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Charles Yuen Life Roller Coaster oil on canvas 60 x 78 inches 2008
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Charles Yuen Mechanical Systems oil on canvas 48 x 40 inches 2008
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Charles Yuen Offshore Drilling oil on canvas 66 x 54 inches 2008
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Charles Yuen Magnetic Resonance Imaging oil on canvas 66 x 54 inches 2008
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Charles Yuen
September 12 - October 11, 2008
In this season charged with political ferment and possibility Metaphor is pleased to present an artist whose engagement with the world around him is readily apparent in the content of his work.
In lush and carefully crafted paintings Charles Yuen constructs provocative tableaux utilizing a personal yet universal pictographic vocabulary to map his trenchant worldview. Yuen's paintings lead us on a whimsical yet deadly serious exploration into some of the dualities which sharply define modern life, nature vs. industrial and military culture, spiritual yearning vs. rampant materialism, and the place of human contact in an increasingly technological landscape. Observing a political and material terrain of confusing complexity, Yuen probes the limits of our own ability to comprehend this mad creation of our own making and our need or desire to escape into a saturated slipstream of media. This may sound like the description of a distinctly dystopian vision, yet Yuen's paintings are always leavened by a gentle even wistful humor. Monks sit in meditation beside a wheezing industrial Golem. Men wear giant bird heads and silently observe our follies. Tears flow upward and a rollercoaster twists and turns in a Mobius loop of uncertainty. Yuen addresses his politics in the language of dreams against fields of radiant linear energy which feel like the collective hum of our thoughts. His paintings at once amuse, inform, challenge, and terrify.
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