reviews

Greg Beatty
The Regina Leader-Post
Wednesday, December 31, 1997
Wong’s paintings evoke spirituality from intricacy
Janice Wong: Fragments
Rosemont Art Gallery
Until January 31

In my profile of author Joanne Gerber (Dec 6), I spoke about the possibility of a person deriving spiritual sustenance from visiting an art gallery. This exhibition of hauntingly beautiful paintings by Janice Wong offers us precisely this opportunity.
Composed of three suites—two executed on Chinese Joss paper, one on aromatic cedar panels—the works depict found objects, (leaves, flowers, pottery shards, wishbones), collected by Wong during her exploration of two sites with personal and familial significance, (the original location of Nanaimo’s Chinatown and the northern Saskatchewan lake district near Prince Albert).
Nominally, these paintings function as landscapes. But instead of offering viewers the type of sweeping vistas ordinarily associated with the genre, Wong focuses on the area immediately surrounding her feet—the locus of her corporeal connection with the earth.
In both Joss series, Wong scattered select objects on a horizontal surface and painted them, using the intuitive arrangement of colour and shape as a vehicle for exploring the interrelationship between time, space, memory and place.
Because of the intricate detail in many of the works, they can only be experienced in extreme closeup. The attention Wong demands from the viewer stands in stark contrast with the simplified graphic quality of the imagery we are exposed to through mass media. Of course, she’s not trying to sell us something.
The meditative quality of her work is enhanced by the subtle layering of paint. Images, for the most part, are executed in rich impasto. These are juxtaposed by minimalistic blocks of colour and delicate washes. The latter serves as a place for the eye to rest while viewing the work.
Visible in many of the paintings is a red mark that underscores the symbolic significance of Joss paper in Chinese culture, (traditionally it is burnt as a way of sending goodwill to a departed spirit). The mark contains the double symbol for happiness demarcated in Chinese characters, along with stylized orchids and bats (the bat is a symbol of luck, and its presence here finds an echo in the wishbone).
While similar in scale, the cedar paintings possess an even more intricate visual structure thanks to Wong’s skillful incorporation of the wood grain, including knotholes, into the composition. The tongue-in-groove design alludes to the possibility of the fragments being joined together to form a coherent whole. This occurs in the second joss series, which consists of several large rectangular paintings hung vertically. Similar in style to Chinese scroll paintings, the works function as a door or window through which the viewer can enter the landscape.
To talk any more about Wong’s work, especially from an analytical or intellectual perspective, would do it a disservice. These are paintings that must be experienced on an emotional level. If we take the time to engage them, we discover a world of mystery, in which the binary certainty that governs human relations in this neo-con age—right/wrong, good/evil, truth/falsehood—no longer applies

articles

James Koester
Essay excerpt
June, 2005
Not Everything All at Once
Janice Wong: A Number of Events
Open Studio Gallery, Toronto ON

Janice Wong's works are exquisitely crafted compositions of colour and geometry that look like science and feel like a dream; schematics of systems floating in larger systems; hybrids of light and sound and other things we don't know. They are at once rational and mystical, mathematical and organic, scientific and spiritual, dynamic and meditative. They are calm and beautiful things that seduce and invite the viewer in where the final transcendence happens; we start to think about the relationships between the lines and the shapes and the blurs and the colours and the composition, and by our nature start to organize and make sense of these equations, this code, this language. We stay long enough to think about these things because the work is curious and beautiful and we feel its sincerity. Curious, beautiful and sincere; there is truth there.


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