ARTIcLES / REVIEWS

 

The Art of Z.Z. Wei

By Kent Nerburn

 

There are artists who can describe the world and show us how it looks. There are artists who can evoke the world and show us how it feels. But only the rare and gifted artist can invest the world with a spiritual presence that seems to have a life of its own, and draw us into this spiritual reality.

Z.Z. Wei is such an artist.

At first glance, we are content to see Wei's works as spare and beautiful renderings of the Pacific Northwest landscape. A lonely road sign, a single cloud above rolling wheat fields, a small car moving down an empty highway—these are the subjects they offer us. They are evocative and lyrical, and possessed of a haunting singularity. They have the uncanny ability to transport us to a place where time stands still, where the earth holds its breath, and the objects and affairs of ordinary existence come alive with an inner luminescence.

These are no small accomplishments. And if this is all that Wei's landscapes offered us, that would be enough.

But if we give them time and open ourselves to their spiritual presence, we begin to realize that, as beautiful and haunting as Wei's paintings are, they are far more than landscapes. They are deep and profound medications on universal issues that confront us all as we make our way through life.

Nowhere is this revealed more poignantly than in the tiny automobiles that grace most of Wei's canvasses. Part cartoon. Part turtle, part 1940's American streamline design---they are like tiny animals, full of life and love and curiosity, as they poke over hills, travel down lonely highways, peek at us from nooks between buildings, stare at us from shadows. More presences than objects, we embrace them in our hearts and identify with them as beings. It is through them that we experience the vast and wondrous landscapes that Wei creates.

Yet there is a sense of infinite loneliness about these vehicles---something we cannot reach and cannot touch. We see them from slightly above and from a distance and we are constantly aware of the great spaces and echoing emptiness which surrounds them. Even as we live them and identify with them, we fear for them and sense their vulnerability and isolation. We want to reach out to them, but we can't. And this dual edge of live and feat, of identification and distance, produces and uneasiness within us that will not give us rest.

We find ourselves awash in contradictory emotions. What began as a simple car that beguiled us with its humor and animation has drawn us into a world of deeper meaning. Without knowing quite how or why, we have been brought to a meditation on the gossamer line between loneliness and solitude, between peace and foreboding, between isolation and protection---all the issues that Wei is confronting in his own life, and issues that we must all confront in ours. And though this meditation may never rise to the level of a conscious thought, it has taken root on the margin of our spirits, where it demands attention, and poses questions that give us no easy peace.

This, I think, is the true genius of Z.Z. Wei's work---to take a subject as universal and immediate as the landscape, to elevate it poetically to the condition of the eternal and timeless, and to invert it with a spiritual depth and profundity that speaks to what is common in us all.

In his works, where no humans reside, we see a true and poignant mirror of our own human condition. He reminds us that we human beings are small and vulnerable creatures---part fearful, part hopeful, full of wonder and terror and awe at the inexpressible mystery of life; that we live in the presence of eternity but are prisoners of time; that we are at once participants in our life and observers of our own passage.

Yet the world through which we journey is a magical place of timeless and haunting beauty, and alive with an all-pervasive, almost mystical sense of Being. As beings ourselves, we are one with this world even as we are separated from it.

Wei's works call us to acknowledge this ambiguity---to accept our separation but of celebrate our unity, to rise above our fears and limitations to claim our part in the inexpressible peace that permeates all creation.

It is not easy and Wei does not delude us. For every dream there is a fear; for every light there is a shadow. What we must do, his works tell us, is continue on our journey, rich in hope, aware of danger, but full of reverence for the task. And though we are fundamentally alone, we must remember that the world through which we travel is a poem to b written as much as a book to be read.

Z.Z. Wei's paintings are the poems his spirit creates as he travels on the journey of life. They are richly complex, full of humor and loneliness, peacefulness and pain. They balance on a knife edge of meaning, half in shadow, half in light. By sharing them with us, he gives us a window into the depths of his own heart, and opens us to the great spaces where the mystery of life resides. It is a gift we should treasure, for it challenges us to examine our own hearts, and find the poems that live within us all.

**Kent Nerburn is the author and editor of many books, including letters to my Son; and Road Angel. He has been an art reviewer for the Saint Paul Pioneer Press and a consultant in art criticism for the J. Paul Getty Foundation's program in art education.