Artist Jon Tsoi's Cultural Revolution

Artist Jon Tsoi hammering a wall at Whitebox, 2024 New York, NY

By ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST December 14, 2024

Watching the blindfolded Jon Tsoi pummeling the chipboard walls with a hammer and an axe at his WhiteBox opening on Avenue B time-tunneled me back to our first meeting. This had been at the Fernando Alvarez Gallery in Stamford, Connecticut, and both were Performance art events which would also enable the production of actual ready-for-the-wall artworks. This though was not at all how the blindfold project had begun. “Initially I just made this art for myself,” said Tsoi. “I told some artist friends that I started to make art  blindfolded. They said very interesting. Can you make a video and show us?”

  This Tsoi did. The resultant video shows him cutting into a canvas with a kitchen knife. “And they said, oh, you’re a performance artist!” So that, Tsoi accepted, was what he had now also become. Tsoi, a doctor’s son, was born in Sichuan, China, in 1958 and was drawing compulsively from the age of 5. Just a few years later, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution. “That was pure war” Tsoi says. “You see the blood on the street, you see people kill each other, you see bullets flying. We have to hide, we are afraid. Both groups, they love Chairman Mao. But they are fighting each other, they kill each other. It’s how the politics were.”

    Tsoi reached New York in 1979, two years after the death of Mao, and was followed shortly by his parents. They moved to Greenwich, Connecticut. There Jon Tsoi set up both his art studio and his own Chinese medicine office, two practices which frequently interpenetrate. Tsoi, is a Taoist, who meditates regularly, and one day he was so doing in his studio when he was overcome by the urge to blindfold himself and make art.  “I drew with colored pencils and markers,” he says. “And after I took the blindfold off I said Wow! This is amazing.”

Tsoi at work
 

    What benefits does Tsoi find in working blindfold?.

  “The art comes out more naturally,” he said. “Because it takes away my personal identity. And when you have less personal identity you can put your body energy and universal energy into creating art.”

   Tsoi moved straight on to the blindfold cutting of canvases with a knife, this being at once a response to and a symbolic expression of the violence that had overwhelmed him during the Cultural Revolution. But when he took to poking holes in his smaller paintings it was to communicate a sense that light and air were circulating, thereby referencing the Yin and the Yang, the light and the dark, the two opposed but interconnected forces in Chinese philosophy. Soon he was also cutting into his larger paintings too. “You follow the energy flow,” he says. “You accept everything. You carve, you make things happen. They have layers. You get inside the paintings.”

A work by Tsoi

  It happens that two other artists I know, Ford Crull and Scot Borofsky, have also made remarkable work with eyes shut. So it was that in 2018 I curated Flying Blind, a show at New York’s Spring Break art fair. Borofsky, a Street artist, wears no blindfold but often paints with his eyes shut. Crull, a Symbolist, says  “I want to see with the other senses,” he says. “If you lose the sense of vision the other senses come into play.”

   For Jon Tsoi the Spring Break curation marked a specific breakthrough, unleashing an artist who had dropped the jagged-edged knife as a picture-making implement in favor of the nail gun. Why so? “I have always liked the nailgun. It sounds like a real gun. They have a new machine, that doesn’t make a machine noise, just the gunshot. I use that one. It sounds like war.”

   Tsoi’s art-making and medical practice have moreover merged in a further unusual manner.

  “I use art as medicine for healing, for diagnosis” he says. “I hang all this art on the wall and get a reaction from the patients”.

  Just how can one diagnose a person’s physical condition from their reactions to artworks?

   There are the colors, Tsoi said. “And some paintings are gentle, quiet. Others have more movement. So there’s a yin and yang effect. And I use that in my diagnosis”

   One such art-as-diagnosis event had taken the form of another performance in the Fernando Alvarez Gallery.

   “Because I had made all these small paintings” Tsoi says. There were some sixty paintings. And he had these whittled down, one at a time, by his audience. “From sixty paintings, down to ten paintings,” he said. “Down to five … from five they singled them down to two … then to one …

   “The one they choose, is their favorite painting. Then I realise what their physical condition is. I don’t need a diagnosis. I know their physical condition, whether it’s on the hot side or the cooler side … or they have an infectious condition or whether they have anxiety. I know that’s very weird for average people. But that’s why art, if you go to a gallery it’s like you go to a clinic. If you go to a museum and go to find your favorite painting, you spend an hour there, half an hour, you go home, you feel good. Art heals.” Thirty plus of Tsoi’s  curative works are on the walls at WhiteBox. WM