Walk into the Mayne Island Library until November 11th and take time to look at Joseph Synn Kune Loh’s deeply personal and symbolic pencil drawings that hang on the walls in the current Arts On Mayne exhibition. Titled, Who Am I, you’ll find yourself pulled into images that touch you at several levels.

At first glance, you’ll simply be impressed with Loh’s sense of composition. Most drawings in his show are built on strong symmetries, either right-to-left or up-and-down. But then, after studying them for a moment, differences on each side reveal themselves. An area that is dark in one part of an image is light in its altered reflection. Molecular Language #12 does this most obviously, as it’s an impression of the well known yin-yang symbol, a symbol of opposites.

In his drawing, Anticipation, which depicts a faceless woman staring out through a window, the symmetry is broken only by subtle differences in shading on the figure’s clothing, in the parting of the hair, of the slight difference in the position of the arms, and the suggestion of objects in the background.  

A drawing like Molecular Language #6 is more visually complex, as the symmetry is pronounced, but broken in several ways. At the top, a single zig-zag shape seems to climb off the paper, while at the bottom, two broken zig-zags seem to sit on the ground and diverge to your left and right.

After you’ve taken in the general form of an image, your eye is drawn to the individual shapes composing each drawing. You will notice how the individual objects and forms are rendered. Loh employs a subtle use of light and dark areas to form dream-like backgrounds over which loose but strong lines define objects and human forms. The very rough paper he uses is a perfect surface to provide texture to the objects and individuals he depicts, and you’ll get the feeling that the artist had an aesthetically intimate relationship with the paper and a real appreciation of how the graphite, as well as an eraser (or likely a blending stump), produce the marks that form the drawing. You’ll notice the occasional use of cross-hatching, but more often, long pencil lines that tend to slope to the right.

The subjects are all at the same time mysterious and suggestive. In many of the pieces, we’re challenged by the image of a faceless woman, just a white empty area where her features are missing. She’s eyeless, but nevertheless seems to stare straight right into your own eyes. In the drawing called, When Will It Happen?, she sits at a desk, a pair of glasses on the surface in front of her. Are the glasses hers, or might they be yours? Could she be interviewing you, or are you the interviewer? Is she waiting for a verdict or an announcement? In studying the artwork, it’s up to the viewer of the artwork to answer those questions.

In Molecular Language #11, Loh presents you with what at first seems like a random collection of circles and triangular-like shapes. On closer study, you see the patterns, and you realize the image could close up on itself like a book, with the circles and dots on one half fitting snugly into the marks on the other half of the drawing. It possibly symbolizes the opposite traits that make up an individual, or the inner structure of an imagined machine, or mysterious relationships of hidden elements of the universe. 

Soft & Responsive possesses the most interesting combination of smudged, ethereal shapes, overlaid with perfectly rendered lines illustrating a bed’s ornate headboard and legs. By any measure, a bed is symbolic, and in this drawing, it’s depicted as if imagined in a dream or a half recalled memory. A multi-pointed star at the base of the bed and a series of three dots in a vertical line above it might provide a clue as to the significance of the bed. Does the star suggest new life, or possibly a relationship to something greater than oneself?

The only image in the show that uses colour in a carefully measured application is Existential Revelations. Three tennis balls, each a different colour and orientation, float in a line above a green couch. The texture of the objects is soft, and the drawing almost invites you to run your hand over the objects to feel their fuzzy and warm surfaces. Juxtaposed with the fully rendered soft nature of the objects is a geometrically exact perspective outline – very architectural – of what might be panelled walls or inward opening halves of a multi-paned window. As in all of Loh’s drawings in this show, you are asked to work out the relationship between the sometimes unexpected objects he brings together in an exact and carefully placed pattern. Because of the use of colour in the piece, this drawing stands apart from all the rest in the show and is a bit startling as a result.

The meaning in every one of his drawing requires your careful attention for it to emerge. The longer you spend viewing and contemplating each piece, and when you hold it in your mind’s eye after you leave the show at the library, additional meanings emerge. As Loh explains in his mémoire, Ping Pong Parkinson’s and The Art of Staying Alive, “Drawing is cerebral, internalizing what eyes can see to reveal what eyes cannot see.” As an artist, this is how he describes his challenge as an artist: “How do I use pencil on paper to convey the mystical context of objects in space coming together to be captured in one stationary moment of time?” 

It’s the artist’s task to render a meaningful image, and it’s your job, as a viewer, to interpret from your own perspective, that meaning.

Joseph Loh’s show provides a rich opportunity to wonder and to consider layers of meaning in both his work and in your own life.

Review by Bill Maylone

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Biographical note:

Joseph Loh was born in Hong Kong, moved to North America, and received a BA in Psychology from the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut. A trip to Paris inspired him to change careers, and lead him to enrol in the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. His artistic pursuits include painting, drawing, and writing. In 2015, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, and two years later, he published Ping Pong, Parkinson’s, the story of his personal journey through his early days dealing with the disease. Currently, Loh lives on Mayne Island, British Columbia.