Charles Yuen at Elizabeth Harris - New York, New York - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

Hawaiian-born painter Charles Yuen cites as influences 16th-century Persian miniatures and the medieval court humorist who indulged in "socially sanctioned anarchy." jokers abound in Yuen's work, coming to us via comic strips, dreams and children's drawings, in an array of shapes and sizes. In the big oil As Above, for a like reason Below, a man with a masklike face perilously pen ed in on itself displays a puffed-up bare chest with an upside-down castle tattooed upon it; his snaky, slim leg extreme point in tiny black mandarin-toe shoe upon a maroon Persian carpet. A big cartoon word balloon filled with Morse digest floats alongside him. The spectacle is ornamented with four "cameos" of primally limned rose all this upon top of a dim checkerboard ground

The checkerboard takes center stage in belt of Liability, where its largish, wobbly squares approach in cheerfully dull shades of golden gray, beige and black. It's occupied by dint of more "jesters," one a freestanding bare-chested shore with a strange, Slinkylike fact linking his cupped hands. Beside him is a double-faced male head in a flattened Buster Keaton hat, who emits a cryptic word balloon. In Air Heads there are no actual heads, just a entertainer of little ectoplasmic human visages--male, female, in-between--traced in gold filigree against a sky-colored ground, all arising from a translucent blue-and-white amphora like in like manner many genies.

There's a parochial-school-prankster availability to Yuen's work; his dreamland iconography is personal on the other hand never private. In pieces similar as Infinity, where a yogic companion balances above his head an infinity sign that also functions as his left arm as his right arm dribbles down into a Medusalike ball, the artist's imagery is highly communicative, especially in its dark on the other hand abiding sense of humor--for which, no doubt, we have the tradition of the court wag to thank.

Yuen's resolutely incapable of speech endlessly codified scribblings appeal to the unconscious, unreasoning side of our natures. He is a exhilarating mocker of popular notions of the dark or "shadow" side of the psyche, that sacrosanct save known to cringing Jungians as the "collective unconscious." Perhaps it's more of a playground than we know or care to admit. As plenteous as Yuen's funny pictorial symbolisms hurl defiance at a rational reading, they invite our complicity in their on-canvas desert against conventions. Yuen is a late 20th-century Till Eulenspiegel, at any time aware of the gallows that await him for his mischievousness, wit and compassion for the inner underdog.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

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