Chinyee: Enraptured by Color
By Hindley WangEnraptured by Color
Alisan Fine Arts
September 5–October 26, 2024
New York
Chinyee, Solace, 1964. Oil on canvas, 30 x 48 inches. Courtesy Alisan Fine Arts.
Walking into the apartment-style gallery space of Alisan Fine Arts on the Upper East Side, I’m met by a giant green field. The painting is covered in layers of warm green and yellow. The darker strokes lay on top, their gestures predictable, continuous yet spontaneous and poetic, as if they are wired in your own wrists. Reminiscence (1964) is the opener for the Asian American artist Chinyee’s retrospective show Enraptured by Color, a fitting title in that the abstract painter explored colors as their own thematics. The result of such an approach is a kaleidoscopic investigation of different pictorial orders of abstraction in response to color relations, one unsatisfied with monochrome or monotony. Each work appears refreshingly “local” within its own context and frame.
Echoing Reminiscence is Solace (1964) on the opposite end of the wall. The marks in this purple plane appear more abstruse, registering as faint textures in the dark. Compared to the dissolution of color in its green counterpart, Solace is anchored by two vague, geometric forms. Yet, upon closer inspection, one finds that the formal arrangements of the two are in fact similar—with no spatial disclosure of depth. The difference is mainly in color and its own interactions. The greens and yellows appeal to the immediately positive, while the tones of dark purples and reds retract and recede. But when taken as a pair, the psychological quality in the darker hues become more pronounced and specific, the lighter picture appearing dispersive and obscure.
Above the white marble mantle that stands between the pair is a watercolor painting. Appearing like an extrapolation, Untitled (2005) still displays a certain landscape sensibility coherent with its neighbors. Crimson clouds drip into the indigo underneath, twisting and turning in angular forces. Vertical scratches were made across the rice paper when it was still wet—a gestural scripture also visible in Untitled (1987) to the left of Solace. Rich ultramarine and magenta take vibrant leaps out of the muddled moods of layered strokes, into an almost translucent dance of illumination under vertically drawn lines of abrasion and energy.
Before moving on to the rest of this show, perhaps it is good to introduce the artist and the context to which she belongs. In many ways, Asian abstraction was a chance encounter, but also an inevitable paradox. For one, monochrome or visual reduction in conveying complex fields or emotions is fundamental to ancient Chinese philosophy and aesthetics. Yet, for the greater course of Asian modern art, “abstract painting” was more or less a foreign export, usually synonymous with Westernization as a result of diasporic experiences during the postwar period. Chinyee (1929–2023) first came to the United States on an arts scholarship in 1947, from Nanjing, China. She had a full life outside of art: she worked in the accounting department in the UN, before going on missions all over the world. She began her experimentation with abstraction in the fifties alongside the rise of Abstract Expressionism, though not quite part of its center. Though one does spot many familiar traces of others in her paintings, her audacious use of color is what sets Chinyee apart from her contemporaries. However, I think her unique experiences and the changing world outside her studio—because of her work as a full-time diplomat—were instrumental to defining her own body of abstraction that is at once traditionally sensible, canonically relevant, and vitally diverse.
Chinyee, Jaune et Noir, 1967. Oil and mixed media on canvas, 30 x 40 inches. Courtesy Alisan Fine Arts.Take Jaune et Noir (1967), finished during her first station in the Belgian Congo. The black rigorous marks across the surface achieve a forceful speed akin to a typical Franz Kline painting from the fifties, in which he would rework the black and white delineation repeatedly with house paint and slight alterations of hue. In Chinyee’s composition, black marks register as a blasphemy of landscape, covering a green horizon which peaks through the black crevices. The lower viscosity of oil gives the painting a softer sensation of time and speed, as if capturing the precarious moment just when ink meets water; taking a step back, it also evokes petroleum exuding from the earth’s reserve. The same formal treatment garners a quaint sentimentalism in Untitled (1967). With rounded brushstrokes dancing on the canvas, the fragments of colored paper underneath acquire a vitality that recalls the joyful movement of koi fish in a pond, swimming under a dark reflection. This pair of paintings attests to Chinyee’s worldly imagination and sensibilities that are only expanded by the vernacular of abstraction.
The second room showcases more of Chinyee’s bold and unnerving experimentations. A wall is occupied by her watercolor collages done in 1997. Although on smaller scales, these collages are ripe with play. The roughly ripped colored pieces are reassembled to disclose a tactile poetics in color, quite different from the pedagogical precision in the color studies of Josef Albers. The flatness typical of hard-edge abstraction evaporates wherever ink or color is spread on paper. It is also clear the fragments are all part of larger compositions of their own. The rough edges subvert the irreversibility of water, while the collaging stages interesting interactions between regions of color, each in its local gradient or in exterior contrast—marking a meta-picture in each encounter. Two blue paintings placed across the room from each other depict two modalities of water and see Chinyee employing long strokes to create fluid motions in her compositions that seek lyrical harmony. Even in larger abstract works, Chinyee’s paintings have a unique intimacy that draws one closer—not to be in awe, but to be moved. Chinyee was not working from life. She often depicted more obscure subjects that don’t have a visual form to begin with—as is common in ancient Chinese painting—which reduces the level of abstraction from its subject. Her abstraction tries to decipher her inner emotions and her open embrace of different sources of expressions in reconciliation with her roots. The result is a brilliant approach to the non-representational in a hybrid language, at once nostalgic and eccentric, reserved yet bold. These are painted with foreign tongues and native landscapes, from memory and living, all combined.