Charles Yuen & Yunmee Kyong
September 12 - October 11, 2008

In this season charged with political ferment and possibility Metaphor is pleased to present two artists whose engagement with the world around them is readily apparent in the content of their 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.

In contrast the prints, photographs, and sculptures of Yunmee Kyong lead us gently into a contemporary peaceable kingdom, Hers is a vision of the city as urban utopia, as a banquet for the senses where foods of all nations are served and absolutely everyone is invited to sit at the table, where, with a little luck, one just might have tea with any of a number of beneficent deities. Informed by her travels and her life in multi-cultural Brooklyn, Kyong weaves sweetly beautiful images in crisp lines and bright colors that remind us (if,indeed, we have ever forgotten) just what it is that we love about our city and what the larger world could learn from the generally peaceful and tolerant place that 10,000,000 of us share. Her eye for the patterning of native fabrics, details of dress, and layered urban textures is as acute as her optimism. Kyong is a humanist and her hopeful and inclusive message resonates at a time when the machinations of politics all too often strive to pull us apart.