Last week, I looked at regime change at the Las Vegas Art Museum, namely the return of James Mann as curator at large. I wasn't able to go into any depth about the show he brought to the museum upon his return: Marlene Tseng Yu: Forces of Nature III.
As I mentioned last week, Yu's work was shown in 1999, during Mann's first stint at the museum, and she helped organize last year's Rain Forest show with the LVAM curator. I wasn't around for the former of those two shows, so I have no idea how closely the work here parallels what was shown before. But, several paintings in the current exhibition date from 1971, and if they are any indication, Yu's work has remained remarkably consistent over the years.
Both the older and more recent paintings are large-scale, bordering on monumental. The paintings have been unrolled and simply stapled to the walls. They look like immense tapestries in the grand hall of a contemporary castle. Yu paints on unprimed canvas, letting paint seep and soak and blend. Some tones are applied densely, some in pale washes. The immense abstractions, reflecting on natural themes, almost read as tie-dyed fabric works, albeit wrought by gargantuan hands.
Her earliest works, such as "Seaweeds Floating" and "Red Cells Floating," from 1971, give the impression of colloidal suspensions—discrete clumps of matter surrounded by a ground, but with a little interstitial "halo" separating the two.
The other works, mostly from this year, are more sweeping and dramatic in scale and tone. The colors are richly high-keyed, with cloud-like pockets of white and outlining regions of black. "Rolling Red Rocks II" (2003), for instance, is a striking, vertical, virtual "landscape," evidently drawing upon lush, russet tones of the canyon west of town. The suite of four vertical canvases bracketing the far end of the main gallery, one "Glacier Garden" and three of the "Turquoise Floating" series, are particularly striking, with radiant linear effects, such as crystal formations, counterpointing otherwise amorphous masses of color.
The only fault to find here is a tendency toward the precious. A text panel explains that Yu is inspired by chaos theory and fractals, but some of these paintings seem a little too mannered for that—for instance, "Molten Lava," with its brilliant red core radiating from the lower right, or "Sunken Treasure," with its golden baroque swirls. Here, Yu strays too far from the abstract to hint at actual context. No law against that, of course, but elsewhere Yu succeeds without straining.
Another text panel makes the peculiar claim that Yu's works "amaze and intrigue to a degree that those of the great initiators of postwar, world-conquering American abstract painting no longer do"—which, at the very least, is a highly subjective assertion. Interesting as it is, Yu's work will always pale before the best of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning or even Helen Frankenthaler.
(Art history is rife with examples of critics proclaiming the undying glory of long-forgotten artists, but I think I can confidently predict that at the end of this century, those three are more likely to be treasured in the canon of great artists.)
One more note about LVAM. Joseph Palermo, the museum's "consulting executive director" until Karen Barrett took over as director this fall, also is the director of the Southern Nevada Museum of Fine Art. He confirms that the latter institution is not related to LVAM in any official way. He also said that it is not a sales gallery, nor is it selling Yu's work. Smaller-scale pieces by the Taiwan-born, U.S.-educated painter are on display in the museum at 1000 E. Sahara.
Chuck Twardy has written about art and architecture for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.