Everyday Ink

Tsai’s lines—whether circular or straight—move. While literally static on the paper, they contain within them the energy of the artist’s gesture as they endlessly redraw themselves before the viewer. The two major traditions which inform Tsai’s work—traditional Chinese calligraphy and painting and modern abstraction—share an important kinesthetic ground. Critic Harold Rosenberg’s description of Abstract Expressionism as “action painting” is in many ways applicable to Chinese calligraphy and painting: the paper is akin to the canvas which becomes “an arena in which to act” and what we see in the finished work is “not a picture, but an event.” Tsai describes the action of her painting as “dancing in space and time with the brush.” Dance is a corporeal and temporal art form. What happens to all the corporeal movement of a dance as it is transferred to a painting? Where is its time? The energy or chi of Tsai’s dance is embodied in the form of works like Hooked (2017) from her “Icons” ...

“Without Beginning or End” The Trans-Temporal Art of Yeachin Tsai Robert R. Shane The Contentment of Mr. Orange, 2015, acrylic on paper “The circle… is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions… it points most clearly to the fourth dimension.” —Vassily Kandinsky A blazing cadmium red-orange circle pulsates with mesmerizing force in Yeachin Tsai’s painting  The Contentment of Mr. Orange  (2015) from the artist’s series “Dot in the Space.” Compared to the small gray spot just off-center within its body, the orange circle looks unfathomably large, recalling graphic representations comparing size of the Sun to the Earth. The orange form’s fuzzy borders give the sense that this monumental circle’s energy is ready to burst outward, a force countered only by the inward gravitational pull of its mass. Floating in a dull yellow and gray void, the circle seems to exist in a no-place and a timeless no-time, but its phenomenal impact on the viewer situates it in the ...