Meditation Drawings by Phong H. Bui (2/6/23)

Phong H. Bui’s exhibit “Symphonies and Meditations” at the Craig Starr gallery quietly and humbly juxtaposes single headshot pencil-drawn portraits with his “Meditation Paintings”.  Separately, he has hung pencil-lined “Meditation Drawings” and I inserted a portion of one of these below.  

Bui has filled the picture plane of his Meditation Drawings so densely that the marks are no longer marks in space, but have become the picture space.  In other words, the subject of these drawings is space itself, truly dharmic art.

The portraits at first glance appear to be a subject in front of a vacant background, but the absence of a rendered background, in most cases, nearly dissolves the portrait into a cloud of graphic elements: eyes, hair, nose, mouth.  

The effect of displaying the portraits surrounding Meditation Paintings emphasizes the dissolving of the entire presentation into space.  There’s no subject-object tension.  The question of compositional balance doesn’t even arise.  One could ponder the contrast of representational portraits alongside abstract paintings, but taken as a whole the effect is cool boredom, to use a phrase from Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s teachings on meditation.  Mr. Bui is displaying his technical skill, but despite the apparent contrasts of the portraits and the meditations, they are all products of a mind capable of remarkable stillness.

This is a detail from #2/5 from Meditation Drawing Group #3 (for Irving Sandler) by Phong H. Bui