This is an interesting article that was sent to me from one of this blog's viewers:
Anthony Poon’s works are simply much ado about nothing. His non-representational, self-referential forms are barely anything more than an uninspired artist’s obsession with depicting geometry.
When critique Chen Chong Swee denounced Poon’s works for being meaningless, he stated there was no excuse for a piece of art to be incomprehensible. There are works of art that fall into the category of abstraction, yet carry some form of meaningful interpretation or that sway the emotion of the viewer in some way. Pollock’s abstract expressionist paintings, for instance, envelop viewers in a sprightly Autumn Rhythm or in the swirling mysteries of an Ocean Greyness.
Poon’s works, on the other hand, seem to be mere decorations that carry little room for interpretation. The Wave series could be taken to carry two interpretations, both of which it has failed to bring to the viewer successfully. Most fundamentally, it could be an attempt at representing actual waves. The colour and form of his Waves glaringly suggest otherwise. Even if it was a conceptual representation of the wave’s form, generic sinuous curves do no justice to such a potentially powerful natural form. Second, the obsessive attention to perfecting proportion and making invisible every brush stroke could challenge the traditional notion of a painting as being composed of brush strokes. It might also achieve a level of so-called “verisimilitude” such that the line between painting and actual form is blurred, a la Hyperrealist ideals but applied to meaningless geometry. On this count, the methods used by Poon are rather obsolete and unimpressive. Any student trained in painting could achieve a smooth gradient between any two hues. The advent of digital media makes it all too easy to displace Poon’s methods. This leads us to yet another critique of Poon’s works.
The careful precision of Poon’s works seems to have lost meaning with the growing use of digital tools to create artworks. He seemed to have selected the equivalent of a real-life Gradient Tool in Photoshop and applied it to the canvas. Abstract, clean-looking geometry is ubiquitous in the world of technology. Many will not take a second glance at Poon’s work if it was simply another digital image – it would fit right in amongst the multitude of digital images that could be created with a few mouse clicks. I have taken the liberty to create an expert digital imitation of one of his Waves. It has taken less time to create this masterpiece than to write this sentence.
Taking these forms and applying them to canvas in no way legitimizes adopting them as an art form on in a gallery. If anything, Poon’s work will be quickly forgotten and displaced by more impressive digital media as these media are improved and increasingly used amidst growing computing power worldwide. As computer programs and tablet apps become more visually appealing, their appeal would inevitably exceed favourable reaction to Poon’s works. The creators of these programs have taken months to carefully consider every aspect of composition and design, and are able to execute these visual ideas with impunity and on a large scale. Artists like Anthony Poon, who spend much of their career merely executing generic ideas on geometry, will be edged out eventually.