"PORTALS OF PERCEPTION":
THE PAINTINGS OF YEQIANG WANG
By Alison Kenzie
Portals: gateways, openings that promise entry into another space. They are everywhere in the paintings of Chinese-born artist Yeqiang Wang (or "Ye," as he is known in North America). Most concretely, for example, portals appear in the windows, doors, screens, mirrors, and blinds rendered in many of Ye's compositions.
On another level, Ye's paintings seem themselves to function as portals promising entry into the "real" world. For so meticulous is Ye's attention to light, form, and texture that we may almost believe we can see (if not touch, hear, taste, and smell) a reality beyond the paintings' frames that is really an extension of our own.
Paradoxically, this latter impression is made possible by the fact that Ye tends to work from photographs rather than from reality itself. By using photographs, Ye has the leisure to study at length something that is ephemeral or simply vulnerable to the whims of memory. And by assembling together many photographs of a single subject, he can add more detail to his paintings than could ever be registered at one time by the human or photographic eye.
But Ye does what the camera cannot--and, in so doing, he confirms his paintings' distance from both photography and reality. He leaves visible brushstrokes that disrupt the otherwise smooth surface of his works. He adds or deletes reflections upon the glass he renders. He deliberately blurs edges that would appear solid and precise in his working photographs. He gives clarity to other forms that would be obscured by shadow or by sheer distance.
Ye calls this approach playing "tight and loose" with mimesis. Its effect is to make viewers all the more aware that they are looking, and attempting to look through--through Ye's eyes, through the painting medium, through the conventions of realism, through the camera lens that had helped Ye frame and preserve his subject. In Ye's words, this approach "makes a common image unbelievable, and changes the viewer's conventional way of viewing." It can create "a feeling of distance and unfamiliarity," an "excitement in seeing," and a desire to see more (25). Equally, it can unsettle or baffle viewers as they recognize the limitations of both their sight and their understanding. Where does Ye's realism end and reality begin?
Ye is quick to identify these mixed emotions when speaking of his transition from China to Canada following his decision to pursue a Masters degree in Fine Arts at the University of Windsor. Ye had arrived in 1998 with an appreciation for Western culture, particularly as it had manifested itself in the Surrealist painting of the 1920s and 30s and in the West's greater acceptance of artistic experimentation. He embraced many of the challenges posed by living in a country that was at once foreign and familiar. Two years after his arrival, he would write:
[in Canada,] I can explore ideas that are outside my Chinese conventional understanding, even those that confront my value system. Here I may be able to loosen the constraints that dominate my work and try to be more direct in my expression as an artist. The open artistic attitude here can allow me to probe the limits of my creativity and confidence. (20)
At the same time, living in Canada sharpened Ye's awareness of difference. He began to see where Western values fell short of those he had imbibed in China. He felt pressure to abandon the realistic style that had been favoured in China, a style that he had honed through four years of study at the Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts. And he recognized the pitfalls of solely embracing a "radical" form of artistic expression. He now saw that, in the West, the radical had long become the conventional, and students were not being encouraged to master basic technique before they launched into their artistic practice.
Most poignantly, Ye also began to locate the many situations in which cultural understanding could never be reached. He continues to encounter such impasses today. Though he intends to remain in North America, he feels he will always be an outsider, someone poised before a portal that may promise entry, but never grant it.
Ye's Reflections series, begun in 2001, conveys most fully this tension between invitation and exclusion. Similar to the New York-based Chinese painter C.J. Yao, who concentrated upon depicting reflective surfaces in his works, Ye devotes intense energy and concentration to capturing the effects of light, shadow, and movement over reflective surfaces. Whereas Yao focused on the reflections themselves, however, Ye also captures fragments of the people, animals, and objects behind the reflections.
As in such earlier works as Hello Cathy (oil on canvas, 2000) and False Transparency (oil on two-sided board, collaged, 2000), the paintings of the Reflections series use high realism that invites viewers into window-like frames only to thwart attempts to reach and fully comprehend the world suggested beyond them. And here as in his earlier works, Ye conveys his fragmented experience of Western culture from within (and outside) the West, a place that is more of a "home base" to him than home.
Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that the portals seemingly offered by Ye's paintings open to a realm that we as viewers cannot enter. But rather than wait for someone or something to ease our passage to the other side, we might learn to appreciate the complexity--and the beauty--of the view from here.
Alison Kenzie
Reference
Wang, Yeqiang. Forces and Influences of the Eastern and Western Art Practices that Operate in My Mixed-media Works (Unpublished M.F.A. Thesis). Windsor, Ontario: University of Windsor, 2000.
* Alison Kenzie is a freelance writer of art based in Toronto. She can be reached by email kenziealison@hotmail.com.
