Cynthia Polsky: Rediscovered at the Pearl Lam Gallery, Hong Kong

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The dominant art movements in the US in the 1960s and 70s were Pop, Conceptualism, Minimalism, maybe Fluxus. When you think of the most famous artists of this period, not many were women. So if you were a female American artist at this time, interested in your own humane development, open to the artistic influences of Asia through which you had traveled and learned, moved by what you had learned through Balanchine’s innovations to dance, and you created art as a way to better understand your possible growth as a person, oblivious to the trends on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, what were the odds your work would wind up at the Castelli Gallery? Zero, of course.

But this is the definition of real art and what a real artist is – someone who engages in a constant type of feedback process between human development and creation, where the art becomes meaningful to the artist who is growing and guides her growth while others can also benefit from this process of insight, growth and creation. Kandinsky, for example, believed this was what an artist was and did. If this is not what an artist is or should be, then we really do not need art. 

Frankly, there was a lot of art in the 60s and 70s we probably did not need but it was promoted by very sharp and greedy men and it wound up in our art museums because it was collected by the “right” people and written about in the “right” periodicals. There is a lot of art now being created that we probably don’t need. We don’t need soulless experimental formalism or self-referential art, but certain people like to buy it and when they die it goes into MoMA.

The Cynthia Polsky show which recently closed at Pearl Lam’s Hong Kong gallery is a rediscovery or reexamination of the large-scale paintings and works on paper from 1963 to 1974 done by American artist Cynthia Polsky, who was a woman in a male-dominated field and who chose to be inspired and work through techniques and colors she discovered in Asia and not which were chosen to appeal to the market by male art dealers in Manhattan wearing Italian suits and chomping on Cuban cigars. 

Polsky’s palette is influenced by the radiant colors we find in South Asian Rajput and Mughal art and not the colors found in comic books or advertisements. These Asian inspired colors often derived from minerals, plants, shells, and sometimes precious stones. Traces of lines or demarcations sometimes derived from the influence of Chinese ink paintings and Japanese calligraphy.

Balanchine added greater quickness to dance, greater flourishes, more style and expression. Polsky studied these techniques and we can see their influence in her work. We sense progress, fulfilment, subtle change and emergence in her larger paintings. She did not stumble around a canvas creating images to evoke anxiety, conflict or confusion. Her canvases convey rhythm, elegance, vitality, symmetry and style. Polsky, herself, referred to her work as lyrical expressionism.

According to the notes for the show, for her larger works, Polsky applied acrylic paint to unstretched canvas on the floor, with bulky objects in an irregular pattern underneath the canvas to create an uneven surface. She would work intuitively and quickly using sponges or Chinese ink brushes. Polsky would then hang the work up to allow the paint to drip downward on the canvas. 

These drips are what really drew me into her paintings. They represented a type of sudden and emergent dendritic branching or creation of a root system from the density of a specific color. The drips represented outreach and penetration with the background of dense or scarce dots of paint becoming a means of assessing or measuring the new quality.

Polsky’s work, to me, actually, is a logical continuation of the experiments in action art created by Jackson Pollock. I recall one art historian writing that many art critics believed a new humanism would appear in art after Pollock’s innovations and that many were shocked when Pop Art appeared instead. The market and gallery owners were, perhaps, more powerful than what should have or was expected to happen. Indeed, going from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art was quite a bifurcation. 

Art was hijacked by gallery owners and buyers. A more humane art was not sought by the art-buying honchos; why would they want this? Art was steered forever toward the demands of the market place and away from the artist’s personal journey.

Polsky’s tweak of action art involved creating density or sparseness while also combining vibrant colors in seamless patterns toward a psychological effect in her viewers. She engaged in immediate mark-making from the inner to outer worlds, trusting in her intuition and perhaps chance operations to obviate the flaws and deficiencies of the human will while allowing a connection with the consciousness of the observer. 

I am not sure whether Polsky knew this, but chromotherapy was used as a healing process in ancient China. The color red, for example, increased blood circulation while blue was a soothing influence on the viewer. Polsky’s work, in her use of and combination of colors, and in her abstract depiction of a process of emergence, allays pain through the hope of a gentle progression toward a higher and more humane state of being.

Wish You Were Here by Maurizio Cattelan in Shenzhen, China (SWCAC)

If you show up at the right time on the right day at the Maurizio Cattelan exhibit in Shenzhen, China, you will meet a person wearing a giant polyester-resin head depicting the artist. Once, Cattelan paid a performer to don a giant Picasso head to welcome visitors to MoMA, mimicking the bigger than life Disney characters that greet people who enter the Magic Kingdom. This is a big-money exhibit, widely publicized and often packed with visitors, in an art-starved city of affluence (Shenzhen, China’s Silicon Valley, now has more billionaires than New York City). Many people will be coming to see the Cattelan spectacle, the work of the famous artiste terrible. To “real” art lovers he might be signaling that he knows what’s going on and is mocking the whole process. There’s Cattelan, there’s the work that he creates, then there’s the work as presented by the folks who want to cash in on his labor, and there’s the Cattelan they create for the public, to give the products of his labor more value. 

 

So, he buys into all of the hoopla while simultaneously mocking it. You enter the exhibit and see a multitude of Cattelan facial sculptures staring at you from a wall with differing shades or tints of his skin color. You are encouraged to view these as types of sperm cells. You see lightbulbs in the shape of Cattelan’s head as you walk down a passageway. A “mini” Cattelan sits on a wall and watches you wander through the exhibit, like one of the many stuffed pigeons in the show. He seems to be asking, what else he is supposed to do. This is how art is promoted these days. The artist hands his/her work over to other people who need to make money from it. They own the system, they give you shows, they get your work in museums. This is the deal with the devil you make to have your work seen and preserved. He has said: “Fame is a strange beast. And as with all beasts, you are the prey, not the predator.” So Cattelan is aware of and allegedly not comfortable with the art reputation-building and promotion process, and openly mocks it, while he also tolerates (if not colludes with) it and makes a fortune from it.   

 

But can he clean his hands through the messages or meanings in his pieces? Does he ultimately rise above the glitz and hype with dazzling insight and a humane message? Is there an overall message being given in the show, as the curators of the show purport (Cattelan supposedly wants to explore separation and longing)? Does the whole approach of his show make art more accessible to the masses or is it just glitz and fuss to attract spectators at 128 RMB a pop (a pretty sizable chunk of money to ordinary Chinese)?

 

Entering the show one sees stuffed pigeons all over the place; sometimes they are a part of a piece, sometimes they are just there, perched and watching. They are so pervasive one might consider them to be the multiple eyes of a god of mercy, or angels that shit. They are like that guy from Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog who just sits next to an outdoor fire and helplessly watches each drama unfold. They are, basically, us, as we are the multiple eyes of the god of mercy, we are angels that shit, often hopelessly looking on at horrible or unjust situations that we feel unable to fix. One senses that to Cattelan, however, as we will see, pigeons are not the divine messengers or witnesses of injustice we might hope them to be, but agents of impersonal entropy with wings.

 

Further inside there is the Disney character Pinocchio, dead, lying face down in a pool of water in a cruciform state. In the 1940 animated film the puppet sacrifices his life to save a human being and is then magically resurrected into a real boy due to his compassion and love. Yet, in the Cattelan exhibit, we just see Pinocchio lying there, no resurrection, no transformation. Cattelan’s piece is a cynical rejoinder to an optimistic film scene as Cattelan also comments on the absurdity of Disney appropriating meaningful symbols of spiritual development for cartoons meant to entertain children too young to understand theology. He wishes to give the lie to all the hope-filled, secret meanings and optimistic endings in Disney’s most iconic films. The piece is called “Daddy! Daddy!” which is spoken by Pinocchio as he is dying. Of course, Jesus calls out “Father! Father!” as he is dying. The piece is a denial of the Christian belief that after one “dies to oneself”, a new life with higher values and more humane behavior may mysteriously occur. Disney uses a cartoon to promote this belief, Cattelan rejects the ending of the cartoon and finishes the narrative before resurrection.

 

Actually, the show seems a hodgepodge of Cattelan’s work loosely categorized to try to give cohesion and a rationale to it. Akin to the Pinocchio piece is a mural of a gallery owner that Cattelan once duct-taped to a gallery wall. The massive amount of duct tape helps create the illusion of wings encompassing a person who is helplessly stuck somewhere between heaven and earth. Of course we also find Cattelan’s iconic Comedian, the banana he taped to a wall at Art Basel Miami a few years ago. This is a piece where something nutritious and life-sustaining is wasted in an act of hoarding and worship. It is like the gallerist suspended between the sky and earth, it is like ideals spoken of and admired but not really embraced, ideals worshipped from afar but never lived. It is like the wealthy art buyers who profit from and enjoy art work which represents a life and ideals they would never want to live. Among the dead Pinocchio and the trapped gallerist and the worshipped banana, we see the giant, elongated foosball table he built so that 11 white Italians could playfully compete against 11 African immigrants.

 

Nothing presents ornately designed Rococo style mirrors with pigeons perched on them. The pigeons silently pass judgment on the value of the mirrors by using the expensive objects as perches while also defacing them. We are invited to view ourselves within the mirrors. We also see pigeons perched on a realistic sculpture of a homeless man while he is sleeping or even dead under thick blankets, as if he has become nothing. In an art gallery show with objects by a cynic like Cattelan, we have to allow this. Crossing the barrier around the piece and kicking the pigeons off the man (as I wanted to do) would have landed me in jail and then on an airplane back to America (I proudly did 10 years of volunteer work for homeless folks at a Quaker shelter in Manhattan and deeply resented this piece). Only the laws protecting Cattelan’s private property kept the pigeons on that man. In real life, I am confident people would have scattered the birds and sought help and greater public dignity for that person.

 

Yet, perhaps Cattelan is not as much of a cynic as I am painting him to be. He does seem to think that dogs have values superior to humans. In a sculpture based on remains from the volcanic explosion in Pompeii, he shows a dog that has chosen to die next to his human friend rather than run away. We also see a skeleton of a dog with a newspaper still bravely grasped within his jaws. This dog will not abandon his duty to his friend. Even this value is portrayed as ridiculous, however.

 

Cattelan wishes we were there. Where? In a world where hope has been abandoned and the belief in individual and social resurrection is the meaningless stuff of children’s cartoons? Many of us already are there, where we live without thinking and give ourselves over to the worst desires and emotions, where we relish causing harm because we think we are vindicated, where we think that good is evil and evil is good. Cattelan was once asked whether he thought his work was funny. He said, “Not at all but for some reason people think it is…I find it quite tragic.” After seeing this show all I can do is pledge that I will hope and fight until my last dying breath for my change into a real boy.

 

Wish You Were Here is at the Sea World Culture and Arts Center in Shenzhen, China until October 16, 2022. Quotes from Cattelan are taken from a conversation between Francesco Bonami and Maurizio Cattelan in the exhibition booklet for Cattelan’s UCCA exhibit in Beijing The Last Judgment. Photos were taken by the author of this piece.

Nanette Carter at Skoto Gallery, Chelsea, Manhattan (March 2018) - Cantilevered pieces

When Al Loving abandoned the geometric painting that had garnered him a solo show at the Whitney, he abandoned his place in the established and respected circle of white artists he had been affiliated with. Loving stated that he wanted to see what creating art as a black man from the black experience might be like, and the trajectory of his commercial career plummeted. As was the case with Norman Lewis, it was felt that Loving was now indulging in a limited type of black esotericism instead of shooting for the ‘universal human statements’ the white guys purported to be offering. In reality, the black experience of enduring and responding humanely to forms of oppression offered the most universal response and Loving attempted to convey this through his torn canvas pieces and other works during the rest of his life.

Nanette Carter was deeply influenced by Loving, who was her mentor for many years, and has adopted some aspects of Loving’s technique, but most notably replaces Loving’s materials with oil on mylar. To a great extent she carries on the language Loving attempted to create to express the black experience through abstraction. This language was born, partially, from the African American quilting tradition as well as a tradition of thrift and recycling to express poverty, adversity and conflict as well as the joy of community and the moral and spiritual insights that one gains by standing in opposition to a dominant culture of excess, violence and bigotry.

Carter’s mom was a dance teacher who often designed and sewed her own outfits and when Carter was a child she was influenced by how her mom worked in differing materials to create fanciful articles of clothing for performances. This mirrors, to some extent, the fact that Al Loving’s mom was a quilt-maker. She was also fascinated by landscapes she noticed from airplane flights and how fields suddenly changed shape, color and texture for unknown reasons. Her father was in politics, and from the visitors to their home, and the discussions that ensued, she became interested in social and political issues in her native New Jersey as well as in the US and the world. So Al Loving, dance outfits, landscapes and local politics were some of the factors that pushed Carter beyond a type of figuration that has been more common among African American artists and into a type of collage-like abstraction.

Carter’s current show at Skoto Gallery is called An Act of Balance and is inspired, to a great extent, by the cantilever. Indeed, these pieces are from her Cantilever series. This is an architectural term for some type of structure, like a beam, that is only connected on one end, but which can support a substantial amount of weight. Any cantilever is going to look suspicious and risky; ideally you would like to have that type of support held in two places, and so it becomes a perfect type of metaphor for lives under stress and pressure, or folks who are struggling against odds to not only hold their lives together but to somehow prosper, succeed and maybe even change things for the better around them.

In many of the pieces you see small structures jutting from the bottom of the piece which are meant to have contact with the ground, often with cantilever devices above them, followed by bulky masses of differing textures and colors rising up. One gets a sense that in order for the bulky, accumulated bunch of things not to fall over one must engage in a rigorous, continual and vigilant balancing act (thus the title of the show). In some pieces these small structures from the bottom seem to serve as invisible sources of strength rising with the bulky materials like the lattices which support vine-like plants. Carter seems to ask us what these sources of strength might be in our lives, what comprises the bulk supported by these lattices?

To me, the source of strength for any one or group that is suffering is the hope or desire that one is a strong enough cantilever that can endure and rise above and then become the agent for change one wants to see. In Carter’s pieces we see that these structures do not represent the stability anyone might have craved, but this could be one’s current reality, and it might be one of the necessary stages some of us are both cursed and blessed with in our development to become more compassionate and humane actors in a thoroughly corrupt world.

We are all connected - Anne Siems at Littlejohn Contemporary (February 2018)

Bruce Wilshire, in The Primal Roots of American Philosophy, argues that even though the US government almost completely eradicated Native American religion and culture, there were those among the white, dominant culture who became deeply influenced by Native American thought. Indeed, Wilshire argues that the influence was so deep that Native American thought forms the core of the American philosophical tradition and differentiates US philosophy significantly from European philosophy. To Wilshire this is seen most clearly in folks like Emerson, Thoreau, James and Dewey. I mention all this because Anne Siems appears to play with the notion that women and children from the dominant culture might just be one short step away from full blown paganism, or, perhaps, might be there already. Her marvelous, winsome and enchanting work, currently on display at Littlejohn Contemporary in Chelsea, appears to take the historically unique American artistic tradition of folk art portraiture and to deliberately infuse it with shamanistic and transcendental meaning.

Folk art portraiture from early 19th century America possessed certain conspicuous characteristics. Perspective was abandoned for a flatness of finely defined, boldly colored and symmetrically arranged images within the context of a non-specific source of lighting. The painters were shooting for a semi-idealized likeness which displayed identity without reflecting personality or emotional state, but which might betray class status. These painters were, generally, craftsmen meeting the needs of their sitters. Animals often are presented in the paintings but they tend to serve moralistic or emblematic functions and nature is a pleasant backdrop often denoting property ownership. These were basically pre-photographic images serving the function daguerreotypes would soon serve as personal and occupational photography. Psychological insight into the sitter was not the point. Documenting the person’s attainment of a social niche within the burgeoning American society was the goal.

So Anne Siems starts with the elements of this strikingly unique and white, dominant culture American tradition, in which nature tends to serve a decorative function, and subverts its elements and conventions to remove the sitter from a social niche to a deeply embedded place within nature. Wilshire points out that science views nature in a limited manner by using what is “orderable and predictable and quantifiable”. We thus become folks “…who appear to ourselves as those who order, predict, quantify, manage and control.” We lose an “intimacy with the world” that folks in a pre-scientific setting often employ to add layers to their experience, insight and relationships. Therefore, Siems often makes the bodies of her women and children transparent or translucent, perhaps as a stylized counter-convention to indicate how indistinguishable we are, in reality, from the natural world.

She might be alluding to the fact that despite the reality that most people now live in cities, we are still biological organisms and the result of the processes of natural selection. All of the emotions we use daily were naturally selected before we built cities, just as much as our prehensile thumbs or other physical features, so that they could serve a survival function. These emotions, combined with advanced communication and cognitive processing skills, allowed our development as social creatures capable of radically altering our environment – but this does not remove us from nature. Even the cognitive abilities which have provided the illusion that we are divorced from nature were selected by nature to ensure our survival. Science has brought with it an anti-nature or anti-transcendental ideology which we have inadvertently and unquestioningly adopted. Siems’ sitters are, however, the ideologically liberated who openly enjoy their participation in a direct awareness and interaction with the natural world.

Even the delicate “whiteness” of the faces of the women and children in these paintings was selected by nature. You probably read that England’s “Cheddar Man” had brown skin, showing that 10,000 years ago whiteness did not yet exist in Europe. Whiteness became a new development due to the lack of harsh sunlight in northern latitudes. A dark skin tone is due to the presence of the pigment melanin in one’s skin, as melanin protects one’s skin from the UV rays in sunlight. An abundance of melanin in one’s skin was not needed as folks moved northward where sunlight is less intense than in equatorial regions and darker skin colors disappeared to a great extent in Europe just as the eyes of fish living in darkness disappear over many generations. In nature if a trait is not used an organism tends to lose it over generations. These lily-white women and children in these paintings are as connected to nature as a mud dauber, and possibly more so, as they can comprehend and accept nature.

Whereas nature was used emblematically in folk art, Siems tends to use it to invoke a sense of union with other aspects of the natural world as well as a type of shamanism. We see, for instance, a child covered in mushrooms. The mushrooms in the painting visually compliment the girl’s being as mushrooms still compliment the beings of those in non-industrial societies who use mushrooms not only to provide sustenance but also to provide visions. These visions constituted the first human religious experience as some shamans used mushrooms to help them reach a hallucinogenic state to connect to a spiritual realm where supernatural assistance could be obtained to alleviate suffering in their community. Nature itself has not just provided humanity with nourishment and survival but has continually provided the means to uplift, console and heal. It is part of the partnership we entered into and which we have violated through a world economy that does not function within the sustainable parameters set by the natural world.

We also see a child riding a bear and another standing amicably with one. The bear, to ancient folks, was a symbol of death and resurrection. Our first symbols came from a close observation of nature and the death and resurrection theme was begun at the point where folks perceived the cyclical nature of the natural world. The bear literally goes underground and disappears for a period of time during cold weather to re-emerge in the spring, mirroring the change of seasons and the renewal of life. James Frazer, in fact, believed that it was agricultural rituals around the theme of the resurrection of crops which ultimately provided humanity with their first gods and mythological heroes – Osiris, Attis, Adonis, Tammuz et al.

By beginning with the American folk-art tradition and tweaking it in this manner, Siems is demonstrating a possible shift in perspective that can nudge us away from the delusion that we are separate from nature merely because we have separated ourselves from most of it. She invites a new approach to rediscovering nature for ourselves wherever we may be located. We are all connected, we are in union with nature every moment of the day, we simply refuse to recognize this or allow this awareness to take root and develop. The creatures with whom the sitters in Siems’ paintings interact seem to welcome their human companions with an esprit de corps as we would be welcomed. Indeed, the cognitive capacities which have lead to the delusion that we are apart from nature and can only measure and exploit nature to our profit and comfort may, in fact, hold the key to leading us back to a greater union and relationship with nature. Siems appears to affirm the capacity for the type of consciousness that can ensure that graceful reunion.

Anish Kapoor at MoCAUP Shenzhen

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Many of the early abstractionists were influenced by spiritual movements of the early 20th century. In Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art you can see that a goal of abstraction was to find a way to reach deeper into the individual viewer, bypassing the mediation of the human intellect, and getting right to the pithy stuff where real inner change and human development could occur. However, abstract artists presumed a capacity for discernment and change in us which we just do not, perhaps, possess. An abstract piece still has to be analyzed for the work to have any effect. There is no getting rid of the mediation of the intellect in art. Nobody has yet to point out that Kapoor speaks to this tradition of the use of color as a potentially direct transformative force in the viewer. Everything about his use of color and form seems to be an experiment to retain and not abandon the idealism of the early abstractionists.

The pieces that one initially sees in the Shenzhen show are based on ritual objects covered in bright red and yellow pigments. One can easily recognize, for example, the shape of a Buddhist stupa. Has the powder been sprinkled over the objects in an attempt to super-enrich them? It is as if the meaning of the form has lost its value and color must step in to reach and transform the viewer. Or has the powder emanated from the objects themselves? Physical structures purported to have spiritual functions are being transformed through the addition of color. Color becomes the element possessing a transformative capacity on its own, independent of form. Colors do, in fact, act upon us without mediation – red, for instance, excites our heart rate while blue calms it. The implication seems to be that the more intense and pure the primary color, the more intense the interaction – perhaps those who believe that art can change folks for the better are still looking for color which does not merely excite or inhibit us, but which also can change us. There is a definite element of humanism in Kapoor’s work, and he seems to hope against hope that color can finally do the trick.

We then transition to blue experiments with negative space – what looked to me like a beggar’s bowl on the wall and a void or vulva opening up within a panel. The vulva, in spiritual art, represents the fulfilment of a “male” endeavor or quest. In esoteric art, penis or phallus-shaped objects represent a desire for a type of spiritual fulfilment. Here the vulva is painted in a deep, soothing, healing blue. Kapoor wants his work to be mythic and so he creates a mythic vulva – the vulva to end all vulvas. This is THE fulfilment of the spiritual quest, the perfect combination of symbol, form and color. The penis is desire, the vulva is fulfilment. There is nothing more mythic than the two sexual organs of humanity representing the culmination of a spiritual quest in hot and cool colors.

Some of the more famous artists in the world these days, e.g. Kapoor, Kusama, Pistoletto, use mirrors in their art as the mirror serves as a type of symbol for processes within our inner reality that present and enable us to examine and potentially work on our motives, emotions, desires and cognition. In a review I wrote on the work of Pistoletto, I pointed out that a mirror reflects light to present a reality divorced from reality. Real stuff divorced from reality is the stuff of symbols and images that we often work with to understand what is going on inside of ourselves and to potentially change problematic aspects of our inner lives. So the mirror can represent this capacity we have to create and use a reality divorced from reality and the problems this may result in as we might move farther and farther away from ourselves in the reflection of ourselves. Kapoor’s experiments with mirrors seem to imply that the capacity we have to capture and work with inner truth may be flawed, but that the flaws can also be discerned, so there is still hope of individual transformation. Working with our inner reality to ensure our human development does not involve a straight-forward process. It involves the collecting of information from a flawed collection device which may be divorced from the real substance of experience.

Kusama uses mirrors to create a sense of infinity, freedom and eternity. Pistoletto uses mirrors to draw the viewer into the art itself and show the possibilities for each viewer to create and interpret his own narrative. Kapoor’s mirrors often present what engineers call “negative reinforcement” – you turn a light switch off and expect the light to go off, but you get something unpredictable. You go to Kapoor’s mirrors expecting a straightforward process and things become skewed, engendering a feeling of amazement and unease. We experience a divorce between the expectations of what we should perceive and what is being presented to us. Is there a deeper process to be tapped in to, beyond direct perception and the mediation of the intellect and our capacity to create symbols, which would allow for a graceful transition to a more humane life?

Kapoor’s mirrors are not the only pieces in the show which indicate he may be referencing problems inherent in our inner reality concerning our understanding of ourselves and attempts to change. The monumental piece My Red Homeland presents what can only be called a procrustean industrial process which does not correspond to any real industrial process. It is the process of flattening for the sake of flattening and not for profit or material processing. It is an imaginary industrial process meant to approximate an inner process perhaps beyond our control, perhaps within our control to stop. A large metallic arm protrudes into an area of thick glutinous red stuff and flattens the red stuff into a large circular form as it rotates. Someone at the show told me the red stuff looked like a type of sugar he had seen in India, others stated it looked like raw meat. Regardless, we see a pre-established process, not of our creation, to crush the organic and present a pleasing pattern in its place.

In the portion of the show dealing with Kapoor’s designs for grandiose structures, we see some common themes. Indeed, one piece is called Dante and one has to wonder to what extent Kapoor was influenced by the Divine Comedy. Much of these monumental structures involves ascending and descending. You have active, positive, phallic space and passive, negative, vulva-like space. It is as if Kapoor feels we should be surrounded by these monumental images of rising and falling, of bringing one closer to or pushing one farther away from paradise. The monuments we should be building should be monuments representing the highest ideals pursued by artists – based on the belief that we can all be so much more compassionate and effective in our efforts to change ourselves and others for the better.

Interview with Sky Kim: Repetition, Reincarnation and the Sensual

Interview with Sky Kim

Repetition, Reincarnation and the Sensual

(originally posted on wsimag.com)

Sky Kim is a New York City-based artist originally from South Korea. In her pieces she often repeats basic patterns, possibly investigating the need, possibility or hope for spiritually emergent qualities appearing through this process. Kim also approaches sensual energy as an essential part of the human experience – sensuality as a type of energy or vibrational waves.

I discovered your work at a 2014 group show at Garis & Hahn called ‘Leaps into the Void: Shamanism, Meditation, Transcendence, Oblivion’. This was an amazing show featuring artists who referenced alternative belief systems, many of which were grounded in ancient religious or philosophical systems. I was attracted to your commitment to pre-modern ideas like 'cell memory' and reincarnation. How did you develop these interests/beliefs?

My inspiration comes from my philosophical belief in reincarnation and, on an unconscious level, my work is largely influenced by the loss of my twin sister at birth. This early separation is probably the source of emptiness that I always feel inside. Growing up, it was tough for a little girl to deal with this uneasy feeling. I had to find a way to fill the hollowness in my heart. I tried to figure out why I was here, in this lifetime. There were so many ‘whys’ in my little head and this made me look everywhere for an answer. I began to dig into spiritual books, religions, new age beliefs, etc. I finally found a partial but critical answer to most of my questions in reincarnation, which I thought explained many incomprehensible phenomena in life. This realization influenced my work a great deal. I began to use the repetition of circles and lines to create patterns that represent the wheel of life: reincarnation. I believe that remembering my twin sister in my art is the only way for me to complete my being, as every old and new cell of my body remembers every minute I was with her in the womb. My memory of her in the long but also brief time we spent together in the womb, which was the only time that we were together, has entirely prevailed in my unconsciousness.

What about folks who do not believe in reincarnation - can they derive anything meaningful from your work?

Whether they believe in reincarnation or life just being one-time thing, they shouldn’t have any problem appreciating the meditative patterns that are both optically three dimensional and still at the same time. I’ve encountered a number of viewers who don’t consider themselves spiritual but told me they sensed an enormous energy emitting from my work which had a soothing and healing effect on them.

That Garis and Hahn show also partly highlighted the cognitive/emotional processes involved in the creation of works requiring time-consuming repetition. Can you tell me a bit about your mental state as you create?

My work comes from stillness and everything within. Out of that stillness, a certain impulse comes, like every sound comes from stillness. I meditate on the nothingness and then something wants to be born and expressed. I honor that quiet space. It’s a deeper space where your mind is no longer operating, but just being in your consciousness. I create a sacred space, a place where I can have a dialogue with my true self--my higher self underneath my humongous ego. I own that moment and that uninterrupted time and space is one of the key ingredients of my creation. You can’t rely on your thinking to produce something powerful and original. You simply focus on the energy of your present moment. It’s natural for negative thoughts to crawl into your mind but you don’t fight with them because whatever you fight against, you make it stronger. Doing isn’t enough, BEING is necessary. Artists need a lot of time alone. I simply BE in the present moment and enjoy whatever I have. Presence isn’t an old pattern. Instead, it’s eternally new and timeless. I complete my life at each moment in my studio since I have nowhere else to go but within. When I’m fully present at the moment, there’s enough of everything. When I know that everything is provided, I stop competing for love, power or whatever I wish to obtain. Then I experience abundance, a pool of energy and inner peace. That is when I’m ready to pick up my pencil. My studio practice is very meditative but also labor intensive as it requires both undivided focus and raised vibrations which create the work. Repeating patterns is like citing a mantra over and over again.

Your visit to the Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation influenced a whole series of your pieces. How did that visit affect you?

I’m very sensitive to the energy field in places, especially when I visit sacred spots where there is believed to be a strong vortex. I feel the energy with all my senses and I even physically get affected sometimes which is not always pleasant. I felt the presence of strong energy from the red rocks in Sedona, Arizona and the Chichen Itza Pyramid site in Yucatan, Mexico. Since I try to contain condensed energy in each circle and fluid line in my work, I’m genuinely drawn to those ancient sites and natural formations which have become a source of my inspiration.

There was a time that your work was considered to be too sexual. Can you tell me about this event?

I was showing my work with the Victory Arts Project in Jersey City. My watercolor paintings and marker drawings were displayed on 5 tall wooden panels in the large glass windows of the building. Since the show room was located in a financial district, my work became controversial. To me the images were subtle and not provocative, but to some people they were too sexual to show in public. This was all happening while I was in the UK. Upon my return, I discovered that 3 of 5 works were covered with sheets of blank paper. I didn’t understand why I was getting such reactions when there were gigantic billboards nearby that exposed half-naked blondes in embarrassingly seductive poses that never seemed to bother anyone. I was amazed by their double standard.

Art and sex have always been tied together, probably because sexual desire seems the perfect analog for spiritual desire and the beauty of sexual union mirrors the beauty of the union between desire for something more and its fulfillment. Can you tell me the extent that you are exploring sex or desire in your work?

Images in my work are often feminine, delicate, untouchable, venerable and sensual with a strong sense of sexuality. I explore the similarities in the scope of birth and life with the images of flowers and seeds that are associated with a fertility, germination, growth and evolution. I create these images to get a sense of uncanny sensuality but in a more playful, teasing way. As a result, the organic, metaphoric images are not overly but they are obviously sexual, and at the same time they are somewhat enigmatic, elusive and ambiguous; just enough to stimulate your imagination.

I often use the symbols of stamen and pistil to illustrate what we once were in the womb, the beginning point of life and of my personal memory of my twin sister who shared my time in my mother’s womb and with me relied on a single umbilical cord. The image of seeds, flower petals and blood on the surface, whose personality also implies both the principles of Yin and Yang, the male and female energies, co-exist in one body. They shouldn't be interpreted as a neutral gender; instead they should be understood as the life energy that a fertilized egg newly acquires, beyond the visual, sexual differences of the flesh. There are two different energies that co-exist, but their essential natures don't blend together into a total stranger.

I have explored issues around the representation of sexuality within a personal and emotional context. I focus on developing new aesthetics to represent a female body with the inclusion of the masculine point of view. Working together with drawing, painting, performance and sculpture, my work has often played, not without humor, on the ambivalence of the feminine and masculine relationship in terms of sexuality. In my constant work on the interrelationship between the masculine and the feminine, I manage to render the interchangeability of sexes and of sexuality by deceiving conventions. The complete, vital form is favored not in order to discover who I am, but to create myself anew.

Do you still enjoy using scrolls? Why did you start?

I try to produce at least one scroll piece a year. It’s a time consuming process which requires serious commitment and dedication. One day, about 10 years ago, I was going to cut the paper after I finished a regular sized painting on a paper roll but didn’t want to stop the flow I was feeling. I decided to paint the whole 30 foot-long paper roll just to record the whirlpool-like creative energy I was having at the moment of creation.

Were you influenced by other artists who use repetition and/or alternative belief systems? With which artists of the past do you identify with?

Oddly enough, if there’s anyone whom I feel connected to, it would be Basquiat. Our styles are totally different, almost opposite from each other, but I’ve always thought that he is like my soul mate in my creative practice. Many people think that my work is precisely calculated and meticulously planned and controlled but that’s not the case at all. It’s all done by free hand, automatically drawn without knowing where to go next. My only belief system is my own sense of intuition which is the strong driving force of my creation from start to finish.

During a time of social crisis, do you think an artist should attempt to make some type of social statement? Do you consider aspects of your work political? Are you interested in politics?

When wasn’t there a time of social crisis in the history of mankind? Somewhere around the globe, innocent children, women and men are suffering from horrendous violence right this moment. I’m interested in both politics and social issues and I believe that artists should always be alert. Whether or not they should make political, social statements in their work should depend on how literal they want their voice to be heard. I strongly feel responsible for all the issues we’re facing today because we’re co-creating every moment, every reality together as one massive collective consciousness. My work shows who I am, every inch of me, but it’s not necessarily showing any particular social issue in a literal context. All the issues that I want to address are rather dealt with energetically. I’m a transmitter that generates and transmits vibrational waves carrying messages and signals through a constant tug of war embedded in the organic undulations in my work.