Su-en Wong at Danese

The artist Su-en Wong, who was born in Singapore and lives and works in Brooklyn, directs her meticulous technique as a painter and draftsman to mysterious and at times titillating ends. The protagonist in the 15 paintings and drawings that were at Danese (all from 2005-06) is the young artist herself, represented as a figure that can be multiplied more than 10 times in different poses within a given composition, and may appear in a schoolgirl's uniform or in various states of undress. Wong contrasts emphatically flat, tightly contained areas of bold color with fragments of nature and the actions of her alter egos. Significantly, the fields of color are painted in acrylic while the figures are carefully executed in colored pencil, which gives them a delicacy they would not otherwise possess.

In the large diptych Wilderness Retreat, Beijing Green, Fun in the Sun (64 by 144 inches), the top three fifths of the background of the (larger) left panel are painted bright green and the bottom two fifths light green. Under the horizon line where the greens meet we see a rocky landscape unfold; it is abruptly cropped off by the (smaller) right-hand panel, painted with a flat beige background. Five identical young Asian girls--some partially undressed, others clothed in white shirts, blue plaid skirts and white socks--kneel, sit, recline or stand among the rocks. One girl crouches over another girl and opens her blouse; still another, standing and looking into the distance with her torso exposed, prepares to pull down her skirt, as two other girls without shirts play cards in the foreground. A sixth, much larger girl is placed alone in the beige panel, and turns away from us as she (inexplicably) rolls out dough. Her buttocks and thighs are fully exposed beneath her plaid skirt. The hard-edge juxtaposition of the unmodulated fields of color, the abrupt transitions in scale and the deployment of erotic subject matter--the young, somewhat androgynous-looking girls, cloned as objects of desire--provide a freshness and tension.

In the diptych Colonial Cream, eight young girls in plaid dresses and white stockings, with feathers in their hair, crouch in a row across a dark beige ground, playing American Indians. At the front, their leader wears an Indian chief's full-feathered headdress and points ahead toward the abstract right panel, where the red, white, black and green pattern of the girls' dresses is repeated in a vertical strip along the panel's right margin. The artist mixes just the right amount of eroticism and identity politics in her paintings, in which figuration and abstraction hold each other in check.

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