The early 20th-century’s turn towards modernism in painting was a decisive shift in interest away from artistic representation of acts of witnessing. Abstract art—which now seems to dominate many visual demesnes including the decorative and graphic design, and sets the agenda for contemporary painting practice—is about a different kind of personal account, one not dependent on history or...
Technically, a grande dame is a highly respected elderly or middle-aged woman who has extensive experience in her field. Although gallerist Jane Chafin is certainly not elderly, she is highly respected and experienced in our art business. And she is building a Gertrude Stein-like community here in the outlands of Pasadena through fine exhibitions and intriguingly diverse cultural events at her...
On a clear sunny day there’s a press preview for the ambitious “@Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz” exhibition. Famous for its former use as a prison, with notorious inhabitants such as Al Capone, George “Machine Gun” Kelly and Robert “The Bird Man” Stroud, its layered history also includes dramatic political protests of 1969–71 when the island was occupied by Native Americans. Currently, the island...
Artist Hema Upadhyay has been a force in Indian contemporary art for two decades. Still, her recent solo exhibition at Chemould Prescott Road in Mumbai in fall 2014 was a major event in both the artist’s trajectory and the landscape of Indian art today. “Fish in a Dead Landscape” was Upadhyay’s first solo exhibition in a decade at the gallery—one of Mumbai’s best—and incorporated the...
In a series of evocatively posed large photographic diptychs entitled Thoamada II, Vuth Lyno expands common frameworks of sexuality, family and memory. This work is an outgrowth of an earlier series of photographic and audio portraits of individual MSM (men who have sex with men) entitled Thoamada (2011). That work was comprised of a suspended circle of nine large-scale color photographic...
Do Ho Suh has a career that has yielded exhibitions at Tate Modern, the Serpentine Gallery, the Liverpool Biennial, the Gwangju Biennale, a retrospective show at the Seattle Art Museum, and the Venice Biennale where he represented his native South Korea. His practice is quite successful, in part because it is a revelatory prism through which to attend the great themes of art and humanities...
For Taiwanese artists Chun-yi Chang and Yinling Hsu—currently in residence at the International Studio and Curatorial Program for emerging to mid-career artists in New York—probing notions of temporality and human disconnectedness form the core of their practices. Less concerned with the specificity of their cultural identity, their work as members of a vibrant international community of artists...
When the Hong Kong police first used tear gas and rubber bullets on the crowd of young and unarmed demonstrators in front of the government building on Hong Kong island—the moment the so-called Umbrella Revolution started in earnest—I was just arriving in the lovely hutong hotel I would stay at in Beijing. The loveliness of my surroundings, a renovated traditional courtyard home in an old area...
In an unassuming location next to a bus station and a shopping arcade in the huge Southern Chinese city of Guangzhou is Vitamin Creative Space, an experimental art space created to engage with contemporary China but “inspired by the confrontation between contemporary Chinese life and traditional Chinese philosophy.” Founded in 2002, Vitamin is part independent art space, part commercial gallery,...
The 5th Yokohama Triennale closing ceremony ended with the burning of the specially created book, “Moe Nai Ko To Ba,” ironically titled “Words That Can’t Be Burned,” an homage to Ray Bradbury’s novel, Fahrenheit 451. This custom one-of-a-kind book was a centerpiece of the exhibition featuring collections of rare documents and visual work, printed by every imaginable mechanical and manual...
Paper is a flexible medium. It is unconstrained frames and backings, untethered by nails or staples, and has become essential across countries and centuries. Still, in the canon of western art history, the primacy of canvas painting has pushed works on paper aside,...
Nam June Paik, the “father of video art” and the man who coined the phrase “the electronic superhighway,” weaves humor, Buddhism, technology, music and sex. Paik was born in 1932 in Japanese-occupied Korea. Tutored in piano and composition, he attended college at the...
For a museum that has torn down all of the buildings on its original campus, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has been putting up some pretty interesting exhibitions in one of only two exhibition spaces that are left. The two photography exhibitions I’m thinking...
This week, New York’s art scene is buzzing with events. With five major fairs and innumerable openings, the city is alight with a variety of options from the heavy hitting Armory Show to the relatively wallet-friendly Art on Paper Fair. I had the chance to preview the...
Ania Hobson’s women often look like they don’t want to be in the spaces they find themselves in: ready to leave the party, staring at wine to avoid a conversation, planning an Irish goodbye. Her characters are dressed cool and distinct in their clothes, expressions...
Step into “Intergalactix: against isolation/contra el aislamiento” at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) and the first thing you’ll see is a largish, flattish, squarish stone smack in the middle of a white-walled room decked with wicker beds of tenon...
Not front of house, with its symmetrically billeted art objects reflecting in its polished concrete floor, these rawboned works by HK Zamani are arrayed deep in the back, in a brick and concrete garage, its loading dock and ramp illumined by dangling warehouse...
“Eurydice,” Kandis Williams’ film and solo exhibition is a work that, once experienced, retains the power to alter one’s perceptions, a power that continues to linger. Both aesthetically graceful and experimental, the central part of the exhibition is a 20-minute,...
Through his glorious tangle of color and motion Kengo Kito has offered an oversized ravel of joy with Reconnecting (2021) a fascinating and immersive installation of hula-hoop spirals that fill the gallery and immerse the spectator. On view at Japan House in...
Leo Mock’s oil stick, oil and charcoal paintings are imaginative hybrids that distort the recognizable elements found in the natural landscape into something fantastic and surreal. Through six large-scale paintings, viewers are taken on a journey to an unknown world....