Laura Smith and Victor Liu

Laura Smith, an American artist active in Brooklyn and Arizona, and Victor Liu, originally from Taiwan but now living and working in the city, have put up a strong show at PS122 Gallery (the former public school, now an art center, is located at the corner of East Ninth Street and First Avenue). In the series Illuminated Black, Smith makes complicated drawings based on the inversion of positive space that treatment of graphite embellished with many small marks. Liu makes sharply detailed figurative sculptures that take their cue from mythology and cartoons. The storyline then influences the form of the works, which manages to connect with art history and today’s popular culture.

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The gallery, on the south side of the first floor of the building, is fairly small: two limited spaces flank by a reception desk that juts into the middle. In the show, Liu’s works occupy the middle of the open spaces, while Smith’s drawings are shown conventionally, being attached to the walls. Smith’s work is certainly abstract, while we have noted the realism of Liu’s art. Both artists are skilled; this show was a real chance to examine two artists whose efforts deserve more study.

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As noted, Smiths drawings are based on a reversal of the outlines of positive space taken up by earlier sculptures and wall hangings, whose outlines are collaged to create forms with sharply contrasting angles; when, as happens in this show, we come up against several of the smallish works set on a single wall, we see, from piece to piece, abstract imagery that looks almost like different arrangements of the same composite parts. These are drawings made on a heavy plastic called Dura-Lar, and the individual works emanate a strong, sharply envisioned energy. Their jagged lines, shifting from quadrant to quadrant, remind us of the modernism that influences them. Compared to Smith’s non-objective pieces, Liu’s highly skilled figurative efforts come close to the creature they are meant to resemble. A large work, Dark Cygnus (2023), presents a standing swan or duck, which lifts upward on the support of its back legs.

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Its upper body is nearly covered by dense rows of feathered wings, while the head reaches high toward the sky. The bird holds a stick that forks in two directions at its top. Seeing this odd but memorable presentation, one thinks of a creature from a mythological narrative—a swan on a quest in a fairy tale. There is another striking figure by Liu: Maiden China (2023), a figure with an Asian, androgynous face (although the person is likely female, given the title and the sheath the woman wears very much like a dress), with a topknot and two sets of arms–one set where they should be, and the other issuing forth from the figure’s shoulders. This looks a lot like a merger of Egyptian, Chinese, and private mythologies. The oddity of the overall gestalt results in a work that makes us curious about the cultural origins backing the attributes we see. Liu’s technical skills are high—to the point where he wins us over concerning the plausibility of the figure, despite its eccentricity.

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In the long run, Liu’s deliberate eccentricity may have more in common with Smith’s abstract flat works than they seem. We are taken by the oddity of the sculptures and the linear modernism of the drawings. Intriguingly, despite their visual differences, both suggest a postmodern attitude: the sculptures are genuinely strange, resulting in a thematic modernization of historical realism, while the abstract drawings continue a style now well established, going back to the start of the 20th century. Eventually, the two can be seen as advances in styles already historically given, even if from very different points in time. This would give the artists more gravitas than we might have thought at first.

 

The art we see, made now, acknowledges the past, sometimes directly and sometimes not. Fine art today almost always makes use of quotations, and Smith and Liu hold true to the tradition. PS122 Gallery now dates back decades to the time when it was first used for art; Smith and Liu continue that tradition, more than honorably.