Sensuality in All Its Many Hues

He calls himself the “Barry White of Post-Conceptual Painting.” Of Chinese ancestry, 31-year-old artist Yek is tall and pale, with an impertinent shock of black hair. Although his navy shirt and slacks may be paint-splattered and rumpled, his manners are impeccable and his paintings are immaculate.

The Barry White of Post-Conceptual Painting? The Singapore native who now lives in Las Vegas cringes slightly as if ruing this catchy remark. Then he says, “I like to make love paintings the way Barry White sings love songs. These are paintings you want in the bedroom where you make love.

“They are sensual and stir up feelings. They are not in your face. These are good paintings for mellowing out.”

Yek’s sultry abstract paintings progress in size from 2 1/2 feet square to 5 1/2 feet square, and curve out from the wall like a miniature cinema screen. The larger paintings can take up to six months to complete--building the thick curved panels and adding multiple applications of airbrushed paint that is sanded and smoothed to a luscious surface.

“My paintings have a quality of holding a larger space than the actual painting has. They have an aura that makes them expand,” says the artist, whose exhibition, “Smooth,” will be on view at the Mark Moore Gallery in Santa Monica from until Aug. 26.

One large painting of radiant lemon-yellow grades to palest green at the top and is inset along the edges with wedges outlined in sharp orange. A searing tangerine painting fades to yellow, and aqua lines dance around the margins. From pale pinks to deep turquoise, they recall the luminosity of 19th century Romantic Caspar David Friedrich and the western sky backgrounds of Ed Ruscha. In short, they are distinctive.

Yek is among a promising coterie of young artists who studied with prominent art critic Dave Hickey at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In 1998, Hickey included many of his former students in “Ultralounge: The Return of Social Space (With Cocktails),” at Diverse Works Artspace in Houston. “Yek makes the most exquisitely synthetic art I’ve seen in a long time,” Hickey says. “It’s just steadiness and commitment. It’s not conceptual. It’s intellectual.”

Others must agree, for Yek has been showing consistently since completing his master’s degree in 1997 and his bibliography already features numerous positive reviews. Discussing his atmospheric aesthetic, Julie Joyce wrote in Art Issues that Yek’s “intellectual endeavor argues that color constitutes a complex and knowable language--that through its use one may be able to comprehend the nature of how we take in and process visual information.

“What could be a better platform for this discussion than the sky itself?”

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Yek was born Yek Wong. His father, a Singapore businessman, and his mother, a homemaker, are Chinese and wanted their three sons to enjoy a cosmopolitan education. All were sent abroad, though his sister remained in Singapore. “My father wanted me to be more well-rounded and absorb other cultures,” Yek says. “Although he didn’t foresee me turning so Western.” (His brothers have since returned to live in Singapore.)

After completing high school in Melbourne, Australia, Yek returned to Singapore and married fellow native Emily Woo. Ten years ago, the couple immigrated to the U.S., where Yek attended college in Fresno and attempted studies in engineering but it was a “miserable place.” After one year, he decided to join his brother in Austin and transferred to the art department at the University of Texas. “It was a very traditional, narrative school,” he recalls. “They taught a lot of basic technique but also wanted you to think a lot about yourself.”

After finishing his undergraduate degree in fine art, Yek was ready for a change of scene. “I was already geared up to do something and make great art.

“Austin is a college town and people want to be kids,” he says. “I really wanted to be in a grown-up town. And you can’t get any more grown up than Vegas.”

While he attended graduate school, his wife worked as an executive for casinos. He did not know that he would study with Hickey and considers it “great good luck.”

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Seated at an outdoor cafe near the gallery, Yek nibbles at his all-American lunch of a hot dog and Coke, explaining that Hickey gave him the courage to move beyond “narrative” and into abstract art. “Dave tried to help us know that what we were making was most relevant to us, not to the world,” he says. “A lot of us saw that and started making what we really liked to make, not what we were encouraged to make. The best work, in my opinion, is abstract and ambiguous.”

Part of that realization led to his decision to drop his last name. “I wanted my ethnicity to be removed from my work,” he explains. “My first name is so unusual, you can’t pin down what it is. So I dropped my last name. It was successful because people stopped reading my background into the work.”

Although his neon paintings with their curling arcs of contrary color recall pinstriped cars and pop culture, Yek disdains such sources. “To me, my paintings are like landscapes with the distinct background gradation and the foreground line. It’s not about formalism, though I have no problem when people refer to that. There is something in the foreground and something in the background that relays the distance that goes into the painting. It is more like deep space, about 15 degrees up into the sky where you can’t see the horizon line.”

The calligraphic quality of the lines around the edges of his paintings have led reviewers to recall Chinese script, but Yek insists, “They are simply to separate the foreground from the background. The working process is such that I finish the background and before I paint the lines, the paintings look good, but they don’t really come alive until I put in the lines. That’s when, for me, they begin to speak.

“I make the lines to create a visual space that is larger than the physical space of the painting,” he adds. “Those panels are 5 1/2 [feet] square but they feel much bigger. The curvature of the surface helps, and the lines, by breaking up beyond the confines of the panel, help create the illusion that the painting is bigger than it is.”

How did he discover something fresh along the well-worn path of abstract painting? “I wanted to make something nontraditional. Everybody was making paintings on rectangular panels. Shaped panels were not good enough, because it had been done before by Ellsworth Kelly and others. Then, I thought of making the painting surface occupy three-dimensional space to break away from tradition. In the beginning, I think I wanted the viewer to admire the structure as much as the image itself.

“I’ve always been a good carpenter,” he adds. “I make some of my own furniture, and I’m good with a saw, chisel and hammer. I like building stuff and I could picture in my mind how to go about doing it. I have the ability to visualize and make it a reality.”

Dryly he says, “I’m a minimal guy, so the obvious choice is to not have too much happening in the painting, so it doesn’t detract from my beautiful carpentry skills.”

Despite his identification with the Minimalist aesthetic, he adds, “My heroes have always been the Renaissance and Baroque painters, never really anybody contemporary. I was never into the Abstract Expressionist stuff at all.

“I want my paintings to have magic so that romance can happen, so people will feel good,” he says. “The last thing I want is for someone to look at my paintings and be angry or crazy.”

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“SMOOTH,” Mark Moore Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., A-1, Santa Monica. Dates: Through Aug. 26. Phone: (310) 453-3031.