Wall Paper

Wei Jia and Lin Yan

One thinks of works on paper as small, meticulous, and fragile. With Wei Jia and Lin Yan, one might be running up against a brick wall.

Yan in fact simulates one, shaping paper into rectangles and the grooves between them. Ink and other media soak into them, but also lend them form. Paper also flies off at the edges, like posters left to peel from a wall. Elsewhere her collage exaggerates the texture of rice paper, to the point of fabric. The roughness, though, also adds solidity. The texture can change abruptly halfway through, or the color may change from black to white, as if revealing something underneath.

Jia's paper wall has suffered changes, too. His surfaces are mostly flatter, but also layered and weathered, stained by muted brown or green acrylic. Successive advertisers might have come and gone, and once I even imagined a face. Larger and lighter brushwork looks like graffiti. The characters may or may not be Chinese letters, at least to my western eyes, but no matter. One is not likely to decipher a work's history.

Of course, traditional Chinese painting can take up an entire wall. However, the husband and wife artists both stick to the scale of Western canvas. If anything, as with Jia's characters, they might be zooming in on a small fragment of a mural. He invites one to step back and enjoy the color, the image, and the taste of the city. She invites one up close to appreciate the loose edges. They call the show "Intertwining Layers."

At her best, she thrives on the opposition between solidity and flight. More than a vertical piece like a stiff dress, I liked loose white furls peeling off a square center. In another work, the brickwork becomes the stripes of an American flag. As with Jasper Johns, this white flag refuses to flutter or to keep the proper distance on a pole, and memories of Johns's encaustic contribute to its texture. She also makes invention out of the necessity of a display case, itself an artifact of paper's fragility. The flag's stars, etched on the case, escape their field.

For real—or at least illusory—decor, one might look to Virgil Marti. Actually, fake wall decoration is still wall decoration, and that is half the point. The other half is that fake is cheesy and kind of fun. Garish round sofas and cushions, out of the hotel from hell, nestle amid the silkscreen illusion of gray swag curtains. There hang a cross between animal pelts and vintage mirrors, chrome plated in the cheesiest of colors. Next time you need a place to stay, and the Chelsea Hotel is too proper for you, you know whom to ask.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Wei Jia and Lin Yan ran at Cheryl McGinnis through March 27, 2010, Virgil Marti at Elizabeth Dee through February 20.