“Play With Me!”—it sounds like the entreaty of a bossy child. In this scorched and blackened landscape set around a tumorous tree, creepy baby dolls, human-headed birds and human-vegetable hybrids play out perverse games. Looking upon Yuliya Lanina’s Boschian orgy, it seems at times innocent, at times twisted. These feelings never quite resolve, but remain in a kind of sustained cognitive dissonance. The scene may evoke queasy laughter, a detached feeling of bemusement and/or disgust, but the title says “Play With Me”—we are asked to enter into this scene with a sense of childlike wonder and abandon.

After receiving my degree in architecture in 1972 I steered away from architectural practice in order to research architectural issues in a laboratory-like setting. I make buildings, furniture, vessels and utensils as backdrops and props for everyday, ordinary human activity. These isolate, elevate and monumentalize eating, sleeping and bathing, turning life into theater. My work includes sculpture, furniture, public installations and architecture. The work becomes mechanisms that activate ritual, ceremony and movement.

A bright, sunny day welcomes us in Middletown, Connecticut, home to Wesleyan University. We’re in for a real treat: a sneak peek into an otherwise little shown, diverse and rather eclectic collection of prints, photographs, musical instruments, archeological materials and East Asian artifacts. The collection is currently relegated to small and sometimes inadequate storage facilities, with little or no room for examination: its importance consequently underestimated and its accessibility to visitors and students made impossible or limited.

Art isn’t formulaic speculation, nor is it the suffocation of a restricted circle, even less is it a game to be played among the nouveau riche or soon to be nouveau riche. Art must be concerned with people. What the artist needs is a consciousness of people. The Lv Xiao is a self-organized internet community of people interested in folk art for children. On the one hand, they emphasize the open-mindedness and democracy of a community; on the other hand, they emphasize the responsibility of art to society.

My current work “Couples” attempts to address a series of questions about self-representation, the private versus public experience, and the ephemeral nature of control in a series of large-scale photographic autoportraits. In my experience shooting fashion and other commercial photography, I became fascinated by roles played both by myself as the photographer/director and that of the model/subject. It seemed effortless to slip into these familiar roles, to assume the lead position to realize a conceptual or aesthetic vision, therefore achieving images that were in large part a reflection of what I was thinking or feeling at the time. 

Deng Jianjin painted all his images with knotty strokes. Thanks to the sense of connection between a knotty look and a morose mood, the painter has been able to express his inner desolation through knotty strokes. This style was commonly seen in traditional Chinese scholarly paintings as a result of the early aesthetical development in calligraphy, which is well recorded in ancient documents. Take the works of Ni Zan for example; here are his sparse strokes along with his feeling of loneliness. In Shi Lu’s paintings are knotty strokes and the plum flowers he painted in his old age.

The sculptural installation, Halong-Kellong, is the imagined self-projection of modern life from a Chinese peasant’s perspective. This is a work of analytical realism, using the processes of design, production, participation and performance to present a microcosm of contemporary China. Halong-Kellong is comprised of a three hand truck imprinted with a Harley-Davidson style logo. Each work forms a space for entertainment by melding the forms of the tractor and the shipping container, and by including a Karaoke room, a Western-style buffet and a movie screening facility. The artist combined these forms into an entirely new creation (vaguely reminiscent of a Chinese dragon).

To me, being an artist is to be perceptive in ways that others can't be. To focus on the details and the texture. To sense tension and mood. In my work, and with these things in mind, I like to create an atmosphere in which to get lost. I usually gravitate towards photographing people, or at least their bodies. I tend to be pretty close with my models, which is helpful since they are usually nude. I like working with interesting and passionate people, I like seeing what inspires them, and, in turn, they inspire me. I like to exhibit their strengths and weaknesses, but not always in a literal way. I'm more interested in showing their humanity and in evoking an emotional response, which is also why they are often depicted anonymously.

My favorite subject matter is people, and specifically, people doing what they naturally do.  When I first moved to New York, I was strictly a behind-the-scenes photojournalistic type of photographer, having been mainly into documenting what was happening around me or what I excitingly stumbled upon, predominantly in the music community and on the streets, while still in Portland.  I was all about the candid shots, into capturing a poignant moment in time, but with no involvement from the subject.

Grappling with an over-active imagination isn’t always easy, but artist Amy Cutler manages to make the feat appear at once effortless and well worth the try. With her drawing and gouache on paper fabrications, Cutler first establishes elaborate alternative frameworks of reality and culture and follows up by throwing women and girls of every age and pigtail length into that conjured up realm’s particular mix. By the time we see them, the female characters are completely adjusted to and invested in whatever ritualized action or bizarre environment Cutler has dreamed up for them.

For artist Lori Earley, painting what is beautiful comes both from inspiration within and from the outside world of cutting-edge fashion. Inspired by the imagination of high-end fashion icons such as Alexander McQueen or the exotic wardrobes of Jennifer Nicholson, Earley’s stunning portraits of esoteric women evoke mood and form as equally poignant and delicate as the textured gowns they wear. Each elegant and edgy oil painting requires a mastery of technical skill and painstaking execution. “Every painting begins as an idea stemming from my subconscious,” says Earley. As a preliminary creative process, Earley translates her ideas into multiple sketches for her evocative backgrounds or minimalist landscapes. The artist arranges a photo shoot in her studio with a model to enhance mood and accuracy of pose and figure.

Pre-eminent in his field, Zhang Lin Hai’s collection of new works shows how he is evolving stylistically as an artist as he further develops his scope of imagination, and his motif of bald young boys against a backdrop of a post-industrial arid wasteland. More so now than ever before, Zhang Lin Hai’s onus is placed on the individual, rather than an oblique field of the masses. Zhang Lin Hai is also bringing a strong emotional pièce de résistance to the fore, explicitly articulating feelings such as sadness, fear, a need for escape, bemusement and even more disconcerting, the vapid glare of shock or even possession.

Spearheaded by an increasing cultural globalization and, more specifically, by the West’s ever-expanding multiculturalism, large exhibitions such as the Taipei, Gwangju and Shanghai biennials have introduced contemporary Chinese art and artists to the global stage. Although this may appear to have been an overnight phenomenon, it is actually a gradual one that parallels the political upheaval beginning with the death of Mao Tse Tung in 1978 and the resulting demise of the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976.

In our modern societies, transparent materials outshine opaque materials, bearers of traditions and sometimes obscurantism.  Either vehicle of political liberty or inevitable means for a capitalism which must maintain trust, this change from the opaque to the transparent is one among the many that a China of the 21st century is experiencing—but probably the one which in the long term will produce the most forceful effects. To exert oneself to light represents a risk for a closed society used to master the shade. Better than any speech about democracy, light, much more so than sound, can stimulate a civil society.

Liu Jian Hua’s artworks present an unflinching illumination of the all too intimate relationship between materialism and humanity.  These questions and issues that are raised in his artworks are, for instance, evident in works like Do You have an answer? This work is a mixed-media piece wherein Liu Jian Hua uses both stainless steel sculpture and technology to create a singularly unique work. A projection of text comprised of rhetorical questions is tantamount to the stainless steel books themselves.