Sawako Nakayasu, Girls and Large Flowers, 2009
Would I call them white paintings. Or flowers. Chrysanthemums for health, chrysanthemums for death, chrysanthemums for the imperial. Do they or do they not last. A country, a region, a continent, in which whiteness is otherness. Silver, the whitest metal.
I step out to get some air. Walk 20 minutes to Monika Lin’s home, to her studio.
These subtle whitenesses, these silver, gray, paintings, these traces of color arriving through disappearance or accumulation. Or the lack of additional color. Or an emergence of an otherwise imperceptible arrival of light and its reflections.
Elegy in the fine delicate movement of brushstrokes. The soft press of hand-carved rubber stamps. Hard layer of resin to follow each gentle layer of manual intentions.
The white that swells, the white that recedes.
Clarity: sharpness, resolution, perspicacity. Minimal scattering of light. Translucency, some other kind of inner light. Just how far the light is allowed. Layers of epoxy, layers of paint. The opaqueness of a toxic residue. The artist removes her gas mask.
On my way to Monika Lin’s home, on Yongjia Lu (”兰温∑, “Street of Eternal Goodness”): in the air that surrounds me are particulates, traces of odors, toxins, fumes, exhaust. The dust and grime and debris of construction. Of destruction.
Clarity of understanding: in Chinese, a white light, mingbai (明白).
Suspension, or. Epoxy presses down upon the painted layers, figures, images. An act of oppression. Then it dries and hardens, to reveal all of it pushing back up into visibility. Or trying. Or failing. Barely perceptibly.
After 20 minutes of walking down Yongjia Lu I arrive at Monika Lin’s home and studio, where I sometimes walk into the faint residual odor of epoxy resin.
As if dimensions were fixed. Two-dimensional work accrues its third dimension through a thickness of layers. Spaces emerge. Look up, into drooping mass, geometric forms, shooting flowers and ghosts of herself.
As if one could distinguish between the sounds of construction and the sounds of destruction. I keep walking.
As if one could distinguish between that which threatens and that which comforts.
Monika Lin’s new paintings are white, and that Shanghai air on my way to her studio is clear.
What color these figures, with and without their environment—
is their skin not yellowed by epoxy, not blued by argyria, not shadowed by your body, hovering over and near it.
Two Korean words for color: saekggal (색깔), color in pigment and solid material, and bitggal (빛깔), color via light. The paintings, subdued in color, conduct an interplay of saekggal and bitggal, and a discussion of color ensues. Heat up the discussion, and the Japanese will call that a white heat, hakunetsu (白熱).
Susan Griffin: It is said that the sensation of color is produced by the action of these particles on the retina of the eye. That the particles are real but that the sensation they produce is not. // That color is not real. Odor is not real. Dreams not real. Pleasure and pain not real. Nor nightmares. Nor chamber music.
Though her previous series employed similar processes and motifs, it is only in these white paintings, only with this diminished presence of color, where one can no longer distinguish between saekggal and bitggal, where pigment and light work with and against each other so that the eye can no longer determine the source, sources of color.
Carole Maso’s small, nearly imperceptible progresses. The unarticulated arc of our lives. Things not uttered yet, enunciated.
The figures are still and the landscapes move through and around them. Or the landscapes are still and the figures travel, emerge, through and around them.