“A person can get used to anything. I got used to being alone all the time.”

By Jean Chen Ho

On Lunar New Year’s Day in 2024, I drove for two hours from Saratoga Springs, New York, to Dia Beacon, the contemporary art museum on the banks of the Hudson River. I wanted beauty.

Tall trees stood to the side of the entrance, stark branches without leaves this time of year. I showed the e-ticket on my phone to the front desk attendant, and she gave me a maroon lapel tag to wear. Lines from a Jane Hirshfield poem floated to mind: I wanted to be surprised. / To such a request, the world is obliging.

I strolled through the bright white galleries. Here were the giants of mid-century conceptual art: Dan Flavin’s splashy fluorescent light “situations”; a series of Donald Judd’s perfectly symmetrical plywood boxes arranged just so; Robert Smithson’s marvelously incongruous juxtaposition of dirt, glass shards, and jutting mirrors. I lingered in a room of On Kawara’s date paintings, each canvas marking a day’s month, date, and year. A Michael Heiser piece: four 20-feet geometric depressions spread across the gallery floor. The installation was fenced in by waist-high sheets of plexiglass, lest any visitors fall into the art.

I made my way upstairs to the Louise Bourgeois sculptures. Bulbous, faintly erotic objects languished on tables, hung from the ceiling, oozed off the walls. In the last gallery, a magnificent black spider teetered on steel talons. She loomed 10-feet tall on eight sinewy legs, taking up an entire L-shaped corner of the museum.

Of everything I saw that day, “Crouching Spider” inspired the most awe. One imagines her ready to pounce, agile and terrible. Then again, there’s something inevitably vulnerable about the work: an invitation to stand directly under the center of the sculpture, caged in by those massive legs, and stare up at the spider’s grand, swollen egg sac.

Jean Chen Ho is the author of Fiona and Jane, named one of TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2022; a “Best Book of the Year” (NPR, Vulture, Vogue, Oprah Daily, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle); and longlisted for the 2023 Story Prize. She lives in Los Angeles.

To read the entire article: https://lithub.com/jean-chen-ho-on-loneliness-and-longing-in-upstate-new-york/

Photo credit: Zack Frank/Shutterstock