13 (Kiki Wang)
KIKI WANG
Opera House, 2021
Oil on linen.
102 x 77 cm
40 1/8 x 30 1/4 in
Sent, when a child, to Drawing School every Sunday, Wang must have instinctually gained an understanding of the non-approach to subject that still life can bring. She must then have started to absorb the fact that the outline of an object, person, mountain or even section of water is never the whole point; that in some way outline and surface become mindful as well as mindless elements. Later, whilst studying photography at UCLA, Wang became fascinated with the photographic representation of sculpture and the particular discipline that that will entail. It is known that anyone who attempts to transmit the true nature and spirit of art already there, in three dimensions, is advised to be overtly expressive with language. A strange selflessness needs to prevail during such a translation from three to two dimensions. The camera needs to play the role of provider of information. Any angle of lighting from which a photographer begins to approach what is mainly a centralised subject, whether dramatic or direct, for instance, means an inevitable work-like, everyday process, apparently far from the varying degrees of independence and effect that are expected to maintain the artist.
Not represented by outline, skin and surface can be about that which is felt and sensed rather than seen. When Cézanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire, he would sometimes paint the whole outline or edge of the limestone form but at times would seem to range in, closer to the surface and peak, to discover and reveal a different set of relationships and associations.
Wang’s recent paintings concentrate on the inevitable contradictions that come with desire. Painting, close up, the point at which a decorative element is attached to the surface of a handbag, Wang reveals the actuality of promise; with a strange, even cubistic, breakdown of surface value. By running alongside the partial role that sight plays with instinctual association, she utilises the way the painted surface can itself become independently desirable. The material of paint becomes the skin and the language, rendered human, can come close to sightless sexual imagination. The subject is transferred, as with the mindful and mindless, the seen and unseen, with stuff to recreate, rather than represent a sample or piece in the translation of three dimensions to two, or two to two.
Further, a relation to the surface of a painting, followed across from side to side, cubistically, with scumbled thin paint, acknowledges the broken decay of natural material and the microscopic breakdown of narrative that mimics the pixelation of the initial advertising campaign. Instead, the sensation of faith, pleased or awkward, is ultimately heavily reduced to ordinariness. Valuable brand goods advertised on second-hand websites, long separate from their initial context, can so easily lack the promised glamour, as just the label remains. As sensual equivalents of desire and luxury, with sleight of hand and broken mark, Wang’s paintings show the belted up, cinched in material detail of elements which in turn, close or closed up, can be metaphorically stumbled across without seeing all or understanding context.
© Sacha Craddock - July 2021
