Misfits in Harmony #2

Curator

Jonathan Thomson

In “Misfits in Harmony 2” Pang seeks balance by dividing his canvas into two parts, top black, bottom white, separated in the middle by a band of red. He seeks harmony by the use of an hourglass shape, the top half filled with grey on light grey marks, the bottom with black on dark grey. In the mid-late nineteenth-century came to celebrate the purity of purpose of art, often stated as “art for art’s sake”. Walter Pater was an important theorist of the movement. His dictum, that all art constantly aspires to the condition of music, speaks to the ability of art to affect the viewer in a direct unmediated fashion without needing to describe the world, tell a story or extol some morality. In “Misfits in Harmony 2’ marks in gold layered over the surface of the work suggest correspondences with the forms of notation used in experimental music or dance.