Lilly Wei
and the Image
What I see: colors arranged on a small square of khadi (a handspun and woven cloth), the thickened paint pushing past the edges of the ground to end in a delicately puckered, uneven fringe.
The colors contend with each other, but only enough to generate tension, edginess. The choice of palette is modernist, mannerist—with a dissenting twang: orange, black, chartreuse—or lime—propped up by a beguiling pink, the field divided—or connected—by two interlocking shapes, one black, one gray, curving into each other where they meet. The outlines of the geometric forms also tremble slightly, hand- painted, welcome in an age of increasing digitalization, of artificial intelligence and the reliance on tech. Here, the artist’s touch, the artist's presence is reassuringly evident. Strips of paper lie beneath, collage elements that add texture and weight, an extra dose of presence. Measuring merely 8" x 8", it is a scrap but nonetheless mighty, its glamour offbeat, sophisticated.
There is also a provocative red line that cuts diagonally across the right side. I see it as all the (metaphoric) red lines that have been drawn of late that were not to be crossed but inevitably have been. It acts as a challenge: to cross or not to cross?
It might be a landscape, seen from overhead—not pastoral or romantic, yet not dystopian, on the cusp between regeneration and desolation: orange earth, black river, fields in bloom, a terrain of gray rock, that sharply sloped red line. While I'm not surprised that my thoughts landed me here, given the state of the world, the fluidity of abstraction, the persuasions of the artist, I also won’t be surprised when I see something different the next time I look.