Rave: Sze Tsung Leong

One of the best shows I have seen this year. A couple of weeks ago, ED and I took a break from being perpetually stressed out by our jobs to wander around Chelsea on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon. We saw a few good things, a few less good things, and one incredible show. Sze Tsung Leong's Horizons at the Yossi Milo gallery.

Admittedly, the collection was right in my sweet spot, but the photographs worked at so many levels for me. First off, they are gorgeous - expansive landscapes, evoking the basic geometry of the horizon, all sharing a common framing and visual syntax. The subject matter, impressive in its global scope, ranged from cities to people to landscapes to seascapes, all bleeding into washed out skylines of gray and white. Each of the photos evoked a common density, bleakness and dullness, which certainly characterizes one aspect of a world overrun with industry, people, buildings, and things. Within the scope of this commentary was enough room for the constant, irrepressible beauty of people and of nature and, at some basic level, of the capacity of human industry. From the good comes the bad. All of this wrapped up in a wonderfully curated show, where the prints were all hung level, to create a common horizon across all of the photographs. Well worth a look, and while much of the photos can be seen online at the artist's website, they are even more powerful when viewed together.