NYAB Event - Theresa Chong “New Works on Paper”

Theresa Chong “New Works on Paper”

Danese Corey

This event has ended.

Theresa Chong’s disciplined and highly detailed gouache and colored pencil drawings continue to explore line, form and gesture, and to evoke a contemplative, almost spiritual, response. Her purposeful and intricate markings, quietly articulated in gray and white on handmade Japanese papers, appear at once ordered and spontaneous. Chong infuses her work with a sense of lyrical rhythm, tranquility and improvisation.

The works are titled after the hexagrams in the I Ching, or Book of Changes, one of the oldest of the great classical texts of ancient China. The I Ching…is based on the dynamic balancing of opposing forces, the belief in continuity, and the acceptance of change, concepts that Chong has long emphasized in her practice. Chong deliberately, brilliantly disrupts the symmetry of a square sheet of paper through the irregular, improvised dispersal of her strokes. The balance she wants is more precarious, verging on instability, on dissolution, poised between opposing systems of expressiveness and order.

These recent drawings were based on rubbings from Chinese stone markers…. Time is represented by the accumulation of her finely inscribed marks, hundreds and hundreds of them like the ticking of the clock, and by the blank areas of the tightly interwoven composition, which indicate the eroded sections of the stone markers. These are the places that most intrigued her, she said, since whatever was once there is gone, scoured away by time. She likened them in some ways to ukiyo-e, images of the floating world, a genre of Japanese painting that thrived in the Edo period (17th - 19th c.), its theme that of reveling in beauty and pleasure while it is possible, an enjoyment made bittersweet by the knowledge that it is fleeting. (1)