Fay Ku: Spettacolo

Installation view of Fay Ku’s Spettacolo. Courtesy of Available Space Art Projects.

Fay Ku, Spettacolo at Available Space Art Projects

by D.K. Sole

The exhibition had the casual feel of being brought here under the artist’s arm in a folio, which was nice. There were lots of paper sheets, pieces of grainy Bhutanese paper in various sizes, none really huge, all of it pinned to the wall. The works ranged from more formal, finished pieces (an elaborate white horse dappled with living parrots, a juggler lying down) to meticulous bagatelles, like the row of paper doll men with penises that moved, or a drawing of a woman bending sideways to fit herself into a handsized rectangle small enough to be an offcut. Ku herself was there at the opening, all the way from New York, explaining (I was eavesdropping, so mea culpa if I didn’t hear this right) that she drew faces that were Asian and somewhat similar to her own because she didn’t see enough people who looked like her when she was growing up.* Hence, also, the twinning in so many of her pictures.

Her figures often glanced off to the side, letting me know I was not doing them any favours by looking at them. I remembered this habit of looking away from the viewer from the Ku I’m more familiar with, the one in the collection of the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, where the person is showing her teeth at something off the page to the right. (At ASAP, the horse was shocked by something to the left.) Once I started thinking about this need for private or hidden space then I saw it in other choices the artist had made: through her materials when she laid a transparent sheet over an opaque backing, though the tattoos and patterns that helped to camouflage the details of the figures’ bodies, through the costumes that sometimes concealed them all the way to their ears, and through her installation when she hung the paper doll men at the bottom of a wall that faced away from us and mirrored them at the top of the same wall with a row of three cut-out women in the diagonally opposite corner. (A post on her Instagram from March 6th showed me how deliberate the loose-feeling layout actually was: “Snapshot of my studio with a … mock-up of a 24-feet gallery wall with color printouts to (approximate) scale to help figure layout, a more accurate drawn layout to make sure it all fits.” Craft!) The six figures were physically shielded by the wall and defensively echoed by the arrangement. I noticed that the white paint on the horse was not thickly applied and the grain underneath it was visible. The brown paper helped to quieten the potential brightness of red, concentrating it into a dull glow. Her gold leaf looked like a brighter shade of the brown.

The evasiveness contrasted with the appearance of performance that was a large part of the figures’ presentation. The title, Spettacolo, refers to this: it’s a show, a spectacle. The expressions and the bodies were not in agreement. They posed on unicycles, wore magician suits, and played triangles. I wrote “appearance of performance” rather than “performance” because they were so careful, so delicately outlined and well-wrought—the lines around them so firm and beautiful—that it was hard to believe that something as messy as a performance could ever take place in their cool, gleaming world. It was easier to believe that they were posing as if performing, but no action was being done. I wanted to read this mirage of performance as another form of camouflage. That’s why these acts looked so amazing; the performance was overblown because it wasn’t real. Could it also suggest that the whole idea of avoidance was being over-acted, that the artist was making fun of the figures for being so nervous? “Come on now,” she sighs in my imagination, “you’re a picture, your whole job is to be stared at.” The three youths stared stiffly, like parodies of soldiers (eyes front!), ridiculously naked except for their socks. Was I viewing the crux of a bad dream, the famous nightmare where you react poorly because you’ve caught yourself in public without your pants? When an interviewer asked Ku, “How would you describe your art?” in 2006, she responded, “Psychological, narrative, figurative. There is a term in psychoanalysis that I find very apt: ‘the unthought known.’” We, the viewers, are the shadowed trauma, the unthought known, heaved back up into sight in front of them, and they do not want to look at us, they do not want to speak of us. We are the reason why the prints of twins try to hide their eyes with their fingers. We are the ones who divorce the minds of the figures from their bodies. We tie them up with shibari ropes. Recurring twins may suggest The Shining but they are not the haunting horror here: we are. Or something around us is anyway–it’s not like it’s personal. The horse is pulling that face at something next to us, not we ourselves, the ones standing in front of it. I feel I should be offended which is amusing; it tickles me.

*She says the same thing in an interview with Claudio Perentela of The exTRa finGer blog so I think I’m OK.

Fay Ku, Spettacolo at Available Space Art Projects, Las Vegas. March 20th-April 7th, 2023

Published by Wendy Kveck on April 25, 2023