In the galleries: Striking Chinese art by a father-daughter collaboration
Also: A 16th-century poem is the through-line for an artist’s landscapes, an artist uses earth pigments from Morocco to create her works on-site and an exhibit showcases notable women artists in the region.
Freda Lee-McCann & Joyce McCarten
“A simpler Chinese poem sparked Freda Lee-McCann’s “After Tradition,” a Studio Gallery show whose convention-bending artworks chop and reassemble bits of 16th-century writer Zhu Yun-ming’s ode to watching May cherry blossoms blow in the wind.
Lee-McCann is a local artist who was born in D.C. but grew up in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. She often makes paintings that combine or contrast venerable Chinese styles with recent Western ones. “After Tradition” is divided principally between two series. One comprises craggy landscapes with Chinese characters lettered lightly atop them or written on scraps of paper collaged at random amid the vistas; the other consists of pure calligraphy in which characters in robust black strokes are superimposed over ones in gray, brown, orange or various intensities of blue.
Outside-In by Freda Lee-McCann.
In both sets, the characters are written loosely and often clipped around the edges, so they function foremost as abstract gestures. The verse is “not necessarily to be read by the viewers,” acknowledges the artist’s statement.
Like Bertrand Mao, Lee-McCann adds color to gray-based landscapes, although hers are a bit bolder and not always naturalistic. Towering rock faces can be accented in brown, green or lavender, while the brighter hues of the purely calligraphic works suggest pop art or commercial typography. In Zhu Yun-ming’s time, his calligraphy was considered extravagant and untraditional, qualities Lee-McCann appreciates. Ironically, her latest effort to modernize age-old shanshui style has a 16th-century precedent.
Downstairs at Studio are expressionist tree paintings by Cheryl Ann Bearss and photo-derived extended-family portraits by Deborah Addison Coburn; both shows contain evocative work by artists who exhibit regularly at Studio. Less expected is the nearby “Morocco: Colors and Shapes,” a set of small paintings by Joyce McCarten.
These pictures are abstractions that weren’t merely inspired by the High Atlas Mountains, but actually incorporate pinches of the arid landscape. McCarten took soil and rocks from dry river beds, pulverized the materials with a mortar and pestle, and combined the dust with acrylic medium. Painted on-site, the paintings juxtapose tans and near-black browns with vivid oranges. The compositions don’t literally depict, yet strongly suggest, the cliffs, rifts and outcroppings carved from rock over millennia. If these geological features can’t actually be seen in McCarten’s pictures, their presence is palpable.”
Morocco #1 by Joyce McCarten.
Freda Lee-McCann: After Tradition and Joyce McCarten: Morocco: Colors and Shapes Through June 17 at Studio Gallery, 2108 R St. NW.
Review by Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post, June 2023. Thank you!