The Chi and Tao of Ying Kit Chan's Drawings |
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Jay Kloner
These fifty large-scale drawings from around a decade in time are revelations of economic and spiritual decline which were made during the prosperity of the eighties. They are responses to deteriorating regions in different American cities and towns. In addition to rust-belt images of Cleveland, Pittsburgh and coal mining towns in West Virginia, the major body of works a response an old industrial sector of the Germantown area in Louisville. A few the early works depict the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood at the heart of Cincinnati, which is severely neglected like too many older areas in American cities. These regions stand for much larger changes everywhere in America and the world. The old industrial is diminishing, and the former sense of community is increasingly giving way.
What is particularly insightful in this work, however, is not so much what has already been previsioned correctly, but what stands as a future vision. Power marks that sweep across our sight like palpable energy fields in the more recent work, suggest a new world of forces of transmission, breaking the bounds of former modes of communication, partially signified by telephone poles.
The seemingly abstract marks emerge out of smoke, as if suggesting that the industrial age is being surpassed, while smothered in the weight of its own demise. The post-industrial epoch, which is causing economic stress in its emergence, will be an age of intelligence more than a time dedicated to making things. Ying Kit Chan's energy fields vivify on a large scale, unseen electronic waves that prefigure new ways of communication and thought.
Dark clouds of hatch marks and cross hatching are foreboding, and the works take on an other-worldly, cataclysmic quality because of them. Yet they have a positive, renovating energy, as if they are progenitors of conceptual renewal, akin to chi, or like directing patterns in the mind itself. The more recent works, then, convey a confrontation of contending powers. Symbols of the industrial age -- high-power transmission lines, storage tanks, factories, smoke-stacks, truss bridges -- are overwhelmed with force fields representative of a new order of mind.
The earlier works, in formerly residential areas of Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati, speak the passage of places worn with human use and disuse. Ying Kit Chan first depicts places which convey the human dimension in emotional terms. With time, and his turn toward equally neglected industrial environments, he focuses on sites which are remote by their very nature, and he makes them even more remote in his brooding contemplations.
Ying Kit Chan portrays a waster land reflecting substantive tensions in material reality. The feeling of portent reminds us of the approaching millennium and of ancient forebodings about the moral clash preceding a new time. In a deeper sense, than is apparent in purely economic terms, the clash of forces in these works may stand for a revelatory vision of the human need for spiritual renewal. Perhaps vaporous atmospheres indirectly express and inner emptiness in the lives of millions who have not found fulfillment in a life of persistent labor. If these same fumes burn with new fires, and these new energies represent new dimensions of interactive experience which can enlarge our humanity, then life may contain deeper satisfactions.
In the inner sense of the psyche, these arcing, interwoven lines may be akin to the interactions of yin and yang within us. As projections outward, beyond the psyche, these marks may also represent the great cyclic power of natural evolution. To a certain degree, the relation of mind and nature, accessible in these works, reflects the best ancient tradition of Taoism.
Ying Kit Chan bridges over from the spiritual tradition of the East towards the current way of the world. As in content, so in execution. His strokes extend the revered Oriental calligraphic tradition, and his great gestural sweeps are in the tradition of action paintings. Both ancient and modern approaches to style inherently expose emotion, and these drawings emerge form the essence of expressionist aspirations. In the vein of earliest expressionism, he speaks forcefully, with depth, and with the most direct means, without color, addressing the human situation.
The arcing lines of atmosphere are lines which create space, bringing forward a palpable vision of space as mass. This is reinforced by the actual masses of structural, and at the same, structures become like lines in space. When the dimensional structures, in their linear aspects become space-like, they relate, in turn, to the spatial masses of enveloping atmosphere.
Ying Kit Chan brings together the abstract and the real, and he approaches an ultimate reality in the reversal of the two. What was real -- the industrial landscape -- is becoming unreal. What is abstract -- interactive energies of the mind -- will be manifest as fundamental reality.
At all times in history, important, immanent change is viewed with reserve. At moments of epochal stress, the unfolding future moves forward, uninvited, as a tide charged with unknown possibility. Ying Kit Chan communicates this, just as he suggests the essence of our nascent consciousness. That essence is an interactive reality, both in our personal experience and in world experience, where old boundaries will succumb to more open, expansive forces of the mind. Hopefully, this interaction will also lead, in some measure, to a renewal of the soul. The then, are not pessimistic images, but images with a complementarity carrying seeds of hope.