Art: Painter in Paper

The paintings on view at Manhattan’s Downtown Gallery last week seemed to be composed of gossamer and mist. Their surfaces looked as if they could be disarranged by a breath. But paradoxically it is this look of fragility that gives the work of Honolulu Artist Tseng Yu-ho its subtle strength.

The colors are soft, as if from a filtered rainbow; but they are not anemic. The images are often hazy, but this makes them all the more suggestive. The shredded and flat pieces of paper that the artist uses are among the most perishable of materials; but that only adds to the delicacy of the whole. Painter Tseng makes her impact not with flat statements, but by dropping gentle hints. “A little bit of thread.” she says, “can express power as well as a large boulder.”

A Peking Education. Tseng Yu-ho (her American friends call her Betty) was born in Peking in 1923, the daughter of a Chi nese admiral. She decided on her career at the age of twelve, when a severe attack of pleurisy kept her in bed for a year and her chief recreation was to paint. She studied at Peking’s Roman Catholic Fu Jen University, proved such a brilliant pupil that she was soon made special assistant to the head of the art department. At the university, she met a middle-aged German art professor named Gustav Ecke whom she married in 1945.

The Eckes left China in 1949, a few months before the Reds took Peking. They lived in Hong Kong for a while; then Ecke got a post at the University of Hawaii. Both U.S. citizens today, they live in a house by a small stream in Honolulu’s pine-studded Nuuanu Valley.

A 9th Century Technique. In Peking. Tseng Yu-ho had studied the technique, dating back to the 9th century, by which China’s artists strengthened their scrolls by pasting layers of thin paper to the back of the silk. Tseng has extended this technique to the surface of her paintings. They are more than ordinary collages; using the Chinese word for synthesis. Tseng calls them Dsui-paintings, for they are in effect, orchestrations of many different kinds of paper. Tseng gets the paper—rice or bamboo or tapa—from all over the world. Some pieces are translucent, others are opaque; some are colored before being put in place with an invisible paste for which Tseng alone knows the formula. The brush designs may lie beneath one or several layers of translucent paper, or they may be painted on top.

Were Tseng Yu-ho’s vision less sensitive, her paper-on-paper paintings could easily degenerate into decoration. But few do. Her subjects range from the stream by her house, to a mountain top to a wispy peek into the cosmos. Her paper world can spit fire, roar like the sea, open up the vastness of a blue-black night. But her chief triumph is that in her work the traditional and the modern come together, not as combatants but as companions.