Jeffrey Wang at Engine Gallery
Until Aug. 7, 37 Mill St., Toronto; enginegallery.ca
Jeffrey Wang paints as if he’s looking at the world through a fun
For all that, Wang is still very much a portrait painter, but one less interested in capturing the particulars of individuals (many of his subjects are family members and friends) than reconfiguring said individuals to match his seen-through-a-glass-bottle-bottom world view. Portraiture, Wang appears to be arguing, is always filtered through some sort of lens, is a subjective response, so why fight it? The results, ensembles of models who resemble distressed noodles, complete with boiled egg pallor, are both hilarious and weirdly fragile – watch out, they’re sliding off the canvas!
For ballast, Wang surrounds his characters with props, objects culled from art and pop culture history – a menagerie of animals, luxurious drapery and rugs, stolid furniture, unremarkable trees and pristine, rolling landscapes, lots of fruit. In many ways, Wang is also a classic “story painter,” in that he invests each scene with allegorical elements – fruit equals fecundity and plenty, birds equal the human soul, dogs equal the baser desires, and on and on. If that sounds terribly precious, don’t worry – Wang’s playfulness makes up for his occasional tendency to overdress his sets.
For me, the most intriguing thing about Wang’s work is his exploration of Asian-ness, especially as projected onto the Western portrait tradition. To wit, his Asian subject’s epicanthic eye folds are exaggerated to double, even triple size, while mouths are small but house gaping overbites. The skin tone of his Asian subjects is at times more jaundiced than olive, and their postures and gestures – bent, stooped and shuffling – could be lifted directly from an old Charlie Chan movie.
Wang is tiptoeing on thorny ground here, and the day I saw his work an Asian couple walked into the gallery and immediately walked out in a huff (not that such reactions are inherently troublesome – art is not comfort food).
What viewers need to observe is that everyone in Wang’s paintings is presented in an off-kilter manner. The Caucasians are lumpy and sickly, made of overcooked oats and stale milk. A woman in a hijab somehow supports her huge head with baby-sized shoulders. One man wears a blue demon monkey mask, for no apparent reason, and the slobbering canines in the paintings are lusty, feet-sniffing little perverts. Wang’s world view is hardly loving (although it is loveable), so his boundary-pushing representation of Asian subjects is part and parcel of an apparent unease with, and mockery of, the human body.
Deliciously unwholesome and decadently languorous, Wang’s paintings are sweaty fever dreams, visions revivified in oily bile and burnt sugar.
Greg Girard at Monte Clark Gallery
Until Aug. 21, 55 Mill St., Toronto; monteclarkgallery.com
While Wang populates his paintings with melting near-humans, Greg Girard’s photographs of Hanoi present a cityscape almost devoid of people – a bustling zombie town.
Girard’s Hanoi is obviously occupied, as the evidence of human habitation is plentiful – from empty chairs to blinking neon signs to motorcycles. But Girard captures the city in midnight moments, when nothing moves too fast, and the city, as all cities do, becomes a warren of closed doors and blackened windows.
