Asian Traditions/Modern
at ARC Gallery, through October 25
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The ink drawings of Sabro Hasegawa are even clearer examples of “wandering” compositions. Though he lived most of his life in Japan–he was arrested there during World War II for refusing to make propaganda art–he gave lectures in the United States on the relationship of calligraphy to abstract painting that were attended by painters such as Kline and de Kooning. In two untitled works from 1956, he combines widely varying lines in designs full of life but also, to Western eyes, oddly accidental, as if randomness were not excluded by these expressive, controlled brush strokes.
Two untitled 1957 paintings by Tadashi Sato are among the show’s most austere–and most luminous. A Hawaiian native inspired in part by tides and tidal pools and also a student of Zen, Sato paints broad fields of cream and off-white punctuated by a few lines, a silent, meditative world that engages the eyes and mind in a kind of dance in which contrasts at once assert themselves and dissolve: the small variations of color both create profound shifts in mood and seem profoundly unimportant.
The ab-ex painters also dwarfed the viewer with their huge, gestural, or intensely colored canvases, not so much by the size of their works as by the power of their forms. Where Leong’s mountain has a wandering ridgeline whose ups and downs reflect nature’s variations, the ab-exers were determined to shape their lines to their will. Leong’s picture, like most in this show, requires a different, more active viewer willing to take time with each new painting. The same might be said of Tseng Yuho’s exquisite collages. An art history professor in Honolulu and a scholar of Chinese art, Tseng created the collage Embodiment (1964) out of gold and platinum leaf. A grid of gray lines underlies gold bands and silver ovals, the gold often yielding to corroded-looking brown patches. As in Hasegawa’s drawings, there is no “picture” or diagrammable composition, no central focus. Wandering, the viewer begins to see previously unimagined dramas in the tiny details of the multifarious surface. Embodiment engages the viewer in the process of learning, or relearning, to see.
In some works, such as Almost Protected, the smears seem to cover the subject and background almost equally; in others, such as Maja, the girl and dog inhabit a protected oval of relative clarity surrounded by near chaos. Though Rosenthal is hardly the only photographer to “decay” her images, her combination of mechanically precise photographic lines, engulfing smears and colors, and subjects related to loss is affecting. The empty chair in Gone seems about to be engulfed by the smears that rob photography of its precision and become metaphors for the natural processes that will return us all to dust in the end.
