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....................Yang Si-Young's works are in many ways reminiscent of the aesthetics of Jean Dubuffet and his archetypal "art brut". Works like Woman in Frick Madison feature the exaggerated features we have come to identify with Dubuffet; three distinct bulbous tufts of flaxen blonde hair are piled in heaves over a coral-bedaubed even skin tone, cracks of paint carved like wrinkles in stone. There is a rhythm to this painterly practice, the same rhythm that not only informs Dubuffet's drooping stroke but also that of the great Cubists - John D. Graham and Picasso. Her left eye bulges large and her right eye, significantly smaller, repeats the color palette featured in her raised, crooked eyebrows. As we scan below, her fuchsia-crimson lips glow with a vivacious vim, repeating the colors of the bonnet that crows her hair-clusters. We notice an array of bodily arrangements: an upturned arm bisects her torso, a raised pinky finger turned towards the heaven. Another limb strokes downwards, a mad dash of extremities free-wheeling in a prismatic craze. Perspective is here, as in the Cubists' works, crazed and flattened, such that distinct angles are collapsed. Floral tones and speckled dabbles of paint spill into the background as periwinkle collapses into lavender-lilac, plumes of plum violet wining and mulling a painterly orchid background. The artist has, quite successfully I might add, limited himself to the colors of wine and flesh, making use of a strict arsenal of paint such that repetition is instrumentalized. We all know that, upon inspecting our own flesh from varied angles, we are imbricated in a world of shadows and tonality - repetition is rarely ever truly found in the empirical world of measurement. Nevertheless, Yang Si-Young forgoes such figurative distinc-tions, making use of the reductive logic of the cartoonish to proffer caricatures of representation. Such a logic gives us felt reality rather than the reality of scientism.
....................Throughout Yang Si-Young's works, we are privy to paintings that make use of sensitive variations. Accented exquisite figures are grouped into Mozartian harmony. Where Picasso's analytic cubism still remained tethered to perspective, his synthetic cubism famously deracinated itself from any anchor in dimensionality tout court. Fragmentary images from distinct perspectives, rearranged into collage, were displaced by a deep flattening. It is this deep flattening that we see here too, as Fendi, White Eyed Woman, Queen, and Queen on Horse increasingly speak to the carnivalesque. Is there a sense of the fetish here, the same fetish that engineered and provided the impetus for Japonisme and so-called Primitivism amongst the postwar Western avant-garde? Undoubtedly, there is, but here it is no longer erogenous and the kind of fetish that speaks to allocentric desire to tame the foreign. Rather, these canvases elicit playfulness. As is the case with works like Elegance woman, Strong woman and Thinking woman, Fendi features a swarthy lady, deep amber-bisque vectors of her neck, face, and limbs framed by an electric, coiling blue. The woman's garb features a tangerine-outlined series of canines and circular-cum-spherical patterns that evoke a wildflower scenery. This work, in particular, is captivating in its logic of repetition: not a repetition so much of tone and color (albeit, again, the artist makes use of this device), but of a geometric persuasion. Shapes repeat themselves, but with permuta-tion playing a key role. The word "FENDI" is imprinted in the lower section of the canvas, each letter offput by the next: there is no trace of uniformity to be found anywhere in these paintings.
....................It is by no means hyperbole when I note that the "outsider" nature of Yang Si-Young's works is pronounced; in fact, one can detect the same "straying" from the received path that prodded along Purvis Young's mad, cryptic, and subconscious paintings, wooden tatters and planks so often nailed into figurative relays animated by a mad genius flirting with abstraction. Yang Si-Young's most affecting paintings are those that care least for representational realism, fully imbibing the lesson of modernism - i.e., an art practice that not only backs away from mirror images and any set measure of fidelity but, instead, prefers to crack realism against the pavement. What we left with are paintings that enjoy a deep advantage over mirror images: preservations of images as they are phenomenologically felt.
....................The artist's website notes that Yang Si-Young was "[d]iagnosed [with] savant autism and developmental disabilities" wherein "[alt five years old, even though he could not speak, he started to draw and paint." If such is the case, then it is no accident that Purvis Young, James Castle, Jean Dubuffet, and Bill Traylor serve as Yang Si-Young's compatriots, for it is where perception diverges from the norm that wistful divergences abound. What these works embody is left unanswered. Are these ballooning, perspective-compressed portraits but the artist's view of the characters they have encountered? Alternatively, are these imaginary figures plucked from Yang Si Young's imagination? However one chooses to approach this concern - which, truly, need not be a concern at all - one must approach this query sans realism. The question was much easier answered in the pre-modern, pre-Manet epoch, where Christ served as God's embodiment - the word made flesh, representations of Christ endeavoring to illuminate and exemplify his divine nature manifest through beauty and luminosity. Although Yang Si-Young has chosen to blinker and neglect the archetypal notion of beauty - for, indeed, there is little, if anything, that is symmetrical here - luminosity seeps through his paintings.
....................The sensuous property of the woman's saffron-colored sundress is underscored, bands and beams of yellow shivering outside the frame, a motif that, itself is repeated: there is a rectangular blue outline of the woman, another outline (using the same color) that services her arms and dress, and yet another that crowns her purse - or is it a pot? These paintings dance a rhythmic tango of ambiguities. Matters grow even more intense with Queen on the horse, a large-scale painting (122 x 153 cm) that shows a regalia-clad figure atop an almost tiger-esque "horse". Purvis Young once again is a suitable colleague, given the two artists' mutual interest in the figure of the horse, that archetypal beacon of freedom and fleeting movement. Drabs of gold and orange flit and flicker across a cerulean blue background, cream-blanched birds perched in the distance. These are works that feature thick and crude strokes of paint, thickness licensing the radically childlike play that Yang Si-Young's vision undoubtedly embraces, prodding us into novel aesthetic terrain.
....................¢º As an introduction to Kate Oh Gallery, 31 E 72nd St. New York, NY 10021 USA
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