The Floating Artist
Noosh creates a freehand NFT art object that she calls Residence Spaces. They are dense articulate architectural drawings inspired by the topography of Hong Kong's city landscape
Update:
This post was written and saved two years ago, but the minting event that was meant to be introduced by this email never came to pass. As I am working on several drafts this year to increase my publishing output, at least I can share the ideas she created and what was meant to be. What follows is most of the original substack piece that was meant to go out near her NFT launch.
The Meeting
The day that I meet Noosh M., who goes by Noosh, a large smelly dredging boat floats just near her house boat, where she lives with her husband and daughter. Two other houseboats did not extend their contracts and a scuba diver is diving beneath the surface to slip loose the chains that held the boats to the mooring buoys. Many boat owners, and many long-time residents of Hong Kong, are moving away. Covid and protests the year before have made people feel like trying for new shore. In a few months, Noosh will join them, although that is not known to me at our first meeting.
Her houseboat gently rocks side to side as other boats pass as I step on board, having taken a small sampan to her berth.
She makes me espresso and she slides into a large sofa and leans back. The thick humid air occasionally ripples as a fan passes over the carpet we are gathered around. She pulls out illustrations, ink paintings, and wonderful, rigorous hybrid paintings that are a mixture of acrylic, ink, and found objects that she glues to the archival paper of each with “really strong glue” as she talks about her life in Iran and now in Hong Kong.
The most striking paintings are the large canvases on paper that are about five feet by four feet, meant to hang from wire, and not be set in frames.
To illustrate, here is one, named after an Iranian song that in Farsi translates to “I looked for you too late.”
Noosh is the type of artist who really insists on letting the art speak for itself. She answers questions clearly and almost clairvoyantly, but she stands back from each flip of an illustration paper, or unrolls the large sheets and walks away to sit down and sip her latte.
She does two types of work – and it is not meant to be rude to her to say that there are only two kinds, but I had to find some way of grouping them.
One set of work is immensely detailed and assembled, all by free hand drawing, like a collage of myriad symbols, faces, song lyrics. They remind me of what Joseph Cornell might have done if, instead of memory boxes and dioramas he had insisted on drawing out what he was thinking.
To make this kind of work, the entire drawing surface is introduced to a carefully placed ink wash, which she blow dries and pushes around the paper to blend it and to also fix it to chosen areas of the surface. Then sets to work dividing up the surface with mathematically precise geometric shapes and angles, generally working to focus the eyes on the center of the paper, where she likes to put most of her illustrative energy. Working outward, in circles, curlicues, rounded corners, edges and sharp angles, she intersperses angles with small and medium-sized “memory windows” or “memory bubbles” (I can think of no other word for them).
These are captivating. Sometimes the people in the memory windows are friends, or family members. Some of her aunts and uncles, for example, who were once held in prison during the revolution in 1979. Then there are famous singers, teachers, actors, politicians, and a host of other famous people from Iranian society. They seem to be modernised versions of the silhouette. The faces are often in profile and mostly focused on the head.
There are exceptions to these memory windows. The images of her parents, as far as i can tell, always shown together, which are usually displayed in full body profile. Then her grandmother who, according to Noosh, “was always skinny, but always had these big boobs,” as she laughs, and points out that her portrait of her grandmother depicts her at a mosque, sitting alone while she prays, as a figure which appears to be Noosh, is looking in on her from outside of the golden aura of her memory window.
And then there is young, teenage, awkward Noosh, sitting on a traditional Iranian candle holder, which Noosh has anchored with her mother and father on both sides, but which she has also decorated with a highly symbolic but distinct image of labia right at the young Noosh’s feet. It’s worth remarking that there are sexual organs all throughout nearly every piece she paints or draws.
Often the sexual organs, especially the penises, are meant to be jokes and ridicule of the idea of highly masculine ideations of religion, as shown in this piece, which is one of her best hand-drawn non-coloured illustrations.
See if you can spot the Islamic minarets shaped like phalluses. But there are some other secrets in the drawings. Lately, images of cancer cells are heavily introduced in her latest drawings, as she was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. The images do not succumb to them, but they are ever-present.
The details of her illustrations often contain the stomata cells of cancer, grouped like frogs’ eggs in the shadows of leaves or hidden under vines or other designs that fill in the spaces of her work.
Like Klimt’s work, these medical and biological metaphors are meant to be a kind of celebration, but I can’t help but think the celebration is a bit morbid. They are also a memento mori, reminding her of her past, and possibly her future. It’s hard to say. Noosh doesn’t disclose too many details in our first meeting. What I do come away with, though, is that the canvas — the mimetic plate, so to speak — is a place on which something of the truth of the real is laid out, to be a memory, to celebrate memory, to document change and transformation. The art is not just an abstract delight, but a puzzle place, something that you have to search through to find a real truth.
The Floating Artist
Noosh is the floating artist hovering in, over, beyond her own paintings, looking in on her own looking-in, who is looking in on herself. What she discloses, she doesn’t exactly mention. There are reasons for that, mostly to do with identities of people she knows in Iran, and the impact that history has had on her.
Update 2
There was supposed to be a link to her work here, but since she eventually moved away from Hong Kong, and never minted the NFTs, there is nothing to link to. There used to be stuff on Artsy but that is all gone, too, from what I can tell. Such is the way of memory, mimetics, and how we make what we make.
