Charles Yuen: Frequency Surfing

About

Yuen, who is of Chinese and Japanese descent, was a founding member of the activist group Godzilla, which successfully protested against the lack of Asian American artists in the 1991 Whitney Biennial. His large painting “Jug Boy” (1994), which features a human figure trapped inside a decorative urn, was one of the standouts of the recent historical show about the art collective at Eric Firestone Gallery.

The “surfing” in the title of the new show is a playful allusion to Yuen’s Hawaiian roots while also reflecting his interest in both physics and science fiction. Yuen’s paintings combine abstraction with figuration. There is a narrative or symbolic aspect to his work. In a sense, Yuen develops his own personal or subjective world. This world often features non-human characters who appear to arise from the earth and look like astronauts or deep-sea divers. It also includes such elements as atomic symbols, wave patterns, arms and hands, ladders, mushrooms, circles, planets, birds, and insects. All combine to create cosmic ideograms that poetically evoke not only visible forces in the world but also invisible frequencies, such as microwaves, radio waves, and magnetic rays, that impact our lives in unforeseen ways. As Yuen observes, “The identifiable things in my paintings are really signposts to describing the invisible relationships and components that surround them.”

In “Sherpas” (2024), three wide white figures with large symbols on their chests appear against a greenish-yellow background, while the planet Saturn floats around them. “If As” (2023) features a single larger figure, a smaller group, and brown circular shapes that appear to be illuminated by radiant light. “Shoulder Assist” (2023) depicts a figure sitting on another’s shoulders. The supportive figure has very long arms that provide balance. The figures appear to be underground, as evidenced by the multiple thin, colored ladders that lead up to trees that sit above the surface. Colorful circles float within the space. As with all of Yuen’s paintings, there are radical shifts in scale. The narrative is deliberately open, cryptic, and mysterious, yet, at the same time, suggestive enough to engage us in attempting to decode the symbolic world the artist masterfully creates.

Charles Yuen has had numerous solo exhibitions of his work, most recently at LaiSun Keane, Boston, 2023; Pierogi, Brooklyn, 2022; and Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY, 2022. His work has been included in group shows, including “Godzilla: Echoes from the 1990s Asian American Arts Network,” curated by Jennifer Samet at Eric Firestone Gallery, NYC, 2024. His work has been reviewed in Two Coats of Paint, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, and the Boston Globe. Yuen has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship as well as a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant. He has a BFA degree from the University of Hawaii and an MFA degree from Rutgers University. The artist currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.