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Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2007 On View: Finding her voice: Amy Lin’s ‘Silence’ On View | Claudia Rousseau
Photo courtesy of the artist The bright colors of ‘‘Accumulation” may suggest anything from pop-beads to the beach. Without narrative, Lin’s drawings tell stories that take place in the silent interaction between art work and viewer.
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The work of emerging regional artist Amy Lin, now on view at the Heineman Myers Gallery in Bethesda, presents something of a conundrum. The interest it has generated, and the sales, threaten to make it suspiciously too popular to be taken seriously. Couple that with a widespread fascination with the artist’s technique — hundreds of small circles of varying sizes hand-drawn in curving strings with little tail-like ends — discussions of Lin’s work tend to be on the level of a ‘‘temple of toothpicks” rather than the kind of analytical response usually accorded abstract compositions. What passes for commentary on her work has tended to focus on the amazing number of dots, the sort of thing that could be done with a computer in short order, but which Lin tediously, obsessively, draws with colored pencils. But does this emphasis on the ‘‘wow” effect do it justice? If there were no more interest here than the dazzlingly meticulous way they are made, would they really be worth looking at? The fact is, once past that level, there is much to be seen and thought about here, and the artist’s much overlooked serious intent, particularly in terms of self-expression, deserves some attention.
We might begin with ‘‘Silence,” the exhibit’s title. The artist’s statement informs us that as a child, Lin’s Taiwanese parents would scold her for ‘‘not saying everything perfectly, as an adult would... I developed such an anxiety over speaking that ... when I spoke, no one would hear me.” The working method the artist has developed during the past three years, with its meditative repetitive motions, has been liberating for her. By this silent, slow method, Lin has found her voice, and something she feels is personally worth saying.
Many of her titles allude to motion or change (‘‘Intertwined,” ‘‘Breakthrough”), and the works themselves suggest a sense of movement of the dots across the page. In the current exhibit, in a drawing like the smaller sized ‘‘Singled,” dark colored circles seem to migrate and collect in certain places. As others have said, they swirl like molecules or cells under a microscope, or tiny animalcules searching for unknowable destinations. In works like ‘‘Singled” or the much larger ‘‘Secrets” that have a darker palette of colors, the strands of spheres hover over the white of the paper so as to suggest multiple planes of a glowing deep space, layered as they are one over the other, but never touching. The sensibility here strongly connotes Far Eastern Asian art and philosophy. In drawings like ‘‘Hybrid,” ‘‘Fragile” and the ascetic ‘‘Trust” (a single twisting line of red dots), the rhythmic, angled forms evoke Chinese calligraphy, an art that is not simply mechanical, but profoundly meditative and spiritual.
The issue of suggesting pictorial space in these works is significant. Most notable in the larger works, the degree to which Lin can create a sense of deep space with her technique comes as something of a surprise. In addition to the spherical character of the circles, each of which is shaded toward a highlighted open center, the layering and the subtle variation in the size of the dots help achieve this spatial effect. And, for all her laments about not having gone to art school, Lin, a chemical engineer by education, has an acute natural sense of composition. This is evident in the easy way the shapes of the intertwining strings hold the field on whatever size paper she chooses.
All is not somber in Lin’s works, despite the fact that almost all the titles in the Heineman-Myers exhibit have psychological references. Many of the drawings feature very bright colors — pinks, greens, yellows and bright purples. These have a totally different feeling, one that speaks of carnival and dancing, of being young and loud. They look like pop-bead necklaces, like Mardi Gras, connoting places full of light and sun. The 9- by 5-foot ‘‘Persuasion” somehow has an Arabic feeling, with its winding flourishes and vertical orientation.
What interests me is the range of dark and light in the content of Lin’s drawings. Their value is not simply formal, as strong and important as that may be. It is in their ability to convey personal meaning and allow the viewer access to new, almost endless interpretations. Without narrative, these drawings tell stories, most of which take place in that mysterious interaction between art work and viewer.
When defining abstraction in the visual arts, one thinks of an art that does not imitate or directly represent nature or the reality around us. That it might evoke the appearance of things that are not represented, but perhaps implied, or that it might provoke memories of things seen only in the viewer’s mind doesn’t make it any less abstract or less serious. The art of Amy Lin should be considered within these parameters.
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