Marlene & Monet

“Yu's grand landscapes hold their own with Monet's luminous water lilies series, which also seem intimate and sublime at once. Both Yu and Monet seem to nail down the detail of nature while conveying its panoramic sweep. They are concretely cosmic, as it were: in works by both artists, natural process, painterly process and perceptual process ingeniously converge in a seamless esthetic unity. Their paintings are marvelously fluid, with no loss of coherence and intelligibility. But I think that Yu realizes more completely what Monet implies but never dares unequivocally acknowledge let alone directly engage: the immeasurable. Monet remains bound by the Western idea that "Man is the measure of all things" (Protagoras). His murals are carefully measured closed systems, however ostensibly open-ended. Strange as it may seem to say so, they have a Poussinesque balance and poise-a certain stateliness and orderliness, even sedateness. Monet's water lilies float, but they seem to be following the steps of a dance, like proper young maidens. In other words, they seem predetermined, however indeterminate their effect. Monet's stream flows, but there is no strong undercurrent in it, which is why each water lily seems fixed in place however freely it seems to float in space. It remains anchored to its appearance rather than absorbed in the primal reality of the water. It never loses its physical specificity to become an emblem of the "metaphysical" inevitability evoked by the water.

Monet's water paintings are a decorous continuum of petites perceptions rather than a convulsive outpouring of the elemental, like Yu's cosmic vistas. Instinct is muted in Monet, but it is conspicuously intense in Yu. She is not afraid of the immeasurable: she meets it with the immeasurable instinct within herself. It is as though Monet uses the decorative to avoid the numinous while conveying his fascination with it, while Yu fearlessly encounters it: no hesitancy before the mysterium tremendum for her. Her paintings are as overpowering, awesome and urgent with energy, otherness and infinity as the mysterium tremendum, drawing us into itself even as its radical difference "repels" us. I have used Rudolf Otto's description of its numinosity in The Idea of the Holy in order to suggest that Yu is a genuine nature mystic while Monet is a nature mystic manque. He is too Western to submit to the sense of the beyond conveyed by the mysterium tremendum.”

- Donald Kuspit, Ph.D., From Las Vegas Art Museum show Review, Artnet