Breaking Through |
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Foon Sham has steadily built an outstanding reputation as a sculptor in the Washington area since the early 80's. In recent years, especially, there have been important activities for him in public commission work and exhibition. In terms of his career development, Sham has clearly graduated from the rank of emerging artists in the region. It is perhaps not coincidental that, since 1990, he has created a body of work that reflects an artistic and personal brek-through that is rooted in professional confidence, personal maturity and emotional openness.
It would be impossible to discuss Foon Sham's development since 1990 without describing, even briefly, his pre-1991 works. His sculptures from the 80's were meticulously conceptualized, sketched, modeled and built. Almost without exception, their surfaces, whether of metal or wood, were finished by lamination or other means. Their shapes were often streamlined or geometrized. Those inspired by figurative objects were stylized by meditations of form, function and symbol, of which the source figures became merely suggestive. Those purely abstract pieces were extremely refined, conveying the sense that an idea had been transformed into the ideal in the creative process. These earlier works bore many of Sham's signature qualities: compositional power, superb craftsmanship, daring experimentation, gentle wit and integrity in the use of materials. However, they engaged the viewer in different ways than his recent pieces. Sham's works during the 80's were a strikingly elegant group that revealed the artist as an observer and a thinker but concealed the artist as an emotional being.
In 1991, Sham created a piece name Ruin, which signified a new level of his development as an artists. Not only was raw surface, exposing jagged carved marks, introduced in this work, there was neither drawing nor model before he started making the sculpture. In juxtaposing the finished and unfinished surfaces, and playing with their contrast, the artist expanded his artistic vocabulary and deepened his vision. With a full decade of scrupulous sculpture making behind him, Sham had developed the confidence to improvise in the creative process, and to accept and handle roughness in his work which, in the 80's, he might have perceived as imperfection.
Sham is an artist driven to growth and challenge. When he finds an artistic idea that excites him, his pursuit of that idea can be relentless. His reaction to the discovery of spontaneous assembly of materials and roughness in texture and surface was no exception. Woodscape, started in 1991 but finished in 1992, showed an intense fascination with these new themes.
The exploration of mass and gravity led into yet another new dimension in sculptural form. With his previous large works, Sham strived to achieve levity with mass and flow with scale. Contrast was used to both illustrate and transform. Woodscape was a more direct confrontation with solidity as an artistic issue. Less virtuosic and immediately dazzling than some of his earlier works, it was no less powerful, being more assured in its approach and certainly more emotionally evocative. Woodscape was the first in a series of works that reveal the artist's heart as well as his mind.
Next in 1992 came a group of small works, such as V Groove, Pear, and Cone, which focused on surface issues. The balance between three-dimensionality and surface texture was tilted towards the latter. With these pieces, Sham worked in a space between sculpture and painting and created an intriguing collection of studies in positive/negative space, shape and boundaries, and diverse manifestations of materials. Freely expressive and, at times, whimsical, these were finished works standing on their own merit, but also exercises which furthered past ideas and validated emerging ones.
The textual exploration of Ruin, the emotional tone of Woodscape and the paintely approach to Purple Heart all came together in Grainny in 1993. The compactness, ragged shape and coarse surface of the work produced an intense and solemn look rarely seen in Sham's works. The jumble of small wood sticks, pushing against the thicker top layer, suggested nerve endings underneath the skin.
In both Untitled of 1993 and Flush of 1994, the contrast of elements and thrusing momentum echoed the complexity of an emotional experience breaking through layers of memories and feelings. With these works, Sham achieved a new freedom in form and feeling.
Mid-Life Crisis, also of 1993, constructed during a period of personal turmoil, was frank in its title and illustrative in its content. Sham mixed steel with wood for the first time to create a deliberately jarring effect. Tension overrod harmony. Jamming various elemnts of previous sculptures together here, the artists barred his angst palpably.
Sham had not forsaken in these new pieces his love of sculpture and faith in harmony so evident in his body of works. Even in Crumbling, where the surface seemed torn apart by violent forces, these qualities were expressed in the form of a benevolent gravity which held things together regradless of the temporary tensionl in time, all would settle and mend.
Compared to his studio works of the 90's, Foon Sham's large scale public works, responsive to the sites for which they were created, are decidedly design oriented. In Trio of 1993-94, created for the City of Richmond, aesthetic reigned over personal feelings.
While making Trio, however, the artist worked on Chung for himself. Both were optimistic, even joyful, creations, but their expressions could not be more different. Trio, featuring three highly defined and refined wings, was a celebration of the designed form, a state of equilibrium achieved by ingenious and perfect architecture. Chung, sporting cragged wings and an unevenly spiraled base, was shaped somewhere between a tornado and an inverted mound. Dynamic but supremely stable, Chung embodied the unpredicatble, uncontrollable but ultimately self-regulating forces in nature.
No longer urgged by his own emotional needs that brought forth Grainny and Mid-Life Crisis, Sham explored the jaggedness and intensity of those pieces as formal artistic issues in Black Trap and Star Fruit, both of 1994. With Black Trap, he also experimented with the horizontal orientation which was unusal among his works. In Star Fruit, a single star fruit, representing the artist, was embedded in the multi-directional clusttering of elements, creating for the frenetic universeof juxtaposed vectors an unexpectedly serene center.
The investigation of the spherical body, a new form for Sham, infused with the larger-than-life drama of Black Trap and the witty momentality of Trio, led to Spheres of 1995. The work was contemplative but impersonal, and aesthetically beautiful without suggesting slickness, It exuded both warmth in feeling and power in design. Its harmony was derived from the coexistence of two circular forms, complimenting and balancing one another in structure. The drama reseted in its richly textured surfaces, the contrast in size and grandeur in concept. In Spheres, Sham achieved in one piece the impact he created separately with his public works like Trio and his more personal studio creations.
The mastery and corresponding confidence displayed in Spheres was evident also in Burst of the same year. There was nothing extraneous in the work. It was natural and exposed in its repesentation of a charged outburst.
Barátság (Friendship) created over 18 days in Nagyatád, Hungary during the summer of 1995, was a heart-felt homage to his experience at an artist colony. It fully demonstrated Sham's skills, power and discipline as a sculptor. It was apiece that colleagues at the colony deemed impossible to finish during his short stay. Against all odds, he created a site-specific monument that, like Spheres, combined the strengths of his public art and his studio works.
A companion piece to Barátság, Sviböl (From My Heart) was Sham's sculptural response to the Hungarian equivalence of "you are welcome", which translates into English as "from my heart". As a structure, viewable open or closed, it symbolized the current state of his art. From an objective perspective, his sculptures of the 90's are vehicles of artistic ideas, universal in their appeal as sculptural forms. Subjectively, many of them are also glimpses into the arists emotional core, capable of creating resonance in the viewer's heart, making even richer the experience of encountering his works.
At mid-career, Foon Sham has proven himself an exciting talent. His tiredless search for challenges and his ability to respond to both ineer and external stimuli has led to important growth with each stage of his career and hlife. One eagerly awaits the continuing development of this artist and the artistic fruit that development will bear.
Samuel C. Hoi
Dean, Cocoran School of
Art
Washington, D.C.
November 1995