THE ART OF NATURE, THE NATURE OF HER ART
AN INTERVIEW WITH MARLENE TSENG YU
Gerrit Henry
New York Art Critic
Throughout her career, nature has always been Marlene Tseng Yu’s primary inspiration – its moods, its weather, its terrain, its waters. Accordingly, it hardly seems strange that Yu should start off a conversation about her work with a memory relating to the nature surrounding her in her birthplace in Taiwan.“I want to tell you,” says Yu – a pretty, petite woman with charm, and sagacity, to spare – “my hometown in Taiwan is a beautiful place, with mountains all around, and fields. The mountains are different colors – green in the mountains close to you, blue in the background. It’s very much like Switzerland.”
Whether or not the remarkable scenery had any direct influence on little Marlene, she drew from any early age – “I drew everything, everything I saw,” she remembers. Her family’s reaction? “People thought that my father would expect me to be a doctor, since he was a doctor. But he saw I had a talent. He always encouraged me to draw. And you know how nice it is, when you’re a child, and someone praises you.
“He himself,” Yu continues, “liked to make sculpture with bamboo, and he was an inventor. I remember him saying, ‘Creation is the happiest thing in the world!’ Three months before he died, he started to paint. The paintings were wonderful – he didn’t have formal training, but he painted some masterpieces.”
Yu herself was headed toward formal training of a distinctive sort. After high school, Yu was off to the National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei, “the only school that had a fine arts department in the 1950s in Taiwan.”
The next four years were a decided crash course in the plastic arts, Eastern and Western. “I got basic training in Chinese painting, including Chinese-style brushwork and Chinese philosophy of art. I was also taught Western art, drawing from Greco-Roman-era plaster casts and from live models.” She also studied anatomy, watercolor, and oil painting.
Yu got her BFA from Taiwan Normal University in 1960. Then, in 1963, she came to the United States to do graduate work under a scholarship granted by the University of Colorado, Boulder.
“Even at that time, I thought I might just be a teacher after that – maybe a college teacher,” says Yu. Still, she was fairly enraptured by the work of the American Abstract Expressionists she was learning about at the university – “I liked the action, the color,” she remembers. And, in her watercolor classes, under the influence of Professor Gene Matthews, Yu was increasingly becoming drawn to one of many water-based mediums then being experimented with – acrylic paint, which was not widely used in America at the time.
The transition to large-scale work came about soon after she received her MFA from Boulder in 1967. “I was teaching at Denver University,” she recalls, “teaching only two days a week. I had lots of time – I started to draw. Then I decided it should be bigger – and bigger! There was, though, a problem here with framing – my first large-scale work in paper, twenty feet, had to be cut into four panels.“With acrylic on canvas, there was no limitation to the size, there were no limitations on the framing,” Tseng Yu remarks (although she has worked large-scale on paper as well). All that free time in Denver also gave rise to the style of painting she still maintains today.
“I started to combine what I’d learned in Taiwan with what I’d learned here,” Yu explains, aglow with the memory of discovery. “As I said, I liked the color and action of Abstract Expressionism – why not combine Abstract Expressionist color with Chinese technique, with nature as my inspiration?”
* * * As well as being a supreme painter, Yu is no slouch in the intellectual department, as she hardly could be given that inward sagacity mentioned earlier. “When I graduated from Boulder, my masters’ thesis was ‘The Parallel Development of Chinese and Western Landscape Painting.’ I compared and contrasted them both through many centuries up until now. I discovered the great differences between Western and Chinese landscape.“In Western painting, man is the – master. Western perspective is head-on – whatever you see in front of you.
“In Chinese landscape painting,” the artist explains, warming to what obviously is a cherished topic, “man is very tiny. Nature is the master; the human being is a tiny element floating in the universe. This is the ancient Chinese conception of landscape painting. When the Chinese paint a mountain, they paint the bottom of the mountain. They also paint the top of the mountain, but to do this they imagine themselves as a bird – they fly, they view things, they look around. So their perspective is, they can look down, they can look up, even all over.
“I used this concept to help me in my own sense of perspective – looking at things from many different positions.”
Tseng Yu met her husband-to-be, James, at the University of Colorado in the mid-‘60s, where he was an architecture student. In 1968, the couple came to New York – “I had all of these paintings, and James said, ‘Let’s go to New York and show the world!’
“We didn’t know if it would be difficult or easy coming here – we were just two young people! We were told, ‘If you want to show in New York, you have to show on Madison Avenue’ – that was the ‘hottest’ place. “The first gallery I stepped into,” Yu continues, “was Cerberus on 72nd Street. I liked what they had in their window. So I went in and showed them my slides. They gave me a show that September – the first gallery I went into!”
Yu’s incredible good fortune – bolstered by her predilection for making remarkably fine fine art – continued after a NBC executive bought a scene of a volcano that had been hung in Cerberus’ window just before Yu’s first exhibition. The executive’s enthusiasm led to Yu’s being interviewed on the old “Today” show by the estimable Barbara Walters. “I didn’t know who Barbara Walters was at the time,” says Yu. “She was very young. But things happened quickly after that. After the interview, I got letters from all over the country, about how much people enjoyed the show.”
To look at one or two of Marlene Tseng Yu’s paintings from roughly this period, and beyond, is to begin to understand the hold her work can have on our imagination, personal or collective. Wax Melting, 1970, from the ongoing (1965-1993) “Melting Series,” presents the viewer with what seems to be an elliptical orb, inwardly aglow with reds, yellows, and even purples, outwardly seeming about to burst its hot yellow ground. Are we watching some form in a fiery state of actual meltdown, or is some new form of being – vegetable or mineral, terrestrial or cosmic – coming to pass before our eyes? More restrained in temperament, perhaps, is another Melting from 1970, in which a tan and black globular form spews green-edged, Chinese-technique-“tears” out over a mottled, mustard and white ground.
Later in the ‘70s, and in the 1980s, Tseng Yu was attaining to the large scale that she prefers – because, “when I do the big paintings,” she smiles, “I feel very happy. I love to emphasize life and spirit in my work, through painting the effects of natural phenomena – their rhythm and movement, which echo the moment in time. I create various textures with my brushstrokes to convey the forces of nature.”
And, just so. Molten Lava, 1984, attains to its grand scale of 42 by 72 inches almost as if to plastically accommodate the rush up the paper of red and purple lava, as it pushes away to either side of itself foamy white spume. Pink Sweep, 1986, offers a scene seemingly painted by angel-wing, as pigment is swept and splashed all over the paper, and an elegant chaos is achieved. This work, too, is a heavyweight, weighing in at 36 by 48 inches.
The super-sized scale, as opposed to a more diminutive one? Yu explains that large and small scales demand different treatments. “With a large scale, I can go all over – with a small scale, it’s so limited. I use a big brush – my largest brush is 88 inches long – and, once over a small canvas would be it, with that. On the large scale, I can go beyond.”
A little more about Yu’s process? “I mix the water and acrylic with chopsticks,” she laughs. “After so many years of painting and experimenting, I’m now familiar with how wet the brush must be for a certain effect – or, how dry. That lets me work more spontaneously with the mediums, to know what I should do here, what kind of brushwork I should apply there.” “Total control of ‘wetness’ and total control over timing of paint application,” says Yu, is the most important key to her work.
What about her ongoing impetus for doing series of paintings instead of individual works? “I guess,” Yu thoughtfully posits, “when I started, I would paint the sky, the mountain, paint the river, all kinds of things. That grew to be confusing, so I put them all in series. The more series I do, the more series come out of them. And I’m inspired by my own work – I’ll do one painting, and maybe the next one will come from that. Maybe it will be certain colors that attract me, or some kind of form.”
And, “all’s well that ends well,” as Yu’s series – be they sinuously frigid “Glacial Gardens” or gently hyperactive “Geysers & Springs” or classically Asian “Waves & Waterfalls” or intricately epic “Concave Veils” – certainly prove. Nature more than has its day – Yu penetrates beyond the veil of its outward appearance into an essence that finally seems strangely, and supernally, human.
* * * Yu’s acrylics-on-canvas and acrylics-on-paper have remained remarkably true to one another over the years, perhaps because of the fact that, as Yu points out, they evolve – like nature’s forms – out of one another. But, in the late 1990s – as seen in this catalogue and on these walls – she has effected some changes in her work that have made it more glorious – and, somehow, more intimate – than ever before.Take, for instance, Forest Moss, which, at 120 by 216 inches, is an oval that fills up one entire wall. All of Yu’s trademark painterly delights are here for the having – the highly charged, highly “Western” color, the active and activating brushstroke, and the precision of picturing in the service of a non-pictorial style. But the scale – and the passion – are new. Tseng Yu here gives us another world, a global universe parallel to ours, yet goes beyond ours in its sublime mysteries and refined depths.
Even more gargantuan dimensions are attempted – and attempted successfully – in Avalanche. On a mind-boggling scale of 12 by 36 feet, Yu has taken up acrylic and brush to paint for us what is as much a mindscape as a geographical terrain, as much a roiling psychological state as a grand natural disaster – a mural, in short, for our troubled times. As if wishing to offer some relief from all this cosmological drama, Yu has also painted the relatively pacific, similarly 12-by-36 foot Undercurrent, another lengthy mural the fleecy white coral and buoyant aquamarine currents of which offer us nature at her most inestimably calm.
Installation view of "Undercurrent" at Las Vegas Art Museum, with artist standing in front of painting.Of course, in order to paint with this much trans-global enlightenment, an artist has to know pretty well what she’s doing. “My painting is on the borderline,” says Yu toward the end of our conversation in her SoHo loft. “It could be abstract, it could be realistic. Abstract painting is two-dimensional – there’s no depth. To get no depth, you have to have similar degrees of color. But, no depth is no fun. So, my painting has depth – then it’s really not abstract anymore. I walk the line. To achieve in one painting two qualities – abstract and realistic – is my goal.
“I think and hope,” she concludes, “people know my work by these effects.” And, we know her work by its singular attractions, and its high-intensity integrity. All painters sign their work – Marlene Yu’s has its own signature. Her painting is becoming “a force of nature” itself.
