The Brooklyn Rail

It may seem improbable that a mid-twentieth century artist who was a student of Richard Diebenkorn and Saburō Hasegawa, who hung out with Jay DeFeo, Bruce Conner, and the Bay Area Beat artists, and who was a respected community organizer and arts administrator went relatively unknown during their lifetime. But such is the story of Bernice Bing (1936–98), a queer, Chinese American, female painter who left behind a captivating body of work upon her death twenty-six years ago. A smattering of recent shows on the West Coast have begun peeling back the shell encasing her largely unknown legacy. Now, Berry Campbell Gallery is presenting BINGO, an important show of the artist’s work that will surely do much to further scholarship on this under-acknowledged artist.

Born in San Francisco to immigrant parents, Bing was orphaned by age five after her father deserted the family and her mother passed away. She spent the remainder of her childhood rotating in and out of seventeen foster homes, always parented by white families, and thus growing up with little experience of, or knowledge about her Chinese identity. With a natural aptitude and proclivity for making art, Bing earned a scholarship to the California College of Arts and Crafts, where she encountered Diebenkorn and Hasegawa, who profoundly influenced her. Hasegawa encouraged Bing to consider her Asian identity, and introduced her to both calligraphy and the tenets of Buddhist thought. Though she eventually transferred to the San Francisco Art Institute, graduating in 1960 and earning an MFA the following year, Hasegawa’s awakening her to the concept of being Chinese stayed with Bing, and throughout her life she sought to balance her “Eastern and Western karma” (as she referred to it). With a range of works spanning nearly the entirety of her career, from 1961 to 1998, Berry Campbell treats its audiences to a solid primer on Bing’s trajectory. One of the earliest works in the show, Velazquez Family No. II (1961) quickly establishes her prowess. A large canvas that riffs on Las Meninas (1656), Diego Velázquez’s Baroque masterpiece, Bing’s treatment uncannily retains a similar color palette while abstracting the figures and introducing a surprising allowance of light. Even in this early canvas, there is a confident elan to Bing’s brushwork, a deftness both fluid and assured.

A move to the Mayacamas Mountains in the California countryside a couple of years after the completion of this painting further opened Bing’s work. Though Mayacamas (1963) is completely abstract, her melding of earthen colors—ochre and goldenrod, juniper and walnut—along with, again, a skillful introduction of light evoke the mood of a brindled, Californian landscape. In many of her earlier paintings, Bing treats the surface in angular planes, so that the eye is drawn across the canvas at a diagonal. A later, sonorous abstracted landscape, Burney Falls (1980), shifts the angle to a vertical, as the eye follows her tumbling brushstrokes down the surface in approximation of a cascading waterfall. Burney Falls, the largest canvas on view (and perhaps the largest Bing ever painted) is composed of a lighter, more buoyant palette, and Bing’s increasing interest in calligraphy is evident in her flowing gestural marks.

A long-anticipated, extended trip to Asia in 1984 aided Bing in her quest to balance her “Eastern and Western karma,” and pushed her thinking in Buddhism and calligraphy. In China, she spent six weeks working with a calligraphy master and upon her return to the United States, Bing endeavored to merge her newly developed calligraphic brushstrokes with those of her Abstract Expressionist lexicon. Many of the later works on view attest to this coalescence. A number of ink works on paper from the early 1990s are instructive, showing the artist experimenting with marks in the indelible substance. A highlight of the exhibition is undoubtedly Quantum 2 (1991–92) a series of twenty-five works on paper hung together as a unified whole. Encompassing a large wall of the gallery, they harmonically synthesize so many of the elements that intrigued Bing about painting throughout her career. Some panels are solidly painted either a deep vermillion or black, while others are open and light-filled. Some marks suggest natural forms, while others appear as suggestions of calligraphic symbols, in an alphabet native only to the artist. As a unit, the discrete cells of Quantum 2 represent a visual language of balance that Bing strove for throughout her life. May we continue to reap the benefits of her posthumous renown, and have many more chances to experience that language.