James Leong, “A Retrospective Parts I and II”
by Matthew Kangas
Chatwin Arts Gallery, Seattle,Washington
Part I continuing through January 25
Part II February 6 through March 1, 2025
January 11, 2025
James Leong, “In and Out,” 1972-73, mixed media on canvas, 45 x 57”. All images courtesy of Chatwin Arts Gallery, Seattle.
James Leong (1929-2011) moved to Seattle in 1990 after a storied career in San Francisco, Oslo, Rome, and New York, and boasting a raft of awards including Fulbright, Guggenheim, and Whitney fellowships. By then, Leong’s saga mirrored that of other postwar American artists of color who had exiled themselves to Europe — James Baldwin, Miles Davis — as a result of lifestyle choice or, in Leong’s and Baldwin’s cases, racial discrimination.
The artist, educated at California College of Arts and Crafts and San Francisco State College, contributed considerably to the Seattle art community. He was invited, for example, to advise the Museum of History and Industry, Wing Luke Museum, and Seattle Arts Commission. Sadly, his art was not as readily recognized or appreciated, with only one show at Lasater Gallery in 1994. This survey goes a long way to correcting that embarrassing neglect, especially for an artist once included in the prestigious Whitney, Brooklyn, and Rome biennials and who showed at the legendary Downtown Gallery in New York, as well as at other significant European venues with an important show of American painters that toured Germany.
James Leong, “Eight,” 1970, mixed media on canvas, 24 x 32”.
Leong is a classic case of an artist transitioning from representational to abstract art, a common shift in postwar art both in the U.S. and in Europe. Examples of Leong’s figurative work are included here, and affirm his reason for rejecting that style as “too propagandistic” — appropriate for a public art mural in San Francisco’s Chinatown (and attacked by Chinese-American neighbors) — and later abandoning awkward mythic-narrative paintings he made in the Bay Area before his relocations. It was abroad where Leong found his formalist voice between 1959 and 1984. With several successful shows in Rome, praised by prickly Roman art critics, he was befriended by Cy Twombly, Vincent Price, Isamu Noguchi, and Buckminster Fuller.
Before Rome, however, the artist’s move to Norway on a Fulbright in 1957 pushed him closer to Edvard Munch’s bright sense of color and toward the overwhelming majesty of Scandinavian landscapes — and weather. Many of the abstractions seem like rain scattered across a window, or colored flurries of snow.
James Leong, “Stretch,” 1970, mixed media on canvas, 10 1/2 x 14”.
Gradually, the abstract paintings in Italy came to depict unusual irregular geometric forms against monochromatic backgrounds, as in “In and Out” (1971-72) and “Little Theatre” (1970). Haunting and enigmatic, they are unlike any other advanced painting of that period. Gradually optical effects came to dominate, connecting the artist to parallel trends throughout Europe, and in advance of American artists discovering Op Art. “Eight” (1970) set up a symmetrical grid followed by “Untitled” (1972), with its whorls of bending linear elements leading to a central circle. “Echo” (1978) imposes the same curves but over cloudy and rocky shapes in the distance. Interestingly, Leong was struck and lost sight in one eye as a child, the result of a hate crime and doctors unwilling to treat him. As he later put it, his space became “one-dimensional,” yet there are paintings, such as “Omen” (1978) that include window-like frames for the viewer to peer deep into and beyond the wide marginal areas.
James Leong, “Monied Mountain,” 1999, mixed media on paper on synthetic canvas, 31 1/2 x 23 1/2”.
Leong repeatedly stressed color as the motivating factor in his evolution of styles and periods. The extraordinary chromatic subtlety of his canvases is beautifully demonstrated in the survey. By the end of his Roman sojourn, optical explorations gave way to all-over spatter paintings that juxtapose muted tones beneath vertical, horizontal or diagonal drips and streaks in works such as “Source” (1976), “Pulse” and “Set Jade” (both 1978). These are smaller, more intimate in size, averaging 24 by 18 inches, closer to Mark Tobey, whom Leong acknowledged as an influence and who pushed him toward an Asian “look” of sensitive, all-over brushwork, a look that would dominate his last works.
In Seattle, as he put it in an unpublished autobiography, Leong found the full measure of his peronal identity. “I never really felt Chinese until I came to Seattle. It is so multi-cultural; you are not forced to take a stand … I came back as a mature artist … the problems are now aesthetic … Seattle provides the comfort of landscape … to work on my own.”
James Leong, “Discovery,” 2000, acrylic, casein, gesso on paper on synthetic canvas, 45 x 57 1/2”.
The results, to be seen in the upcoming Part II of the retrospective, are impressive, perhaps a climax to the stylistic divagations of his European exile. “Lijiang” (1998), “Monied Mountain,” “Guilian Three” (both 1999) and “Discovery” (2000) could fairly be called Leong’s “late period,” final breakthroughs of glistening color spatters that cohere into classical Chinese mountain-and-river landscapes. Seen with the other works in Part II, they affirm that all Leong’s travel, exile and stylistic transitions fed into a culmination of abstract painting that embodies rich cultural implications.
Matthew Kangas writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas.