May Yang: Wordplay
Liggett Studio
February 7-27, 2025
Looking for a word in May Yang’s “Wordplay” is like looking for life in a forest. It’s not in any one thing you can see, exactly, but it’s there—a hidden force that drives everything visible. In this robust and subtle solo show, a word becomes a situation, an environment, almost a dance.
For Yang, who grew up as a first-generation Asian American in Oklahoma, making art out of words is a personal matter. She writes in her artist statement that she “encountered cultural contrasts and communication barriers within my own family, further amplified by language differences. My frustrations fueled my artistic journey, and art became my method for processing and reconciling these intercultural challenges.”
All of the works in “Wordplay” start with a source word, which Yang (a printmaker who runs Flash Flood Print Studios in Kendall Whittier) then begins to play with in ways that range from typography to laser cutting. She writes the word, draws it digitally, morphs and expands it, traces it onto fibreboard, cuts it, paints it, layers it with other cut and painted shapes. By the time a piece is finished, the source word itself is so abstracted and obscured as to be nearly lost. It’s no longer a standalone thing but a catalyzing event that creates an interplay of meaning-making forms—which reveals much more about the word itself than a literal representation would. We never know what her source words are for each piece, nor do we need to. What we see is what they are.
May Yang, "Whiplash" and "Twist" | photos by Alicia Chesser
As she takes them from sound-signs to digital images to 3-D objects, Yang’s words become more complex as they move further into the tangible world. Let loose from the literal, speaking, writing and listening become kinetic, embodied experiences, rather than intellectual or verbal ones. These pieces—which she calls “relief paintings”—invite you to get close, look into layers, process surprises in depth and perspective, notice connection points and divergences and overlaps. To me, they’re about relationships.
The whole show unfolds like a train of thought expressed not verbally but physically. “Wordplay” starts to the right of the gallery door with a small box filled with unpainted fibreboard shapes, almost like a children’s puzzle. Next to it, the only flat painting in the exhibit (The Tide Will Turn) sets up another stage in Yang’s own development; her flat paintings, she told me, “always wanted to be dimensional.” I can almost feel the phrasing of the painting’s title here, the rhythm of a wave in the stroke of pink and the shifts between dark and bright. Beside this piece hangs After Image, which seems to take elements from its 2-D neighbor and pop them off each other—and we’re off and running as Yang states her new process with authority.
May Yang, "The Tide Will Turn" and "After Image" | photos by Alicia Chesser
The kinetic force in each relief painting is made more potent by its containment in tight, box-like frames. You can feel the frustration as well as the pleasurable effort in this communication, the wriggle towards freedom inside the constraint. As she brings these word-shapes into embodied, abstracted form and builds with them, Yang told me, they become what she wants to say far more than any individual word ever could.
I wanted to get around the edge of each piece, see into it from the side, look between the stacked shapes and through the funky maze of angles. The further in you go, the less individually coherent these shapes get, and the more they become about the ways they communicate with each other. Thin curves tuck behind chunky brushstrokes; pieces insert neatly into each other or push at the edges of the frame; lines take nonlinear pathways; strong diagonals read like the flourish of a pen at the end of a signature; conjunctions make echoes and shadows that become forms of their own; foregrounds draw the eye to backgrounds and vice versa.
The layering Yang has perfected in her 2-D printmaking becomes a visceral experience here—as does her use of color, which has always been utterly recognizable as her own. Her palettes in “Wordplay” take you on jaw-dropping journeys through saturation, gradation and contrast. Surrounded by so many subtle shifts, even an assertive primary yellow or blue seems to have questions inside it.
May Yang, detail of "Love Letter"; "Sign From Another World"; "Wedge" | photos by Alicia Chesser
As you reach the back wall of the gallery, the work suddenly jumps out of its frames and floats free. Yang calls this wall “a paragraph.” It’s made of individual deconstructed mini word-forms that she created when the big laser cutter at Fab Lab was down for a while. Necessity breeds invention, and these single thoughts or sounds or actions make me want to grab a few and play with making a stream-of-consciousness sentence of my own.
Closing the loop are the stillest images in the show, two large frameless works called Foundation and Shell. Yang lands us in a space in which the gutsy, liberating deconstruction process explored until now becomes grounded, stable, weighted. Something about Shell reminds me of the shape of a heart; it’s vivid and deeply layered, exposed and also protected, not by opaque armor but by a shield of transparent acrylic with little openings cut into it.
May Yang, "Foundation" and "Shell" (with "Shell" side view) | photos by Alicia Chesser
“Words carry power, but their meanings can be slippery—objective in form yet subjective in interpretation,” Yang writes. “Are we speaking the same language? Are we having the same conversation?” How do you capture a word? How do you say what can’t be spoken? How do you catch hold of something ungraspable? The answer I found in this show is: you can’t. What you can do is play with it, move with it. Get to know its strong, unruly, tender life—and, as Yang does here, invite others to listen for what’s hidden in its gestures and connections.
