Pan Hsinhua and David Frazer exhibitions reviewed in SquareCylinder

The hectic contradictions in our era of “fake news” and “flooding the zone” have been the bane of contemporary digital life for a decade. We never seem to reach bottom. The regressive Intelligent Design crowd has for years been demanding faith and obedience to the white-cowboy fantasy world of the 1950s that never existed. Now it is joined by the Artificial Intelligence proselytizers, who promise Utopia — personal robots for all! — while conceding that radical change will be forced upon the 99% even if their lives are disrupted or destroyed. Amid this tumult, can art offer a meaningful response to contemporary life? Two painters, one Chinese and one American, make a compelling case for art’s ability both to reflect contemporary life and aesthetically transform it, wresting meaning and beauty from the chaotic jumble of social-media unreality.

PAN HSINHUA, Hazy Mountainscape, 2025, mixed pigment on paper, 28 3/4 x 52 3/8”.

Pan Hsinhua (born 1966) follows up his 2023 “Garden of Mind” debut with “Phenomenon of Qi,” a selection of fifteen ink and mineral-pigment paintings on paper, employing motifs and symbols used in Chinese painting for centuries, drawing from a great, living cultural legacy—but one that requires some enlightened historical revisionism. Qi is defined in Chinese thought as ‘breath’ or ‘life force,’ so Pan’s semi-scientific framing of Qi as a phenomenon both reifies it , proclaims its reality, and strips it of mythological or metaphysical meaning. Pan explains, “I wish to bring sarcasm and ridicule with a touch of humor … to … mock traditions of poetic narratives.”

PAN HSINHUA, Reading the Breath, 2025, mixed pigment on paper, 28 3/8 x 48”.

While the artist’s arch revisionism is in sync with contemporary skepticism about grand totalizing narratives, his work reveals a seemingly contradictory dedication to tradition and craft. If the historian Will Durant once characterized the Chinese as the most traditional of peoples, Pan’s dedication to the style of traditional ink painting, materials, and motifs make him an “old soul.” His ink and mineral-pigment paintings on Puli hemp paper display the traditional ‘boneless’ mogu flattened perspective, and the skillful calligraphic brushwork of Chinese Meticulous Painting, so that his birds, plants, animals, and other codified symbols seem to have stepped into the present from the distant past. In addition the isolated life he leads in rural Taiwan, amid familiar (to him) flora and fauna, recalls Confucian scholar-painter-poets of yore who retired to cozy mountain and forest hermitages to paint and compose poetry.

The traditionalism behind Pan’s gentle humor is evident in his long rectangular formats. Oriented vertically (“Painting by the Riverside,” “Plum Branch Miniature Garden”), they reference historical hanging paintings on silk. Painted horizontally (“Viewing Flower and Butterfly,” “Hazy Mountainscape”), they evoke the scroll painting tradition, combining landscape and poetry. The predominant golden tonality of Pan’s elegan depictions (“An Autumn Outing Among the Flowers,” “Moonlit Night”) may reflect the traditional symbolism of the color yellow, huang (“Yellow generates yin and yang,” goes one proverb), associated with the fertile earth. Beyond the landscapes, Pan also parodies (and ironically extols) traditional medicine in “Map of a Man’s Moles,” “Map of the Lung Meridian,” and “Map of the Heart Meridian.” With his childlike Buddhas and saints, he also sends up religious imagery in “Where the Berries Grow” and “Practicing the Breath.” In “Reading the Breath” an adult figure — possibly a priestly self-portrait with his hair shorn and his face covered with magic inscriptions (like the man rendered invisible by calligraphy in the ghost story, “Kwaidan” — takes part in the mysterious ritual.

DAVID FRAZER, *Improv #14*, 2022, oil on canvas, 32 x 32”.

While Pan mixes the cultural past and present to comment on the human condition, David Frazer (born 1948), a distinguished artist and educator now retired from Rhode Island School of Design, follows his 2023 exhibition, “Lyric Abstraction, Hami and Home,” which featured paintings made in Hami, China, during the pandemic, with “Mirage,” a group of eight semi-abstract paintings accompanied by six small square-format works that are completely abstract. Frazer is an intuitive painter who trusts the process and works without preconceptions, open to impulse and improvisation, welcoming “a chaotic and problematic surface that offers unique opportunities for resolution later on … “

DAVID FRAZER, *Stone Slate*, 2024, oil on canvas, 40 x 36”.

Frazer’s paintings are densely wrought tours de force of structured painterly abstraction that reflect his aesthetic mentors — Giotto, Piero della Francesca, Giorgio Morandi, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and Paul Cézanne — as well as Abstract Expressionism and collage, two ways of working that are synthesized in his hybrid style, with its visual power combining with hints of narrative. Abstract Expressionism provides movement and energy; and collage, or, rather, simulated collage, using hand-painted birds, eggs, and lily flowers, suggests implicit narratives. I would add to the eclectic stew Cubism and Surrealism, another stylistic odd couple, with mysterious brushstroke-objects commanding ambiguous landscapes in “Twilight,” “Reflections II,” “Stone Slate,” and “Chromatic Gray,” or darkened, cloistered interiors in “Love Dearly” and “Improv14.”. All art-historical pedigrees aside, these paintings, modernist without apology, are captivating hybrids of abstraction and figuration held in lively, lovely suspension. Frazer’s mirages may be illusions conjured by a exceptionally skillful prestidigitator, but “Art is a lie that tells the truth,” as Picasso said.

The paintings of Pan and Frazer are exceptionally imaginative, intellectually rigorous, and visually stunning. Such artistic pleasures, in our fraught, fractious era, are to be, to empty the Trumpism invented for 2024, cherished.