H-Dropping Exhibition Catalogue
2025
Softcover
Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.88 inches
Pages: 32
On the occasion of the exhibition, Kasmin Books has published the accompanying artist’s book Lyn Liu: H-Dropping. The publication features an original text, which is written without the letter H, by critic and essayist Jenny Wu.
Conceived by the artist to push the expectations of the traditional exhibition catalogue, all 11 reproduced artworks have been overlaid with a thermochromic ink. When in contact with a heat source, the ink disappears to reveal the paintings beneath. The sensitivity of this ink is designed to degrade over time, ultimately rendering the book a non-functioning object akin to those seen in Liu’s paintings.
Lyn Liu: H-dropping
Lyn Liu’s 2022 debut at Kasmin, Dogville, was a solemn soirée and an existential circus. Paintings featured gargantuan red balls, retro jester patterns, a kangaroo traversing a stage before a row of defaced onlookers clad in muted formalwear, a spry clown in a baggy red outfit trying to lead a recalcitrant pony to a pool of algae-mottled water. Sedate figures performed various acts of labor of a nonutilitarian and irrational nature, jobs often linked by association to arts and entertainment fields in our late-capitalist society. Liu’s outlook for artistic labor – a paradox in and of itself – was always bleak: Screening (2022) depicted a row of empty, overstuffed seats. Conference (2019) granted a single avian spectator to a grisaille projection of two dignitaries making a deal. In Untitled (2021), a figure in a collared blouse, standing on a red stage, picks up a waxy red ball as if to demonstrate its properties, but any potential joy in said demonstration is undercut by an imposing image of an anonymous torso in an expensive-looking suit and tie, projected on a wall like a dictator’s portrait.
Liu’s Dogville paintings wittily captured a sense of malaise endemic to – if not intrinsic to – artistic labor. Stories in miniature, narrated by an artist traversing near-identical black-box cultural venues ad nauseum, enacting rote personal rituals like ordering a drink at an efficient but impersonal bar and smoking a cigarette in autumnal air next to a silent stranger, works in Dogville were set in no specified time or place but, regardless, liable to be interpreted as critiques of contemporary urban life and, particularly, of New York’s artworld apparatus. I’m reminded of scenes by American figurative painter George Tooker (1920–2011) – of dreamscapes conjured out of lifeless subway stations and government buildings. In Liu and Tooker’s paintings, I see anomy steeped in melodrama, individuals atomized in public space by unfriendly building design; I sense understated affects bordering on surrealism. Like Tooker’s figures, Liu’s crowds often dress similarly, conforming to unspoken social rules, but people in Liu’s paintings – take, for instance, Traverser (2022)’s trio – appear self-possessed, angled towards a realm beyond our stagnant present. If Tooker’s figures are wide-eyed and paranoid, Liu’s figures are sleeping beauties – placid, somnambulant, able to turn inward and disconnect from urban noise.
Arriving as an adroit response to a number of emotions called up for analysis in Dogville, Liu’s second solo presentation – of eleven oil paintings made in 2024 – examines defunct, decommissioned, and dysfunctional states of being via a linguistic development observed in speakers of several Western and Eastern tongues, a development diagnosed, in experts’ terms, as a “dropped” – omitted – “voiceless glottal fricative” – consonant produced using only air: it sounds like “would’ve” and “could’ve,” “’Artford” and “’Ereford.” Liu’s predilection for disappearing letters emerged from l’École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris: classes were delivered en français, leaving a great many consonants unpronounced. During a studio visit, I was educated on visual peculiarities pertaining to said fricative in its upper- and lowercase manifestations. I began seeing it as an acetic settee sporting a ninety-degree back, as a cross-section of an iron beam, as a specter looming amid verbal jousts. Notably for Liu, a fricative dropped in spoken dialogue continues to appear in written correspondence, its functionality eliminated but its form unyielding.
Liu’s new paintings are playful propositions: Suppose vocalization is labor, no different from emotional labor or domestic labor. Suppose we imitate dropped fricatives and adapt nonlaboring modes of being. Suppose we lingered about but refused to perform – not even to earn good grades, not even to make rent. We could all try, Liu suggests, becoming a bit “anti-functioning.” Consider, for instance, an image Liu conjured – oil on linen, around one square meter in size – containing ten green pencils fastened using neon-colored rubber bands to ten supple fingers resting on a clean, blank table. I believe I’m to imagine a comically caffeinated multitasker preparing to attempt to produce ten drawings simultaneously – to no avail. In Liu’s pictorial universe, pencils are not tools but impediments to motion and ultimately to productivity, distracting toys for a wayward elementary student refusing to pay attention in class. A similar jocundity emanates from a figure in a blue sweater in a different painting, staring into a telescope angled not up at distant stars but down onto a featureless gray table, magnifying a void, pretending to learn.
Indeed, an “anti-functioning” subject or object can be identified by its performativity: In lieu of tangible products, it performs ersatz labor – fruitless gestures. As we consider a painting of a bird lodged between a pair of mauve lips, Liu brings up a surprising fact: If allowed to, a pet bird may voluntarily peck at (read: attempt to floss) its owner’s molars, scavenging for stray bits of food, futilely enacting a mutualistic ritual observable, out in nature, among crocodiles and plovers. In captivity, birds roleplay as dentists and scavengers, but no real cleaning occurs, and no organism benefits. Liu’s oneiric tableau commemorates a scene of simulated labor. Into a discomfiting depiction of interspecies contact, Liu injects a critique of facetious productivity.
Still, to be “anti-functioning” can mean enacting, in a broad sense, a covert form of self-preservation. Upon encountering a painting of pink tulip buds bound in bands reminiscent of black liquorice – a passing suggestion of violence verging on erotic – I recall lines by midcentury American confessional poet Sylvia P., about a tired infirmary patient confronting a bouquet of distastefully vivid tulips, sender unseen. Drained by excessive visual input – by beauty – our speaker likens blooming flowers to “dangerous animals” – large felines sporting wide, open jaws. Despite friends and family members’ good intentions, our convalescent wants only to be left alone, to wrest free of cloying gift-givers, and forgo emotional labor in its entirety – in a word, to cease functioning as a member of society. Liu’s bound and “anti-functioning” tulips seem like correlatives to our patient’s refusal. Tying pistils closed is also common practice, Liu informs me, among florists seeking to extend flowers’ lives. By preventing a tulip from blooming and completing its “work” (i.e., producing visual pleasure, standing in as a proxy for a busy friend) florists – albeit provisionally – safeguard flowers’ longevity. Immobility, inaction, and abnegation, traits perceived to be deleterious to productivity-obsessed capitalist cultures, are recast in Liu’s paintings as potentially utopian qualities linked directly to individual subjectivity.
In a recently penned statement, Liu references a famous German ontologist we’ll call Martin. Liu reads Martin’s concept of enframing, or das Gestell, as a process of instrumentalization, a process of gradually reducing living beings’ existences to units of utility. Instrumentalized people, Liu glosses, are treated as mere means to an end, by a logic given to viewing trees as wood – good for making furniture – and ponies as a means of transportation no different from cars. Liu wonders if it is fair or smart to prize utility over more transcendental values and, accordingly, seeks meaning in lieu of functionality. A living German luminary, surnamed Steyerl, likewise riffed on Martin’s ideas. Writing in 2017, Steyerl decried contemporary art economies’ dependence on artists’ instrumentalized, corporeal “presence” – on panels, at openings, and so on – a presence summed up as “Dasein” in an era of “task rabbits and Amazon Turkers.” Steyerl found it absurd for self-employed artists to attempt to organize an “art strike.” Fortunately, little can prevent artists – an overbooked yet ever resourceful labor force – from simultaneously working and striking (e.g., distractedly scrolling social media during a panel discussion). Indeed, it is not necessary to be fully present – to commit oneself to every event; nor is it advisable to go dark and, in essence, quit working as an artist. Steyerl, favoring a strategic extrication from economies of art, prescribes a covert yet radical “absenteeism.”
Suppose Liu’s notion of “anti-functioning” were not simply a negation of a positive utility. Suppose, like Steyerl’s “absenteeism,” Liu’s “anti-functioning” images offer clever alternatives to presence and absence, unconventional escape routes away from stilted notions of function and dysfunction. Let us turn finally to an enigmatic painting in Liu’s latest body of work. A bespectacled tailor bends down to cut a ream of fabric depicting multiple iterations of a jester-like figure wearing pointed slippers and a red, windswept kilt. In some “frames,” our jester carries an umbrella; in some, a storm carries it away. Sans umbrella, our jester, arms raised, strikes an awkward and illegible pose. It is a quaint gesture; we can get accustomed to it. Just as Polykleitos’s spear-bearer can forgo its spear, and its identity – not to mention its formal beauty, its value as an emissary from antiquity – persists undisturbed, instead of seeing a lost umbrella and sensing an omission, a lack, a “dropped” component of a legible totality, we can start to detect, in Liu’s astute figuration, new ways of functioning. By taking Liu’s playful propositions as seriously as a jester takes a circus or a kid takes pencils and telescopes, we, too, can dare to comport ourselves differently in work and in life – and rekindle our appetites for nonproductive pursuits.
Jenny Wu is a critic, essayist, and the New York-based associate editor of ArtReview, where she writes a monthly column about the city’s art scene. Her work also appears in The New York Times, The Washington Post, e-flux, BOMB, and elsewhere. She teaches art writing in the visual arts program at Brooklyn College CUNY.
