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ART IN REVIEW; DoDo Jin Ming -- 'Seascapes'
Laurence Miller Gallery
20 West 57th Street, Manhattan
Through June 15
A conceptual artist who happens to be a photographer, DoDo Jin Ming goes after nature, wild or tamed, in her big, viscerally appealing pictures. In richly toned negative prints, she has shown masses of sunflowers and lotuses dying in abstracted chaotic splendor. Her more predictable pictures of the pyramids, shifting sand, camels and oases of Egypt appeared in her first solo exhibition in the United States in 1996, also at Laurence Miller.
In ''Seascapes,'' she returns to chaotic nature. Ms. Jin Ming, who lives in New York, was born in Beijing and was a teenager during the turbulent Cultural Revolution, when she privately studied to be a violinist. She taught violin for a while in Hong Kong before taking up photography in 1988. In this body of work -- taken last year, mostly in Hong Kong -- the roiling waves tend to assume other grandiloquent lives. They resemble molten lava in one picture, the burning turrets in a Turner painting in another, or snow-covered mountaintops, or a waterfall. Looking at ''Plate VIII'' you might think of a magical kingdom dotted with white peaks. Sometimes, of course, a stormy sea is just a stormy sea.
To get what she saw and what she sensed in the scene before her, Ms. Jin Ming exposed the same frame twice in her Graflex camera, using black-and-white Polaroid film to give her a negative and an instant positive. Most of the time, how she made the images doesn't matter. ''Plate V,'' though, has an unfortunate, artificially trumped-up look.
Ms. Jin Ming shares the dare-devil spirit of 19th-century field photographers and is not intimidated by overly familiar subjects. ''Seascapes'' shows why she has every reason to think that way. MARGARETT LOKE
