Leaf 8
The Body in Nigredo
[Zhang Yun Yao Drawings at the Shiprock Gallery]
© Photo: Brad Trone. Courtesy of SITE SANTA FE International
“Loss is no exception,” says Sicilian composer Salvatore Sciarrino, [quoting a line from a 1903 letter by Rainer Maria Rilke] in his Street Notebook. In a narrow corridor, fronting the second-floor Shiprock Gallery, stretch small-scale color pencil and pen-and-ink drawings topped by New Mexican shape-shifted, dried chamisa. Zhang yun yao’s modest, almost-self-effacing installation sits, paradoxically, in front of one the most historically -rich locations on the Plaza— a famed business containing only the finest woven Navajo rugs and abstractly -patterned blankets, sumptuous Native jewelry, and antique Native American art and hand-thrown pottery.
The Shanghai artist arranges a limited repertoire of Renaissance-inspired diminutive skulls, flanking skeletons, rapacious male head into triptychs of loss. This preference for the defleshed body, or memento mori, is underscored in a drawing technique inspired by etching or, aptly- named, drypoint. To this viewer, the pervasive shadow mood is reminiscent of the first, difficult stage of the alchemical process that begins with the breakdown of the material world.
That is, death imagined as de-composition or organic stripping. This physical and psychological journey towards “blackening” precedes the whitening [albedo] and reddening [rubedo] stages leading to the Great Work of the self’s illumination. Zhang’s work notably lingers at the moment of corporeal dessication.
The question is: are we being asked to see this “dark night of the body ” as a precursor to spiritual rebirth or as total decline into devouring matter? Evocatively -entitled works, such as “Traces Left in a Moment” or “Lines Just Past,” heighten this philosophical ambiguity around transience and materiality as do his two favorite mounts. In the first, thin paper is attached either on the reverse of used, stained cardboard whose folds encourage the visual dismantling of the body--as in the male cadaver lying on a slab tomb. Not yet rotting, bony head, torso, knees, and feet are compartmentalized in the act of awaiting separation. Felt stretched taut like skin typifies the second type of mount which, in turn is strangely placed on silvered paper. These insistent flatnesses of thin graphite lines, reflective shine, and gray-scale barely -textured fabric suggest the body, not as tactile or living, but as dry as the isolated specimen eternally shut in a jar.
Because of the incongruity of the title, this obsession with the arid is particuarly evident in “Skin to Skin Love Pink” [after Pavel Tchelitchew.] Despite flesh- toned panel and blush blotting paper --half-folded over a male martyr strung -up by his hands--passion is as paled as the Russian Surrealist’s anatomical studies. This tension between the substantial and the abstract becomes clear as the visitor moves from the brightly-lit corridor to the hermetically closed door and darkened room at its end.
Here epiphany occurs with the singling out, and altering, of two works from before: the isolated small skull on copy paper, now placed against an indigo background , and the two skeletons, now enlarged, and ominously encircled by serpentine coils. The key appears to lie in the third, largest and enigmatic, felt piece stretched on wood panel . What does this chiaroscuro diptych, "The Lingering Nightmare” [2024], visually inform us about the anxious images that preceded it? Divided by a glittering bar, it’s two sides display a corseted androgyne to the right, a radiant window and a silvery floor to the left, crowned by a headless figure roped in a garland of shimmering lights. Have the unconscious desires finally become revealed promising union?