Biography

Eastern and Western aesthetics converge in the art of Marlene Yu as she integrates elements of Chinese landscape painting and gestural abstract expressionism in order to create sweeping meditations on the rhythms, movements, and cycles of nature. Her large-scale paintings focus on the complex details of our environment, while effortlessly communicating the vastness of the natural world. Marked by their immediacy and forthright ambition, her canvases present a thoroughly contemporary image of nature in which painterly and graphic values are combined to deliver what art critic Donald Kuspit calls “environmental tour de forces.”1

Born in Hua-Lian, Taiwan, in 1937, Yu began drawing when she was very young. Her father, a local doctor who built bamboo sculptures in his free time, encouraged her development, telling her that “creation is the happiest thing in the world.”2 After high school, Yu enrolled in the only university in Taiwan with a fine arts program, the National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei. Here, the artist received a broad education in the arts, studying Chinese painting and brushwork, and the Western traditions of figure drawing, watercolor, and oil painting. In 1963, three years after completing her B.F.A. at Taiwan Normal, Yu came to the United States to continue her studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. It was here that she first encountered abstract expressionism and began to experiment with acrylic paint and large-scale formats. Since her childhood in Taiwan, Yu had been interested in the beauty of the surrounding landscape. Shortly after graduating from the University of Colorado in 1967, she began to visually explore nature by blending the Chinese techniques she had learned in Taiwan with the expressive gestures and colorful palette of abstract expressionism. For the next thirty years, she would continue to develop this interest, fusing Eastern and Western techniques in order to achieve her own unique style and to communicate the infinite variation and patterns of the natural environment.

Painted in 1996, Molten Lava Grand exemplifies the themes that have consumed Yu throughout her long career. As part of her ongoing Forces of Nature series, Molten Lava Grand delivers a striking vision of nature that evokes both abstraction and the magnificent, epic screens of the Ming Dynasty. Yu’s treatment of color and her active application of paint is reminiscent of Western aesthetics, while her use of line and perspective emulates Chinese painting. Yu presents her vision from a variety of positions rather than using the straightforward perspective that is typical of Western landscape painting. In doing so, she creates an abstract image that is recognizable yet not fully identifiable.

In Molten Lava Grand, the artist captures the tremendous force and destructive potential of the raw flow of lava. Occupying the central portion of the canvas is a huge rocklike formation, rendered in a wash of thin brown paint enriched by interwoven patches of rust and gray. The central image is framed by touches of frothy white and deep, fiery reds, which seem to suggest the intense volcanic heat as lava spills from the rock-encrusted mountain. Characteristic of Yu’s work, the colors of this painting are modulated, built up, layer upon layer in order to develop intensity and to imbue the painting with rich texture. The grand scale of the work communicates the energy and tension that is in inherent in the destructive phenomenon of volcanic eruption. Alive with detail, her painting abounds with rhythm and movement as if to emphasize the ever-changing nature of the universe.

Yu synthesizes what Kuspit calls “the natural sublime and abstract sublime” in order to present an idealized vision of the environment.3 In her paintings, minute details and sweeping panoramas coexist in striking studies of the forces of nature. Rooted in both Eastern and Western traditions, Yu’s work balances quiet subtlety and broad ambition in order to present new perspectives on the natural world. —L.W.

1. Donald Kuspit, “Marlene Yu: Cosmic Inscape,” Marlene Tseng Yu: Forces of Nature II (Las Vegas: Las Vegas Art Museum, 1999), 6.
2. Gerrit Henry, “The Art of Nature, The Nature of Her Art: An Interview with Marlene Tseng Yu,” Marlene Tseng Yu, 13.
3. Donald Kuspit, “Forces of Nature,” http://artnet.com/magazine/reviews/kuspit/kuspit2-18-04.asp, accessed 24 February 2004.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)

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