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Ying-Yueh Chuang and Yi Chen at Plum Blossoms
Art in America, June-July, 2004 by Eleanor Heartney
These two young artists, one Taiwanese-born and living in Canada, the other from Beijing and residing in New York, share an obsession with the hybrid. Ying-Yueh Chuang, the former, is a ceramist whose brightly colored sculptures have the look of deep-sea creatures crossed with exotic vegetables. Some exude cylindrical protrusions, suggesting suckers or tiny legs. Others present gaping maws surrounded by rows of shell-like tubes from which little tongues seem to project. A large floor installation presents arrangements of individual elements resembling lobster claws, bulbous flowers or spiky okra poised above the ground on the tips of glass rods.
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These sculptures have a sexual quality, with orifices and extensions that suggest various sorts of reproductive organs found in flora and fauna. But despite resemblances to sea anemones and coral, the sculptures are sufficiently mutant to bring to mind the familiar cinematic nightmare of nature gone bad. Meanwhile, the pastel palette conjures elaborate bakery confections. As a result, 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 press release references cloning and plastic surgery, noting how the latter is often used to make Eastern models conform to more "universalist" Western standards of beauty. Chen subverts this desire by painting "portraits" based on head studies collaged from eyes, noses, mouths, ears and hair cut from advertisements and fashion magazine spreads. Each head has the proper number of features positioned in approximately the right arrangements. However, eyes 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 presented here. The paintings reproduce the photographed features with illusionistic realism while leaving the surrounding heads completely flat. Noses and full pouting lips seem to be swimming around in undifferentiated fields of flesh-colored paint. The results retain something of the source's fashion-model hauteur while taking on a cartoonish grotesqueness.
Both artists embrace the possibilities of hybridity in a playful manner. Nevertheless, one detects an undercurrent of anxiety about the unforeseen organisms that may be the outcome of our ability to manipulate nature.
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