Art

Wong Sing Tai is exhibiting three recent paintings at Victoria University Library until the 18th March.

The paintings show a change of style, a change of colour. A change of feeling. If you want labels, they could be surrealist, to a lesser degree expressionist, expressionist in feeling but not in application of paint. There is something threatening, something ominous in these paintings.

Man in the Mountain is a theme used already in a different way, in a grotes que way by the German Expressionist Nolde. Some early works are faces that are mountains, mountains that are faces. In Wong's painting the man is seen in an ambiguous blue shade.

The major work of this trio and the most immediately striking is an important beautiful painting has as its title 'Threshold'. Pictured on a landscape are two reptiles. This painting is large. The landscape is the first landscape or the last landscape. It is a landscape we don't belong to now. It is of our future or of our past. This land is a wasteland, the Antarctic, the Southern Alps, the desert. It is hot and cold. A howling wind blows across it. Nothing grows here. Placed on the canvas are a tortoise and a Tuatara lizard. Are these two creatures the first or the last? The weight of the tortoise especially is felt. His shell is analogous to an American marines helmet. The tortoise is clumsy, stupid. It has destroyed everything. In a way it floats on the landscape, the strange polar world. Is this the Threshold of a new world? This painting has been taken from a comic strip, from fantasy, it is unreal. It is a still from the film '2001 Space Odyssey', beautifully painted. Will the encounter of these 2 creatures end in death or will they just make love?

The colours used for these paintings are similar to the colours used by Wong Sing Tai's brother. Brent Wong, but the paint application is more alive than his brother's dryer work. The canvases are beautifully taut. Everything is beautiful.

The other two paintings are less obvious. They grow, with their colours of technology.— these night-life, jazzed, unrea flowers. These paintings are the product of a 1972 mind, or world. They're from [unclear: t] dark side, from the unreal. No sun has ever shone in these paintings. No children ever laughed healthily here, only screamed

The beauty of the paint and of everything leaves one with a feeling of [unclear: decaden] and nausea. It is unfortunate that since World War II that to feel this way has seemed the most legitimate way to feel.

Only perhaps after all this sickness and more sickness can something new and healthy be born. Since 1945, it is of this darkness that one section of our most important painters have told us. It is the only thing they have to tell. That is our fault.

Reviewed by Jeffery Harris