Charles Yuen's spores and magic
Wells Chandler 2022
The mycelia network of interweb algorithms finally delivered a plump mushroom. “Between Here and Now” is Yuen’s second solo show with Pamela Salisbury Gallery in Hudson, NY.
Charles Yuen's Time is Now
John Yau 2020
Yuen’s ambiguous works resist a simple or anecdotal reading while speaking to our apprehensions and paranoia.
Beer with a Painter: Charles Yuen
Jennifer Samet 2016
Charles Yuen’s home in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, is comfortably domestic and suburban in feeling, which somehow surprises me, after having seen his zany and sardonic paintings earlier in the year at Studio10 in Bushwick. Yuen pulls a couple of summer lagers from his refrigerator and leads me down a metal staircase to the garden level. The tile-floored room with a sliding glass door opening to a backyard patio is his studio, with several paintings in progress and detailed photographic images of flies stacked on a desk.
The Somnambulist: Charles Yuen's Painterly Waking Dreams
Drew Lowenstein 2016
After sleepwalking through an afternoon of painting exhibitions stocked with retreads of Emil Nolde and Edvard Munch, I was awakened, ironically, by a show entitled Crypto–Somatic Incantation. If painting is a form of dreaming in an active state, Charles Yuen has achieved it.
Charles Yuen
Fintan Boyle and Jennie Nichols 2014
Charles Yuen’s studio time is a friendly civil war between old comrades of the painter’s trade, figuration and abstraction. Sometimes –often– for Yuen to abstract is to decapitate. Minus head the former figure terminates in a swirling of color. Or, other way around, the head, minus figure, swirls in a field of sine waves emanating from beyond the canvas and wobbling left to right, right to left across its surface. These latter are a frequently used sign of Yuen’s, to let us know that the rendered figures, plus his own thematic interests and musings, will be kidnapped by some narrative of science or science fiction. The sine waves themselves are merely one member of a vocabulary of images on loan from astronomy, zoology, geology, anthropology and psychology or from the fictional siblings of any of those disciplines.
Charles Yuen—Honoluu to New York
2005. Pay attention to titles like “The World Trouser Center”, “Life Along Denial” “Oil Brain", Charles Yuen goes straight to the great crisis our world faces today. Will Condi Rice buy his “Ribbon on Her Shoes” or better yet commission Charles to paint the shoes she bought at Ferragamo?