Viewing Megan Vun Wong’s work in order to identify its various notations and marks, an attempt to “read” it for it’s near associational messages might be time well spent for some people. And yet it would be far more pleasurable and satisfying to see each work as a living entity outside of the realm of guessing games. The heartfelt ambiguity which is at the core of each painting is part of the conceptual attitude that infuses the artist’s overall project Vicissitude. Here the known and the unknown co-exist as does the unseen with the seen, the visible and the invisible, the discernible with the evanescent. It is especially felt in the artist’s layered plexiglass constructions. Her regulatory aesthetic impulse is to sensitively intuit where she wants to go without any prearrangement. This laissez-faire aesthetic drive allows her to interact with her materials and to see what they can actually do instead of making them do anything. Fundamentally, the mysteriousness aspect of each work is the psychic residue left between the ineffable distance of conscious reality and unconscious processes in Megan Vun Wong’s painterly applications. This is the gift which this artist so provocatively brought to the public in her recent New York exhibition at Artifact and it stems from a rare discernment and the capacity to see beyond sight’s everyday parameters.

— Stephen Glass

 

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