In the last 15 months, Material Gallery has presented several excellent exhibitions from artists — Lu Wei, Andrew Alba, Fazilat Soukhakian and Russel Albert Daniels — who traverse two cultures in their respective backgrounds and translate their memories into gestalt narratives steeped in history. More importantly, they also progress in responding to identity’s fluid and organic nature in edifying forms.
Regarding Material’s latest exhibition, which closes Jan. 11, Darkness Against the Glittering Sky by Fay Ku, born in Taiwan and now based in New York City, adds a splendid chapter to this multifaceted exploration of the creative crossroads artists resolve and resonate in their work.
7 x 10 x 1 inches, collaged graphite, watercolor on Yupo and single-color collagraph, hand-constructed box with glitter wallpaper.
Ku’s media focus is drawing but she also works with materials and processes not traditionally associated with this medium. Like her preceding exhibitors at Material, Ku fuses characteristics of different cultures of artistic aesthetics in her pieces. As with the others, Ku’s work is not biographical per se. It does not search for a pivotal narrative point but instead responds as a continuously evolving gestalt force embodying experiences, observations and responses of histories as they are shaped by crossing back and forth between different cultures. This is the manifestation of a truly American contemporary art.
Ku’s pieces in this show are exemplary in how she has fused elements of mythology, folklore, European art styles and Western art sensibilities with those of Eastern culture, literary traditions and art. Ku’s work rises to a result of transcendental beauty. Just as expansive is the spectrum of techniques and materials in which she continuously experiments — variously, ink, graphite, watercolor, collage, gold leaf, embroidered thread, handmade Japanese and Nepali paper, Kizuki Somegami (a thin, high quality, kozo paper), translucent drafting film, archival wax and, of course, glitter (as reflected in the title of the show). The eponymously titled piece for the show is Darkness Against the Glittering Sky (2023), featuring collaged graphite, watercolor on Yupo and single-color collagraph, along with a hand-constructed box with glitter wallpaper. This piece signals the bridge of context and perspective Ku has explored, as her work has evolved over the last 15 to 20 years.
metallic watercolor on black Stonehenge paper.
Some of Ku’s mythological and folklore-driven pieces stand out equally in larger (20 x 30 inches) and smaller (7 x 10 inches) sizes, for their exacting detail: Joust (Hand of God, 2022) and Horse I (After Han Gan, 2024), as well as the exceptional graphite drawings of Coelacanth, an ancient group of fish which resembles tetrapods and lungfish. The most thought provoking pieces in sociopolitical commentary come in drawings with graphite, ink and watercolor and thread embroidery depicting women: Mouth Feel (2023), Cry, Cry, Cry (2023), Can’t Look, Can’t Look (2023) and Mouths of Gold (2020).
With a handful of exceptions, the pieces come from the last five years, and especially from 2023 and 2024. The two largest and earliest pieces (50.5 x 63 inches and 50.5 x 72 inches) in the show, provide the baseline for the viewer to track how Ku has been evolving. In fact, an image of New Icarus (2010), metallic watercolor on black Stonehenge paper, was selected for the cover of a chapbook Lucid Animal by poet Meghan Maguire Dahn. Its iridescence aligns with the tone of the text, with reviewer Gregory Stapp noting how both artist and author “smartly [eschew] flying too close to the sun and instead assumes the beauty of trying in the midst of trial, of bathing in the light that promises to outshine it.”
on handmade paper.
In an interview with The Utah Review, Ku explained how she has used her art to find meaningful context in her experiences of growing up in two different cultures and realizing how she wanted to invent herself in a strange and lonely landscape. When her family immigrated to the U.S., the internet and social media had yet to establish their broad presence and access. Ku felt isolated. Her father was an amateur historian so there were stories rich in Taiwanese tradition and the patriarchal context. Among the stories her parents told was a 17th century legend set during the Qing dynasty,The Legend of Zhen Huan, where the empress seeks revenge, angered at the sight of concubines who are trying to win the affection of her imperial husband.
As a lonely junior high school student in an American suburb, Ku, fascinated by how the stories being told reveal so much about the writer who is relating the narrative, was captivated by folklore, mythology and the use of allegory in all sorts of literary traditions. “There was no real material or visual component to our reality,” Ku explained in an interview published elsewhere. “It made sense to have characters existing in a psychological realm, disconnected from the physical world.” She earned her baccalaureate degree at Bennington College in Vermont and master’s degrees in studio art and history at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.
“My work over the last 20 years has changed, more so by moving from a narrative interpreted upon a plot point and instead reflecting the discovery of a gestalt moment,” Ku told The Utah Review. Currently a visiting assistant professor at the Pratt Institute as well as the school’s summer program abroad in Venice, Ku said that while her early work disconnected the subject characters from the physical world and placed them in a psychological or cosmological realm, her recent pieces have shown subject characters claiming their space in a world of reality.
“My most amazing teachers were those who saw the student not as a projection of their thoughts but instead were interested in seeing what I was most interested in expressing,” Ku said. When she started her graduate studies at Pratt, she assumed that all serious painters worked in oil. ”My professor told me that I was not a painter and I could do whatever I wanted,” Ku recalled. “I realized that it was not an insult. It blew my mind then but it is very obvious to me now and I can see this in my students.”
20 x 30 inches.
As a drawer, Ku continues experimenting in ways that force her not to risk complacency in the way she works, especially during the numerous residencies she has participated in around the country. The 2024 prints of Tattooed Woman I and II (graphite, watercolor on Kizuki Sogemami kozo paper) came after a printmaking residency the year prior. During a textile arts center residency, she discovered parallels in the meaning and significance of lines in a piece of thread, which is evident in recent pieces.
Ku also is reconnecting to her native cultural roots, by immersing herself anew in the Mandarin language so she can be literate and internalize the language as an adult. “My mother never learned to speak English and I remember the sounds of the language she spoke but I didn’t know what she meant,” she added. Recognizing how oral traditions in a literate society can influence and contour the way we think, Ku sees possibilities in adopting the space and visual elements of the Mandarin language folklore her parents shared, to lift them out of a vacuum and find her own relevant contexts that resonate in her evolving body of creative work.
A Jan. 11 reception, beginning at 6 p.m., will mark the closing of the exhibition at the Material gallery (2970 South West Temple).