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Occasionally, the art world gets the opportunity to experience the work of an artist which is both contemporary in sensibility yet classic in its maturity and emotional intelligence. Such is the work of Yichiao Chen.

 

The first aspect that draws us to this artist's abstracted water imagery is its sense of conflicted tensions that course through this work. It is no exaggeration to say that Yichiao Chen’s imagery is deeply paradoxical: simultaneously haunting and lyrical yet tinged with a sense of danger. The artist’s work refers to the domain of lived experience even while it attempts to lift itself (and us) up into a realm of the sublime. So, while the work resolutely attempts to transcend, to go beyond the human (that is towards God or the gods, the daemon or Nature), it is rooted in an oxymoronic condition that Thomas Weiskel has termed 'a humanistic sublime' -- an enticing contradiction.

 

Yichiao Chen’s works with their frozen-fluid dynamism, show us an engagement in attempting to define existence as an asymmetrical experience. Equally, the artist records her fascination with what Charles Baudelaire in "The Painter of Modern Life" called the genius-artist's capacity to revert back to the ecstatic gaze of a child "...in confronting something new... whether a landscape, gilding, colors, [or] shimmering stuffs."

 

To get a full taste of Yichiao Chen's provocative vision it is important to enter into her artistic world in all of its levels, to immerse ourselves, so to speak, within it. In order to do so, an exploration of the imagery of water through archetypal, psychoanalytic, mythic and art-historical lenses is useful. In water, Mircea Eliade writes, "everything is 'dissolved'... everything that has happened ceases to exist... Immersion is the equivalent, at the human level, of the cataclysm (of the flood) which periodically dissolves the world into the primeval ocean. Breaking up all forms, doing away with the past, water possesses this power ...of giving new birth." "And," he continues," immersion signifies regression to the preformal, reincorporation into the undifferentiated mode of existence."

 

If Yichiao Chen's surfaces are redolent, then, of a Modernist's sensibility who is attuned to the evocative power of water to recall (in Freudian terms) the irrational unconscious and childlike wonder, they are also associated with a more mythic, pre-modern sensation. The artist's obvious conflation of a sense of the ecstasy, of transcendence and of immateriality is clear. In a sense, they are meant to recall the supreme experience of the shaman who attempts to reach, as Mircea Eliade, notes in "Myths, Dreams and Mysteries "... beyond the realm of the sensorial; it is an experience that brings into play and engages only his "soul", not his whole being, body and soul; his ecstasy manifests the separation of the soul; that is, it anticipates the experience of death."

 

Thus, while Yichiao Chen's abstract skeins are thoroughly engaged in recalling the sensory experience of primordial man, it is also a mirror, allegorically speaking, of Modern's man's fear of Nothingness. The artist’s imagery is the essence of impermanence. The oscillation between "a magic flight" into an abstract sublime and being grounded in the reality lends imagistic power to her works.

 

In looking at the the artist’s surface patterns, the viewer's mind is directed in complex and contradictory associations and suggestions. Her abstractions seem to defy their totality as images. They remain on the cusp between recognizability and its opposite. This is so because they may be viewed as exactly not being pared-down images of something else, something refined, or at a distance from another reality, as the word "abstract" (as the roots of the Latin for “to draw away”, “abs+trahere” suggests). Instead, Yichiao Chen's imagery has the power of evoking a concrete passage of time (from concresce "to grow together") that has been knitted together visually. The remarkable emotional intelligence and a heightened sense of aesthetic play which saturates her haunting imagery washes over us; her work cannot help but recall Keats' phrase: "the moving waters at their priestlike task of pure ablution.'

 

 

 

 

 

 

David Zimmerman is an art writer working and living in Manhattan.