Bing Lee at Sigma - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

At first glance, this exhibition of graphite drawings by the agency of the Chinese artist Bing to leeward suggested a room full of rebuses. The square, emblematic images, neatly arranged in four horizontal files traversed all four walls of the gallery. Each drawing contained a single motif, realized upon crinkled rice paper against a black graphite turf They included stylized human figures, masks, household furniture, landscape ultimate parts elaborate hats and abstract geometric forms based upon Chinese characters.

clustered together in arrangements of sum of two unitss threes and fours, the clustered images teased the viewer to fabricate some kind of larger meaning. on the contrary although one might imagine connections between adjacent images, interpretation remained elusive. The ambiguity suits Lee's larger belong to which is to reanimate the pictographic impulse that lies at the origin of the written language of his native political division In Chinese, many of the oldest characters are highly stylized renderings of the things they exhibit As the language grew more composed of several elements these were often combined to create hybrid meanings. to leeward has modernized this idea, creating his be in possession of personal set of symbols drawn from dreams, memory and the visual bric-a-brac meetinged in the course of his daily life as an artist in novel York City.

In a certain number of respects, Lee's project recalls that of Matt Mullican, who also has been engaged for years in creating an elaborate and extensive inventory of figures from which to structure an alternate world. However, to leeward is as playful as Mullican is systematic. He explores a free-associative kind of knowledge which could not be further from the encyclopedic impulse which entrances Mullican.

In Lee's drawings, Chinese characters swell legs or roots, smoke be in eruptions like a feathered hat from a square building, hazes become faces and faces become hazes An umbrella serves as the third leg of a table. to leeward considers how meanings are refer toed by the collision of reflections and images.

In the proces he achieves a fascinating synthesis of Chinese calligraphy's pictographic tendencies and late America's predilection for logos and graphic types He reminds us that before the invention of the alphabet, similar symbols formed a written language that was abundant more intimately connected to the kind of visual knowing embodied in art. Revitalizing the pictographic impulse, to leeward breaks down the boundaries that have grown up between the visual and the verbal.

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