James Leong, “From Abstraction to Landscape”
by Matthew Kangas
Chatwin Arts, Seattle
Continuing through August 29, 2026
The reputation of many well-known and accomplished artists after their death can be difficult to fathom. In the case of James Leong, who died 15 years ago at the age of 82, well-meaning efforts to ensure his legacy have come to naught. That’s not for want of trying. In this, the second show of his work in two years, the gallery has once again displayed a chronological range of his subdued but colorful modernist abstractions. Whether they constitute an end point of “landscape” as the exhibit title, “From Abstraction to Landscape” suggests, is debatable. Leong’s last paintings address the history of Chinese landscape painting but do not arrive at anything close either to realism or conventional landscape.
The artist, San Francisco-born and Chinatown-raised, and a product of California College of Arts and Crafts and San Francisco State College, fled to Europe as a young man in the face of a racially motivated attack. Living for decades in Rome, Oslo and New York, Leong digested a parade of contemporary painting movements from Abstract Expressionism to Hard-Edge and Color Field painting. He was included in dozens of international surveys of American and European art, but the smaller scale of his paintings, when compared to the bombast of leading New York school artists, placed him in a more intimate viewing relationship with Asian contemporaries.
Retiring to Seattle in 1990, Leong became a respected elder with appointments to public and civic cultural institutions and boards. The experience of owning and managing a studio building for many years in Rome prepared him for this late role. While there had he befriended many expatriate artists, among them Cy Twombly, Isamu Noguchi and Buckminster Fuller. While the bulk of his estate remains in storage in Seattle, the archives are at Stanford University. One scholar has spent nearly 20 years examining them but without publishing the monograph so sorely required to cement his stature. This is the main reason Leong’s reputation floats in limbo.
All the same, we get a glimpse in this show of the fluidity, elegance and distinctive approach to abstraction Leong practiced for so many years. The earliest works, such as “Study for Fragments in Light Ochre” (1961), “Well of Dusk” (1966), “Dawning” and “Tromped Up” (both 1967) demonstrate the artist’s transition from textural surfaces to thin, filmy rectangles with ghostly, apparitional shapes emerging at their centers. In the latter works, a single horizontal band punctures the base of a mountain-like shape, pointing the way toward his next body of work.
Consisting of ambiguous hard-edge shapes, often polygonal and set in pairs against neutral backgrounds, the paintings of the late 1960s and early 1970s, such as “In and Out” (1967), “Oscillines” and “Soft Stroke” (both 1969) and “Susan’s Floating Theatre” (1971), align with the geometric shapes of Minimalist painters such as in Robert Mangold or Dorothea Rockburne. But they exude a delicacy and indeterminate origin of imagery that is all Leong’s own. Could they be a response to Chinese bronze shapes or architectural fragments? Insistently doubled, they posit segmented forms, often split vertically or horizontally. With their darkened black notches, these works reinforce the artist’s originality, which was no doubt also due to having absented himself from the hubbub of New York in the 1970s, living abroad and finding his own path and exploring postwar European painting.
With such simplified shapes and seemingly anticipating Minimalist painting, it is important to point out by contrast Leong’s obsession with painterly surface. Spatters, blots, blurbs, dots and streaks cover not only the blocky pairs of forms, but also inform the paintings that came next, Leong’s arrival at the center-less, “all-over” composition so crucial to New York School painting and its Asian-influenced cousin in the Pacific Northwest.
These middle-period paintings are among the artist’s most compelling works. With the largest, such as “Jag” (1974), averaging around four feet, and smaller canvases such as “Heather” (1975) at about two feet, Leong’s center-less compositions extend only to their surface covering, hovering and covering shifting blocks of color beneath the drips and strokes, blending unexpectedly decorative colors such as purple and pink, green and orange. They are quiet rather than rambunctious, and tie the artist more closely to the subtleties of Mark Tobey whose “white writing” calligraphic brushwork finds a distant echo in Leong.
The final paintings, the ones that supposedly culminate in landscape, may indeed look back to classical Chinese landscapes — river, mountain, rocky cliffs — but their agitated, rippling, repeated conical shapes and peaks hold thicker blobs of paint and, unlike the earlier works, expose a much wider palette. “Monied Mountain” (1999) and “Mountain Chop” (1998) reveal Leong more firmly as an Asian American artist who ultimately addressed his ethnic heritage and West Coast origin. They are a triumph in that sense but are overshadowed by the wholly abstract works of his middle period.
Matthew Kangas writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas
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