piece in Natural Dilemma resembles a rounded loaf of bread, right down to its toasted-looking brown color and rough texture.
Also by Miller are two parent and child pieces: the wide, plateau-like Cantilevered Form and the smaller squarish Cantilevered Bud Vase. Similar to Dilemma in color and texture, each has a outline echoing hole in the center. Bud Vase is so named for the smooth light green vessel nested smugly inside.
Other Lai pieces in the show include: Red Matrix, White Matrix, and Nuur Resides.
Arthur,
Again, I see why you like the Lai pieces. The textile resemblance is not just the blocks (like quilt squares) but on other pieces, the lines look like quilting lines. Of course, quilting lines are just a sub-version of line in general. In fact, in Watermill, some of the lines (as seen on my screen) look like stitching in which the tension has been deliberately distorted.
She uses an interesting combination of stark black and white with the colored geometries off to one side.
In White Matrix, it appears that some of the lines were incised from the reverse side of the paper. Is that just my eyes or do you remember if it was done that way.
Thanks for the review.
You’re welcome.
I think I must have had quilts in mind while describing Before Sunset. As for White Matrix, I’ll have to go check it again. Not that I mind doing that at all.
I love Syau-Cheng Lai’s work because is so lyrical.
One day, I will make a trip to Ithaka to see her art.
The lyricism can be something of a trap I think; it can be tempting to go on and on about how magical they are (especially her larger pieces as linked to above). What makes them work is how rigorously they are put together.
Arthur,
Your comment “the lyricism can be something of a trap” bothers me. Is it a trap for the viewer, who sings along instead of noticing the rigorous underpinnings? Or is it a trap for the artist, who might like the melody so much she forget to gird her structures? Or is it a trap for the reviewer, who might be seduced when she should be thinking severely intellectual thoughts instead of whistling cheerily?
I sound facetious, but I am actually interested in your point of view, because if you substitute “beauty” for “lyricism” (which is easy to do), it’s a frequent critical comment about quilted textiles. So how does the artist/viewer/critic get around the “beauty” or “lyricism.”?
June,
I suppose I meant mainly a trap for the viewer or reviewer. The artist knows what she’s doing. Lai’s paintings are indeed lyrical, but they’re deeply intellectual as well (I don’t know about “severely”). It seems disingenuous for to ignore that.
Regarding the description of artworks as beautiful as lyrical more generally, I would say that its okay, but I would feel obliged to add qualifications. Its as if lyricism by itself or unchecked is not enough or merely decorative. I suppose this could reflect a prejudice against decoration or against the traditional work of women. But I also realize that I could get in trouble for describing work by a women artist as lyrical without qualification.
I would appreciate hearing more of your own view.
Arthur,
I see her work as both lyrical and intellectual. I do see the structure, the pattern of the music.
Once, I relax into my summer, I may even be able to sing along.
Arthur,
Jay Hoffman and I are discussing my own work in something of these same terms (or at least I think that’s what’s happening). And I have a definite prejudice against the “merely beautiful” in part because so many of my colleagues use it to justify the nice and pretty.
But sometimes I think I’m also reacting to the word “merely” and the cultural dummying down of the idea of beauty.
So like you, I would want to add other elements to the lyricism, to speak of the work in other terms than the pleasurable, to play down the sheer pleasure of being in its presence.
Perhaps, though, the lyrical, based on a strength of intellect and artistic experience, is sufficient to make an art that stands on its own. The intellect involved might have a great depth and breadth, so that the beauty comes out of it but isn’t necessarily attached to any part of it but comes because of the weight of the artist’s experience and intellect.
I fear I’m just blathering. What I meantersay might be something like, once in a lifetime or two, perhaps a work is so astonishing beautiful that it simply needs to be discussed in those terms, without further ado about underpinnings.
I don’t know. I think Helen Frankenthaler’s work sometimes strikes me that way.
As a reviewer, of course, you do have to be very careful about what you say — you could seriously damage the artist’s reputation if you went on too much about pleasure and lyricism. And of course, you have to fill up the column with words, too. But that’s a problem of audience, rhetoric, the culture we live in, and so forth. A writer is always working with more or less malleable external perceptions. But I guess I’m asking if, in the privacy of your own home, you think that astonishing, amazing, uncanny, unequaled lyricism could be an adequate presence for a work of art.
And without some specific art in front of us, perhaps the whole discussion is impossible.
I overheard my name being mentioned…
It’s a tendency of mine, when in the presence of work by folks with Chinese, Japanese or Korean names, to go looking for calligraphic influences. The discipline of ink brush painting, which is part of the standard curriculum in many places, will lend a sense of sureness to the composition. In the case of Ms. Lai I can also sense the feeling of Japanese screens in the spatial architecture.
Lai is from Taiwan, which has been colonized by both China and Japan.