Paintings that transcend the dominion of brush strokes over canvases as a kind of anti-authorial testament exemplify what on the surface may seem like a rigid singularity in MM Yu’s works. This focused and singular objective of letting paint drip, however meek the process may seemingly be, in fact denounces stubborn assumptions about what is ‘subject’ in paintings. First, it unshackles itself from the tyranny of imagination that has long upheld the hand as a dexterous source of expression through brush strokes. Secondly, and more notably, it forces the artist to relinquish her control over the canvas.

The kind of attention poured into the usage of hue thus gives way to are markable Color Field approach in MM Yu’s paintings. Some of the aesthetic decisions to make are narrowed down to which direction the pigments should fall. This unusually limited approach of letting paint drip becomes a liberating act instead; it becomes an act that renounces all external forces except one: gravity. The results are free-winding lines of color in isolation or merged with other forgone drips of lines—an amalgam of pigments that spirals into a vortex—and then the inclusion of coins as totems / obstacles for the freewheeling line to plaster any remaining value.

As a kind of abstraction, MM Yu’s works favor process over expression. And as a kind of process, it is one that is rooted in determinacy, of exactness, and unequivocal necessity—that the line of color will be drawn to none other than the field where it was directed. And the lines make their own stops, curls, and turns. They generate their own rhythm; they unfold their own narrative. The accumulated pattern becomes the subject-in-itself. And the artist, a detached composer, wagers her intuition in an attempt to redefine composition in painting.