FRACTURED PERSPECTIVE
by Gina Fairley

“I live a parallel life where my eyes collaborate in a manner that creates illusions. Somehow fate seems to keep them apart. I see things that are juxtaposed, repositioned or inversed, leading to pixilation and fragmented visions. As the images overlap, I am often puzzled and amused at the same time. Is the world as real as it appears to be?”
- Wong Chee Meng (2008)

We are permitted to enter Wong Chee Meng’s world, albeit vicariously, when standing in front of his paintings. While our initial response may be a graphic read, born of this millennium’s blips and bytes of digital technology and computer design they also resonate with the tenant of abstraction or a kind of sentimental modernism. They have an exciting visual acceleration, fluttering between layers of unconventional colour and an intricate web of dots, lines and forms. Overall, they appear out of register, a little like a flawed screenprint. The viewer may even take a step backwards in an attempt to better ‘focus’ upon what affronts them. It is a natural reaction. As humans we to want to make sense of what we see and unravel their disorientating code. However, Wong Chee Meng’s world will always remain altered. It is our privilege to enter it through his paintings.

Wong’s sight was impaired through an accident that left him with a condition known as stereo-blind, the inability to differentiate between shapes, dimension and depth. As a result, Wong fractures and flattens perspective. His paintings are not ‘out of focus’ par sé, quite the contrary; they definitively record a unique view of the world. The great optical artist Bridge Riley once explained the visual energy of her paintings: “For me nature is not landscape, but the dynamism of natural forces. These forces can only be tackled by treating colour and form as ultimate entities, freeing them from all descriptive or functional roles.” (1.)

Wong similarly blurs the boundaries between the conventional picture plane and modes of representation or, to hang it on rhetoric, a post-modern deconstruction of the image. His paintings have the visual push-pull of eye exercises, the pop vernacular of Damien Hirst’s dot paintings and the geometric optical play of Victor Vasarely’s work, but unlike these artists who fabricate an abstraction, Wong’s is lived.

Take for example the painting “Beyond Finishing Line” (2008). Wong builds the image through thin veils of information that are compressed giving the painting its flatness. The banding at the top of the painting splits it into foreground and background, its red and blue spots connect across the image to the flighty surface dots at the bottom. Does Wong see them in the same plane or describes a spatial vibration? The two are separated by an opaque mid-ground that, while dense with detail, remains beyond our recognition. These are devices Wong uses repeatedly across this body of work. Despite the three spatial divisions in this painting, there is no conventional use of perspective that moves us visually back through the image as we would experience in traditional landscapes painting. It is as though Wong’s real world has been compressed in Adobe Photoshop into a single flat layer.

Similarly, if we look at “Scarcity” (2008), the sophistication and balance in Wong’s compositions is apparent. Here a narrative sits behind bands of colour that separate the canvas from left to right, just as the colour-field painter Kenneth Noland would formulate a picture into blue, yellow, gray and white zips. As a device it offers punctuation and pause in Wong’s visual chaos and allows the viewer to digest the fractured image in bite sizes. While the oscillation between these colour scrims and the linear forms give the sensation of depth, in reality it is an intensely shallow plane that has the effect of repelling the viewer, like a magnet, in an attempt to find their point of visual comfort with the work.

Wong orders the information in “Scarcity” into what could be though of as chapters. To the right we can discern a face but it remains anonymous through pixelation. It is split vertically describing a kind of bi-polar identity; its left side adopting the camouflage of the painting’s palette and the right, a monochrome in blue. To the left of the painting a narrative is played out; stacked buildings and figures dining at a table have the feeling of history or religiosity yet, like the anonymity of the portrait, again remain beyond our resolve.  One ponders the two’s connection.

While singling out these two works they are indicative of Wong’s oeuvre. The most exciting development in these new works, however, is the way Wong steps beyond his impairment to describe our contemporary world. We are left confused whether we are affronted with commentary, cultural portraits or mere design? This non-understanding or double meaning metaphorically speaks to today’s hybridism and homogeneity and their translation in a world increasingly less bounded by geography or, in a Malaysian context, its institutionalized separation. The discombobulation we feel when encountering Wong paintings could also allude to the speed and un-natural forces of development. It has a particular resonance with Malaysia, intuitively capturing the layers and tensions of a society in flux.

This visual trickery plays with our cognitive patterning that is ingrained in us as human beings. While for Wong his paintings describe the reality of his world, he has intuitively transferred that visual dichotomy and questioning into a cohesive style that speaks of contemporary art and the unsettling pace of now. He has given it the humanity of painting. This is the strength of these paintings – their universal foundation. These are deeply complex and considered images.

(1.) Quoted in “The Mind’s Mind: Bridget Riley, Collected Writing 1965 – 1999”, pg 116, published in “Working with Nature”, 1973, Robert Kudielka’s (editor)