ABSTRACT DISCOURSE AND EXILE IDENTITY - THE ONTOLOGY OF CHAOS

Abstract expressionism is often seen as a liberation of form, but viewed in the depths of psychological analysis, it is also a spiritual migration. For artists living in exile, whether geographical or culturally isolated, abstract painting is no longer an aesthetic choice but becomes the only means of survival when traditional symbolic systems collapse. Willem de Kooning's Woman series (1950–1953) is a prime example of this intersection, where the female form is torn apart by brushstrokes to reveal the structure of an inner self without a place to call home.

Exile is, first and foremost, the collapse of the social "mask." According to Jung, this is the facade that helps individuals adapt to cultural and community norms. When an artist like De Kooning leaves the Netherlands for America, he simultaneously loses the common symbolic system of his homeland. Religious imagery, landscapes, or national symbols—once the "surface language" for communication—become meaningless. Stripped of these readily available symbols, artists are forced to retreat into the collective unconscious. At this deeper level, concepts do not exist as static images but as pure energy. Abstract art is the language of this uninhabited land, where artists construct a new identity from the nihilism of old values.

In his Woman series, De Kooning centers his dialogue with the feminine aspects of the male unconscious. However, instead of gentle figures, he presents on canvas colossal entities with bulging eyes and bared teeth, corresponding to the obsessive and tense aspects of his being. This is the result of consciousness being invaded by untamed, instinctive energies. Exiled artists often carry within them existential anxiety and a hidden resentment toward the power structures that have shaped their lives. De Kooning's women are not biological women; they are "psychological objects" containing both nurturing and terrifying destructive power, reflecting the shattering of the ideal mother figure in a post-war world rife with trauma.

De Kooning's "madness" in technique, such as painting the same canvas hundreds of times, is a process of "active imagination." In analytical psychology, this is a method for the ego to directly dialogue with the unconscious. De Kooning does not aim for a perfect result; he performs an excavation ritual. Each layer of paint applied and then scraped away represents a layer of experience being unearthed. His use of large painter's brushes is an attempt to break the subtle control of reason. The rough, broad brushstrokes force the entire body to participate in the act of painting, creating a sublimation of muscular energy and inner impulse. The accumulation of overlapping layers of color transforms the painting into a spiritual site, where viewers can see the "haunting" of old forms beneath the surface of new ones.

The colors in this series act as a thermometer of the unconscious. Blazing yellow and fleshy pink juxtaposed with streaks of blood red and ash gray create a unified state of opposites. The balance here doesn't come from tranquility but from accepting contradictions. De Kooning's paintings are unsettling because they force the viewer to confront both allure and revulsion, order and chaos simultaneously. For the exiled artist, this chaos is the truest reality. They cannot use the harmonious colors of classical painting to express an inner turmoil torn between the desire to belong and eternal solitude.

The fierce reactions from critics and contemporaries like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko to De Kooning further highlighted his "marginal" nature. While his peers turned to pure abstraction as a new religion for escapism, De Kooning chose to stand on the boundary between form and abstraction. His retention of the female figure was seen as a betrayal of modernization. However, from an identity perspective, this was the ultimate anchor of the self. If he completely dissolved into abstraction, the artist would be swallowed by the collective unconscious; if he retained the realistic form, he would be trapped by old cultural masks. De Kooning chose the "pain" of tearing apart the form to maintain the existence of the self in a world without a foundation.

The final series of Woman paintings is a report on the disintegration of old symbols and the emergence of a new one: the symbol of commitment and incompleteness. De Kooning demonstrated that the abstract art of the exile was not an escape from reality, but a courage to look at the chaos of the soul without any cultural filter. These distorted women offer no aesthetic comfort; they offer the truth of an identity built on the scars of erasure and re-starting. It is a permanent existential state where the artist does not seek a fixed homeland, but accepts the canvas as the only refuge for unnameable impulses.

De Kooning's career and this series remind us that, in modern art, beauty lies not in harmony but in the degree of the artist's honesty in the face of the call of the unconscious. Abstraction, in its deepest sense, is the painful process of transformation, a return to the most primal essence of humanity before being shaped by any social tradition.

NGUYEN HUNG

(Excerpt from an art notebook on abstract art and exiled artists)

Image: painting from De Kooning's Woman series