This artist’s paintings entrance and intrigue to a degree that those of the great initiators of postwar, world-conquering American abstract painting no longer do. In the work of Pollock, De Kooning, Rothko, Motherwell, Kline, Still, and Newman, for example, it has become easy enough to say how their paint was applied to canvas, and to assess the resulting technical effect, by merely observing the finished product.
In the paintings of that generation, there is no real mystery now, if there ever was, as to how the works were physically executed, and what anti-skills may have been required. The same may be said of the next generation’s Color-Field, Post-Painterly, and Minimalist abstraction: work by artists such as Olitski, Noland, Frankenthaler, and Stella, with a notable exception in some of the gravity-assisted work of Morris Louis.
All these artists produced canvases whose technique, or express lack thereof, quickly became obvious to the initiated: a variety of manners which gave logical rise to terms like Action Painting and painting-as-process. Despite the new-world shock of their revolutionary, non-depictive nature, these were not paintings whose technical qualities were mysterious and fundamentally astounding. Indeed, much of this art inherently flaunted its deliberate, often spontaneous crudeness: its dripped, poured, slung, sloshed, scraped, spread, splattered, mucked-over, and/or house-brushed rejection of delicacy.
That phase of art history paved the way for the rebirth of a conscious yet liberated refinement so spectacularly employed in the work of Marlene Tseng Yu. Like natural wonders beheld for the first time, her paintings can literally take one’s breath away, with the lovely, deep mystery of their technique. Her paintings both enter technically unexplored territory, and achieve effects that are unprecedented. Critical inquiry has yet to uncover and explicate this artist’s methods whose results are so freshly dazzling. Her work belongs to the current innovative frontier of contemporary art in that it comprises a new, thorough exploitation of the physical properties and possibilities of paint on canvas and paper.
For centuries, art at the highest cultural level strove to imitate nature. But in the present century, it embarked upon a relentless process of breaking down and purging its own arbitrary, authoritarian artificiality. Yu’s work transcends this now-exhausted era of analytically dismantling the former resources of painting. Her art has come to imitate nature again in a new way, and has culturally paralleled or converged with the intellectual emergence of chaos mathematics and fractal geometry. Yu’s hitherto unimaginable paintings now stand on equal footing with that science’s iconoclasm, in representing to us a new-true empirical nature of the physical world experienced through our sense of sight.
The import of postwar abstract painting was mostly a matter of what a given artist was dismantling, or dispensing with. Jackson Pollock eliminated the brushstroke and divested line of any depictive function, so that it finally became the mere evidence of an arm’s motion in dripping the paint onto and across the canvas. Mark Rothko eliminated line altogether. The quadrilateral forms in his paintings have only blurred, non-linear edges, so that pure color resonance became the essential point of his art. Morris Louis found a way even to take the motion of the human hand out of the act of applying paint, by simply letting the liquid acrylic stream across the canvas by laws of gravity. At last, the clean Minimalism of Ellsworth Kelly then removed all trace of human agency from painting.
The development of abstract painting was thus a gradual, inexorable process of the divestiture of technical elements. This succession is brought to a screeching halt in the work of Marlene Tseng Yu. Instead of impoverishing the artistic discipline she practices, her work replenishes it with an amazing recovery and advancement of the technical resources of painting. Her work displays a rich variety of original technical effects and accomplishments, and creates a distinct new version of the possibilities of non-figural visual imagery. It also raises the newly resurrected issue of artistic beauty in a way not previously explored with such painterly profundity.
Yu’s work has been as enthusiastically admired as any exhibition the Las Vegas Museum has mounted in the two years it has occupied its stirring new quarters. As LVAM’s second-anniversary show, her work has filled the waiting walls of the museum to an extent and to an effect that no other art has yet done, or is likely to do again soon. Her work is earthly in its swirling, dizzying detail, yet cosmic in its sweeping scale and scope. The artist herself has spoken of the revelation that seeing her work in this museum’s soaring setting has been to her: a vastness of view not afforded in her studio in New York, that high, imperial citadel of culture where acreage comes so dear, and where the stupendous vistas are vertical.
Marlene Tseng Yu’s art ranges from magnified-microscopic to as monumental as the walls of a canyon on Mars. Here in the open American west, her work expands the spirit like cinemascope, deepening our breath and exalting our vision. Her art thrusts one thrilled into the renewing endlessness, the immeasurable, churning cosmos of the forces of nature we live within. Her paintings orbit around one in this museum with awe: a fearsome love of the earth as deep as the Pacific, as wide as the beautiful western sky.