 |
 |
 |
 (by artist name, ethnicity, media,theme, or keyword) |
 |
|||||||||
 |
ARTIST ARCHIVE
James Kuo
| ||||||||
Themes: Abstract, nature Review: James Kuo's semi-abstract paintings are based on a creative and successful combination of traditional Chines painting and Western Abstract Expressionism. Since he came to the United States in 1947, he had spent the rest of his life in the United State creating his paintings until he died in 1995. His earliest influences were the works of traditional Chinese masters such as Pa-ta Shan-jen and Tao-chi. Since he arrived in the United States, Kuo found in the work of Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and other first generation abstract expressionists a very congenial bridge between East and West. James Allen wrote of the artist in the catalog essay of James Kuo Retrospective Exhibition, "It would, however, be a mistake to think of Kuo's art as simply his canny adaptation of mid-century American artistic "breakthroughs." His work is easily distinguishable as his own, and yet is connected to the art world in which he emerged, much as is the case with the work of such second generation abstract expressionists as Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Francis, and Paul Jenkins, contemporary whose work he also greatly respected." Three major themes had recurred in his work over his entire working period: "the floral or garden pieces; the landscapes, particularly rock and mountain imagery; and the "purest" abstractions, often labeled "Untitled," "Composition" or, simply, "Abstract." The art criic Jonathan Goodman mentioned on this artist that "Kuo's ability to use abstraction at once as a formal element in its own right and as an intellectual corrective to the sometimes decorative effects of traditional Chinese painting makes him a strikingly contemporary artist." | |||||||||
