Fengzee Yang: Cross Into Limbo
Fengzee Yang exposes the natural world internalized through carved wood, hinting at the bodily or animalistic whether bone or organ that harkens to the totemic and mythic. In a contemporary time of industrial processes run by digital technology, the artist still prefers the slowness of the hand rooted in classic technique to deliberately shape these stylized objects through laborious craft.
Her feminized structures feel familiar yet alien as if Georgia O’Keefe meets H.R. Geiger transporting the viewer to an alternative place, somewhere as she suggests, lost from or even displaced of time. So then what is hung on the wall also evokes artifacts, atrophied trophies hunted from before, laid bare and raw as tribute or memorial.
Stripped of skin and flesh—outer trappings Yang considers barriers between real versus imagined, these curious forms emerge like Daphne running away from Apollo from a tree trunk trying to grasp their humanity in hopes to connect to what life offers.
Photo credit: YoungSun Choi