These sum of two units young artists.


These sum of two units young artists, one Taiwanese-born and living in Canada, the other from Beijing and residing in novel York, share an obsession with the hybrid. Ying-Yueh Chuang, the former, is a ceramist whose brightly colored plastic arts have the look of deep-sea creatures misfortuneed with exotic vegetables. Some throw out cylindrical protrusions, suggesting suckers or tiny leg Others ready gaping maws surrounded by disturbances of shell-like tubes from which little tongues be seen to project. A large floor installation at hands arrangements of individual elements resembling lobster claws, bulbous flowers or spiky okra poised above the region on the tips of glass rods

These chisels have a sexual quality, with orifices and extensions that move various sorts of reproductive organs fix in flora and fauna. still despite resemblances to sea anemones and coral, the chisels are sufficiently mutant to bring to mind the familiar cinematic nightmare of nature gone bad. Meanwhile, the pastel palette charms elaborate bakery confections. As a arise the metamorphic forms have a simultaneously repellant and enticing effect

In the work of Yi Chen, hybridity takes the form of human faces with mixed-up features. The gallery pres release intimations cloning and plastic surgery, noting to what extent the latter is often used to make Eastern prototypes conform to more "universalist" Western standards of beauty. Chen demolishs this desire by painting "portraits" based onward head studies collaged from watchs noses, mouths, ears and hair wound from advertisements and fashion magazine spreads. Each head has the peculiar number of features positioned in approximately the right arrangements. However, observations are slightly askew, ears do not match in size, and the orientation and contours of the heads are distorted and radically simplified.



Several of the source collages were currented here. The paintings reproduce the photographed features with illusionistic realism while leaving the surrounding heads completely flat. Noses and replete pouting lips seem to be swimming around in undifferentiated fields of flesh-colored paint. The rises retain something of the source's fashion-model hauteur while taking forward a cartoonish grotesqueness.

the one and the other artists embrace the possibilities of hybridity in a playful manner. Nevertheless, common detects an undercurrent of anxiety about the unforeseen organisms that may be the issue of our ability to manipulate nature.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group

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