Jo-Hung Tang is a diligent and sensitive student of how artifice animates what may be intuited initially as lifeless. In his own words: “The brushstroke and color I paint on the masonite would give me feedback, and thus begins a conversation between me and the work. It feels like my lungs are full of fresh air and I simply know the resulting work would be good during the process. That is why I believe that the state of mind is more important than the result. The result will be good if the state is right.”
From this process of animating the inert, or the mere object, comes an intense dialogue between painter and painting in which both the artist and artifice bring to bear practical judgment, or a self-consciousness that conceives of the work in the world. The interest of this creative intelligence lies in the life of the figure and the ambience of the figure. This figure is not just in the eternal present; it possesses a life that is constantly mediated by a timely encounter and the trace of time that has since gathered in the long duration. In other words, Tang remembers the figure in the history of art as much as he responds to its articulations in his immediate sensorium. Hence, this figure is immersed through and through in art history and the mediations of public culture. Part of this traffic, of course, is the biography of the person and the artist.
This is the matrix of his image and the scenography that tends to unsettle it or unhinges it from a restrictive iconicity. It is built up without a linear, surefire plan, only an exchange between his expression and the emerging and formative scenario of the painting. It is tempting to characterize this operation as random and spontaneous, as if there were no deliberation involved in the fabrication of its visuality. This is true to the degree that there is a high level of contingency in this back and forth between the will to make form and the form that anticipates the will. Structure, therefore, is not to be seen as external or extraneous; it is embedded in the impulse of the artist. The “form” produced across the spectrum of artist and painting finds a life of its own, or more precise to say, an afterlife beyond the artist and the painting.
Tang strives to frustrate the expectation of visual information to inevitably overdetermine iconography, meaning, content, theme, or context. To do this, he does not let the image settle in a kind of autonomy, or commonsense, that isolates it from the mess of the ecology through which it assumes cogency and potency as an appearance or a vision.
Instead, he subjects it to the atmosphere of color and stroke. It is mainly these chromatic and bodily elements that govern his pictorial space. In this procedure and in light of this temperament, he is led to two options: an evocation of quality and a demonstration of abstraction. Both options complicate the artist’s skill in intimating texture, energy, and magnitude.
With regard to quality, Tang is drawn to a kind of transcendence of physical reality and sensation. He refers to music, voice, and gaze as ways in which this empiricism may be overcome so that a different dimension could be glimpsed. Listen to him when he describes how a singer from a Peking opera carries out the task of vocality: “the voice vibrates from her abdominal cavity, through her ribcage, out from her mouth and reaches high up in the sky.” This deed is comparable with how a performer executes the design of her métier: “Her gaze penetrates whom she looks at, and the meaning of what she sings no longer matters. She has departed from the drama and gone beyond to a higher state.” If transposed into the philosophy of painting: How does the image of painting depart from drama and move into a presumably more exalted plane? And why must drama be foiled? What kind of values does it introduce to the practice of painting, values that may burden the art with, let us say, theme or social reference? It is interesting that Tang should take issue with drama, because his own investment in painting partakes of quite remarkable dramatic risks.
Through this fascination with performance, Tang hones the potentials of his gesture. It is a gesture that is decisive in a painterly register, bold and daring in its aspirations, inspired by the capacities of Pablo Picasso and Willem de Kooning but also attentive to the nuances of narrative in the vein of Neo Rauch. Juxtaposed here are the graphic intuition and the expressionist dynamism, the desire for allegory and the privileging of experience, which in the French language also means experiment, at the moment of painting. He considers these artists his exemplars who help him craft and conjure a language that begins with the flatness of the image and incites an algorithm of all manner of accretion: marks, drips, erasures, scratches, palimpsests, all done with a certain bravura. Here, scale matters because the vision is somewhat mass-mediated, akin to the screen of the cinema or high-definition television, or cognizant of the techniques of advertising in terms of the deployment of text. The instinct that prevails is that of a bricoleur and the effect is pastiche. This is only a partial account of Tang’s aesthetic though. The other aspect to grapple with is the condensation of the emotional range that the painting absorbs. In this respect, Tang turns to another disposition of making images, the Spanish school, as it were, by way of Antoni Tapies, Miguel Barcelo, and Eduardo Chillida. Atmosphere is primordial in this tradition, a longing and the alacrity to scatter outward, calibrating the rawness of exertion and heedlessness with the glimpses of the sublime.
This dispersion begins first with an attraction to color and then a fascination with light, or how the latter penetrates or mottles objects, as if they were dissolved, through the thinning out of the pigment. Objecthood, its status and its recognition, is delayed in this suspension between transparency and opacity, with oil’s greasiness being laid bare as a residue, the skid marks, so to speak, of an artist’s vehicle. The artist’s use of masonite might be key, too, in the aesthetic, as it resembles the texture of fiber and betrays a temporariness, an unfinished appearance of sheer paper. This outwardness is performed by the artist’s rather idiosyncratic sources of modernity and contemporaneity, cultivated in Spain and Taiwan. Such an ensemble that forms a creative axis is very much different from, let us say, New York, Paris, or Berlin. His movement within these loci implicates a gamut of inspirations to include the work of Chia-Wei Hsu and Yu-Cheng Chou, a corpus of contemporary art that keeps Tang wide eyed. With this broad sympathy of diverse trajectories, he is aligned with a species of painting circulating globally that enmeshes popular culture, a visceral quotidian visual vicinity, and restless psychological states. Tang may be constellated with Amy Sillman, Brad Kahlhamer, George Condo, Sanya Kantarovsky, Jason Fox, Cecily Brown; and in an earlier time in Asia with Bhupen Khakhar and Manuel Ocampo. He may also be in conversation with the Cubist repertoire in terms of the syntax of the troubled portrait and the highly faceted still life. These are Tang’s lineages and interlocutors. In this constellation of possible wellsprings of the artistic imagination, he comes to terms with the materiality of paint, the indeterminacy of gesture, the prospects of mingling, and the coming together of a fertile mindspace and a vertiginous mediascape. A genus of painting that attempts to make this assemblage manifest demands a plasticity that is technically artful and a talent that is venturesome in both the conduct of making and the technology of speculation.
A counterpoint to this plenitude is the artist’s reflection on marginality, his ethnic heritage and his hearing condition. The latter tend to limit his circulation as an artist, a confinement to routine and the house. According to him: “It has always been hard for me to be part of any group, and I am aware of being rejected and marginalized. This is not necessarily to be inferior, but just not in the mainstream…It is not ‘between,’ but floating out there. Losing my hearing has enhanced this sense of floating…I am alone in the studio when most people of my age are working in the offices. I would go out sometimes and might pass by some marginal people. I am aware of their marginalized status due to my sensitivity to my own conditions. Around 5:30 in the afternoon, I would take my twin girls home from the kindergarten and wait for my wife coming back home from the office. The reality would grasp me again from the illusion of the marginal world.” This whirl on the canvas resembles a weather of varying intensities of turbulence. Perhaps the general description would be disturbance that may incrementally mutate into turmoil. It is for this reason the we discern quick-change instances and dissipating substances. Tang refuses to ensconce the situation of painting to an existence. For him, painting is flux and dreamscape. On the other hand, this fleetingness may cohere at some levels, revealing the integrity, and the interior, of the hybrid, the highly wrought image that plays out on a flexible slate, which is now the screen-painting.
This kind of painting in contemporary time is vital in a revaluation of the art of painting itself. The work of Tang makes us ponder the dynamics of mastery, on the one hand, and the necessity of disfiguration, on the other. Why must painting mar its own surface? Why must it create the conditions for its own violation? It could be that the liberty with which the artist wields as he confronts the picture derives from the critique of the enterprise of painting as an object. With the gesture centralized as the signature that enlivens and incarnates the painting, the history of painting as an academic system is opened up to the possibilities within it as a method of deconstruction or a fulfillment of the promise of painting as, first and foremost, an inscription of a surface. A consequence of this elaboration may be phrased in this counter-question: How is this not formalist and overly indebted to personal predilection? Such a concern is salient and should be enfolded back into the aesthetic, so that the latter may be able to complicate the duality between the plastic form and the sensuous intelligence.
Another point to probe pertains to locality. In view of the hectic appropriation of the bits and pieces of everyday life in various places and archives from myriad origins, how do we appraise the “local”? It seems that Tang reframes the local from a singular emanation to a contact zone of plural persuasions, of what the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls “process geography.”
Another point worth arguing is the force of painting as a vessel that can survive the tensions and the provocations of contending images within its visual sphere. Tang accomplishes the endeavor with virtuosity and the skill of interspersing and juxtaposing not only the details of sensual data from the world at large, but also of schemas and tactics of abducting those data and cobbling them together within a mélange of signs or a montage of discrepancies. Figure turns into figuring. He confides that he is intrigued by, or even attracted to, the “double.” He talks about one painting in which “two men share a body—they both have control over the body but not completely. They are ancillary and captive to each other. It is often that one of them is more subsidiary and weaker in power.” This is a fundamental frisson that ramifies through the work of Tang. Painting ceases to be an opportunity to consolidate. It finally becomes a chance to confuse.
