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ARTIST ARCHIVE
Charles Yuen
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Themes: narrative Review: Charles Yuen's paintings show primitive figurations in which "people have undifferentiated barrel torsos, tiny hands and feet, rubber-hose arms, and unmodeled faces with ovals or mere slits for eyes" (Janet Koplos, Art in America), revealing a mix of compassion and humor, experience and innocence, acceptance and criticism. The artist has been interested in the internalization of socio/cultural elements and their manifestation in individual entities. He believes that the figures in his paintings represent beings in an ambiguous relations to our dominant culture. The figures are some kind of agents for an investigation of the status of being Asian in America. Charles Yuen asserts that "signifying a minority, they function in a subversive capacity, similarly to the notion of artifice in relation to a cultural mainstream." Critics have mentioned of his work as "Charles Yuen's allegorical paintings of loss and negation picture jesters and their brides to be. ---His figures stand in the midst of nostalgic regrets and fragrances--- but his primitivism is formal and responsible, and reaches out to the values of iconoclasm from the potent civilization of the "East," as he molds a dough that asserts a double negative of incarnation, frozen by a neglectful promise of infinity."(Rachel Youens, Charles Yuen's Introspective Infinities), "By reinterpreting the exoticism of the East in a way that is not merely a pastiche or wholesale absorption of it, Yuen creates a highly seductive space that defies the rigid binaries of masculine/feminine, protrusion/orifice, or east/west. The paintings embody a critique of Orientalist impulses, ultimately, by re-creating them."(Karin Higa, Essay for the exhibition Casbah Paintings by Charles Yuen in Art in General) Available research materials of the artist in the AAAC Archives are 65 slides, 8 photographs of his paintings, invitation cards, a poster of a group exhibition in Exit Art where the artist's works were included, a catalog and reviews written by numerous art critics and curators. Reviewed by Young Park | |||||||||
