Inspired by Byzantine icons and early Renaissance painting, Chris Twomey explores themes of motherhood and identity as impacted by the latest scientific theories of ancestry genetics. The “Madonna Series” is her second solo show at the Tribes Gallery. Using all the tools available today; computer manipulated digital photography, printing, scanning, DVDs, old fashioned painting and drawing, she has produced a heady, engaging, innovative cocktail—an iconography of the past updated for the 21st century in a series of seven paintings, nine digital prints and a DVD.
I have always enjoyed the adventure, the art of storytelling and the pure fun found between the delicate pages of comic books. Comics have helped me maintain a vivid imagination, kept me reading something, lead me to other books and philosophies and even ignited my interest in visual art. During the early 70s there were little images that reflected anything relating to my experience as a young African-American. When I did find a Power Man book, the stories were lame and it seemed writers made no effort to make black heroes heroic.
“Dodge a Bullet,” my current solo exhibition at the Hilliard Museum in Lafayette, Louisiana, came about as a result of the invitation of Mark Tullos Jr., the museum’s new deputy director.This installation of painting, video and stainless steel sculpture was created in the immediate aftershock of hurricane Katrina, a time when I did a lot of floor pacing. Family and friends were among the evacuees. This repetitive studio roaming led to a video of my art process called eXile. Wearing Stella McCartney stilettos, I stalked across a reflective surface, leaving footprints that I would later paint on. Both the video and the subsequent paintings and sculpture are about displacement, about losing the reality you think you inhabit. Your spirit wanders.
My collage work has been linked to my work as a designer. Its influence comes from Japanese magna art, comic books, high fashion, photography and graphic art. For a long time, collage has allowed me to tell stories in a very straightforward way that has a bit of an edge to it, almost political commentary. Since 2D graphic collage allows you the freedom and flexibility to combine different mediums, cutting and pasting, I thought it would be interesting to actually take the production methods and apply them conceptually to the work I was making. Most of my work deals with power be that through sex, violence, virtual power or through the forces of nature.
Through the factory windows of the Two Lines Gallery, the hazy skyline of Beijing encases the work of three artists; Weissensteiner, McCormick and Scott, who consider the self in this city. Walking through three distinct spaces, the viewer perceives three questioning statements from three perspectives and, thus, art and city merge. Does the artist become a transient in a physical and virtual nomadic world? Weissensteiner, McCormick and Scott have travelled in and out of each other’s location as insiders and outsiders—Melbourne, Vienna, Beijing.
The art of Donald Damask plays with color, texture and line—all of which are cobbled by the forces of time and chance. He creates within an action-based process that leverages opportunity and opportunity overturned. His work addresses the great tides of the universe as they move from renewal to decay in a never-ending spiral. While his compositions are challenging, they are certainly not static; tension arises when structural elements and surface masses appear uncomfortably paired. Just as one begins to comprehend the composition of a particular work, its fine line, fields of color and photon-like impressions nearly collapse the structure of it.
Since Zhao Fang's graduation from the Jilin Academy of Fine Arts, China in 1997, his works have met with accolades and popular acclaim, not least for his obvious mastery over his medium, but also for his admirable anti-violence stance. Zhao Fang paints with the vocabulary of a classical renaissance style, achieving incredible depth of form and movement in human anatomy by poising his subjects in a moment of torsion, receding into and reaching out of the canvas through light and shadow. By capturing motion through his subject's anatomy, Zhao Fang's use of foreshortening imbues form and function into his composition, and captures the humanity of his vision.
“The Joy of My Reality” is art project curated by Biljana Ciric and Hu Yuanxing and will be featured in media such as newspapers and magazines in an effort to integrate art into the every day people’s life. Thanks to the co-operation of Art World Magazine and Oriental Morning Post, the project will be presented in print media monthly and daily. Later, it will build into its own online presentation. The project began in June of 2006 with these two print media and will go on for one year, until the beginning of 2007. The project consists of three parts.
Real life experiences have always been the basis for my work. As such, over the past few years, my work has been closely connected with changes in the urban environment. When I was young, I always felt that my life was intricately linked to urban change. When construction of the Three Gorges Dam began, my hometown was directly affected. It is a place that is very small, an insignificant speck in the entire construction of the Three Gorges Dam. Those familiar sites of buildings, streets and friends have slowly faded from memory. A roaring river has become a shimmering, placid lake.
The flash of orange scales scintillates in the swirling water as the washing machine churns. Chinese Koi are tossed about like inanimate objects in the unforgiving torrents of the machine. At the end of the cycle, they lie gasping for breath as the machine empties. No reason is given for this low-grade torture, but the video by Chinese artist Ma Yongfeng raises myriad questions and incites an array of visceral and cerebral responses in viewers from China to Europe to the United States, many of whom are arrested by the hypnotic horror of this scene—who want to turn away and yet are unable to stop looking.
It can be said that the modern age is an age of self-discovery, a time to dispose of the feudalistic concept of one’s existence as an element of a community and to seek a modern form of self, which is separate from others. Various experiments were attempted in the process of achieving this. Some pronounced that “God is dead,” while others raised their sense of self with attachment to personal possessions. However, this was merely the first step towards escaping feudalism and modernizing one’s consciousness. After this, people found themselves caught up in a storm of nationalism and totalitarianism, centering on developed countries.
When he adopted the name Black Moon (Hei Yue), back in the heyday of the Yuanmingyuan artist colony, Ji Shengli could hardly have known the intimate connections in English between the verb "to moon" and the performance art that would bring him fame. Yuanmingyuan was one of China’s most fertile art communities, which flourished from the late 80s until it was disbanded in 1995. Hei Yue or Ji Shengli originally made his name in the avant-garde art scene as a painter, but, after he moved to Japan in 2001, he began to work in the medium that would take his work to a new level: his buttocks.
In English, “China” means both the country and porcelain. In this way, the famed Chinese export is inherently connected with the transforming country and its culture. Thus, porcelain is so significant a substance that it connects the past history and the present moment of this great country. The material is not a widely used medium in contemporary art, but its unique character as shown in the art works of Ma Jun and Huang Min makes one believe that porcelain improves the variety of contemporary art greatly. The art form has been a symbol of Chinese art for more than 1000 years.
We have been informed that we are on the road to happiness, striding from the deceptive fantasies of the past into a feverish frenzy of economic modernization. The effects of so-called globalization and modernization rain down on us like blows to the face as we hurtle from one world toward another, rushing towards the mirage of a make-believe China, bloated with decadence and becoming grotesque with vulgar self-indulgence. The view of history and the yearning for a new life are concentrated in China's pursuit of so-called "modernity."
Dinosaurs maraud in downtown Beijing. Scaly lizard bodies sprout Kewpie doll heads, and the sky rains silver with “renminbi”—the people's money. Chen Qingqing's stunning new series of light box installation photography bursts with creative collocations of imagery that illuminate her unique and provocative visions of who we are, and what we are well on our way to becoming. Although she only began making art a little over a decade ago, Qingqing has been making her own characteristic mark in China and abroad ever since. Before answering her calling as an artist, she worked in traditional Chinese medicine for almost a decade.