Propped against the wall of her second-story Hollywood Boulevard studio, three of Liat Yossifor’s gray paintings—each about seven feet by five feet—in various stages of completion sit perched on low wood supports. Yossifor’s high-ceilinged studio feels spacious, if rather austere; other than her paintings, supplies, a table with tools, and an old paint-stained leather sofa, there is little else....
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,...
I’ve written a lot about Los Angeles and how it’s mistakenly known as an “ugly city.” And while before I’ve been willing to blame that mistake on biased reporting, I’m starting to believe that the call is coming from inside the house. Truthfully, we have only...
“All men are gay,” reads the cover of a newspaper from Bøssehuset (The Gay House). The newspaper is part of the exhibition Psychopathia Sexualis at the art space Overgaden in Copenhagen, which displays a combination of archival material and contemporary art—the former...
It is hard not to wonder if Hanna Hur's paintings were made explicitly for Kristina Kite's gallery space or if it is pure coincidence that the black and white checkerboard floor so perfectly complements the geometric patterns within the paintings. The way the space...
As an omnipresent symbol across the history of humanity, the ocean assumes many roles. It is a healing force, and is immensely destructive; it is divine and earthly. The ocean encompasses the myriad of natural and mystical forces which have captivated our imagination...
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...