From Turquoise Floating to Rain Forest, Three-Plus Decades of Painting Nature

“For more than 30 years now, Marlene Tseng Yu is continuing to enrich the art scene with impressive paintings. Very definitely the visionary with something significant to say, Tseng Yu has with incredible consistency in the 29 series of painting she has done since the mid-1960s-and all the while showing indefatigable energy and a boundless enthusiasm succeeded in recasting the concept of picturing nature. Using the special qualities of the medium to enhance awareness of and advance appreciation for the subject, Tseng Yu is found to be opening up new prospects for painting nature. Color, form and space, the basics of painting, are called upon by her to do double and triple duty even, in showing how a variety of situations and occurrences, including those found in nature, and those adduced partly from actuality and imagination, look and feel. Eschewing a mirror-like imitation of appearances, Tseng Yu chooses to rely on abstract qualities and values to in a fundamental sense do the talking. In the wonderful evocative ways that paintings do communicate with us, the text from the start has been about raising certain essentials truths about nature.

For example, have you ever seen turquoise floating? In two paintings separated by almost three decades, a striking early and recent examples from "Forces of Nature," the general over-title for all of the series, we do. "Turquoise Floating" 1970, an acrylic on canvas, six feet high and ten feet wide, focuses attention on the beauty of the distinctive bluish green surfaces. The wall-like dimensions and their scaffold-like placement make the different sized and shaped turquoise pieces appear to loom. This in turn triggers the idea of living stone, and by extension appreciation for nature's awesome vitality. Already evident in this 1970s work is the fusion of Chinese and Western approaches underscoring her method.

It seems Tseng Yu, who was born in Taiwan and left to go to the United States to attend the University of Colorado at Boulder, brought along her initial interests in nature and painting which had been formed by her early studies of Chinese philosophy and traditions. Tseng Yu, who received her M.F.A. in 1967, has recalled how "liberating" the studies of abstract painting she did as part of her degree program were. She has commented on how well her background in Chinese philosophy and art served in providing her with a basis for taking only what she needed from Color Field Painting. For example, the bold composition in "Turquoise Floating" 1970 is revealing of her interest in the all-over grid, one of Color Field Painting's major structural icons. While the depiction of depth and shadow, another aspect of endowing the turquoise pieces with vital figural presence goes against the then minimalist veneration of flatness in painting, the painting's content flies in the face of minimalist dictums against subject matter and its hostile view of nature.

Tseng Yu's recent return to the subject of "Turquoise Floating" is representative of how over the years continuity and change have gone hand in hand leading at every stage of her career to greater challenges and achievements. A magical excitement is projected by current series like "Turquoise Floating" and "Rain Forest." In the 1999 painting "Turquoise Floating" the more we regard the contrasting organic and geometric forms and register lights and darks and volumes and contours, the mind's eye picks up on the composition's fascinatingly emblematic edge. If turquoise is symbolic of earth here it also is evocative of sky, just as the unfurling white passage can be seen alternately as clouds or dancing coral. Tseng Yu's "Forces of Nature"-no limits!”

Ronny Cohen, Ph.D., Reprinted from NY ARTS Magazine