The Journal of Art
Exhibitions
“Dr. Chen’s Post-Modernist Cross-Pollination”
New York – Tsing-Fang Chen’s latest exhibition at the Lucia Gallery in SoHO, organized by the Taiwan Museum of Art, features extreme free-association cross-referencing of famous modern paintings. These images create a new context and meaning; some offer playful social commentary, others just plain fun. This type of art is a combination of post-modernism and cross-pollination.
Chen’s work is both off the wall and on target: his great skill as a copyist allows the viewer to appreciate the paintings’ compositions even while chuckling at their references. For instance, Van Gogh-Pope combines the background and setting of Velazquez’s Pope Innocent X and van Gogh’s Self-Portrait in Front of Easel. Chen depicts van Gogh as Innocent X, holding a palette and brushes in one hand and a check for $1.6 billion dollars in the other. Another painting has the ladies of Toulouse-Lautrec’s Salon at the Rue des Moulins in the foreground while the window behind them reveals a grim Jose de Ribera Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew lurking outside. Chen’s mad shuffle of images from the “slide museum without walls” is not so much high-minded and appropriationist in spirit as witty and self-mocking. “The Art of Dr. T.F. Chen: Neo-Iconography” will be on view at the Lucia Gallery through May 30. 1993
Van Gogh-Pope /48×36’’/ac / IV-90 |
Hang ups / 42 x 29 / mmp / 1974 |