For four days, January 20-24, 2010, the 15th Annual L.A. Art
Show was held in the West Wing of the downtown Convention Center.
This is one of the four largest shows in the U.S. and it is
filled with hundreds of galleries and thousands of spectacular
works of art. At the David Lawrence Gallery, I was kindly
introduced to the work of Tao Dong Dong, which I have been
enjoying and contemplating these months since.
It is rare to find something interesting enough to contemplate.
That is what excites me about Tao Dong Dong's work. The images at
first don't look pretty to me. My first reaction was not to look
at these images, but to look away.
The first painting I saw was the underwater Marilyn, part of his
series of "Water World" images. I had been wandering from one
Marilyn after another, thinking about the iconic beauty, and how
she was represented by so many artists at the fair in so many
forms. In this image, Marilyn, as Andy Warhol would have seen her
colorized, is only an image flattened under a pool of
water.
The surface refraction of the water in rippling motion creates
depth, so that crests of light pull the viewer to the distorted
patterning, which obliterates one's original preconceptions about
the icon underneath. Approaching the iconic with a blank state,
it becomes abstract and void of meaning in the few seconds that
the brain suspends recognition of what we've already seen
thousands of times.
As I took a second look at Marilyn, to see if I could see
"underneath" the surface of the water, a representative of the
gallery approached me and she and I struck up a conversation
about the artist, for whom she had a deep respect. She talked
about the process of developing a photograph, in which the images
are submerged in chemical baths. A person with more classic
photography experience than me might have instantly thought of
that when first seeing the paintings.
What I liked more and more about the work was that it made me
keep looking at it. On a purely physical level, I wanted to look
because I couldn't see the surface of the water at the same time
as the image below. Trying to get to what was underneath seemed
like a metaphor for how we try to approach iconic representations
of archetypes; looking past the representation or outward form to
the symbolic meaning of that figure in that culture at that time,
distilled.
For example, Marilyn Monroe is a person who people today, born
decades after her death in some cases, still feel like they
"know." But the "knowing" is really trying to reconstruct a sense
of depth from what we only really know on the surface, trying to
see meaning, or understanding, in something we are far removed
from.
Other subjects of the Water World series include the Virgin Mary,
Venus, and Buddha. I took home with me a lovely set of prints,
one of which I tacked up on my wall, a picture of the Virgin
Mary. I have enjoyed looking at this image, as it fills me with a
sense of peace and calm. The act of looking and looking again,
seeing distortion, and then seeing wholeness, is an ongoing
process and something I look for as a sign of accomplishment in
art. I look forward to continuing to watch Tao Dong Dong's ideas
progress.
www.davidlawrencegallery.com
www.taodondongart.com
© 2010 Moira Cue for the Hollywood Sentinel, all rights
reserved.