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06/14/2007: "FROM RED TO BLUE SKY: Leah Wong’s Terribilitas"
I was introduced to Leah Wong nearly in the late 90’s. I was desperate for someone who could teach an illustration techniques class and a friend told me about this young woman who had a painting degree and a computer aided design degree. She had worked as a freelance illustrator for a few years and since her husband was a professor at Ohio State she had some time on her hands. What I found when I met her and looked through her portfolio was so much more than I was told. She was a gifted painter who had studied traditional realism which eventually graduated to pure abstraction.
Leah Wong grew up in Northeastern China. There paper-cuts are a traditional form of folk art. When she was very young she was separated from her parents and sent to a re-education farm and later became a member of the Red Brigade as a matter of form. She did murals for Mao Tse-tung. Later she fell away from those early influences and became more democratized. She was in Tiananmen Square when it all went down in 1989. She had been an art student working on her BFA at the China National Academy of Fine Arts. It is one of the more prestigious schools in China. Even though she is still very young she has some amazing stories to tell. She has lived in the United States most of her adult life and recently became a citizen. She received her MFA in Painting from Ohio University a few years ago. She also has a BA in computer aided design. 
Leah is petite and perky and smiles most of the time. She has a great sense of humor and I often find myself laughing out loud when she is around. She is as gregarious as her little monsters and can keep you in conversation for hours. Be prepared to call your next appointment to let them know you‘ll be a little late.. She’s also a great cook. She seems most happy when she is painting or cooking. If you are ever invited to one of her Chinese feasts I advise you to accept. You won’t be sorry. She usually invites up to four people and with her an Chris you get a melange of six intelligent people for conversation covering history, art, politics, social concerns and lots and lots of laughter. 
When I met her she was working abstractly. Her work had an affinity with Miro‘s organic shapes with strong primary and secondary color combinations. I’ve watched her define herself over the last 12 years. Her shapes have evolved again and again including written script as well as fanciful creatures which she has overlaid upon her textural fields of color. Imaginative, free-form shaped animals and other terribilitas have taken over her skyscapes. One often feels they are looking up at something in the sky rather than at a horizontal landscape. Leah calls them landscapes but I think they tend to rise above the horizon more often than not. And of course the sky has its own meanings in both Eastern and Western culture. 
While one recognizes animal forms often the exact animal is not recognizable. They are most often hy-brids…bird-like, mammal like, reptillian dragons. Beyond that one’s imagination is engaged. Hence the term ‘terribilitas’, a latin term suggesting little monsters…more precisely young immature monsters...naughty children really. They are the most gregarious and the least predictable. These terribilitas also play with both her Eastern and Western cultural ties, contemporary social issues and cosmic spaces. Though her work seems mostly upbeat there is often a sense of turbulence and sometimes a kind of western stacked and cycled heavens as found in the frescoes on the inside of the domes of European cathedrals. 
But there is also a sense that these could be woks with sizzling shrimps or vegetables frying.
