The second time I saw the exhibition Leah Ke Yi Zheng at the David Lewis gallery, I brought the poet Laura Mullen, who was visiting briefly from out of town. I was sure she would be intrigued by the paintings, and I wasn’t wrong, because we talked about the relationship between legibility and illegibility, which is at the heart of the artist’s work. Zheng works acrylic, ink, and pigments (mixed in one case with ox-bone glue) on silk, which she wraps around deep stretchers of mahogany, cherry wood, heartwood purple and black wood. The 12 paintings range in size from seven by eight to 108 by 85 inches (one of two large-scale works). A painting displayed in the display case, with silk stretched on both sides, became a shallow box in which one could both see and not see, making the interior a kind of safe space.
I first became aware of Zheng’s decisions about wood when I considered the attention she pays to the depth of the stretcher. In many cases, the silk functions as a semi-transparent veil over a deep box. By varying the paint’s viscosity, which ranges from thin washes to dense layers, it is able to articulate a surface we see and into. A number of stretchers are oblique rectangles, making them planes that appear to move or twist in space. This perception is complicated by the semi-transparent silk support and the ghostly imagery, as the physical form of the painting does not fully align with the spectral forms of the painting. It was like they couldn’t sit on the wall.
The shift between readability and illegibility in Zheng’s work goes against the long-held assumption that a painting must recognize its two-dimensional surface. This shift allows the artist to question the relationship between readability and illegibility, while pursuing a trajectory of his own. Each of the paintings in the exhibition presents a different level of readability, from graphically immediate to impossible to decipher. Seeing this spectrum reminded me how invested the art world is in legibility, which is one of the unfortunate legacies of Pop Art. Zheng’s resistance to this is admirable because, as she said in an interview with Nicky Ni (Sixty inches from centerMarch 26, 2021):
[…] the paintings on silk are slightly oblique; they illustrate my attempt to destabilize the infrastructure of a painting, deviating just enough from the norm, but not enough to upset the balance. And this balance is strange; it is based on irregularities and aporias.
I also learned from this interview that Zheng’s knowledge of silk painting began when she was a child in China:
My childhood art teacher trained me in painting techniques and the study of ancient Chinese paintings. Our relationship was like an apprenticeship that lasted a long time – I studied with her from the age of four and a half until I left my hometown of Wuyishan for college. […] it was thirteen continuous years of dissecting images and constructing my own aesthetic. My paintings are in line with traditional Chinese paintings – it is important for me to receive but also to overcome the influence of history. I use the same materials and techniques that a Chinese painter of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period (907 AD–960 AD) would use, but I transform the scroll painting and its flatness into an object. I inherited a precision in hand movement from my childhood practices. And silk is a seemingly delicate but strong and capricious material; it feels like skin.
The conundrum of simultaneously receiving and moving on is one of Zheng’s concerns. Is it possible to make this medium work without being nostalgic? Is his desire to “destabilize the infrastructure of a painting” related to the history of Chinese silk painting, Western oil painting, life in the diaspora, or all three? By painting on silk, which absorbs the medium and cannot be altered or scraped off, Zheng recalls that this method of working preceded Helen Frankenthaler, who is said to have invented the so-called “dip-stain” technique in the 1950s. it possible to make yourself visible without being nostalgic for what you left behind, while resisting assimilation into a society that will always see you as “other”? Do the subjects of Zheng’s work shed light on his plight?
One of the recurring and readable subjects of his recent painting is a close-up view of cogwheels, which seems like an unlikely subject for someone trained in the practice and history of silk painting. If we look inside a watch, do we have to read it literally, like a painting on time? The larger’s scale suggests this isn’t necessarily the case, as its dimensions roughly align with a human’s physical reach, rather than something worn on the wrist. These paintings also evoke Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Chocolate Grinder (No. 1)’ (1913) and Francis Picabia’s ‘Voila la Femme’ (1915), both of which used imagery to explore sexual themes. What does it mean to paint a machine on silk, which is produced by an insect? Silkworms live on mulberry trees, which were also the source of paper used by generations of Asian artists. The more you delve into Zheng’s paintings, the more questions arise.
And yet, as I continued to look at these paintings and many questions arose, I began to think about the less readable works in the exhibition and how they escape definition and language. If Zheng doesn’t name them, does that mean she feels she can’t be seen? Could this feeling of invisibility also be linked to life in the diaspora?
The face of the man in “Untitled (Maradona)” oscillates between legibility and illegibility. The photograph used by Zheng in his painting, which measures seven by eight inches, drawing the viewer up close, was published in Argentine newspapers when Diego Maradona – one of the greatest soccer players in history – died in 60 years. Reviewing the circumstances of his death, the Argentine courts ruled that the eight doctors in charge of his health “violated the duties each was charged with”, which “led to the fatal outcome of the patient who otherwise could have been avoided”. Thinking of his proud and defiant face, hard to discern, I thought of how the emphasis on legibility that permeates most art forms, with its calls to be accessible and transparent, is essentially a racialized construct that denies difference by affirming clarity.
Comparing the silk she paints to “skin”, Zheng works on a territory in which the Asian female body is one of the subjects. His treatment of this subject is complex and difficult and does not fit easily into the popular narratives in which this issue is discussed. I find this desire for independence, and the way it is presented, admirable.
Leah Ke Yi Zheng continues at David Lewis (57 Walker Street, Tribeca, Manhattan) through June 3. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
