FOREST RAGING:
PAINTINGS BY MARLENE TSENG YU
Robert C. Morgan, Ph.D.
Marlene Tseng Yu's paintings offer a visual intelligence that is beyond remarkable. Her paintings reveal an extravagance of worldly demeanor that is rarely seen in art today. The kind of issues and feelings made manifest in her visual vocabulary -- the shapes and colors that evolve through her steady eye and hand -- suggest a resilient flow of energy that is boundless and yet miraculously controlled. One might never notice the means by which she exerts her control. Her paintings are like good theater where the presence of the director remains unknown. Her lavish colors are hidden in the clouds, speaking a language that we do not understand – the language of the forest, the raging forest, given to primitive forces, pulsating torrents that are deeply embedded within the human mind.Marlene Yu’s paintings present (not represent) the tempest in the wind of nature, the solace in the eye of the hurricane, the artist’s conscience that refuses to deny its own source of inspiration. She tames the wild and gives exorcism to the replete nonsense that surrounds our digital decadence. Her paintings pour forth with abundant conflict as they quietly seek the center, the perfection, through an effervescent serpentine resolution. The primary, amorphous coils of energy roll in and out, covering her surfaces, evoking new spaces, new solitudes of loneliness, giving us the sense of that we are possessed by a nature that has either been lost or forgotten, a nature from which our minds have become attached. Indeed Yu’s amorphous coils take us to the very epicenter of consciousness where we may discover our colliding affections as we stutter in the wind of urban desire.
Marlene Tseng Yu came to the United States in 1963 from Taiwan and graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Colorado in 1967. Being in the high mountains of Colorado – so different from those of her native homeland – must have had a deep impression upon her. In 1968, one year after her graduation, she wrote: “I love the many elements in our environment, be they as broad as the horizon beyond or small as cells under the microscope. In this vast setting, I hope to capture the spirit of the universe, its quiet and angry moods, its colors and forms.” Until the present, her point of view as an artist has not changed. She continues to work steadily and without equivocation. She has remained on a single-minded path. After more than fifty solo exhibitions and many important group exhibitions, Yu continues to paint without mitigating the intensity of her message. Her paintings give us nothing less than a sanctuary for the eye and a place to remember what constitutes the very fiber of being.
To see a painting by Yu – whether it be large or small – is to open the threshold to an experience that gives art a renewed statue, a rejuvenating sense of being in the world, an offering that goes beyond the obvious into another world of the imagination. Her immense painting, entitled Emerald Forest, is clearly (to my eye) a tour de force. (Yu and I agree that John Boorman’s film by the same title is an unacknowledged masterpiece!) As with the Pre-Raphaelite Westerners of the Nineteenth Century, there is a kind of solipsistic tension in the folds that collide with one another into these up and down pyramidal shapes. The pyramid, of course, implies a stabile geometric form, a structure that ties the painting together, that remarks on its horizontal reference to the landscape. Yu’s painting is deliberate in this way. It does not refrain from its assertive thrust outward from the interior. It goes to the center of the forest primeval. It puts us there. We are suddenly in the place where we tremble and shiver as the light cuts through the clouds on the wake of the deluge.But her sources are both Western and European. There is also a reference to the magnificent screens of the Ming Dynasty – to the decorative colors, the representation of foliage, rivers, mountains, and the elegant openness, concealed within the interstices of the folds of her canvas. Other themes employed by Yu include the Forest Wind, Forest Moss, and Forest Fire paintings. Each of these series expels the notion that nature is static. They are about movement that is essential to our consciousness. Yu allows the scale and the color, the diagonal sweeps of color, the build-up forms, and the white clouds to suggest a creative energy that is everywhere to be found, a kind of purposeful animism that offers delight. Her paintings are a retreat from the mediated excess of our electronic dynasty.
Here we get another aspect of nature, another view of time, another appeal to the human spirit – to move ahead to discover hope amid the raging fires and rising winds that engulf us in an atmosphere of negative politics and paranoic sublimation. There is something about Yu’s painting that informs us to think, to move ahead, to go on, and to survive. When I look at the abstract wind in her paintings, it is more real than abstract. When I look at Yu’s forest fires, I am comforted by their rage and exorbitance. When I look at her Emerald Forest, I feel comfort and solace. Such paintings are a testament not to remain static, but to launch into the stream of life and embrace optimism. Her paintings are profoundly spiritual.
One cannot say that Yu’s paintings are on the same order as the formalists of the sixties – not Frankenthaler, not Francis, not Olitski. If anything, her approach is anti-formal. It is more about the hand and eye responding impulsively to the connection between thought and the physical world. Yu’s paintings present an allegory of how to live in a world that is dismissive of nature, a world that is calculated with affectation, a world fraught with greed to the point of knowing nothing else. She gives us a vision of hope – not a calculated strategy about careerism in the art world. Her vision of the forest is an allegory of the human mind, a wavering between light and dark. Her paintings suggest a way out of this morass, a light into the future.
