| A woman lies prone upon an eerie, back-lit dark and ominous glass examination table. The hands of six men wearing crisp white shirts and black ties touch her naked, dot-infested body. It is unclear if she is ill, expired or resting. This photograph, Diagnose Series I, by Cheng Young is part of a series of photos, paintings and sculptures that explore issues of interpretation, barriers and the breakdown of meaning by using the dot. Left to its own devices, a small, dark round circle is, essentially, devoid of meaning. |  |
Touch and Diagnose at the Imagine Gallery – Ellen Pearlman
A woman lies prone upon an eerie, back-lit dark and ominous glass examination table. The hands of six men wearing crisp white shirts and black ties touch her naked, dot-infested body. It is unclear if she is ill, expired or resting.
This photograph, Diagnose Series I, by Cheng Young is part of a series of photos, paintings and sculptures that explore issues of interpretation, barriers and the breakdown of meaning by using the dot. Left to its own devices, a small, dark round circle is, essentially, devoid of meaning. The dots or overlays here actually represent letters and words in the Braille language, but serve only as a thin patina to obfuscate and not to clarify significance. Another photo, Angle Touch, shows a standing, ill-looking woman with dark circles under her eyes who is also overlaid by the dots. It is hard to tell here if the dots condemn her, as fatal sores and pustules, or heal her, as acupuncture points.
The dots carry over into Cheng’s paintings as well, as he uses the Braille motif to contradict basic pointillist notions of the optical, instead of the physical mixing of colors. The dots in his paintings are monotone and present themselves as types of pixilation, the smallest dots of phosphorous color that can appear on a computer screen. Pixilation breaks down the visual plane into its smallest essence, theoretically. When something is broken down into its most elemental part, it no longer carries the message of the whole, it is thus rendered insensate.
The dots are then placed onto a white, glossy sculpture not as dark, flat circles, but as raised bumps. In this way, they here become a whole new set of encoded messages specifically rendered in a tactile way. They are hidden instructions, or keys to touch pads that hold the potential of unlocking of even more information. However, jumping between mediums with the same underlying concept, such as from photography to painting to sculpture, has its limits. The sculptures, although attractive, are on the fringe of Cheng Young’s thematic motif. Standing on their own, they embody entirely different matters of plasticity and spatial arrangement, but do not convey the same sense of disorientation or dislocation.
