Sea change

Leigh Li-Yun Wen’s elemental explorations

By Chris Thompson

“Leigh Li-Yun Wen shows at The Clown through July 29. Call (207) 756-7399.

BACK TO THE PACIFIC III: Leigh Wen, etching, 1995.

According to the philosopher Heraclitus, you can’t bathe in the same river twice. Cratylus pushed this a step further, arguing that you can’t bathe in the same river even once.

Cratylus’s argument didn’t take Heraclitus’s point to its logical conclusion so much as bring logic to the point where it concludes. The world that happens around us, in us, and as us, is in a process of complex and constant change. Like a rushing river, this always overflows the concepts and languages we use to describe it. Afterwards, something else happens, and keeps on happening, carrying us with it until we start thinking about how we’ll describe this great communion with nature to our friends.

Leigh Wen’s show at The Clown brings together a series of works, in a range of two-dimensional media, that dance in these ineffable moments. The exhibition includes a number of prints and etchings, and three bound volumes of intaglio and watercolors, but is anchored by her large oil paintings. With few exceptions, her subjects are the four elements of Western cosmology: water, fire, air, and earth.

The simplicity of her subject matter, and the combination of delicacy and confidence with which she approaches it, lets her create second-long sketches of the life of the universe.

Each painting is a saturated portrait, picturing not landscape or seascape but the patterns whose variations we use to make sense of our experience of such vistas. Her “Ocean T-21,” for example, is a topographical portrait of the ocean, built from a tangle of irregularly drawn lines over a background of ultramarine and cobalt blues. The waves’ peaks are described by agglomerations of these lines, ripples that spread out and cascade into each trough. It is in the spacing of their varying rhythms, and not the identifiable contours of this or that wave, that Wen’s lines bring the sea to life as if it were a single skin.

The title of this painting hints at an endless series of studies, so many that Wen had to use the entire alphanumeric system to index them. Others, like “Back to the Pacific” (pictured), take on more suggestively autobiographical tones. This sense of being at turns invited into her memory, and then held back by her analytical distance, catches us between feeling as though we might share her experience of standing amongst the elements, and knowing that she won’t let us inhabit that space for long.

This tension parallels the conflict described by scientist Rupert Sheldrake, who said that no matter how materialistic and mechanistic our lives are during the workweek, we all become romantic animists on the weekends. We pack up the gas-guzzling SUV and head for the hills for a communion with nature that lasts about as long as it takes to get that first mosquito bite.

Like Sheldrake, Wen’s work suggests an alternative to thinking of nature either as giant machine or New Agey spirit-realm. Her paintings and prints, in their emphasis upon its changing and developing patterns, picture the natural world as an evolving, learning organism of which we’re a part.

On the other hand, with a spate of forest fires raging out west thanks to some weekend animist’s poorly built campfire, paintings like “Fire 2004” could be seen to point to the uneasiness of our inextricable connection to this thing called nature. Interestingly, unlike the other images, the fire pictures are the only ones in which human-made shapes are visible. In “Fire 2004,” so intense that the painting on the adjacent wall seems to reflect it, flames consume what are obviously fabricated objects: traces of architectural skeletons can be seen beneath a wall of fire that almost warms the gallery. The title of this work has a prophetic edge, highlighting the volatility of the bond between human and nature, warning of a catastrophic near-future.

Where the show as a whole intensifies in its progression through the endless cycles of the elemental continuum, the several text fragments that accompany the show detract from Wen’s painterly successes. One of these, posted near “Fire 2004,” reads: “The flaming fire warns me off by its glow. Save me from the dying embers hidden under ashes.” Such pathos has the effect of simplifying and deadening this painting’s emotional and intellectual range.

Wen’s two paintings “Air 2006” and “Air 2004” have a similar effect. Her others present the dizzying complexity of elemental flux and allow its psychological resonances to unfold in our own time. But these outer space-scapes, with their over-stylized shooting stars, blazing comets, and colorful nebulae, seem giddy and staged. Their chalky paint-handling is out of place with respect to the luminous precision of her other work.

In “Twilight III,” Wen’s return to focus on the rhythm and pitch of her line allows her to deal with the vast poetic potential of the night sky much more eloquently. In this work, wild white orbits tie knots around celestial clusters carved out against the dulled black expanse. The image embodies the contemplative bond that Wen, borrowing from James Joyce, calls “persevering penetrativeness.” It’s here, where playful wonder commingles with empirical exactitude, that she finds that materia prima that animates all of her other works. n

Chris Thompson can be reached at xxtopher@hotmail.com.