NYAB Event - Fay Ku "Work on Paper"

Fay Ku "Work on Paper"

Kips Gallery

This event has ended.

A first look at the work of Fay Ku, a young American artist of Chinese ascendant, reviles immediately her masterful technique in these large drawings on paper. Based on myth and folklore, the boys and mostly the girls depicted are not your everyday well behaved youth. They are always doing some mischief: Lilliputian soldiers helmeted with palmed feet disembarking from wooden embarkations which are in fact wooden spoons (Deployment 2007). More nasty, a single nude figure, crouched eating or vomiting, not only with her mouth, multiple long stringy and thorny creeper-like vegetation , her hands very elegantly looped by a thorny crown (Thorny 2007). The same is happening in “Briar” 2007, a beautiful smaller work, where this time, two dressed girls seem trapped like flies in the network of the spiky creepers emanating from the mouth of the girl on the right. One of the smaller piece, drawn on heavy tan hand made paper, show the more sexual side of the artist. This time, the girl with long healed shoes ; crouches on her fours, holding her hand up like she is waiting for the nail polish to dry, while presumably a man in striped pajamas sticks his head under her skirt right in her backside.

The background of Ku’s is certainly one key to her work, but more interesting, as she herself mentioned, in some aspect she seems closer to the classical 19 century Japanese woodblock prints world. The incomparable “manga” drawings by the great Hokusai (there is on print of “rats fishing” in the show) prefigure so much of the future western art, that it is impossible not to find connections in the arts of the past 150 years to the present. And then there is the unusual Yoshitoshi, who, by the end of the 19th century, to my mind, single handedly for saw surrealism. Even though, grounded very much so in the present, it is interesting to view Ku’s work in the light of these past masters. The refined lines, the sometimes unsettling scenes (I think of all the battle scenes prints), the tradition of the erotic prints (shunga) all have some echo, albeit completely personalized, in Ku’s work.