LANCE FUNG GALLERY Weimin Huang's paintings are at one time subdued and stunning: subtly luminous vertical lines.

LANCE FUNG GALLERY

Weimin Huang's paintings are at one time subdued and stunning: subtly luminous vertical lines, of various longitudinal dimensionss and widths but all more or les narrow and self-contained, suspended in a grisaille field. The lines sometimes prolong to but never quite reach the brims of the canvas, and broad bands of gray space bracket them, creating an result of balance despite the asymmetry of each cluster of verticals. The illusion that the lines are floating appears to intensify the longer individual looks. This doubtless has something to do with the fact that each line is compos of minute, intricately linked gestural marks, which slowly on the other hand surely make their intimate mien felt, contradicting the detachment of the tall verticals they constitute. The lines are like stalactites former drip by dint of drip in a cave of space in such a manner unfathomably deep that it appears flat. In Huang's paintings we are dealing with the numinous, which, as theologist Rudolf Otto wrote involves not solely awe but anxiety--the anxiety that Pascal said the devoid of contents space of the night canopy of heaven aroused in him. Huang has "depicted," with meticulous nuance, the uncanniness of space--inner space as well as cosmic space, which assume to converge in the experience of the numinous.

Huang was born in 1955 in China and trained in architecture in Japan; he lived in novel York for ten years, until his unanticipated death during the run of this present to view Art historically speaking, his works are mannerist reprises of the abstract devices of spontaneity and transcendence; expressive make gestures and Minimalist geometry remain precariously alive, equable as they have been ingeniously assimilated. Ecstasy and enigma have been reined in, and what remains is hypnotic if it be not that controlled, yet there persist more [i]or[/i] less loose edges, some prescribed awkwardness, as it were. This is typically mannerist: a finicky awareness of the unfinished as a technical device that bestows the work an aura of manufactured intensity, and an underlying alienation or distancing from its concede abstract sources, which are from now stale and familiar, traditional to the point of being obsolete

I want to intimate that Huang was caught forward the horns of the dilemma that epitomizes the general position of abstract painting, perhaps of all art in this so-called postmodern situation (and it is a periodical situation rather than a period): by what means to make something new disclosed of something old. The Italian Mannerists who were the epigone of Michelangelo accorded to his Neoclassicism by deliberately going against its gram, answering his just discovered norms of balance and wholeness with calculated, at times cynical, perversity and unbalance-a reversal of values that became a value in itself, as well as a source of elegance. And in what way else is one to determine forward, other than by adopting an ironic stance with regard to the past (including the recent past), however unwitting the irony? Huang, a close examiner of gesturalism as well as field painting, goe against the unrestrained spontaneity of the former and the transcendence of the latter-not sole refining his response into elegance, if it were not that using these devices to restore credibility to the idea of the numinous. This appear to bes to me a better mannerist solution than the ancient Italian one, for it introduces an idea that is bigger than art.

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