JON TSOI, A Blind-Fold™ Sept 11 , Visual Performance Act + Exhibit

JON TSOI, A Blind-Fold™ Visual Performance Act + Exhibit
OPENING:
Wednesday, September 11, 7-9 pm
RSVP required: gallery@salomonarts.com 212 966 1997
83 Leonard St. 4th Fl. New York NY 10013

JON TSOI

Acts of war and deliberate bloodshed are horribly real subjects but so repetitively human that the artworks commemorating them tend to recede into bland symbolism, as with most war memorials. Jon Tsoi here will engage with 9/11, an action intended by its perpetrators to be brutal showmanship, but Tsoi’s performance will be an act of violence which resolves into the making of art. Tsoi was born in Sichuan, China, in 1958, and began drawing compulsively at the age of 5. As a teenager during the Cultural Revolution, he was sent off to farm the fields but made it to New York after the death of Mao. He found a place on the Lower East Side, saw non-Agitprop art for the first time, apart from an occasional photograph, and enrolled in the Art Students League. Tsoi also set to make his own art, painting on plywood mostly, and paying for his art supplies by washing dishes, before graduating to waiting tables. He was joined in New York by his parents, and his father a practitioner of Chinese medicine, set up in Queen’s. It was his parents who suggested to Tsoi, who was familiar with their practice, that he also get a license. He did so, opening an office in, Connecticut, with his art studio in the back.

 

Tsoi is a Taoist, and practices meditation. Alone in his studio one day, as if involuntarily, he blindfolded himself, immersed himself in thing-ness, and began to make art. “I drew with a colored pencil,” he says. “And after I took the blindfold off I said wow! This is amazing!”Blindfold cutting followed a few years later. He began by poking holes in the smaller paintings, enjoying the sense that lightness and air were getting into the work, both feeling a personal sense of liberation – Yin and Yang, the Taoist duality, reconcile the inside and the outside, the dark and the light – and communicating it through the work. He then began cutting and roping the larger paintings. “You follow the energy flow,” Tsoi says. “You accept everything. You carve, you make things happen. They have layers. You get inside the paintings.”

Using a nail gun to finish the works has been Tsoi’s most recent development and it is his darkest, direct commentary on our ever more violent world, with the horrific Hongkong situation very much on his mind. Tsoi had been long aware of the nail gun as a tool. “But it was very noisy and inconvenient so I didn’t use it,” he says. Now he soaks himself in the noise. “It sounds like gunshots,” he says. “And the violence. People are craving peace. So it is like medicine.” Shock Therapy, literally, Art Medicine, which is also a means of making excellent art.

 

 

GALLERY HOURS:
September 11 – 25, 2019
HOURS: Wednesday – Saturday 2-6 pm or by appointment