Wang’s circumspect abstraction holds forth throughout the room. If the finest art denies full disclosure in order to draw viewers, then her subtle loquaciousness dominates this conversation. The various voices of her visual counterpoint organize around geometry like chords on the staff of a musical score.
The influence of the grid structure and visual nature of Wang’s native Chinese versus the opaque English alphabet, and the ineffable transitions between them, is evident in this capacious work. Painterly calligraphic characters take their time, requiring some degree of musings in execution and interpretation. Connections among thinking, writing and painting into Wang’s methodology is reinforced by the commas, semicolons, dashes, etc., that intermittently punctuate her surfaces. Transformed by abstract context, periods become dots, spots, or circles; quotation marks expand to the shape and function of word balloons.........Whether an artwork talks back, mirrors your observations, or has its own thoughts – any pattern is possible.
Calmly, Wang’s poetic investigations of permanence solidly assume painting’s basic meditative function. Acrylic is coaxed to the slow feel of oils to let reconsideration trump clarity of purpose, a wandering full of fruitful hesitation. Viewing becomes excavation; large mesmerizing moves passing across the surface of Mapping become metaphors for and evidence of this still rich exercise of the curious, careful hand, and expansive, revising mind.
Wang’s work spans the gamut of mixed, from found objects to handmade paper, but the strength of these pieces is that the randomness is contained by geometric patterns and repetitions. This mixture of chaos and order shows the viewer how Wang makes sees memory working. Her piece “Poem” probably is the most literal connection to the threads of her past. It’s an image that reminds her of the poems she learned to sing as child. The pieces reflect the geometric structure of her other work as it is a grid in through these holes is found a colorful mixture of objects and paint. Peering through these layers to see what’s underneath is like going through a bedroom closet and finding old Christmas cards, love letter, and other tokens from the past that spark new memories.
Shiao-Ping Wang’s fascinating, semi-three-dimensional “Waves” has the rational look of a scientific graph plotting phenomena and the precious feel of rare insect under glass. Abstract musing about the character of memory of sound, light, or water waves is manifest in a tentative visual language and delicate materials – colored pencils and pins, clear and dotted lines, transparent vellum – that in places reveal an inner layer of possibility. While Leonardo’s meteorological visions of deluges, etc. marvel at what they try to understand, “Waves” takes ethereal pleasure in the inscrutable as an end in itself.