Paul Ching-Bor: High Anxiety, NYC
Spanierman Gallery, New York
February 3 - 28, 2005
Spanierman Gallery presents Paul Ching-Bor: High Anxiety--New York City. The exhibition and sale presents over twenty-five works in watercolor and mixed media by Paul Ching-Bor. Filled with multi-layered washes, dense splatters, and gestural strokes reminiscent of the Abstract Expressionist art of Franz Kline, Ching-Bor’s dynamic large-scale works are powerful urban vistas reflecting a sense of place and time: New York City in the post 9/11 years. Titled with the precise, military time that Ching-Bor witnessed a subject, the works combine explicit reportage with an editorial subtext, capturing the emotive force of their locales on the artist.
Born in 1963 in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, the capital of the province of Guangdong, Paul Ching-Bor received a traditional art education in China, before moving to Sydney, Australia, in 1987. In 1996 Ching-Bor settled in New York, where he began to create watercolors of the structures, arches, and bridges in which urban architecture became a vehicle for expressing New York’s intensity, loneliness, ambition, and drive. After the September 2001 attack, this subject matter became a natural means for conveying the mood of a changed city, and it is in his atmospheric chiaroscuro that Ching-Bor expresses the haunting anxiety that is at times below the surface and at other times openly resonant, as in his images of the empty expanse of the Winter Garden or in his depictions that feature the solemn and transcendant memorial lights.
Working on a large scale, Ching-Bor eschews the traditional use of watercolor to create thin, translucent washes resulting in delicate images. Applying many layers of color in a physical, painterly way, he stretches the medium to the extremes to which it is capable. Subsuming both the muscular strength of Abstract Expressionist art and the rigor of the techniques of ancient Chinese scroll painting, Ching-Bor’s works pronounce the presence and potency of painting at a time when it is often viewed as an obscolent art form.
While carrying on the legacy of portrayals of New York City by the Ashcan School and such American modernists as John Marin and Georgia O’Keeffe, Ching-Bor’s moving urban images embody the complex emotional gestalt of our age of apprehensiveness.
SPANIERMAN GALLERY
45 East 58 Street, New York, NY 10022
www.spanierman.com
