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Phong Bui at Holland Tunnel Art Projects - New York, New York - review of exhibitions - Brief Article
Art in America, Jan, 2000 by Calvin Reid
Holland Tunnel Art Projects is a small garden shed in Paulien Lethen's backyard in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which she has used to present adventurous and charming exhibitions of contemporary art. Phong Bui's "Homage to Meyer Schapiro: An Architectonic Installation" was an imaginative response to the distinguished art historian and critic's theories on the nature of abstraction and representation. Schapiro often emphasized the artist's systematic but deeply personal reaction to the world, no matter whether the result was an abstract or representational work of art. Indeed, Schapiro often took pains to debunk easy assumptions about abstraction and realism, pointing to the metaphysical and emotional content of both approaches.
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Bui, who was both Schapiro's student and friend, created an abstract installation that was rich in sensual grace and metaphysical and emotional allusions. The walls of the shed were covered in pigment with an overlaid web of geometric markings that at times seemed to leap from the wall. Using string and wire, Bui extended the linear gestures outward into space, crisscrossing the shed's volume. The 3-D lines echoed the contours, geometries and soaring vectors of the wall drawings. Black and colored lines delineated triangular planes of color that made up a succession of cubistic forms. Green mirrorlike paper added to the experience of seeing all aspects of Bui's formal invention at once.
This activity surrounded a dangling mobile that resembled an Asian wind chime. Built of paper, cardboard, wire spokes and the battered remains of an exhibition catalogue, the mobile provided a different strain of antic complexity, effectively wedding the alluring legacies and associations of the mobile form with the modernist enigmas surrounding pictorial abstraction and literal representation.
Bui's installation was a sculpture that insisted it was a drawing; an abstract idea about space that existed in real space; a serious conceptual notion that was enriched by an understated skein of memory and sentiment. Bui screened the initials M.S. on the wall, in apparent tribute to his teacher and friend, but also perhaps to reiterate the thought that a critic must look deeply into the lives, the times and the ideas of artists in order to reach serious conclusions about the nature of art.
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