This lush exhibition by the Taiwanese-born, New York-based painter was titled “Forces of Nature” and featured works from the early ‘70s to 2008. In one of the museum’s ground-floor galleries, ten mural-size paintings, removed from their stretchers, hung on the walls.

As a pioneer in the “green” movement in visual arts, Marlene Tseng Yu anticipated such issues as global warming and conservation. Her subject matter seems inspired most of all by what she calls the “angry moods” of the universe, and her paintings are frequently impressionistic depictions of tidal waves, tornadoes, avalanches, whirlpools, and erupting volcanoes. The artist’s color palette consists of greens, aquas, purples, earth tones, and black, which appear to shift with the motion of the aggressive swirls.

Titles such as Whirlpool, Molten Lava Park, Forest Snow, Fly over Milky Way, and Tornado give clues to the kind of forms that are represented. However, in Tseng Yu’s world, a wave can resemble a patch of sky and a mountain might resemble a melting mound of ice. When viewing these shifting, abstracted images, the viewers’ eyes move involuntarily with the sweeping brushstrokes: it’s as if the painter were challenging them to take it all in the with one visual gulp. Despite the colorful violence in the paintings, though, Tseng Yu romanticizes nature, clearly enamored with its ability to replenish itself, and celebrates its state of continuous, majestic flux.