A SENSE OF PLEASURE
– PAINTINGS AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY EMILY WANG
2019.01.16-02.16
YI&C CONTEMPORARY ARTS
CURATOR: RUDY TSENG
COCURATOR: JENNY LEE
The concept of sight is a matter of sensation. For the visual artist, the life of the artist’s work springs from what can be seen of feeling. Even the intellect gives way to the shaping of colors and the ordering of forms.
The Sense of Pleasure
Introduction by Bill Scott
I met Emily Wang in 2010 when she lived in Philadelphia and was studying painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. I taught there then and was glad to meet her because I was curious about her paintings. I was surprised when she told me that previously she worked extensively with photography. An expertise in photography would not have been what I expected for someone so entirely devoted to her experiments using oil paints and charcoal. Emily was uninterested in painting like the other students who worked in a less perceptually grounded style than that of the school. Nor did she veer toward the representational imagery I naively might have expected from a student who was so well versed in photography.
In her studio, as visual stimulation, she set up, arranging and rearranging, complex still lifes from which she painted. They were grounded with vivid pink, yellow, blue, red, or green fabrics. Sometimes resembling a mountain, the fabrics often hid an underlying armature that felt as it rose to the ceiling. On top of this, almost scattered, were bottles, vase, pieces of fruit like apples or oranges, and flowers – sometimes she creates a visual jolt by juxtaposing opposite colors together and other times a lemon will vanish when placed on a yellow cloth. She does not create the traditional spaces of foreground, middle ground, and background one expects to see in paintings. She speaks of the influence of the compressed spatial relation found in Chinese painting she has known since her youth. Yet, she avoids presenting us with the distant vista one would experience when looking at landscapes.
Her narrative is not based so much on the objects she paints. The narrative with which she engages us is her ability to walk us through her painting process, showing us her decisions and doubts every artist faces when painting. In doing so, she tips her hat to the work of American artists like Mercedes Matter and Jane Piper whose still life paintings structurally combine high-key color with elements of Cubist drawing. Like them, Emily pulls one in to her paintings with a promise of pleasure yet, once there, the paintings do not allow you to perceive them without seeing and feeling the struggle required to achieve such imagery.
The space in Emily’s paintings is created by how she directs one’s eyes to move between objects and defined by the speed at which one’s eyes perceive and travel between these shapes. To achieve this, color and drawing exist simultaneously, sometimes aggressively battling each other as evidence of Emily’s own struggle to discover which will dominate the finished image.
December 10, 2018. Philadelphia
Exhibition Catalogue
