Breaking Down Walls
San Diego Union-Tribune, May 18 2006
By Robert L. Pincus

There is an architect inside of Foon Sham. He employs the
elements of his sculptures as if he were constructing a building.
This doesn't mean that the sculptures on view at Scott White
Contemporary Art resemble edifices. In fact, most don't.
The artist, who teaches at the University of Maryland, has good
reason for titling his solo exhibition "In-Exterior," because his
creations often break down any distinction between inside and
outside.

Done in small blocks of walnut and cherry, "Opening" displays this
concept forcefully. He's created rounded walls in walnut and
cherry with small blocks of both, which appear as if they should
continue all the way around the sculpture – but they don't.

Instead, the structure recedes into what would look like an interior,
except there's nothing in front of it. The effect is akin to that of a
graphic image of a house with a cutaway that reveals the rooms
within.

"Opening" looks like a cross between a tower and a female figure
without head or lower legs. The gaps in its blocks – the openings
– have both an erotic and a ritualistic dimension to them.

Sham is an artist who is as enthralled with craft as with structure. You can see his intense devotion in all nine of the works on view. The exactness of a sculpture like "Opening," as well as the dizzying quantity of units that create the whole, are both seductive qualities in his work.

Wood is a common denominator in this show, as in so much
of his recent work. But shifting from piece to piece, there are
dramatic differences in how he uses it.

"Passage I," done in walnut, cherry and ash, appears as if
there were a sort of low-tech faucet in the wall, which was
sending a stream of water into a slender vessel on the floor.

Its method of construction is similar to that of "Opening."
For "Spiral Vessel," he uses a different wood, Philippine
mahogany, and its walls have a strikingly different style. This
is because the individual portions of Sham's sculpture are
prefabricated sections of hardwood floor. Sham adapts them
gracefully to an S-shaped form, standing nearly 3 feet tall
and 5 feet long, that he calls "Spiral Vessel."

The work has its parallels in postminimalist contemporary sculpture,
Martin Puryear's work prime among them. But Sham, a native of China who trained in the United States, has forged his own intimate relation to his medium and his objects exude their own pensive sort of power.