MINH LE is a writer and journalist with a focus on art and culture. He was born in Hanoi and now lives in London.
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ELI PING: ENGINEER’S THE VOID
A numinous calm envelops Eli Ping. For one, his soft speech cracks with prayerful rasp, and his magisterial meditations on art could seemingly veer wildly off course, but they almost always, like an ouroboros, find their way back to their original thesis. What’s more, he enjoys solitude and works mostly by himself out of his studio in Brooklyn. The shaven-headed artist, who was born in Chicago in 1977, has spent the last half-decade developing a sculptural form that is starkly singular.
This fall, multiple variants of the work stretch up in his solo show at New York City’s Clearing gallery. The sculptures are built from canvases that feature long slashes, through which the fabrics are pulled and twisted into tight coils, as if wrung out to dry. A subsequent drenching in resin fossilizes their surface. At the height of a stoplight, they stand around the room in a permanent face-off. Each rests on three slender legs that splay out like a tripod on the floor, before tapering to a sharp point at the top. Their midriffs appear as if gashed by their own appendages, which either shoot up in the air like a firework or dive like a knife coming down on a cutting board. How fitting that they’re titled Monocarp—a plant that flowers only once and then dies.
At first, the all-white sculptures evoke something majestic and monastic. You see stalagmites, or shards of light filtered through trees, or folds of fabric falling down on a Buddhist monk’s robe. But then violence surfaces, solemnity slowly dissolves, and they evolve into all sorts of strange things. Wounds. Wandering spirits. Spurting semen. Sweat-soaked latex suits. The alternating currents also run through his wall sculptures of similar design, titled Motes, and paintings that boast incisions in the vein of Lucio Fontana. If Fontana’s center lures you into the cavernous void beneath, Ping’s acts to quell what’s already threatening to burst its seams. But, of course, his suppression only heightens the terror.
From his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Ping discusses his most treasured body of work and how he’s bringing it into the future.
MINH LE:How did you come up with the idea for the Monocarps?
ELI PING:The idea came from the smaller wall bronzes that I was making for some years. Earlier in my career, I often oscillated between architectural minimalism and more intuitive, visceral pieces that conveyed difficult feelings about the human experience. The bronzes marked the first time I successfully married those impulses. However, leading up to the Motes and Monocarps, I felt that they were confined within too modest a frame. The feeling I wanted to externalize was more expansive, like a sound much louder than this small rectangle could contain. The larger sculptures ultimately solved that problem.
ML:What about them got you excited?
EP:The Motes came first pinned to the wall, and I still stand behind that work. But I also thought that as long as they relied on architecture to achieve their verticality, they weren’t going the full distance. Once I made a Monocarp that stood on its own, and it looked like it was growing, or moving, or ascending, I felt that I had done something special.
ML:There’s also so much textural life on their very surface.
EP:You know how a person’s physiology can tell you a lot about them? I view art the same way. I’m often drawn to objects whose forms are a record of their journey into existence. I want that to be legible in my work. In fact, my work requires that for me to find it satisfying. And that path into being is there for the viewer to encounter and create their own understanding of.
ML:It’s interesting the way your process leaves a mark on the object, but the process remains mystifying. You can make educated guesses, but you can’t really tell how exactly.
EP:That indeterminacy you described is another key quality of my work. I’ve realized that a piece isn’t complete until it evokes the question of “what is this?”
ML:Now that you’ve been making the Motes and Monocarps for quite some time, how do you think they fit into your larger body of work?
EP:They’re the clearest distillation of my inquiries about sculpture. Fundamentally for me, sculpture’s essence lies in making heavy materials appear as if they can move, particularly upward. Ancient obelisks exemplify this. If they’re lying flat, they’re not sculptural. But when upright, they are, partly because they evoke the human stance, and we want to see ourselves in all things. My aim has always been to animate inanimate matter, suggesting life through verticality. I’ll make the Motes and Monocarps for the rest of my life. But currently, I’m focusing on making related forms in bronze. The objective remains the same, which is to make them look like they have levity.
ML:Tell me more about the new work.
EP:The bronzes have been in the works for two years. One of the challenges was ensuring that, in switching to bronze, I could retain that ambiguity of surface. I wanted the material to act and present itself in ways you might not have anticipated. I wanted that misreading.
ML:And getting bronze to behave in unexpected ways is challenging. Bronze is, well, bronze.
EP:It has so many historical associations. We’re used to seeing it in specific ways. My early attempts felt unsatisfactory compared to the white works. Part of what gives those a more emotive resonance is their subtle translucency, which gives the viewer a sense of the void within each piece. That was lost in the bronzes because bronze is opaque and heavy. So I had to engineer the void into their form by allowing the contours to more explicitly outline and define the interior. That body of work isn’t out in the world yet, but I'm excited for you to see it.
ML:I can imagine that you’re more or less limited by your material. You can either honor their existence in the world or you can try to fight them.
EP:You’ve perfectly distilled what took me years to learn. Being a sculptor comes down to knowing when to fight and when to cooperate with your materials. And I’ll tell you that you want to cooperate far more than fight. I often ask materials to do things they don’t always want to do, and I’m pushing up against their limits to get unexpected results. But I also want to confine my struggle to productive domains.
ML:I guess before anything is an object, it’s a material.
EP:I want to remember that for a moment. Before anything is an object, it’s a material.
It’s funny because my admiration for minimalism was actually an obstacle to me because minimalists emphasize truth in materials. I always wanted that in my work. But after some time, I realized I was under the influence of taste. To become a better artist, I had to move beyond my acculturation to what I thought good taste was. The objective is to make something powerful and not have it be constrained by words or ideas. Words and ideas can come later, and hopefully they come from other people.
ML:How long does it usually take to complete a piece?
EP:It can take as quick as three months and as long as eight. When a piece accomplishes its quintessential form, the process is quite linear. If I find the form unsettling, I break it apart—cutting, smashing, reassembling the fragments. That's much more difficult and deliberate. Sometimes I’m in the mood for things to unify and come together quickly, and other times I crave some struggle and difficulty. I don’t really get to choose how a piece is going to go, so I’ve structured my practice in a way that satisfies both appetites.
ML:Do you ever feel the pressure to produce new ideas?
EP:I went to Vassar College, and the commencement speaker at one of the graduation ceremonies was Susan Sontag, and she said that culture is the development of attention. At the time, I thought that sounded right, but I wasn’t completely sure what she meant. Over the years, I’ve come to understand that to make a thing worth paying attention to, you have to pay attention to it over a long period of time. I focus on the same materials, processes, and forms out of obsession. I feel a tremendous urgency to see if the next iteration is the more perfect one.
At the same time, you can’t just work in one mode because you run the risk of becoming your own fabricator. There’s nothing wrong with only fabricating things, but it’s important to me to explore, grow, and feed my curiosity. For many years, there was little to no interest in my practice, so I was working for myself, and I was my only audience. My focus was on making the best things I could make. It still is now. Whatever the need, whatever urgent feeling I have at any given moment, I’m going to attend to it because that’s the thing that sustains me.
ML:What are some of your earliest memories of art?
EP:When I was young, after our Saturday drawing class, we would walk around the Art Institute of Chicago. The Impressionist works made an impression on me. I could see how time was sedimented into the composition of a painting. And it struck me how much consideration went into getting such a result. Even as a child, I had this intuition that maybe I could contribute to the legacy of object-making that involves that level of intense looking over time.
But at some point, I kind of lost sight of that. I did not study art. I went to school for political theory. I only found my way into art-making in my 20s. My younger brother, who was my best friend, died in a car accident, and I just thought, I’m not going to waste any more time. I’m going to do something that matters to me.
ML:How did you get started?
EP:I enrolled in the University of Illinois in Chicago for my MFA. Then I moved to New York and got a job at a gallery through a professor. I photographed artworks and laid out ads. And I started my studio practice in my bedroom until I could afford a shared studio. I was hoping I could get some people to look at my work, but I had no contacts, and I was working at the gallery all day, feeling increasingly desperate about it all. I was thinking about moving to Philadelphia, where life would be cheaper and I could maybe find more time to make art. But right when I handed in my notice at work, Susan Inglett offered me my first show. For the next decade, I barely supported myself with the occasional art sales and documenting work for other artists. I was living hand to mouth, poor, but without a job, which was nice because I had more time for my art.
ML:What lessons did you learn during those early years?
EP:I came into art through photography, and the technical aspects of photography are straightforward, with clear boundaries to the medium. Little by little, I had to give myself permission to work from a more intuitive, chaotic, and difficult place. This took years, and the final threshold was letting go of intellect as the main driver of exploration. I learned to get out of my own way and trust that time would lead me to new territories. But that’s easier said than done. Frankly, I spent over ten years making art before making the work I was truly proud of.
ML:Then you opened your gallery at one point.
EP:I had a brief period of good luck where I unexpectedly earned a significant amount of money from my work. With that, I opened a gallery in a Chinatown basement. This experience exposed me to artists who were more socially and politically attuned to their careers and savvier with exhibition-making than I was. The gallery did well, but I didn’t have the time when my son was born in 2016. Being a father, I knew if I kept the gallery open, I’d have to let my dream of making work myself die. So I closed the gallery. Then I really fell off the map. I was hanging out with my son all the time. Other than that, I was just in the studio. That was when I developed the Motes and Monocarps.
ML:How do you think they speak to the art and artists that inspire you?
EP:Some of the artists I most admire are the New York School painters, Pollock, de Kooning, and Sam Gilliam. Their work reflects the principle of alloverness, where the composition doesn’t have a focal point, so attention can travel across the entire surface. But in my work, there’s always a singular event happening, and the work harnesses and channels attention through that singular event. In my paintings, there’s no question where the action is—it's smack in the middle of the frame. With the Monocarps, the attention is directed to the center of the piece, and then it flows out vertically. My work has so much to do with the body, and humans take a primary interest in the head, the eyes, the mouth, the genitals. The body is ultimately a portal to unseen energies. And those are the energies that drive my work.
ML:I find the violence that exists in Pollock’s and de Kooning’s works to also be in your work.
EP:I’d say I’ve experienced a fair amount of violence in my life. There was violence in my household, and there was a period in my life when I got in a fair amount of fights. So there's that. You can't control all the experiences that you've had in life. I guess my work is a way of expressing things that I've experienced and probably finding healing.
ML:How has fatherhood informed your practice?
EP:I developed the Monocarps after my son was born, and the title refers to a plant that bears fruit only once before dying. I chose the word only after the work was made, but when I encountered it, I knew it was the right title. It was born out of the sense that whatever happened next in my life was in service of my role as a father. In that sense, I was no longer living just for myself. But I also think it was about learning how to put pain behind you and break the cycles of damage that may have bedeviled people in your family to create a different emotional environment for your children.
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