I-Ching / Machine Leah Ke Yi Zheng

 Wilhelm-Baynes on I-Ching Hexagram #3: Difficulty at the Beginning 

The knots of Leah Ke Yi Zheng’s silk paintings are the kind that get tighter the harder you pull to loosen them. When you know just a little—your mind slackened—they seem simple enough: here are some with repeating horizontal bars, like a woolly Stella or LeWitt. Line, line, line. Palermo, Kelly, Buren. When you draw nearer, pull a little harder, things become more complicated. It works a little like what they call close-up magic: these paintings’ uncanny details multiply the closer you come. Apparently solid lines turn out to be streaked with tears of naphtha, cobalt, dissipated by a celadon marine layer or the sienna haze of evening; ochre stains bloom; a fine mist of dots here and there, as if their acrylic had been exhaled not painted. There are too many surface effects to take full stock, and then, at the edges, the outline of wooden braces appears, bones beneath taught skin. So that silk ground isn’t ground really but maybe a net that catches what it can or a veil that cloaks confessions. Those surface stripes are in fact closer to transcriptions than geometry: each set is one of the 64 soothsaying texts of the I-Ching. A broken line stacked atop five solid ones comes from #43 (Breakthrough), a pictogram of a lake below a cracked sky and a spell for pushing past creative block: 

One must resolutely make the matter known  

At the court of the king.  

It must be announced truthfully. Danger.  

It is necessary to notify one’s own city.  

It does not further to resort to arms.  

It furthers one to undertake something. 
 

It’s hard not to think of Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514), a cryptogram that we still puzzle over. There, the artist at wits end is rendered as a winged maiden, chin on fist, surrounded by a heap of obscure, cast-off tools and esoteric symbols. Zheng’s paintings belong to the same tradition, so-called vexierbild, “puzzle images” that bristle with secrets, images like flat gears asking to be turned by the crank of our mind. For five hundred years, viewers tried to work out the exact meaning of everything Dürer crammed in his print, to get to the bottom of it.  Eventually art historian J.L. Koerner pointed out that there actually was no bottom, that Dürer had purposely overloaded the image with multiple and contradictory meanings so that subject and viewer were forever united in their vexation.                                              

Similarly, with Zheng there isn’t so much a code to crack as a switch to flip. Each I-Ching reading, for one, is not a conclusion but a kind of engine, a sphinx-like spring wound up tight. Their lines, which in groups of six correspond to a stanza of prophecy, are each calculated from three coin tosses whose specific combinations charge the reading with a kind of hairpin trigger that can invert its meaning. The whole stack carries not only its enigmatic message but also a precarious, tensile force: an architecture of see-sawing associations that represent the fluxing forces supposedly animating the universe.                                           

For a number of years, Zheng has also returned to representations of the fusée, a specialized cog invented in the 17th century to regulate the erratic unwinding of the spring in clockworks. In this exhibition, she has superimposed them onto I-Ching readings, sharpening their contrasts into another koan on the artist’s process: a mystic whirring regulated into an officious tik-tok. Art must come from some authentic beyond and no one can say when the muses will sing, but, you know, time is money. Elsewhere Zheng sketches an early mechanical computer designed by the mathematician Leibniz to speed up bookkeeping. Well, even the ancients grew tired of waiting around for silkworms to finish spinning their downy cocoons, so artisans boiled the grubs out while they were still slumbering.                                                                                                                          

Zheng’s use of the I-Ching is involute like this, set to puzzling its appearance in her paintings from any number of different directions. Their gossamer, silk surface betrays the fact that their wile is in this ability to keep adding on layer after layer, materially and metaphorically. Everything appears to dance on that limpid surface; take one off the wall and the canvas becomes so insubstantial that even light will pass untroubled. Yet as Koerner said of Melencolia I, there’s no way to reach the bottom.                                                                            

This is so different from the I-Ching’s first, faddish appearance in Western art (at the hands of mostly white, male artists). John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Philip K. Dick...they asked the book to make decisions about their work for them. But the resulting work was like a mess of empty bottles left in the wake of a self-absorbed bender. Zheng’s paintings, by contrast, aren’t concerned with producing decisions or outcomes. If they have a temporal aspect, it is the everlasting, shimmering now palpable in their many-layered flatness. Brush strokes, hues, stretchers, allusions to the canon, prophecies…each of Zheng’s paintings is like the pile of esoterica heaped at the bottom of Melencolia. In this context, their silk ground is sublimated into a metaphysical support— the scrim of the present, that delicate moment of attention that rushes upon us intuitively and all at once.                                                        

Ask Jung instead of Greenberg about this peculiar kind of flatness: the psychologist was fascinated with the immanence proposed by the I-Ching, how its methods produced a richly textured snapshot of happenstance that was anything but random and reflected the “peculiar interdependence” of apparently unrelated events. Western thought (and let’s add, western art), which was preoccupied with deterministic chains of cause and effect, the I-Ching produced “a picture of the moment that encompasses everything down to the minutest nonsensical detail.” Jung called it the book’s metaphysics of synchronicity, an insistence on the irreducible density of experience. In a word, this is the form and content of Zheng’s vexierbild. And the result is an entirely different way to read the flatness of the painted image: as the coordinates for the ultimate compression of all our making and seeing down to a single dimensionless plane, like the unfathomable crunch at the center of a black hole. Here is modernism’s material honesty without its bloodless hauteur. A vexing flatness, instead, like that cosmic version that they say is capable of holding not just this or that but absolutely everything.