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Artist Statement:
My work presents an allegory
of human thought and society.
I portray a landscape of the
mind and a perspective on
life. Having grown up in
northeast China where the
traditional popular paper-cut
suffused my imagination, I
coat colors onto paper, cut
thousands of imaginative,
abstract-representational
creatures. I ...
Further Information
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Artist Exhibitions:
Gallery V. Columbus, OH
February 23 - March 25, 2006
www.galleryv.com
Sherrie Gallerie
694 North High Street,
Columbus, OH
October 6 - November 7, 2007
www.sherriegallerie.com...
Further Information
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Artist Galleries:
Sherrie Gallerie
694 N. High Street
Columbus, Ohio 43215
tel: +1 . 614 . 221 . 8580
fax: +1 . 614 . 221 . 8550
web:
www.sherriegallerie.com...
Further Information
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Collections:
Coming Soon!
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Commissions:
Coming Soon!
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By Tracy Zollinger Turner
For Columbus Alive Nov. 1, 2007
Leah Wong used to paint figurative landscapes in oil—literal visions of her Northeast China homeland. But when she came to the United States, the bend of its trees and the shapes of its cities felt too foreign to capture.
"I got a little distorted when I came to the U.S.," she laughed, scanning her work on the walls of Sherrie Gallerie with a quick spin on her heel. "Everything changed. My thinking changed, the landscape changed."
Among dozens of her more recent canvases, on view at the gallery through this month's Gallery Hop, there are marks, shapes and wild creatures that suggest particular items and beings from the material world, but they would be hard to pin down with labels. They could be gigantic bird-bears sauntering through the bustling city, or catfish-pigs swimming under a sky with a hundred suns.
If you are able to recognize them directly, you might just be from another dimension. Or, more likely, caught between two dimensions.
When Wong began painting from the perspective of a new side of the planet, she tried to capture that sense of living in the in-between, like imagining the strange sounds of English to her mother's ears back in China. It's a theme that runs through all of the pieces in her exhibit, Two and a Half Dimensions. But when it comes to interpretations of individual pieces, she would rather leave them open.
"There is narration—each painting has my own story, but I don't think I should dictate other people's thinking," she said. "I give the title as a start, but then I want [viewers] to take it wherever they want."
Now an adjunct instructor at the Columbus College of Art and Design, Wong also embeds the playful element of paper cutting into her work. As a girl, a friend's mother taught her the Chinese folk art, and she would spend hours making intricate lions, tigers and dragons. Now she uses a knife as though it was a pencil on stacks of hand-colored paper, cutting out ambiguous creatures and pinning them to her studio wall before giving them a permanent place in her work.
"The characters are all combined, no one can pinpoint what animals they are," she said. "Everybody comes from different cultural backgrounds, so everybody associates different characters with them."
Wong works on multiple canvases simultaneously. Sometimes she leaves a painting untouched for weeks or months before deciding upon the figure, line or small dot that will make it finished. In a painting like Around Time, it took her years before she found the balance of images, color, rhythm and motion that made it complete.
"It is like life. We are layered—nobody can be simple. Noise surrounds us," she said. "There's an interesting energy that we live in. We don't even notice, but there's a system involved."
While she doesn't want to impose a framework or narrative on people viewing her work, there is one thing she does hope it accomplishes for them. She hopes that the images will pull them, even if it's only momentarily, out of their usual patterns of thinking or being. Some of the canvases have handmade edges that invite the viewer to look at the spaces that surround them.
"Painting, to me, is always magical in some way because it's flat—it's a frame, and you make others think beyond the frame," she explained. "Painting has that kind of power. It's pretty magical to give other people another dimension."
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