| Angela Lyn
“There is no greater privilege and responsibility than to
enter the world of another person.
In a culture consumed by ever-faster formulas for newness and change, I choose painting as my primary medium. Through painting, through its sheer stubbornness
to survive as a language, through the immediacy of its
physical, mental and spiritual demands, and through my
own personal engagement as an artist, I try to examine
what it is that touches us as human beings. I am interested in the resonance and sustainability of an image. I build
on the simple premise that if the work is to give something genuine to the viewer, something genuine has to
be given to the work.
ection and persistence.
My scope then, through the act of painting, lies in
transforming my own time into a visual language offering
the viewer a sense of space in which he, or she, can
renew aspects of the self tarnished by the density and
haste of daily life.
I like to think of a painting as a sort of time bank; a place
where one can come and go to deposit and withdraw
energy. Whilst painting, I am aware that if the painting
succeeds, it may become a doorway to the world of
another person: a humbling and inspiring prospect.”
Angela Lyn, Lugano, 2014
Through my Chinese father, traditional Asian culture lies
rooted in my upbringing. Within a contemporary context,
re ecting on the essence of beauty, and its power as a
universal language remain key to my artistic approach. In
a media strategy often dominated by the negative, there
is a danger that we become immune. In contrast, I nd
reaching my viewer with a certain kindness gives way to
introspection. It is here that I hope my paintings become
communicative.
In my approach to painting, I stay close to what I see.
Living in Ticino, Switzerland, painting in a large studio
that faces through large Himalayan cedar trees on
to Lake Lugano, landscape becomes the essential
basis of my enquiry. Through attention to detail and
the slow building of an image, I try to create a sense of
presence and accountability. The subjects I choose,
be that fragments of cedar trees, engaging with each
single needle, or the horizon of a landscape through
which millimeter for millimeter I examine the exchange
between mountain and sky, or in still life painting where
the observation of a thing becomes an existential enquiry
into the ephemeral question of reality; all require time, re
cover:
beyond 2004 | oil on canvas | 140 x 140 cm
Angela Lyn
| p. 1
conversations of a lifetime
I consider Swiss artist Angela Lyn as a very good friend of
mine. Our paths crossed sometime a year and a half ago
through my blog and she has accompanied me all the
way through my incipient recovery from an addiction to
drugs and a rather unexpected chronic depression and
I would say that the starting point of our, how to put it,
‘common belief in art’ had its first crystallised moment in
what became one of the most read articles since I started
writing my blog. I am referring to the Conversations of a
Life Time that you can read here.
From the moment I realized I was an addict, I decided to
write a daily (sometimes, hourly) post in my blog which
allowed me to reach out both to ask for help but also to
establish a dialogue with a world that seemed to me far
too distant. If I have to summarize, however, what my blog
is about I would say that it conceives life as a visual riddle
that art can help untie through allowing us to connect
with other human beings not only through space but
also through time. As a matter of fact, portraiture and
photography are two ways, as Leo Alberti used to say
about the former, to make the death come back to life.
Praying to an image of Christ we can also connect with
ourselves, and that that lies beyond.To say it in modern
terms, the image allows us to establish a relationship
between expression and our own anxieties by helping
us to approach our existence as creatures who care
about the future, hope for good outcomes and worry
about bad ones. This is, roughly, the existentialist view.
Sartre thought that we feel anxiety so we appreciate the
responsibility we bear whenever we act – when we realize
that, ultimately, there is nothing out there, including
the ethical system we are born into, that backs up our
choices and nothing that guarantees that they will be the
Angela Lyn
| p. 2
right ones. Dogs and cats, presumably, do not know this
feeling. Hence, it could be said that human anxiety and
depression are the price tag on human freedom. In a way
this was what my conversations with Angela Lyn were
all about. It was at this point where art, artist and viewer
(critic, in this case) become relevant as vehicles for
something that the solipsism of post-modern life seems
to threaten. Of course, I am referring to the need to be
touched and addressed by other human beings in the
here and now.Looking at the progression of Angela Lyn’s
practice from an Anselm-Kiefer-ish neo-expressionism
to his syncretic (oriental and not that oriental) approach
to landscape (and still life?) as if portraying nature and
its objects, I see the immanence of what we could call
‘the soul’ not only into the iconography (what is painted)
but also in the economy of the brushwork. I used the
word ‘portraying’ not as representing something but
as the action of ‘portraiture’ in which Lyn’s landscapes
become mirrors of the soul and present the viewer with
ethical choices. That is why, I think that those ‘mirrors’
are not only reflective but projective and it is in that calm
optimism that the viewer and the artist engage in what
I called ‘a conversation of a life time’. The restrained
brushwork, the pale colours, the bracketed composition
and the self-effacement of the artist reveals a sense of
self-control that does not draw attention to itself as an
act of humility. Instead it creates space for the viewer
to fully participate in the connective experience that art
entails. Since lack of connection seems to be the feature
of all neuroses, I wonder what the contemporary art
world has to say about this. There is a celebration of the
unawareness of the psychic conflict that tears humanity
apart, and this is achieved by turning art into visual jokes
or by transforming the visual image into monuments
to monumentality, which usually (and unsurprisingly)
comes across as ironic. This is a big mistake and it is there
where Angela Lyn’s caring restraint emerges triumphant
by allowing the viewer experience to become part of
the artistic drive. In her cedars, effortlessness is not
carelessness but a rhythmic belief that nature and human
beings (as part of nature) are synchronized and it is Man’s
job to survive without blocking that link with nature. It is
in the simplicity of that principle and the effortlessness of
the viewing experience that Lyn’s images are graceful as
depictions of change. And change is what life and time
are all about. Hence, our conversations of a lifetime.
Rodrigo Cañete January 2014
Angela Lyn
| p. 3
for the time being 2014 | oil on canvas | 140 x 175 cm
Angela Lyn
| p. 4
stringing pearls I, II, III 2011 | oil on canvas | 40 x 80 cm
Angela Lyn
| p. 5
all at once I, II 2015 | oil on canvas | 84 x 84 cm
Angela Lyn
| p. 6
building site 2015
There are large cedar trees growing outside my studio
window. They are so close it is as if I could reach out and
touch them. The cedars are one hundred and fifty years
old. I spend a lot of time looking out and wondering how
many thousands of needles there must be on a single
branch.
For a number of years now, I have been painting
these trees. Painting cedars is tedious; you have to
contemplate the weight and angle of each needle, think
about the spaces between, yet still maintaining a sense
of the tree as a whole.
For the past two years there has been is a big building
site going on below. The day the dig began I looked out.
Between the cedar branches I could see a large yellow
bulldozer digging into the earth, hauling up the mounds
of vegetation and soil in preparation for the foundation of
the new building. The bulldozer stopped at the foot of the
cedars. Since then, the oddly colourful machinery glides
to and fro between the cedar branches and has become
part of my daily enquiry.
During my break time I watch the builders. I have got
to know some of their names. They have to shout in
order for their voices to be heard above the noise of the
machinery. I often listen to music, so during the summer
months when my windows are open, the music, the
cement belt, the buzzing signals and the sawing and
hammering all fuse together into one sort of symphonic
thing, topped off here and there by the sound of a single
name. I have gotten used to the builders and they to me.
Giuseppe the crane operator knocked on my door. He
brought me the high wooden chair that he had made to
sit on whilst waiting. He had heard from the foreman that I
wanted to have it. I noticed the builders have to wait quite
a bit. I also spend a lot of time waiting; waiting for things
to dry, waiting to know what to do next, waiting to know if
what I have done will hold up. Giuseppe mentioned that
he was also a sort of an artist; that for every new building
site he worked on, he designed himself a new chair to sit
on. He turned to look at the cedar paintings, crouched
down, and looked carefully at the details.
Later, another builder also called Giuseppe arrived. He
brought some used pieces of construction wood that
he thought I might like. By then the builders knew I was
an artist and that artists tend to like that sort of thing. He
stood in the doorway looking straight at the painting
opposite and said, “That’s me”. I wrote him a dedication
of thanks on one of the many pictures I had taken of him”.
He said that perhaps people would be more interested in
builders if they would see that painting.”
The foreman accepted my invitation to visit. He stepped
through the door, stood still for a moment and then said,
“So this is your world.” I showed him the documentation
I had been gathering; photos and videos of the builders
and life on the site as I had seen it, from my window,
through the cedar trees. He stood there where I usually
stand and looked out onto the site. He told me that this
was the most complex project he had ever done. I was
thinking the same thing about my own project. Turning
to look at the paintings he said, “But this must also be a
lot of work”.
I was wondering later that day what, in Vincenzo’s mind,
art was. At some point, I would ask him.
Angela Lyn, January 2015
Angela Lyn
| p. 7
building site 2015 | oil on canvas | 220 x 84 cm
Angela Lyn
| p. 8
container 2015 | oil on canvas | 180 x 55 cm
Angela Lyn
| p. 9
oil on canvas | installation views, various measures
Angela Lyn
| p. 10
oil on canvas | installation views, various measures
Angela Lyn
| p. 11
cedaring v 2015 | oil on canvas | 200 x 110 cm
Angela Lyn
| p. 12
from here on out I, II, III 2015 | oil on canvas | 90 x 125 cm
Angela Lyn
| p. 13
my china: of migration and mixed blood
When I was born in 1955, being Anglo-Chinese was
still considerably uncommon. The influences of having
a Chinese father and an English mother were subtle,
woven into the details of our daily life; the difference
of my father’s expression whilst bending over a plate of potatoes with a knife and fork, to that of emptying a bowl
of rice with his chopsticks, was clearly worlds apart.
Our house in the small village just outside Windsor, in
the southwestern part of England where I grew up was
called Amoy. It was named after the area in Southern
China where my father was born and raised. A climbing
plant with pale delicate leaves wound its way around the
wooden nameplate on which the four letters were placed,
diagonally from top to bottom. In springtime, despite
the struggle to survive in a foreign climate, the plant
produced small purple flowers. Each year the blossom
was brought to our attention. We would be called to
breathe in its unusual scent and once again absorb
the story of how this plant flourished in the Lin Family
Gardens back home. I recall the peonies my father had
put great effort into cultivating in our front garden; their otherness and the somehow misplaced enthusiasm with
which he showed them to the neighbors.
Letters periodically arrived at our house baring colorful
Chinese stamps. I kept those depicting things such as
chrysanthemums, colored birds, or painted bamboo,
storing them neatly in a red silk box. Sometimes
packages would be delivered. The contents, whose
Chinese labels were illegible to me, were mostly things
to eat. They were things that I had not seen before, things
that one did not find at the local grocery; salted plums,
star spice, dried miniature prawn, black mushroom,
powdered pork, ginseng root, moon cakes, foreign
Angela Lyn
| p. 14
smelling herbal medicines and teas in tall embossed
canisters with pictures of dragons, mountain landscapes
or floating figures. At the sight of these precious things
my father seemed to transcend into another space and time. Sometimes the packages would contain things for
my mother; embroidered pieces of traditional Chinese
clothing, silk slippers, tasseled purses, a jade pendant,
a flower shaped mother of pearl pin, brightly enameled
bracelets or perhaps rings for small fingers. Still to this
day I wonder if she felt they suited her. All these things,
gifts from my invisible Chinese family possessed an
intimate sense of belonging to which I felt included.
This slow infusion of cultural heritage laid the basis for
my own sense of cultural identity; in an obscure yet
profound way I felt part of me belonged to China. When
I was seven, my teacher at school asked me to bring
something Chinese to the geography class. Assuming
to be an authority on the subject, I took a bowl and
chopsticks and gave a demonstration on how to eat rice.
At the peak of the Communist revolution, my relatives
fled the mainland to Taipei. Despite losses, my father
always presented a forward thinking view that change in
China was necessary and inevitable. In1972, seventeen
years of age and Mainland China still largely inaccessible,
smells, objects and information about China: Chinese
fast food, plastic Buddha heads, Chinese style furniture
and an inexhaustible list of goods made in China. As
people move and travel, mix and mingle, the definition
of origin and cultural identity is becoming increasingly
complex: I ask myself what kind of cultural dialogue
and exchange is evolving within today’s frenetic pace of
globalization?
From my own perspective, lasting cultural exchange
is a slow process, established through shared human
experience over time. The mixing of blood between
cultures is perhaps the most permanent exchange of all, transcending any one source, inherent of both.
Perhaps it is herein that my china lies: in the mingled
roots of two differing cultures, wherein the translation
from one to the other, back and forth, becomes in itself a
language of its own.
Whilst painting I ask myself, does my china have anything
to do with the real China and what is the real China?
The ambiguous zone of cultural exchange and shifting
identities evokes questions. I have no answers as such,
but through my work as a painter, hope to visualize a process that once merely personal, has now become a
common issue.
I went to Taiwan to meet my family for the first time. A large group of relatives was awaiting my arrival, curious
to meet the daughter of No. 3 son of the Third Branch.
Angela Lyn 2008
When they first saw me they were shocked by my
difference: although considering me as family, they saw
me not as a Chinese, but as a foreigner.
Where is my china, I asked myself?
Since those days, Mainland China has opened up. We
are saturated with the China boom bringing us sounds,
Angela Lyn
| p. 15
my china paraphernalia 2008 | oil on canvas | 30 x 80 cm
Angela Lyn
| p. 16
overall and everywhere 2008 | oil on canvas | 30 x 70 cm
Angela Lyn
| p. 17
an arranged marriage 2008 | oil on canvas | 30 x 50 cm
Angela Lyn
| p. 18
the emmigrant 2008 | oil on canvas | 125 x 180 cm
Angela Lyn
| p. 19
giving way paintings for london 2012
curated by max koss
The delicate paintings of the Anglo-Chinese artist Angela
Lyn offer respite from the haste of our lives, reconnecting
us with the ethereal essence of human experience. In her
new series Giving Way, Lyn aligns large primordial landscapes with still life painting reflecting fragile interludes of
everyday life. Mixing the transcendental with the specific,
her work leads us to discover the dialogue within us in an
experience that is at once kind and powerful. Her differentiated language as a painter, her close observation and
quiet insistence, gratify the viewer with a sense of renewal.
Max Koss is a scholar and curator. He was educated at the
London School of Economics, the Courtauld Institute of
Art and is currently pursuing a PhD in Art History at the
University of Chicago.
Koss has been following Lyn’s work closely since 2005
and is a major contributor to her numerous publications.
At once, upon entering the gallery from the street, with
its myriad of city noises, you are mystified by the uncanny
quietness of the paintings. You sense their presence, a low
murmuring emanating from the walls.
A number of years ago, when I first came upon Angela
Lyn’s paintings, I understood her paintings to be a distant
echo of the romantic landscape tradition infused with a
distinct modernist inflection. They were, and still are, paintings about the act of painting itself, pointing as much to
the world outside, as they are invested in their own being.
Angela’s paintings of the past decade bear witness to her
unrelenting exploration of a uniquely painterly poetics for
today, as well as signaling a genuine concern for the medium’s past and future.
What has become ever more pronounced for me with
Angela’s paintings since when I first entered her studio,
and what has found its clearest expression to date in
these
new paintings for London, is the fact that the
paintings are meant to be behold, by each other, arranged
to create conversations between themselves, but most
importantly behold by us, the viewers. Rooted in the
pleasure of painting, touching the canvas with a brush, the
images that Angela Lyn constructs, layer of thin paint upon
layer of thin paint,
are modeling an attitude, a relationship.
That is true for
the landscape paintings, which herald the
specificity of Ticino mountains, whilst seeing a timeless
abstraction in those formations, as much as it is true for
those paintings which contain fragments of trees, closeups of pearls scattered or arrangements of found objects,
sharing in a playful moment of surreal theatricality.
The contact between sight and surface becomes a
moment of validation of the embodied eye and the
canvas and
the image upon it alike. It is a mutually
reinforcing relation- ship. Reconfiguring time and space,
the images accrue in depth over time, through repeated
looking, and through repeated looking the viewer’s
sense of being in the world is heightened. Through
painting, he reconstitutes his own bodily experience.
The story of the paintings for London does not end
here however. What I have called abstraction in these
paintings is perhaps best characterized as a form of
graphic impetus.
It is not quite writing – although the cedar
branches come close – but an articulation of propriety of
space, and of owning space, which is always also acutely
aware of its limits.
Angela Lyn’s paintings are then occupying a liminal space,
into which they quite literally draw you in, compositionally,
and prepare you for the moment when the work of reconfiguration is done, at which point they will give way for a
new, yet unknown, experience.
Max Koss, Chicago, May 1st 2012
Angela Lyn
| p. 20
the lightness of being 2012 | oil on canvas | 125 x 180 cm
Angela Lyn
| p. 21
reconcillation 2012 | oil on canvas | 125 x 125 cm
Angela Lyn
| p. 22
all and everywhere 2012 | oil on canvas | 132 x 230 cm
Angela Lyn
| p. 23
via dufour 21 (ang. via vanoni)
6900 lugano (CH)
+41 (0)91 921 17 17
michela negrini
+41 (0)79 173 29 54 | [email protected]