Material co-founder Colour Maisch speaks with artist Fay Ku at the opening of the exhibition Darkness Against the Glittering Sky, Friday, Nov. 14.

I wanted to know about the fish. As Colour Maisch interviewed artist Fay Ku before an overflow crowd, they stood before two drawings of enormous-looking, strange fish. All the other drawings were of human figures, sometimes on horseback. But the monstrous fish stood apart.

Entering Material, the combination studio and gallery opened last year by Colour Maisch and Jorge Rojas, visitors pass through a shotgun series of rooms, some clearly part of the studio and two that serve as galleries. At the opening on Friday, the latter were hung with recent drawings by Fay Ku, whose exhibition, Darkness Against the Glittering Sky, will be on exhibit until January 11. The one that most immediately drew the eye in the first gallery is titled “Mouths of Gold” and displays seven women who appear to be demonstrating in a public forum. Familiar from countless media images, they’re Asian: perhaps from Taiwan, the homeland of artist Fay Ku. Or they might be ripped from a headline image of Hong Kong, where autonomy demonstrations have waxed and waned over the last few years. In any case, the drawing includes only their torsos, with each wearing a uniform-like jacket that gives them a feeling of floating, and their heads, featuring practical, anti-cosmetic hair done in braids, bands and twisted knots. Their faces, in turn, are similarly twisted by snarling and shouting expressions. Yet their mouths are full of gold glitter, as if to suggest that the unheard speech sounds and sparkles brilliantly, and all but one has one arm raised, either in a fist or clutching the air like a claw.   

The drawing, like most of those here, is exquisitely executed in precise lines resembling engraving, with shading so subtle it disappears into the illusion of depth and the fullness of the figures. Some are covered with tattoo-like ornamentation almost too subtle to see. Fay Ku explains her focus on drawing by calling it “the first art,” by which she means the shortest, most direct connection from an artist to her work. This may sound like a formula for monotony, but in practice it’s anything but. Fay Ku is constantly seeking new materials and media, such as the transparent drawing film on which she drew “Mouths of Gold,” or the black paper on which she drew variations on mythological figures in gold paint, or newer drawings like “Mouth Feel,” in which red threads sewn through the support sprout from between her lips. In fact, it’s possible for an alert observer to date her work over the last 15 years by noting the progression of materials as she discovered, “mastered,” and then laid aside. She interrupts herself at this point to insert, modestly, that she never feels she actually achieves mastery. Laypersons may be tempted to disagree.

Fay Ku, “Mouths of Gold”

 

Fay Ku, “Accumulation II”

The value of biography in contemplation of art is overrated, and Fay Ku shows why. Knowing she was born in Taiwan, a viewer might conclude that she is the direct product of the phenomenal success Asian teachers have displayed in teaching Western painting, music and so forth. But her parents brought her to the United States well before she felt any interest in art, and she confesses with some embarrassment that once here, all she wanted to be was 100% American. Her journey towards Asian modes and sources has more to do with her primary interest in mythological subjects, both as narrative forms and examples of cultural histories.

That said, there is one bit of biography which she connects to her art, and that is the Mandarin language in which she first learned to speak. In Mandarin, she explains, there are no primary tenses. Everything happens in the linguistic present, but is peripherally located to time the way another language would locate things in space, using auxiliary phrases. While both modes are understandable to users of either language, the Mandarin keeps events in a timeless zone, modified by context. Contrary to what radical linguists were teaching a few decades ago, this doesn’t mean Fay Ky experienced time differently; only that she expressed it with greater emphasis on the continuity of being through the timeline. If nothing else, she suggests this may make it easier for her to do what a drawing does: remove her subject from the passing of time. It’s possible it could also explain why, in her more recent work, she finds posed figures more convincing than those in motion. All this remains hypothetical, at best.

Fay Ku, “Can’t Look, Can’t Look”

Fay Ky remains a figurative artist, which she argues inevitably endows her work with political content. For that reason, she tries to produce something at least initially attractive. She wants to draw the audience in, not repel them before she can engage them. So she chooses to foreground identity, though she insists her images are not autobiographical. That is a familiar dilemma for artists of all stripes in this time of overwhelming stimulation: how to distinguish the artist from the content of her work?

So what about the fish? They turned out to be coelacanths—pronounced “see luh kanths”—a species thought to be extinct, alongside the dinosaurs, for more than 65 million years. Since the discovery of surviving coelacanths in 1938, they’ve been labeled Lazarus fish and studied as paragons of how living things adapt and survive, not only through a great extinction that ended almost all life on Earth, but over millions of years of environmental changes that have seen better-adapted species replace older ones, including fish with better fins, in the so-called “survival of the fittest.”

Fay Ku, “Coelacanth 1”

Fay Ku: Darkness Against the Sky, Material, South Salt Lake, through Jan. 11, 2025

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.