|
 |
Kwon Ki-soo, Colour forest (detail), 2006
|
 |
|
|
news + headlines
feature
reviews
one to watch
interview
media
credits
|
New Asian-Pacific Art
March 21-April 3, 2007
Surveying art across Asia, Australia, and the Pacific, this year's Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art brings intriguing contemporary works — often incorporating traditional techniques — to Brisbane, Australia. Among the highlights
are Japanese artist Yuken Teruya, who cuts delicate trees from shopping bags, and the Long March Project, a Chinese group that reinterprets Mao's famous march. Our media pick is Apichatpong Weerasethakul's film Mysterious Object at Noon, a fragmented narrative set in rural Thailand, and within our coverage of current exhibitions, we recommend Rachel Harrison's off-kilter assemblages in New York and Allora & Calzadilla's politically charged videos in London.
|
|
 |
|
Jonathan Rhys Meyers is King Henry VIII as you've never seen him before. With a lust for power and an appetite for love, the
young monarch ruled his kingdom as he lived his life — with ruthless abandon. The epic Showtime Original Series The Tudors reveals the untold story of the beloved tyrant whose reign was marked by treachery, betrayal, and intrigue.
|
|
Saatchi Launches Chinese Art Website
(New York Times, March 11)
After the instant success of Stuart, his website showcasing student artists, Charles Saatchi is launching Mandarin, a similar site for Chinese art. Designed
to give Chinese art students international exposure and a forum for connecting with their peers, Mandarin links to the Saatchi Gallery site, which receives at least six million hits a day. The project stems from Saatchi's long-standing interest in the region and
aims to tap the thousands of Chinese artists without gallery representation. Not coincidentally, the first show in Saatchi's
new gallery in London will exhibit contemporary Chinese art. Plans to launch sites for India, Russia, Spain, and South America are in
the works.
Dubai Holds First Art Fair
(Times Online, March 13)
Held in Dubai in early March, the Gulf Art Fair was the first international art fair to take place in the Middle East. Top
galleries from around the world participated, showing art worth a total of $1 billion. While Dubai has welcomed Western culture
in recent years, some aesthetic friction was evident; exhibitors only brought artwork appropriate for an Islamic state, meaning
no nudity or religious imagery. Many Western works — such as Damien Hirst's medicine cabinet — left viewers puzzled and bored, while
Arab, Indian, and Chinese art sold briskly. The event comes at a time when Dubai and Abu Dhabi are competing for cultural cachet — the wealthier Abu Dhabi is currently planning its branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums.
Counterfeit Art Market Booms Online
(Globe and Mail, March 9)
While the prices for contemporary art are rising astronomically, cunning counterfeiters are generating a second, deeply discounted
art market. Websites such as chinaoilpaintingwholesale.com, which copy the work of famous and lesser-known artists in a wide variety of styles, are making astonishing profits. Many
of these businesses are based in China, with one southern town making $120 million in counterfeit artwork last year. The copyright
infringement directly impacts the Western artists whose works are reproduced, as the websites are in English, sell in US currency,
and ship internationally. chinaoilpaintingwholesale.com is also more accommodating than most artists, offering to "paint any
image, any size."
Gehry Blogs Abu Dhabi Guggenheim
(Guardian Unlimited, March 5)
Always up-to-date with new technology, Frank Gehry has ventured into another digital frontier: the blog. Posting on the Guardian website, Gehry mused on his designs for the Abu Dhabi Guggenheim and deflected accusations that he's "stuck in a groove,"
promising that the new Guggenheim will be radically different from Bilbao. Although many still appreciate his signature metallic
buildings — his recent Stata Center for MIT is drawing praise from students and faculty, and the Weisman Art Museum hired him to expand his seminal 1993 building — others fault them for their insensitivity to context. A new documentary, Brooklyn Matters, chronicles the fierce opposition to a Gehry-designed development in Brooklyn's Atlantic Yards.
|
|
Critic Michael Kimmelman leaves New York more »
Christie's auction infuriates artists more »
Russian oligarchs' wives want art galleries more »
Seattle critic trades art for reviews more »
Debate rages over "Desert Louvre" more »
Second Life recreates political strife more »
Calatrava unveils plans for Chicago spire more »
Adobe creates software to detect manipulated photos more »
Picasso paintings stolen from his granddaughter's home more »
Bio-artists merge science and art more »
Banksy mural accidentally destroyed more »
Architecture for Humanity launches online network and major prize more »
Baltimore museum director starts a blog more »
Architects favor walls for security more »
Imprisoned Black Panther designs dream house more »
Antony Gormley's naked men allowed to stay more »
Brice Marden discusses his retrospective at SFMOMA more »
Spielberg collection harbors stolen Rockwell more »
Modernist landmark by Paul Rudolph endangered more »
Cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard dies at age 77 more »
Note: Some online publications require registration
to access the articles. If you encounter a
registration screen, try akreader1 as the username
and password.
|
back to top
|
|
 |
 |
[
APT5
]
|
|
 |
Michael Parekowhai / Sivaimauga Vaagi / Jackie Chan / Masami Teraoka
|
Since 1993, the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art has showcased recent art from Asia and the Pacific, including Australia, bringing worldwide attention to the region's contemporary
and traditional practices. For this year's show, the Queensland Art Gallery and its new Gallery of Modern Art — designed by the Australian firm Architectus — are currently housing the work of 37 individual artists, filmmakers, and performers, as well as two collaborative projects.
With GoMA accommodating the Australian Cinémathèque, there is a new emphasis on Asian-Pacific filmmakers. In works by Chinese video-artist Yang Fudong, individuals negotiate alienating cityscapes. Though these characters are isolated in monotonous office buildings or in city
gardens, glimpses of Shanghai's architectural feats hint at a sense of place. Meanwhile, Jackie Chan fills monitors and projection screens with an installation of his films, but we only catch glimpses of the Hong Kong action
star — and his fusion of Peking Opera and kung fu — as he flies through the scene.
The polymorphic comic characters of Indonesian artist Eko Nugroho climb the gallery walls in a large mural and appear again in his smaller embroidered works. Other artists using the fabric
medium include more than 19 women in the Pacific Textiles Project. Working from across the South Pacific, their labor-intensive, hand-stitched quilts and woven pandanus mats depicting royalty
and Christian worship are imbued with vibrant colors and adaptive tradition.
Artists such as Masami Teraoka and Nusra Latif Qureshi engage traditional techniques with contemporary imagery. Teraoka draws on Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints to frame traditional
geisha figures situated amidst condom wrappers and lubricant tubes. Pakistani-Australian Qureshi employs her formal training
in miniature painting to present silhouettes with a contemporary aesthetic that suggest contexts for her female protagonists.
Two contrasting landscape painters, Yoo Seung-Ho and the Madarrpa leader Djambawa Marawili, are highlights of the exhibition. Yoo creates landscapes from thousands of minute Korean characters, while Marawili's bark
paintings consist of intricate crosshatching. Other juxtapositions in the Triennial work on a more discordant level. The presentation
of New Zealander Gordon Walters' paintings next to Michael Parekowhai's sculptures highlights the issues surrounding postcolonial and cross-cultural art practices; Maori motifs appropriated by
Walters are later recaptured in Parekowhai's work. The discursive tension also reminds the viewer that the placement of a
regional art festival in an Australian institution remains contentious. (EB)
The Fifth Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art continues at the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art in
Brisbane, Australia through May 27.
|
|
|
|
 |
|
Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color
Houston
Museum of Fine Arts
Now through April 1
|
|
Dedicated to transforming color into space, late Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica receives his first comprehensive retrospective with The Body of Color at Houston's Museum of Fine Arts. In his White Series, Oiticica manipulated the tone and brush strokes of white pigment on canvas and cardboard to demonstrate his theory that
painting can manifest itself as a unique moment in the perception of time. Grand Núcleo (Grand Nucleus), a suspended large-scale wood construction, invites viewers to move through its panels to experience color as a physical
environment. Oiticica's color theories climax with his Parangolés, bright cloth capes that give the sense of color in motion. (LLP)
|
|
Rachel Harrison: If I Did It
New York
Greene Naftali Gallery
Now through March 31
|
|
The world is full of things to look at, but few are as rewarding as Rachel Harrison's current show of photographs and lumpy, asymmetrical monoliths. Simultaneously formal, narrative, and conceptual, her bricolage of absurd props — thermostats, lottery tickets, taxidermied poultry — and carved Styrofoam blocks slathered with bright plaster
are caricatures of entertainers, theorists, and explorers. Johnny Depp — a swarthy, abstract jumble — is unadorned except for a small gold earring. Nearby, a spray of foam packing peanuts trails
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a clothed mannequin wearing a Dick Cheney mask back-to-front to Janus-like effect. Harrison's sharp, playful memorials provoke discussions about context, consumerism, universality, beauty, fame,
politics, and the nature of seeing. (LC)
|
|
Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla
London
Whitechapel Gallery
Now Through March 25
|
|
Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla's interdisciplinary practice takes an unusually intimate perspective on postindustrialism's political, social, and environmental
effects with four short films at London's Whitechapel Gallery. In Returning a Sound, a man retrofits his motorcycle with a military trumpet to produce a free-jazz anthem as he traverses sections of Vieques, Puerto Rico, that were once restricted by the US Navy during its 60-year occupation. Under Discussion finds the son of a fisherman/activist motoring an upside-down conference table past Vieques' new luxury resorts and along fishing routes still depleted by past US military exercises. Rooted in performative whimsy, these mappings proffer
small but potent reclamations of expropriated space. (TC)
|
|
Crystal Crunch
Padova
Perugi Artecontemporanea
Now through March 25
|
|
After taking over Tokyo's Watari-um Museum last winter, artist couple Taylor McKimens and Misaki Kawai now divide and conquer Padua's Perugi Artecontemporanea. McKimens, who creates lumpy, oozing, comic-inspired installations
and has curated exhibitions such as Stranger Town at New York's Dinter Fine Art, presents Crystal Crunch, a group of nine artists riffing on similar themes. Amy Lockhart's small paintings of angular, strong-boned women clash with Matt Leines' mythical, masked creatures while Eddie Martinez's Guston-eyed girls adorn the inside of a giant cardboard cereal box, printed with a "Crystal Crunch" logo. Amid this constellation of playful and menacing characters, an energetic, orange-faced
figure blasts through a brick wall in Kawai's adjacent installation, Big Break. (AA)
|
|
David Salle
Salzburg
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
Now though March 23
|
|
In the '80s, David Salle was associated with a bombastic set of neo-expressionist painters; his large, figurative canvases juxtaposed pop-culture
pastiche with art-historical snippets. The eight recent paintings at Thaddaeus Ropac all share a new visual trope: a Dalí-esque color swirl that obliterates the canvases' subjects. In The Party, a disfiguring maelstrom, set against a monochrome background of seashells, twists a face into an unrecognizable, Munch-like
Scream; salmon steaks lifted from a Goya painting and a dessert from a Thiebaud still life hover incongruently in the foreground. In Evolution, another delirious mash-up, Salle combines an African mask, two tulips, a black-and-white figure, and a whirled cartoon vixen. (HGM)
A recreation of David Salle's 1977 installation Bearding The Lion In His Den is on display at Deitch Projects in New York through March 24.
|
|
Streams, torrents, lakes, glaciers, rocks, waterfalls, steep slopes, cliffs, peaks, firs, beeches, stumps, wind, storms, snow,
sunrises, and sunsets, for example.
Berlin
PROGRAM
Now through March 24
|
|
Merging landscape painting with architecture, the PROGRAM project space has invited nine Berlin-based painters to conjure
alternate realities on its gallery walls. Working with an assigned horizon line, the artists each create wildly different
scenes, with surprising overlaps along the borders. Leigh Bridges plays with perspective, making white trees appear to move through an ethereal, yellow haze. Ethan Hayes-Chute disrupts a peaceful sea colony with monumental splashes. In a side alcove, Brent Wadden's geometric polygons crawl across the walls and echo the bright, triangular forms of Markus Shimizu's painted column in the larger room. In this panorama of styles and methods, each wall opens up a different illusory space,
connecting to the others in a web of visual association. (BR)
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
[
Yuken Teruya
]
|
|
|
Yuken Teruya
|
For his Notice-Forest sculptures, Yuken Teruya cuts and folds minutely textured trees from paper shopping bags, which are then cantilevered from gallery walls like delicate
dioramas. Suites from the series have included bags from luxury companies including Louis Vuitton and the ultimate icon of global plebeian culture, McDonald's. In Teruya's work — a unique blend of poetry and critique — processed paper is reborn, and natural beauty is coaxed from
handcrafted material waste.
Teruya first garnered international attention in 2002 when he won the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum's Emerging Artist Award. Subsequent inclusions in the 2005 Yokohama International Triennale and Greater New York at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York have enhanced his reputation.
For his current solo exhibition, New York's Asia Society commissioned Teruya to create a piece in response to a Ming-dynasty jar. Teruya has cut outlines of fish — akin to the koi adorning the jar — from five orange plastic bags, which surround the antique
vessel. In Poi, the artist has suspended secular tokens of modern life — including a coupon, a credit card, and coins — in delicate nets
used for catching fish in a Japanese game. Teruya also displays the paper stencils used to create the accompanying bingata, a kimono dyed in a traditional Okinawan technique. At the Fifth Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Australia, alongside pieces from Notice-Forest, curators have selected Teruya's 2002 You-I, You-I, an earlier bingata whose decoration points to the American military's ongoing residence on Okinawa. (HGM)
Yuken Teruya's work is on view through May 27 at the Fifth Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane, Australia. Free Fish: The Art of Yuken Teruya runs through April 29 at the Asia Society in New York.
|
| back to top |
|
 |
 |
[ Long March Project ] |
|
|
Fu Xinmin / Qin Ga / Li Shurui / Sui Jianguo
|
| Inspired by the historic Mao Zedong-led Long March — the Red Army's grueling 6,000-mile retreat across China from pursuing Nationalist forces — the Long March Project was founded in 1999. In 2002, it enacted The Long March: A Walking Visual Display, a series of performances and interventions at sites along the Red Army's original route. In 2003, the 25000 Cultural Transmission Center (the Long March Space) was established in Beijing as a dynamic exhibition space. The Long March Project also continues to
participate in international exhibitions and is included in the Fifth Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. Artkrush
reviews editor Andrew Maerkle spoke with founder and chief curator Lu Jie about the project's history and current activities. |
AK: What is the inspiration behind the Long March Project?
|
LJ: Recalling the Red Army's historic Long March, China is now on a new Long March, experiencing rapid change in geographic and
social landscapes and artistic expression. The Long March Project seeks a new approach to contemporary art, using China as
a platform. Participants work together with local communities, exploring the relationships between individual and collective,
theory and practice. Unlike an art collective, the Long March is not composed of core participants; rather, it is an ongoing
art and curatorial project, which I started and continue to serve as chief curator, and from 2002-03 the artist Qiu Zhijie was co-curator.
|
AK: What is your view of the conditions for contemporary art in China today?
|
LJ: Contemporary Chinese art is developing with great diversity and inspiration, but with the current period of success, there
are also concerns about the market's influence on art, exhibitions, and opinions. While still taking advantage of the market's
positive aspects, how do we maintain artistic originality and an engagement with society in an atmosphere of consumerism and
transformation?
This context is also indicative of a greater uprooting of contemporary Chinese art as it moves further into the international
system — an unmooring from history, tradition, and the creative capacities of folk culture. The Long March looks to re-establish
these connections. For example, the painter Yang Shaobin's 800 Meters Under is a two-year, nine-month project involving coal mines and the history and current state of industrialization in China.
|
AK: Did your Long March interventions in 2002 reflect a specific moment in recent Chinese art history?
|
| keep reading the
interview » |
|
| back to top |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
Mysterious Object at Noon
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Plexifilm
Influenced by exquisite corpse drawings he discovered while studying film at the Art Institute of Chicago, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's first feature film explores a concept of multiple, sequential contributors. Shot in his native Thailand over a three-year
period and released in 2000, the 85-minute black-and-white film strings stories from different narrators into a surreal tale.
The movie begins with a young woman recalling the tragedy of being sold as a child. Asked if she has any other stories — real
or fictional — she begins a story of a boy in a wheelchair and his teacher. This recurring narrative becomes woven into a
documentary road picture of rural Thailand, where the villagers share other fictions that add to the film's sublime structure. (PL)
Thirteen Apichatpong Weerasethakul films — including the acclaimed Tropical Malady and Syndromes and a Century, his latest — are being screened at the Fifth Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane, Australia through May 27.
|
|
back to top
|
|
 |
|
Cover
Art
Kwon Ki-soo
Colour forest,
2006
Synthetic polymer paint on canvas stretched over board
71 1/4 x 89 1/2 in./181 x 227 cm
Courtesy the artist
All Rights
Reserved
|
Editor
Paul Laster
News Editor
Greg Zinman
Reviews Editor
Andrew Maerkle
Production Editor
Bryony Roberts
Contributing Editors
Jennifer Y. Chen
Shana Nys Dambrot
Allison Kave
Sarah Kessler
Doug Levy
Mark Mangan
Marlyne Sahakian
Peter Stepek
Zolton Zavos
Contributors
Anna Altman
Ellie Buttrose
Tyler Coburn
Lisa Cooley
H.G. Masters
Lisa L. Powell
|
|
Production
Anjuli Ayer
Morgan Croney
Teel Lassiter
Lauren McKee
Andrew Steinmetz
Daphne Yang
Mailer Design
Jessica Bauer-Greene
Mark Barry
Media Partnerships
Every
other week, Artkrush presents one
exclusive media partner. Click for more
information about advertising
opportunities on Artkrush and
across all Flavorpill publications.
Press
Send press releases to press.
Feedback
Please take a
moment to let us know what
you think about Artkrush — all
praise and criticism is welcome.
About Us
Artkrush is a
twice-monthly email magazine, featuring
current news, people, and events in the
international art community. All stories
and links are pure editorial, never paid
advertisements.
In addition to
this twice-monthly digest of the visual
arts, Flavorpill also publishes ten
other email magazines, covering NEWS, BOOKS, MUSIC, FASHION, and cultural events in six cities
— NEW YORK, LOS ANGELES, SAN FRANCISCO, CHICAGO, MIAMI, and LONDON.
|
|
back to top
|
|
 |
 |
© 2007 Flavorpill
Productions LLC. All Rights Reserved.
|
 |
|
|