by Leslie Kender
In her paintings exhibited at Artifact Projects. Yi-Chiao Chen records movements of water as a spiritual metaphor. The technical elements of her images show off her technical prowess of excavating and revealing the hidden. At the same time we can see a drive toward material, whose content is new. Clearly, the artist has imagined a reconstructive idiom that works two ways—as abstract structure and representational device.
This kind of imagery suggested by the artist also implies the power of the trace image—it is as if we see the gleanings of a more involved, larger system that reaches out toward the imagination but cannot be easily described. Yi-Chiao Chen’s seascapes keep the page alive, in the sense that the field of her compositions becomes a sum of partially configured structures, at once idealized and real.
The lack of specific definition in her work allows us to contemplate on the various meanings of the images; as we have noted, the artist creates a middle ground between the nonobjective and the visually describable. Part of her appeal lies in its juxtaposition of indeterminate meaning and precise delineations of form, as well as her ability to combine content and form in a seamless esthetic application. For this reason, her compositions come across as ethereal offerings of a reality that is imagined. The art is larger than that, giving us insight into conditions that first intrigue and then convince us that the artist’s imagery shapes our perception and then our minds.
Yi-Chiao Chen’s artworks are composite ones, which put a premium on expressing emotion by combining colors, shapes, and surface, in a highly personalized fashion. These sensations are realized through an embodied and lyrically suggestive pieces that encourage us to recapture the world through the fresh responses of an artist who is ultimately unconstrained by tradition or convention. Wedded to this fresh perspective is the artist’s equally persuasive emphasis on capturing fleeting perceptions of time and space.
Leslie Kender is an art writer living and working in Manhattan