TUESDAY IN THE TROPICS 172
1st November 2022
Dear friends and colleagues
Many apologies for my silence in October: I was away in the UK seeing children, grandchildren, other family and friends. Also, as I shall write about soon, I went to Venice, Dresden and Kassel for a very serious splurge of art viewing!
What is Asian-ness? Rosa Lee at Richard Saltoun Gallery, London
It was a pleasant surprise to see that an old acquaintance of mine the British painter Rosa Lee was showing at Richard Saltoun’s gallery. But, an awful shock to find that she was dead. Indeed, she had died way back in 2009. I had written a catalogue essay for her in 1990 and then in April the next year written about her in an essay on the state of painting in England published in Art in America. To my regret I had not stayed in touch with her: much of my time in the Nineties was taken up with teaching and she was one of many artists I had worked with in the Eighties who I did not manage to stay in touch with – mea culpa – and my loss.
In 1991 having earlier in the article noted the influence on her of Thérèse Oulton, an artist at that time very celebrated, I wrote, “but her work is different in key respects: she is much more interested than Oulton in the use of pattern, and her Colour sense is tilted distinctly towards the acid. Although she shares Oulton’s predilection for all over composition and her emphasis on Titianesque painterly touch her landscape influences are more often traditional Chinese. Of Hong Kong parentage, Lee is one of many artists who find their own cultural diversity problematic but valuable. Her work is about opposition; touch-pattern, sexuality-order, East-West, etc. her work, like Oulton’s is concerned with extending colour from sheer optical effect to a more synaesthetic appeal. Pattern is for her is a perceptual grid that is at the same time conducive to sensuality: a stripe may be read as a column that may in turn be seen as a ribbon twisting in endless feminine curves. The apparent modular composition of the pattern is not an end in itself but a framework for subtly varied colour.”[1]
Were I writing that now I would find a discussion of her relationship to an artist such as Philip Taaffe more fruitful than that of Oulton. Taaffe manages in his work, like Lee, to both embrace the “decorative” and yet keep a critical eye on it. Likewise, I would want to write much more about her as a Veronicariste – a woman painter very aware of being a woman painter. After all she did write in the Feminist Review.
What come clear from the nine paintings in this exhibition (it is shared with her friend Jo Bruton) is that in the remaining 18 years of her life she developed in various and complex ways.[2] Tweezed and tweaked and squeezed the paints wriggles about the canvas. Paint becomes more and more a living thing, writhing and spiraling out, spreading across the canvas, no longer in all possible directions or following some invisible grid but willfully as if seeking some undeclared goal. The canvas become a place to explore, not to cover. Put another way, the drawing becomes more important; there are many more variables in achieving a final composition.
1. Rosa Lee, Ellipsis, 1989, 241 x 149 cm.
2. Rosa Lee, Inscriptions, 1999, 147 x 173cm.
3. Detail
4. Rosa Lee, Swathe, 2003, 163 x 172cm.
5. Rosa Lee, Spangle, 2006, 168 x 173cm.
6. Rosa Lee, Granite, 2007, 123 x 117cm.
It amounts to a substantial body of work. It seems tragic that she never had an exhibition in a public gallery or kunsthalle. But she was of that generation who in the early Nineties were overlooked in favour of a much younger generation of artists (the YBAs). They never got their mid-career shows at the Arnolfini or MOMA Oxford or the Serpentine. It is time, surely, to start making amends for that.
How Asian was she? Initially I did not know she was Chinese just from seeing her paintings: Lee is a common surname in the UK. It was a surprise when I visited her studio and this elegant Chinese woman opened the door. If you did not know she was from Hong Kong would you be looking at a kinship with Chinese ink painting? I think not. But once you know she was it is inevitable would you look for that. Like the sculptor Kim Lim, a Singaporean domiciled in the UK, she was both Asian and European, in different ways and at different times.
7. Wawi Navarroza at Kristin Hjellegjerde London 2022
What is Filipino-ness? Wawi Navarroza at Kristin Hjellegjerde London
In the press release for her show in London Wawi Navarroza is quoted as being interested in the Tropical Gothic. As a friend and resident of Philippines I understand well what she means by that (as you may recall I quoted at her in some length on the nature of the Tropical Gothic in TITT 154) but if I re-imagine myself as the London resident that I was up to 2011 I do not think I would. I was caught in two minds, even though I like her work very much. I liked this show but I wondered to what extent it would be understood in the UK.
I remember in the 1993 Whitney Biennal the artist, Pepón Osorio, of Puerto Rican origin complaining that white establishment Americans do not take seriously the maximalist aesthetic typical of Puerto Rican culture – their cluttered homes filled with catholic kitsch – that to them it was perhaps amusing but ultimately tasteless. The Philippines is like Puerto Rica where the Spanish Catholic baroque blends with US commodity culture – plus some other indigenous traits. It creates a particular, and interesting, aesthetic.
How then or now to convey that in the white cube of a Western gallery? I am not sure. Painting the different walls of the gallery different colours was a little too discrete. But to have added suitable furniture or have appropriate music playing would only have convinced many this was kitsch to be enjoyed much as one enjoys Diwali celebrations.
But, these are large photographs, big enough to create a spell. We need to read firstly from the pleasure the eye is given, secondly from symbols or indexical signs.
8. Wawi Navarroza, Mouths of Pearls, Oryental and Overseas, (self-portrait) 2022, 135 x 101 cm.
9. Detail
10. Wawi Navarroza, La bruja II, Vagus (Self-portrait rebirthing the self) 135 x 101 cm.
11. Wawi Navarroza, Portals, double portrait, 2022, 117 x 101cm
12. Wawi Navarroza, The Shopper, Heart Sutra (Self-portrait with artichoke) 2022, 100 x 93 cm.
Of course, you can never understand as fully as a native does. There is, for a start, the sheer cultural specificity of some elements: how many London residents would have any inkling what the blue and white box with the jet pane marked on it in Mouths of Pearls, Oryental and Overseas, (self-portrait) is? It is a balikbayan box, a special delivery service for Filipino OFWs to send goodies back to their families and relatives in the Philippines. But it means more than that: suggestions of exile, Western wealth, Filipino poverty, a longing for home, a longing for Western commodities. Does Wawi, I wonder, now that she lives in Istanbul, send balikbayan boxes to her family? Is she good at packing them? Yes, it is a skill!
Some of her best work has based itself – loosely and imaginatively – on images from Frida Kahlo or Balthus. Those echoes allow a much easier association with or entry into the picture. Will she start now she is an OFW to look back at icons of Filipino culture or art?
This show feels like a transitional one. A show made between two worlds. I am fascinated to see how she will deal not only with having had a child, but how she deals with living in Istanbul. Flying to Istanbul from Manila a few years back it struck me as not at all Asian: a European metropolis with mosques instead of churches. How “Filipino” will she remain now that she lives abroad?
I will try and get my thoughts on South-Eastern Art in Venice, Dokumenta and Frieze to you next week.
Happy Halloween
Tony
- “A British Painting for the ‘90s” Art in America April 1991, p. 181. The essay was originally titled ‘Is there an English Painting? Scottish painting was then and is distinct from English painting. The title was changed without my knowledge and approval. Indeed, the essay as finally printed was edited without my final approval. Hence I suspect the somewhat tangled grammar, ↑
- A fact proved even more by the book accompanying the show and solely devoted to her that illustrates 27 of her paintings. ↑