The Great Perfection: Charles Long & Khang Bảo Nguyễn

The Great Perfection explores two artists’ diverse approaches to the aesthetic expression of nondual consciousness. In a world that seems more fractured and disconnected than ever, cast sculptures by Charles Long juxtaposed with abstract paintings by Khang Bảo Nguyễn lead the viewer to consider the underlying oneness of all beings.

THE EXHIBITION

Nondualism, an ancient concept rooted in Eastern thought and religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism, recognizes the fundamental nature of reality as the unbounded wholeness of universal consciousness. It offers a pathway to transcend the dichotomies of us and them, subject and object, self and other, while still affirming the reality of manifold existence. Long and Nguyễn share an interest in nondualism as related to their artistic practice and co-hosted a workshop on the topic last fall.

The exhibition, curated by CLMA’s Associate Director of Exhibitions and Collections Seth Pringle, offers a through line between the presence and creative flow that happen in an artist’s studio and the potentiality of art objects as catalysts for revelatory experience.

The title, The Great Perfection, is drawn from Dzogchen Buddhism and refers to the completion or wholeness of the universe. Each person’s true enlightened nature is not something to be achieved, rather it is ever present. One must simply access it.

THE ARTISTS

Charles Long is a sculptor living and working in Pomona, California. Known for his efforts to re-examine the tropes of modernist sculpture within his wildly distinctive and speculative practice, his recent work has taken on a psychedelic and metaphysical approach in his search to answer the question: ‘what is sacred art?’ Works cast in amalgamations of bronze, aluminum, brass, nickel, mica and gypsum reveal a creative alchemy born out of a commitment to altered states of consciousness and a faith in the eternal presence, the ground out of which the illusion of material reality appears. He does not see his sculptures as part of contemporary art practice; the resultant objects are at once ancient and futuristic. Amorphous idols, irresistible portals, and sumptuous incisions access a world beyond language where presence is favored over ideas.

Born in 1958 in Long Branch, New Jersey, Long received a BFA from Philadelphia College of Art and earned an MFA from Yale University in 1988. He was the recipient of the 2008 Award of Merit Medal for Sculpture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York. Long’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions worldwide and featured in exhibitions at the UCLA Hammer Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He is currently a Professor of Art at the University of California, Riverside.

Khang Bảo Nguyễn is a painter and scholar of philosophy and religion. He creates abstract paintings that combine diagrammatic stability with effervescent luminosity. His heavily layered surfaces offer a space for spiritual buoyancy and balance where the symmetry of mandalas combine with the weightlessness of outer space to prompt self-reflection. Their perfectly human scale and verticality envelope the viewer, opening a window into boundless realization. The viewing of Nguyễn’s paintings is an inherently meditative act, where visual abstraction offers an opportunity for pre-conceptual.

Nguyễn immigrated to the US after the fall of Vietnam to communism in the 1970s. He holds a MA and is a PhD candidate, both in philosophy and religious thought at Claremont Graduate University. His spiritual understanding and aesthetic visual vocabulary developed over the past decade of studies with teacher Madelon Wheeler-Gibb at Spacious Mind. His work has been included in numerous exhibitions throughout Southern California including Transcendent at Louis Stern Fine Arts last year. Khang is currently represented by the Wonzimer gallery in Los Angeles with a solo exhibition scheduled for November 2024.

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