TANGIBLE REALITY: The Work of Foon Sham
By GLENN HARPER

OVER the three decades of his career as an artist, Foon Sham has used a variety of materials (including steel and stone, though he has most often used wood), diverse forms (abstract and figural vessels, woven and stacked forms, monumental stelae, architectural forms, wall-works, pedestal sculptures, wandering lines), and colors (the many colors of wood and bark as cut, carved, and burnt, as well as red, black, and green paint), and he has created public art as well as art for interior and intimate spaces. But in retrospect, the common element tying all the work together is an approach to art that might be called phenomenological.

The phenomenological tendency in contemporary art can be traced to the Minimalist art of the 1960s and to a negative appraisal of Minimalist sculpture written by Michael Fried. Fried complained in his 1967 essay "Art and Objecthood" that Minimalist art had compromised its aesthetic nature by including the viewer within the art. That is to say, the sculpture is not only an aesthetic object but also a mise-en-scène that includes the object, the space around it, the viewer, and the viewer's experience. After Fried's pronouncement, what he called theatricality (and what I am calling a phenomenological approach) has been adopted by some of the most interesting and accomplished artists of our time. The work of Richard Serra, for instance, began in Minimalism as delineated by Fried and has over the years become more and more involved in the perception and experience of the viewer.

Sham's early works seem (when seen in isolation) to be more oriented toward the more discrete aesthetic that Fried saw as the highest accomplishment of Modernism. The various works in the Vertebrae series (1979-88), for example, explore line and form as compositional elements moving through space. Pillar of Smoke (1988) has the quality of "drawing in space" that characterized the work of David Smith as well as the frontality that Clement Greenberg praised in the early abstractions of Anthony Caro. Only the separate form placed on the ground in front of the piece suggests an intrusion into the space of the viewer. But viewed in continuity with later work, such as Ruin (1991) and Chung (1994), it is clear that Sham's work always approaches the viewer with more than a discrete aesthetic experience. His work approaches you through multiple perceptions and cognitions, channelled through the artist's as well as the viewer's conceptual and palpable experience of the world. Ruin refuses to settle into a single perspective: neither the point of view nor the artist's approach to form and material are resolved in a single form. Rather, the smooth and rough, the laminated and carved, the singular and the stacked, the minimal and the multiple are all integral aspects of the work. Chung adds further complications to the unresolvability of the earlier work: the sculpture twists and spirals, flowers upward in a heavy mass that seems to balance uncertainly on a narrow base. The alternating carved and laminated sections suggest not only stacking and carving as artistic means, but also as human necessities, metaphors for the striving and laboring qualities of human life. These works, and in fact all of Sham's works, embody both the metaphorical and the tangible experience of art; his sculpture gives the viewer an empirical experience of the work's making and its significance.

Sham's approach to sculpture is extended further in a series of works that offer direct participation by the viewer, who is invited to enter the work literally or conceptually. This new direction begins in the mid-'90s with Barátsåg, a tall, stacked wood installation at Nagyátad in Hungar. The perpendicular upright elements of this piece rise and cross one another, forming a bent arch and creating a space between the work's two legs. This space provides a viewpoint through the work but also an opening into which the viewer can penetrate the work. Three years later, Wind from the East goes further. Its stacked elements, again perpendicular to one another, form the four legs of a shrine-like structure that calls upon the viewer to enter, to look up into and through the work, and to meditate. And two other works from 1999 demonstrate differing phases that Sham's work has followed into the 21st century. Torvtak, created during a residency in Norway, is a spiral structure constructed with a more complex and subtle stacking of blocks that are finished on the inside of the spiral and both cleanly cut and unfinished on the outside. The structure is capped with grassy sod, in the fashion of rural log houses in Norway. Torvtak invites the viewer into a closed space, rather than the open spaces of the earlier monumental works, and provides an organic roof that, although out of reach, invites the touch and interaction of the viewer.

A pair of site specific works, 20-20-3 in Chicago and Three in a Compliment in Washington, provide the other side of Sham's late-20th century thinking. These works are created by the stacking of regular, cleanly cut elements in a basket-like fashion, leaving space for air and light to penetrate through and into the interior of the structures. The stacked elements create a smooth exterior and a more syncopated interior rhythm. In the Chicago piece, the two vessel- or teepee-like elements have a tall narrow door into the interior and are joined at the base and rise symmetrical toward the sky, suggesting shelter and human scale. In Washington, the separate elements cant into one another, and offer both a discrete doorway and a tilted, open tops as entry points (for the eye at least). The unbalanced composition and the regular, stacked construction create an ambivalent, unsettled, and active impression. Each element suggests a basket or vessel, but the spilling rather than containing the contents of the interior. Several recent works, Vases on the Run, 2003, and Merida, 2005, continue Sham's exploration of the vessel/basket forms, some more regular in balance and construction, some more unbalanced.

Other recent works continue to explore the style of Torvtak. Bio-Morphic Forms, 2003, is a pair of forms leaning together, unroofed this time, that contrasts an unfinished exterior with a finished interior, but the form is more complex, bulging and deforming with some unseen stress. Jessica Dawson suggested in the Washington Post that Sham's work combines the macho of Richard Serra with the Minimalism of Martin Puryear, and Bio-Morphic Forms demonstrates what she means. The work has an organic form that seems totally natural, but the experience of its interior is unsettling as the double walls rise monumentally and swell in and out, above and around the viewer. What Sham brings to the experience of art that is different from the work of either Puryear or Serra is the palpable sense of the construction of the work, in these stacked pieces or others created by the carving and joining of the wood. The more explicit reference in this work, to the events of September 11, 2001, is subtle. Sham's work on this piece was interrupted by the public trauma of that date, and when he recommenced, he increased the height to 110 layers (to correspond with the stories of the World Trade Center) and doubled what had originally been a single, open form.

Some of Sham's recent works coil up to create an open space, not quite surrounding the viewer (as in Wave, 2004), and others are enclosed, leaving a space for entry (such as Squeeze, 2004). Squeeze also demonstrates other prominent aspects of Sham's art: his use of materials left over from the construction of other works and his increasing sense of these works as installations rather than discrete objects. Strewn around the central, chimney-like form of Squeeze, there are circular, cut-wood rings, cut ends left in the studio from other works. Here, they become and integral part of the work's presence, an agglomeration like flotsam gathering around the posts of a pier at the seashore, leaving a path that directs the viewer to the interior of the work. Michael Fried's comments about the theatricality of Minimalism lead directly into new forms of art in the '70s and '80s, in particular installation and performance art. Sham's work had already embodied the architectural and phenomenological aspects of installation and performance, and with works like Squeeze, his composition of the work also seizes the territorial imperative of installation: The work loosely occupies the floor of the gallery in a manner that suggests it could continue to grow out into the space.

Other works can't be literally entered, such as Budding and Hatch, both 2004, but these works offer views into the interior and also move into new conceptual directions. Hatch, composed of irregular rings threaded together in a loose, flattend "V" form balanced on its heavy central section. The structure has no correspondence to the natural world, other than the wooden elements of its construction, but it nonetheless suggests a completely natural form, as if found rather than created. This work is related to the earlier, smaller Twist, 2003, that has a more organic, less constructed form but is also balanced at the center of its rising branches. Budding is a tighter, more regular form than Hatch, but at its peak it reveals a second structure being born within. This more metaphorical use of forms in the work is also seen in a series of vessels created in Australian Red Gum (discovered during a residency in Australia), some of which include other elements (tea leaves and stones). These are mostly smaller works whose monumentality comes from the elegance of the forms rather than their scale. A larger work related to the vessel forms, Sea of Hope, 2003, combines the wooden boat-like form (another sort of vessel) with paper boats that contain both messages and tea leaves. This poignant work is one of the artist's most personal sculptures, created in response to the death of his mother. The paper boats contain memorial messages contributed by others. Sham continues to explore the possibilites of installation art here, moving into the literal space of the gallery and the metaphorical space of personal, shared experience.

Sham's recent sculptures continue to surprise. Passage II and Link, 2005, use various species of Australian wood in organic forms joined by a fibrous line of carved wood (short, in the case of Passage II, in which one floor-bound body is linked to another propped against the wall; long and sinuous in Link, where the line joins two wall-mounted, pod-like forms. These and other smaller works explore the varieties of construction and composition that Sham employs so fluently regardless of scale.

Several new works add a new tension of form and contradiction. Spiral Vessel (2006) turns in on itself, creating an interior without closing on itself or enclosing space. In-exterior (2006) is three disparate acts of stacking, carving, and layering, held together by the artist's sense of form and his ability to conduct the viewer's experience of the work. An organic base rises from a slim footing toward a broad bowl, but the bowl is no longer organic. It is grid-like, resembling at its peak a skyline somewhere between a contemporary city and a medeval fortress. But inside the bowl is a further shift: the interior is a stepped vortex, a terraced cave or canyon that leads the eye down into the dark throat of the sculpture's narrow foot. Sham seems to bend reality and scale, not just perception, in the seamless transitions between his carving and stacking as well as an external instability and an internal vertigo.

Opening (2005), on the other hand, is a complex standing form that, cloak-like, divides and opens, only to draw itself back together again. Here the opening is distinctly seductive, inviting a guilty glance inside. But one detail at the top of the work brings a new element to the work: pure light. Sham has left a jagged gap between hi stacked pieces, drawing the eye up (where light penetrates the piece) as well as down (into th edarkness enveloped by the form as a whole). Vessel of Wind (2006) is a similar but smaller form, its tiny foot rising to envelope an interior of jagged spiky forms. Perhaps because of the scale, the eye is drawn here to the shifting pattern of Sham's subtle, carved marks: pegs, gouges, planes, and joins. The smaller sculpture has the same logic of balance and contradiction of exterior-interior, but in a lighter mode that allows us to see the delicacy and care of his construction.

Throughout the diversity of his materials and his diverse ways of shaping and combining them, Foon Sham constructs not so much objects as experiences, tangible realities into which he invites us to enter both physically and mentally.

Glenn Harper

Sculpture Magazine

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