藝評

Agnes Martin, Kyrie, 1962, Oil, ink, graphite, nails/canvas, 101⁄2” x 101⁄2“, cropped to top half (image: Sotheby’s, 2010)

Both Wai and Martin employ abstract forms of drawn line to express themselves; neither seeks to be representational. Martin uses pencil and paint, mostly on canvas, Wai ballpen and Chinese ink, mostly on paper. Their closeness and their differences alike illuminate the work of each. To explore them together benefits our understanding of both.

Wai Pongy, An elephant's reverie, 2022, 244cm x 144cm, (detail 2 from bottom left)

Artist’s website https://waipongyu.com/An+elephant%27s+reverie (photo: Eddie Chu)

Grids

Both Martin and Wai use the drawn line to create space, not by forming a representational image, but by creating for the viewer a sense of place. They each use a form of grid (which defines space through the use of a regular pattern of lines), and those patterns of lines operate in space and time, to put into the mind or heart of the viewer a tangible sense of place within space; sometimes defined by emotion, sometimes by association.

In each case, the presence of the grid is not obvious from a distance, but the emergence of the grid pattern is still a necessary consequence of the process by which both artists create, and the grid-lines emerge more clearly the closer one approaches the surface of their work; when examined at closest range – one or two inches - we may find the lines themselves are in fact discontinuous.

Martin’s space-creation depends on a pattern of lines that follows a classical grid – a 2-D layout that implies a graphical set of ordinates (x-, y-axes) as used in science to define location (what Lawrence Alloway, writing about Martin, called ‘a network of uniform elements’ combined with ‘A play of irregularizing refinements’) – so that, in her works as observed, the grid’s precision is defocused to create uncertainty within the visual frame to form “luminous containers for the shimmer of line”. 

Wai’s pattern of lines is different, essentially 1-D (an x- or y-axis only), defining space by a series of positions as the ‘line’ moves, thus importing (as the reference points continually evolve) an element of time, but providing nonetheless a ‘uniform network’ allowing us to situate ourselves, as viewers, in relation to the work and its content. Rarely, and early on, Martin did use a ‘1-D’ grid form, as in her pencil and ink drawings Mountain (1960) and Paper (1961), but these lack the ambiguity, the ‘Irregularizing refinements’ of her ‘2-D’ grids, and being bounded don’t imply a significant time component.

Line and Distance

A striking characteristic shared between Martin and Wai is how their use of line creates different effects at different distances. On Martin, critic Rosalind Krauss respects the observations of Kasha Linville, of whose writings she noted in 1993 that “for the first and only time there is a description of what it is actually like to see the paintings, which, she [Linville] explains, “are sequences of illusions of textures that change as viewing distance changes.” This effect is analysed by Krauss with reference to the "Three Distances” that characterise Martin’s paintings  - near, medium and far distances, which in turn lead to “Three Moments”, experienced by the viewer at transitional distances where one predominating impression shifts to another. Krauss then considers Hubert Damisch’s exploration of /cloud/ and his observation that an artist may choose:

“… to make the optical a function of the tactile (kinesthetic) field of its viewer, that is to say, the succession of those viewing distances the observer might assume. This latter is the case with Agnes Martin. And in her work it also remains clear that the optical, here marked as /cloud/, emerges within a system defined by being bracketed by its two materialist and tactile counterterms: the fabric of the grid in the near position and the wall-like stela of the impassive, perfectly square panel in the distant view.”

Agnes Martin, Untitled No. 4, 1984, 72” x 72”, acrylic and graphite on canvas, cropped to detail at top right corner (Christie’s, 2010) 

In the case of Wai’s grids, the small and irregular (seen case by case, close up to reveal the surface and weave of the paper) variation of distance between his drawn limes (which never actually cross over each other) creates a sense of pattern and rhythm that resolves itself into wavelike forms that in turn create associations with nature, despite the absence of classically representational form in the lines themselves. The ‘order yet not order’ within these lines is his equivalent to the sense of ‘shimmer’ created by Martin’s grids hovering at the edge of perception as you first approach her canvases. 

In the Near, in the Far

Examined up close, each artist’s work draws attention to its tactility and facture, its material presence. Observers have commented how Martin’s drawn line can seem only intermittently to touch the surface in her grids, and then with great delicacy, and to play along the weave of the canvas, almost shy of imposing itself; thereby creating, as you retreat from the picture surface, a dissolution of the marks into the beginnings of an ‘atmosphere’. 

In Wai’s work, too, the line at close quarters is almost tentative, intermittent in cases, reflecting his freehand skimming movements along the surface of the paper. As distinct from Martin’s frequent use of rulers, Wai’s freehand lines take as their principal reference points the line last drawn rather than a geometrically firm location. In his early works, especially, the sense of atmosphere was expressly mirrored in the titles – Lightwave Memory Pacific (2006), Lakedream (2006), Mist of air (2008), Lightwave Memory (2007) – and as with Martin’s early works the implication of landscape is always present. Though Martin firmly dissociates herself from the idea of landscape as representation, at least her titles suggest emotion as ‘landscape’ which she accepts: Night Sea (1963), Stars (1963), Garden (1964), The Tree (1964). In Wai’s more recent, large-scale works (say, Genius Loci – Wuhan, 200 cm x 1200cm), it is not clear whether the work should be regarded as a record of a performance or the transcription of various landscapes, but the line consistently skims the surface of the paper, rather than impressing itself on it with the aim to enclose space; instead, the gaps in the line themselves directly record reality: sand, seeds, soil, impede the transmission of ink to the paper surface. As this author commented in an earlier article, on looking along the length of such a work:

Wai Pongy, Lightwave Memory, 2006, 90cm x 178cm Detail 2 - https://waipongyu.com/?portfolio=lakedream) (image: the artist) 

“The fine drawn lines disappear in the distance, as if they were details in a real landscape. They mark their passage across the xuan paper not as earthquakes mark a seismological chart in ink sharply, but by recording the impediment of the very earth to their passage in minuscule lumps and deviations of passage in the line. We are reminded of Wang Wei’s observation on recording nature: 

“in drawing waterfalls

Use many interruptions but no break;

Leave intervals within the rapid flow;”

在绘制瀑布

使用许多中断，但没有中断;

在快速流动中留下间隔 .”

The degree of interruption depends on the type of paper Wai chooses. Some are softer, others harder. The weave of the papermaking itself will affect how the interplay of the lay-lines from papermaking and the drawn lines of ink interact, seen from inches away. Apart from the lines themselves, both artists have used dotted intrusions as component parts of the systems they developed to tantalise our visual appreciation. Tiffany Bell, who is working on Martin’s catalogue raisonné, tells us how Martin painted while she (Martin) was still working in New York and before her hospitalisation for schizophrenia:

"… [in] Little Sister (1962), lines of a grid are drawn directly onto a flat canvas; the nails, fully inserted, form slightly protruding dots, which reinforce but materially contrast with the pencil lines. In … The Islands [1963], the dots are inked or painted points within rectangles formed by ink or pencilled grids. In all of these works the compositions are related - grids punctuated by points - but the emphasis on the material presence of the object varies from one to the next. … Embracing conventional materials - graphite line, paint, paper and canvas - and presenting them in a direct, non- representational way, Martin was able to assert the material presence of the artwork."

Wai Pongyu, Genius Loci – Wuhan, 2023 (detail)

Agnes Martin, Garden, 1964, 72” x 72”, acrylic and pencil on canvas – (detail by Bill Jacobson in Dia Foundation's book, Agnes Martin/ from Hirschhorn Collection, 2011/14) 

Wai, to compare, uses the detritus from the waste ink of the ballpen, discarding it directly onto the surface of the work: nothing is wasted, and a supplementary set of reference points is established. As with Martin, the material presence of the work – paper and ink alike – is heightened. Martin subsequently purified her work, relying only on the almost subliminal effects of her grids, shimmering beneath the threshold of visibility. But in the case of both, to adopt Bell:

“… nothing is materially hidden and the creative process is fully available, yet the whole is not perceived at any one time. These paintings rely on a process of looking and remembering.“

In Same Line Twice (‘SLT’), Wai’s collaborations in 2017 with fellow Hong Kong artist Hung Fai, the sense of distance interfering with the perception of the work, the need for looking and remembering, became part of the creative process. As Hung Fai commented on Same Line Twice 10 (138 x 70 cm):

“We start drawing lines from diagonally opposite ends of the paper. The distance between us does not allow us to see each other’s drawings but only the body movements. When the bodies and drawings are emotionally separated, the relationship becomes unfamiliar. As we continue with our line drawings in opposing directions, at some point we would encounter, brush past each other, then disappear from each other's sight; that’s when the lines of each emerge with distinct clarity to the other."

… “that’s when the lines of each emerge with distinct clarity to the other" identifies a ‘Moment’ when the respective line patterns of the artists, their ‘grids’ became ‘fully available’ to each other. In this SLT work, notably smaller than Genius Loci – Wuhan the viewer sees everything in focus, unless looking along the drawing’s long axis, when the ‘far end’ of the eye’s transverse movement across the paper reveals misty uncertainty, a feature of the much larger Genius Loci – Wuhan. Unlike Wai’s freehand ‘grid’ lines, Fai’s lines are ruler-drawn, creating his own grid, carrying his impressed ink-marks (symbolising man’s entrapment in society) with which Wai’s gridlines engage dialectically. 

Cultural Commonalities

Other common perspectives emerge from exploring the above. While Wai’s cultural formation automatically embedded aspects of Chinese history and philosophy, Martin, like many of her generation, found and embraced those by choice and learning. Her notebooks talk of Tang and Song ceramics with affection for their aesthetics. As Anna Lovatt reminds us:

“Suspended in a perpetual state of becoming, Martin’s painting is likely to have been informed by her awareness that in Taoist philosophy the undifferentiated unity from which all existence arises is represented by a circle or sphere.” In her essay ‘The Untroubled Mind’ she urged the reader to ‘Try to remember before you were born... As it was in the beginning, there was no division and no separation.’"

Similarly, the ability of each artist to find the ‘small in the big, the big in the small’, a Chinese aesthetic principle inbuilt in Wai’s work but in Martin’s case acquired by choice so that (per Tiffany Bell, though the parallel with the corresponding Chinese principle is not exact):

“The non-referential compositions and frontal presentations of these 1963 paintings emphasise the material presence of the object, while comprehension of the process - making something grand and beautiful from small, simple repetitive gestures - evokes more ambitious, expressive content.”

Another aspect of each set of works, perhaps adding to mystery for a Western viewer of Martin’s works, but confusing the paths by which those with Asian cultural predispositions might get to grips with Wai Pongyu’s work is that, to start with Martin: “Martin’s work confounds familiar oppositions - representation versus abstraction, objectivity versus subjectivity, materiality versus spirituality… indicative of what Barthes called ‘the fascism of language’, which requires us to choose between opposing values in order to communicate.”

We will return to ‘the fascism of language’, but for now, we can note that Wai’s work like Martin’s ‘confounds familiar oppositions’. He can be seen as operating in the ink tradition, but in ballpen; is not engaged in representation, but feels ‘materially real’; believes he engages in creating landscapes, but not directly within the Chinese traditional definition; is arguably abstract, but neither geometrical nor classically gestural; and arguably is a performance artist, while ‘simply’ drawing; his work fuses a self-communing dialectical character with meditative qualities; his process combines order, chance and instinct in the evolution of his lines through time. This is not easy to pigeon-hole, even describe.

Also like Martin, his history as an artist, notably in his Same Line Twice collaborations and Rhythm of Landscape series, makes clear that he refuses to be part of a socially imposed classification, and insists on toleration of social coexistence as a value in its own right. To borrow from Lovatt’s essay again: “Martin [substituted for the circle] the non-hierarchical, subtly modulated shimmer of the hand-drawn grid. Asked why the grid was important for her, she replied that it represented ‘innocence’.” In Wai’s case the corresponding “I” is “Idealism”: Same Line Twice was an idealistic search for common ground in time of strife, in 2017 Hong Kong. We explore below the fascinating reality, that in her social disengagement, Martin is more ‘literati’ in Chinese socio-historical terms.

Repetition

As mentioned in opening, Martin and Wai use the drawn line to create for the viewer a sense of place. In addition to having in common some eight characteristics in their gridwork - line, tactility, the ‘shimmer’, a preference for paleness and understatement, delicacy of touch, and of engagement with underlying grids, plus the ability to create different layers of emotion across different degrees of viewer distance, and to evoke atmospherics through line – in addition, they engage in repetition. Martin in the structure of her grids, Wai in the series of his lines. But as we shall see, there are more differences beneath the surface use of line, than commonalities; here we move towards areas where similarities mislead and it is more their differences that better illuminate both forms of art.

Repetition is often regarded as an aspect of the minimalist search for unity and harmony through simplicity. However, Martin rejected that association, seeing herself more as a slowed down, de-theatricised proponent of a different kind of abstract expressionism than a minimalist. But still, her approach to ‘expression’ is the opposite of the American love of scale and drama. She dominates her space, but in a most unaggressive, unassertive, Taoist manner, one which disarms the viewer. The outcome, says Lawrence Alloway, is that: “As she draws it, the grid is halfway between a rectangular system of coordinates and a veil.” 

And later, after her departure from New York, she created On a Clear Day - a set of 30 screen prints first shown in 1973. Suzanne Hudson says of their repetitive qualities “Martin coaxed from the repetitive structure a near infinite range of iterative possibilities: matrices alternately expand and contract; lose their interstitial armature so as to exist as parallel lines; and creep toward the margins or maintain autonomy from them.” Adding: “In a postcard to [composer Morton] Feldman, Martin explained that On a Clear Day concerns ‘inocense [sic]’”. In respect of these prints, Tiffany Bell suggests: “The effort and intensity … now would unfold as a sequential experience with infinite potential, as the viewer sees multiple renditions of a similar idea in time and space.” However, that does not, in my view, mean that the viewer moves beyond the grid present in each work as an enclosure of the space so delineated. One moves conceptually, perhaps, but the physical ‘capture’ of the viewer remains focused within the four sides of the artwork, as with her paintings, before and after this print series.

In contrast, Wai’s serial repetition of freehand lines, while possessing a clear meditative quality (in that respect aligned with that aspect of Martin’s works) retains their sense of individuality and freedom, the option suddenly to diverge. The lines create a frame within which other actions or interactions can be measured, assessed; and like Martin’s they ensure through their natural rhythm that “the shifting placement of the lines are paced like natural irregularities, the currents in water or the wind on a field”, even evoking land art. But when ‘divergence’ from regularity arises, a major side-effect is to sharpen our awareness of what might be imported into Wai’s grid(-lines). 

Imported, for example, might be the pain in the dark 2019 works (Rhythm of Landscape 12 onwards) that emerged from a reading of poems by Osip Mandelstam: the drawn ‘grid’ disappears under darkest floods of black ink, and the paper itself is rent apart by the strength of the artist’s gestures. Later, his choice in the Rhythm of Landscape works from Nos. 29 to 37 to use a carefully formulated grey-blue ink (a symbol of a search for social unity in Hong Kong), and from Nos. 38-42 to use materials (alcohol, bleach) that reflect Hong Kong’s experience of Covid-19, show the grid being used to frame social experience. Martin imports the experience of a space for the viewer to feel. Wai connects the viewer through his chain of lines with spaces outside in which the works were conceived.

If emotion is one subjective/affective impact on viewers of Martin’s grids shimmering at the edge of perception, it is in ‘performance’ that Wai’s lines provoke the strongest responses from his viewers. Though is unclear if the effect is visually stimulated, a significant number of visitors to Wai’s public drawing process at Axel Vervoordt Gallery in Hong Kong experienced and acted on the desire to unburden themselves of psychological stresses when embraced by the repetitive, rhythmic and meditative aspects of Wai’s drawing process, lines being slowly added to under the large, billowing sail of the paper hanging down from the gallery ceiling. This repetition is more in the spirit of the Buddhist prayer wheel than of Donald Judd’s or Sol LeWitt’s orderly grid-making. But it is also close to the affects preferred by Agnes Martin who openly expressed her desire to evoke inner emotions. Seeing this ‘paper sail’ in situ affirms a Moment or Distance at which Wai’s work appears as a stand-alone form rather than a discernible grid – as Krauss/Damisch describe this ’distant view’ in Bachelors (v.s.: n.5). The meditation-protection spirit in Wai’s ‘sail’, and Genius Loci’s ground-rubbings of Wuhan historical spaces aligns with Damisch’s use of ‘stele’ to describe Martin’s paintings seen from afar.

Colour 

Colour is not strictly relevant to grids, and for neither Wai nor Martin is it a primary issue. Neither of them is a representational artist. Both avoid colour as a field, defining a space. To avoid emotion through colour as such is part of their artistic DNA - Wai as a Chinese painter in the ink tradition, where tones of black to grey or even pure water may take the place of colour (including green-greys, blue-greys, and all the white-hued greys); and Martin as a painter for whom moderation of expression has always been key in her grid based work; even if, before she ‘found the grid in New York in 1960’, she did deploy firm hues and anthropomorphic shapes. Her late works do present the viewer with pale colours in bands, but with the aim that emotional affect might match the inner emotion transmitted by the form. Even in her untypical but important early, ultramarine-rooted 1963 work, Night Sea, it is the interaction of the semi-hidden grid that seductively reveals itself as one’s distance from it varies that drives the work’s feel; the colour merely brings out that quality. More broadly, as Suzanne Hudson observes:

… Night Sea''s interminable reversals of priority - stasis versus movement, frontality versus recession, colour versus line - underscore those most fundamental, of death and rebirth.

Agnes Martin, Untitled #5, 2002, 72” x 72”, acrylic and pencil on canvas, (Estate of Agnes Martin/ARS/Pace)

In Wai, in the case of his Rhythm of Landscape works from the late 2010s in the grey-blue series, Nos. 29 to 37 mentioned above, colour is an adjunct to the dynamics imported by the grid or the disruption and distortion of the grid by gestural power. In these works, as in Martin’s works of the 1960s, the fact the grid is obscured by colour, forms a part of the mystery to be deciphered by the viewer. What looks like a turbulent disruption of the physicality of the paper fibres, reveals on closer examination a grid distorted by the very energy of its forward movement, coursing around energy points that have broken through the paper, and mostly concealed by the wash that spreads the ink across the surface, all without losing the already-mentioned essential quality that “shifting placement of the lines are paced like natural irregularities, the currents in water or the wind on a field” noted by Alloway of Martin’s work in ArtForum. In Martin’s later works, colour may import a sense of serenity; in Wai, it distils socio-economic forces onto the  paper, including his colour-coded aspirations for conciliation.

Oppositions

Turning to other differences, those between the artists’ chosen ‘grid-forms’, if we accept the broadly ordered, rhythmic pattern of lines created by Wai as a type of grid, ordering space, then the clear differences with Martin’s grids are that Wai’s are 1-D (height/length is varied only by curving the line; there is no implied set of co-ordinates), where Martin’s are 2-D; Wai’s are open-ended, where Martin’s are bounded (made evident by their form, and by how her marks, in early works especially, stop before the edge of the deliberately human-scaled (generally 6 feet square, Vitruvian) canvas; Martin’s lines grant stability – a protected space – and as experienced by a viewer, operate to charge the emotion and the intellect as that viewer moves backward and forwards perpendicularly (or sits and watches) within the projected boundaries of the work, while Wai’s lines appear unbounded, and their progression can be imagined to extend beyond the already far-stretched ends of the paper - they operate transversely rather than in recessionary fashion, creating a strong sense of movement and thus narrative.

In terms of time’s effects, Martin’s lines encourage calm, stasis, introspection. The suggestion is of reclusiveness, even invisibility - a form of Western Literati detachment reflecting Martin’s own determined position towards the world (‘independence and solitude’, as she says in her note ‘The Untroubled Mind’); a non-narrative position - as she insists not merely suggests. 

Conversely the directional quality of Wai’s grid reinforces its narrativity, and permits us to imagine interactivity outside of the boundaries of the work itself; even, as suggested earlier, an association with forms of land art and their recording; the conceptual linked to the real; while concerning Martin, Richard Tobin notes “[Donald] Judd’s astute observation in January 1964 that the empty borders [in Martin’s early works] render the perception of the grid field as a rectangle, ‘not a section of an implied continuum’ ”;  though Tobin proceeds to imply that after hearing his comment, Martin didn’t want to suggest that such a continuum was unlikely in her work.

A further difference is that the freehand quality of Wai’s drawn line imports flexibility, and reflects the operation of Wai’s process as one of periplum, of finding the path by action and experience as recounted in Ezra Pound’s China cantos: "periplum, not as land looks on a map / but as sea bord seen by men sailing". Each step across the paper takes place by reference to the one that went before, exploring, without the numerical discipline that Martin applied in designing her works – her notebooks contain careful computations of ratios she found pleasing. Martin also found that to insert squares into the square format of her paintings was too stiff: she preferred the rectangle which ‘lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power’. And the repetitive use of rectangles within the square, or almost square form of the painting creates another grid-form pattern of repetition without stiffening the feel of the works involved.

As well as being freehand, Wai’s lines also engage time flexibly; while Martin’s, notwithstanding their visible human deviations from perfect line in their closely-examined detail, offer a classical sense of time-free rationality and order – a Winckelmann-like escape from spiritual imperfection. We fall perpendicularly into Martin’s grid-delineated worlds. But to observe and traverse by eye, or on foot the 12 metre length of Wai’s large performance work such as Genius Loci – Wuhan, is to experience its variable pace of creation – over several months - and its undemonstrative, mutable record of happenings. The viewer then helps (re)make the work, placing it within a particular class of ‘performance’. As Alloway in looking at his parallel analysis of Martin’s oeuvre observes: “in …  “Response to Art,” she has this to say of the relationship of artist and spectator: “Works of art are not purposely conceived. The response depends upon the conditions of the observer.”

Finally, though the outward form of Wai’s lines offers only limited hints concerning the events underlying them (which call for very close inspection – at inches, not feet of remove – to discern) if one ‘enters’ his performance artwork, not while thinking of the visual experience a viewer before the finished physical work, but from the opposite end, temporally and creatively … if one enters its space in full awareness of the process of creation as it occurred from its beginning (perhaps helped by the photographs that captured the serial selection of locations for performing and drawing the work made by Wai and his photographer-collaborator, Li Wei), we see more clearly an alternative raison d’être for the paper and its conjoined gridlines: not just to create a visual experience for viewers to observe, but to serve as carriers of external experience and transposers of physical realities across new spaces, as the work moves from studio to public hall to outdoor or built spaces, or to display. 

Wai’s lines do emphatically constitute a grid, but a predominantly temporal one, within which events are located and then relocated. Wai’s grid brings events into the display space, while Martin’s grid transports you outside the space defined by the canvas, into a numinous world. In this respect, Wai differs from Martin, who contracts our notional and actual motions as viewers, into timelessness.

The ‘fascism of language’

It is an irony of cultural displacement in the modern world that Agnes Martin, born in Saskatchewan, Canada, should have embraced so much of China’s philosophical heritage, and be understood by art lovers globally, while Wai Pongyu, native to those same traditions, sits uneasily as a Hong Konger in the hinterland between Western and Chinese artforms. For both, the possibility of outsider status, imposed by Barthes’ fascism of language “which requires us to choose between opposing values in order to communicate” can be solved if only we will recognise and accept their multiplicity of form. 

In response to the tendency to impose categories, Agnes Martin simply rejected the idea and stepped outside of the debate about meaning, insisted that her autonomy not be narrowed by her works being defined. The price was that she was not part of the arts community writ large, but formed her self-contained community of one – with good friends admitted as honorary members. Her Idealism was found through a process of Tao-style detachment.

Wai Pongyu is determined in the opposite direction. Engagement is the watchword, though firmly not submission. In his processes and actions, he unrepentantly insists on the possibility of harmonious social coexistence. In this he surely hews to the mainstream of Chinese cultural values, even if the politics of the present seems to insist on the opposite. But though the search for harmony is surely culturally Chinese, the alternative - escape from society, Martin’s choice - is perhaps closer to the Chinese literati tradition - as discussed by Jonathan Hay in his review of the response of Chinese aesthetes to radical changes of regime over the centuries.

Offering a political allegory of political disputes in Hong Kong,2017’s first Same Line Twice works asserted that different perspectives on grid-formation could be resolved collaboratively. Wai’s 2019 Rhythm of Landscape series insisted on unflinchingly presenting the stresses his society faced, and on the possibility of honesty about the nature of those divisions. What became Genius Loci – Wuhan opened viewers’ hearts to express deep personal worries by their engaged participation in meditative grid-based art-actions. And because the inclusion of ‘abandoned spaces’ in the narrative presented by the line-based timescale in Genius Loci – Wuhan contradicted the economic positivity demanded by its sponsor which banned the ‘abandoned spaces’ photographs, Wai’s time-based grid also exposed, in the extension of its performance into the act of display, the imperfection of the world outside the artwork.

Endwords

In their different ways, Agnes Martin’s and Wai Pongyu’s grids open doors for us, allowing us to approach the truths they reveal through the contrast and commonality of their art-making. 

Martin’s grids step outside of time, and offer peace. Wai’s grids embed themselves in time and offer battle, or more gently, unintimidated social engagement; if tempered by a preference for mutual acceptance and understanding gained through art, once battle is joined.

Both artists resist the external imposition of normative rules and practice on their self-generated voyage of discovery, which each undertakes through his/her distinctive, grid-based art processes.

The works transcend any language used to describe, categorise or even appreciate them and must be seen, at their different ‘distances’, so that their shifting natures, their shimmers, their alternation between object and atmosphere, their emotions, can be sensed and appreciated ‘live’.

Notes:

1 Lawrence Alloway on Agnes Martin, ArtForum, April 1973 Vol. 11, No. 8, p.34.

2 As described by Rosalind Krauss and Marcia Tucker, “Perceptual Fields,” in Exh. Cat., Amherst, Fine Arts Center Gallery, University of Massachusetts, Critical Perspectives in American Art, 1976, p.15.

3 Collection of Museum of Modern Art New York https://www.moma.org/collection/works/36262 – accessed 4-Jan-2025

4 As Alloway puts it, (ibid.), “By removing the internal boundaries of the grid, by which it was seen to stop and start, Martin emphasizes not the succession of the modular bits, but the wholeness of the module, its occupancy of space rather than its duration in time.”

5 Rosalind Krauss, Bachelors - Agnes Martin: The /Cloud/ OCTOBER, MIT Press, 1999, p.89 (written Paris, 1993)

6 Irving Sandler asked Martin in interview how her memories of the great plains in Canada factor into “the openness and expansiveness in your work.”: “My work is non-objective but I want people, when they look at my paintings, to have the same feelings they experience when they look at landscape ...” - Art Monthly, September 1993, p.5

7 Paul Serfaty, The Wuhan Project with K11 and its ‘Genius Loci’, unpub., 2024, p.6 accessed on 5-Jan-2025 at
https://www.academia.edu/126806641/Wai_Pongyu_Outdoor_Wuhan_drawing_The_K11_Drawing_Project_with_cover_Genius_Loci_v_3_Academia_

8 See a slightly extended form of wording in The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting - Facsimile of 1887-1888 Shanghai Edition, Trans. Mai Mai Sze p.204, Bollingen Edition, 1963, Princeton, p.205. “ "When one is painting a waterfall, it should be so painted that there are interruptions but no breaks." In this matter of "interruptions but no breaks," the brush stops but the spirit (ch'i) continues; the appearance of the flow of water has a break but the idea of it is uninterrupted.”

9 Agnes Martin, Tate Modern, 2015 (catalogue), 'Happiness is the Goal' – Tiffany Bell, p.26

10 Ibid, p.27

11 In Exhibition Cat., p.118, Grotto Fine Arts (pub., Hong Kong, 2017), trans. Nathalie Cheung

12 Agnes Martin, Tate Modern, 2015 (catalogue), 'In pursuit of the Neutral: Agnes Martin’s Shimmering Line', Anna Lovatt, p.104

13 Agnes Martin, Tate Modern, 2015 (catalogue), 'Happiness is the Goal' – Tiffany Bell, p.27

14 Anna Lovatt, ibid, p.104

15 Anna Lovatt, ibid, p.104; see also the text to n.16, infra, for a more specific reference to ‘innocence’/’inocense’.

16 Lawrence Alloway, Agnes Martin, ArtForum, April 1973, Vol.11, No.8 p.35

17 Suzanne Hudson, Agnes Martin /Night Sea, Afterall Books, 2016, p.45

18 Alloway, ibid.

19 Though if we consider LeWitt, then his wall drawings, as commented on by Cindy Hwang, ‘being applied directly onto the wall— eliminating paper altogether—... take on the surface irregularities of the wall, making them integral to the character of the drawing, and collapsing all physical boundaries between the viewer and the artwork.’ The process could describe the formation of lines in Wai’s Genius Loci – Wuhan, and how they reflect the underlying nature of the terrain they are drawn on – whether painting table, riverbed sand, or an abandoned building’s concrete scree, we see the bobbles on the paper, and the breaks in the drawn line that result. See: Grids/ Neutral Frameworks for Serial Variation https://cindyhwang.info/lewitt-and-grid/essay/

20 Rosamond Bernier, 'Drawing the Line', Vogue, November 1992, interview about her about her quest for “abstract emotion.” And, as regards colour: “ "I'm going to show you a failure," she will say, before destroying it. Pale blue rectangles did a duet with palest yellow ones. It was very seductive. "Yes, but it suggests the sea. That's what's wrong with it." Direct or specific echoes of landscape are taboo in this studio.” Accessed at https://www.maryellenmark.com/bibliography/magazines/article/vogue/drawing-the-line-637529870880634781/V 

21 Suzanne Hudson, Agnes Martin /Night Sea, Afterall Books, 2016, p.65

22 Agnes Martin - Writings, Dieter Schwartz, Ed, for exhibition Agnes Martin: Paintings and Works on Paper, 1960-1989, Kunstmuseum,
Winterthur, 1992.

23 Richard Tobin, in Agnes Martin, Tate Modern, 2015 (catalogue), The Islands, 1961, p.78.

24 Ezra Pound in Canto LIX, from Cantos LII-LXXI, Faber & Faber, London, 1940, p.83.

25 Lawrence Alloway, Agnes Martin, ArtForum, April 1973, Vol.11, No.8, referencing Agnes Martin, unpublished notes, Institute of
Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

26 Jonathan Hay: Posttraumatic Art: Painting by Remnant Subjects of the Ming, https://ifa.nyu.edu/people/faculty/hay_PDFs/historical/Posttraumatic.pdf

27 Paul Serfaty, 'The Line of Politics – Collaboration as a Political Allegory' in Same Line Twice, Exh. Cat., Grotto Fine Arts, pub. Hong Kong, 2017, pp.36-38

28 Philip Auslander: 'The Performativity of Performance Documentation', PAJ - A Journal of Performance and Art, Sep., 2006, Vol. 28,No. 3, pp. 1-10

Paul Serfaty©  Hong Kong, February, 2025