Marlene Tseng Yu's Dream Series
by Cynthia Nadelman
MARLENE TSENG YU's dreams seem suspended in a watery medium. And indeed they are. Limpid and floating as this world of hers may seem, though, it is rendered in clear crystalline strokes before her water-based media – watercolor and water-thinned acrylic on large sheets of saturated paper – have a chance to dry. Rather than coaxing and worrying paint, the artist uses the time she has to illustrate visions from her mind’s eye. Occasionally, she accentuates the images with pencil or ink. Yu, who formerly worked in a nonrepresentational vein, points out that her work is still abstract, especially in scale and compositional space. Now it’s the images she coaxes and worries.
Self-portrait, 1985. In front of painting, "Winner Takes All".
For her disciplined mastery of brushwork, Yu credits her early art training in Taiwan. There she also studied anatomy in the academic western style, for which she must now be thankful, as legions of artists recently schooled in this country struggle in frustration with the once again viable figure. “But here I learned to create,” she says, referring specifically to her time in graduate school at the University of Colorado in the late 1960s. In Boulder, the landscape tradition of the artist’s ancestors came into contact with that of American abstract painting. Interestingly, the emphasis there was on water media, and in this Yu was most qualified. It’s not surprising to learn that one of her heroes is Morris Louis, the master of stained canvas. It is Yu’s control of such factors as wetness and timing the making of her large-scale works that allows her to retain such a fine balance of intention and spontaneity. Other dualities and opposing forces – male and female, water and fire, man and nature East and West, soft and hard – seem to follow naturally.If some sense of the connection between natural phenomena and the human body has always been implicit in Yu’s work, this sense began to take explicit form in 1984. In Enchanted Rooster, the artist who had most recently been painting landscape forms, presented a pair of breasts – presumably her own – as twin mountaintops, with some fallen leaves at the base and birds in attendance. The colors were muted. Next in the work Adoration, she portrayed a pair of voluptuous, vapory buttocks painted light blue, with a rooster – this time, and obviously male symbol – looking on. Then, full female torsos began to appear, always headless (in dreams we rarely see our own faces), along with a growing menagerie. Colors became brighter and compositions, more varied.
One almost moonlit example, Reaching for Sleeping Beauty, shows a woman’s bluish torso glowing from neck to ankle against a dark background. The head seems to have been torn away at the neck, or to have been covered by the decaying leaves depicted in that area of the work. A large hand reaches toward the torso, and some twisting snakes, a frog and a ram are on hand. One can even discern, or imagine, a man’s mysterious, partially obscured face in the upper section of the work. From the very first, Yu has been concocting a rich brew of the erotic, the symbolic and the whimsical.
Snakes, rams, frogs, swans, roosters and now deer are all frequent denizens. They are rendered rather realistically but in dreamlike, symbolic and sometimes primarily formal configuration. We both identify with the female dreamer and feel taken into the animal confidence; we are at once awed by the swirling or still forces of nature and one with them; and we are given to believe that our own minds and bodies hold keys to knowledge that we rarely use. The ram, Yu says is one of her favorite animals to depict, mainly because of its form; as it turns out, her husband is a Capricorn. The frog, people have pointed out to her, is a disguised or bewitched prince in western folklore; in Chinese interpretations, he represents a man not good enough for the woman in question. The artist welcomes different reading of the animals – from the Zodiac, Chinese tradition, Greek mythology, the Bible, Shakespeare, or modern psychology – but states that her own inspiration is mainly accident or intuition, not calculated symbolism.
Yu is interested in monumentality (the torsos in her works are usually life-size or larger), and the rabbits and doves of her earlier watercolors seem all but extinct in the newer work. Strong animals with rounded forms, through which novel combination she would represent the male principle, are the ones that inspire her. There are exceptions, though: in an unusual newer work, Midsummer Night Dream, inspired by a trip to Niagara Falls, Yu presents a stag with ornate antlers against the backdrop of a rushing waterfall. Though there is water in this scene, it is not the lapping enveloping fluid of the earlier watercolors. It takes a contrasting work such as this, which almost seems to signal the start of a different series, to make us see what a hermetic and at the same time, universal dream world Marlene Yu has lulled us into.
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