Leigh Li-Yun Wen at Artemisia, through May 31
This work looks unusual even at the very inclusive Artemisia, and the same can be said of the other 20 paintings and etchings in Wen’s show. Born in Taiwan in 1959 to a family of modest means–her father was a farmer–Wen studied Chinese art at the National College of Art in Taipei, which also has a Western curriculum. She was a frequent visitor to Taipei’s Palace Museum throughout her childhood, and she cites Sung dynasty landscape painting as a primary influence. “They looked for a spiritual atmosphere,” she says. But Wen also points out that Sung painting was based on a close, almost scientific, observation of nature: “They did a lot of studies of water; they do water with a particular kind of mark making. To me they are very, very realistic.” Wen cites Western influences as well, particularly Brice Marden and Mark Tobey, two painters of abstract lines who were themselves influenced by the East.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
But the key to their power lies in the smallest of details. The figures are of cast glass, and their hand-polished surfaces have an amazing luminosity. The mixture of preternatural smoothness and palpable suppleness gives them life. The figures are at once naturalistic and distanced, remote. This distance is a quality that owes little to our present age, and it prevents them from even remotely resembling kitsch. They are instead advocates for an unfashionable idealism, their opalescent surfaces managing an improbable fusion of opposites: at once human skin and the embodiment of an ideal. The perfection of Africano’s surfaces, the ways in which their smoothness gathers and reflects light, gave me an unbalanced, even expansive feeling, as if these works are about something that cannot be shown at all. In this sense, they recall Wen’s Ocean.
