Author Archives: jolanta

My work explores ideas surrounding repetition, transformation, memory, and the physical and mental processes involved in the production of art objects. My practice encompasses a wide range of media, from painting and drawing to text and video. In my recent paintings, simple actions and patterns are repeated over and over again, imbuing something otherwise simple […]

Among the many Chinese artists who work with military themes, Xing Jun-Qin is a maverick. Military-focused artists are a special category in contemporary Chinese art, in that they are sponsored by the military and make work about army. Their work is mostly about realism. They utilize military subjects, building a visual image of soldiers that […]

Our perceptions normally encompass a viewing angle of roughly 90 degrees; anything wider has to rely on short-term memory. What happens when we’re presented with a panoramic view? Our wonderful brain adapts, and we transcend our biological limits. Concepts like left, right, front, and back no longer are valid. The viewer becomes like Panoptes, suddenly […]

My full-time job is actually an architect, not an artist, though I attended quite a few art fairs. Most of the time, I was involved in the space design of the fairs. I provided an appropriate space for the participating artists to display their works. The more “invisible” my design was, the more popular it […]

My immediate environment has always provided the impetus for my art practice, a snapshot view of the world, something to work with, or more often than not, kick against. For a period of six years I lived in Amsterdam, Berlin, Lisbon, and Prague, absorbing what I could from each environment and culture I found myself […]

My works continue to show a variety of lifestyles, either partly current experiences or partly reminiscences. Of great fascination to me is man’s socio-economic and political behavior, which has influenced my direction of work over the years. These works are rendered in a variety of media, including bronze, concrete, polyester, plaster, resin, waste materials, and […]

The birth of photography can be traced to the camera obscura, a device dating all the way back to 400 B.C. Originally conceived of as an enclosed box with a tiny hole on one side for light to pass through, the camera obscura became the de facto aid for landscape painters who sought to transcribe […]

Leafing through notes, the critical juncture for this project began to germinate in the summer of 2007. It was just when Shi Jin-Song had finished a three-person show at the Today Art Museum, Nine Trees, and he took me to Beijing’s eastern suburbs for a look at the place where his works are being manufactured. […]

In autumn 2005 I had just finished a giant installation at Exit Art, part of its Traffic exhibition. Essentially a sloped ceiling coated in 12,000 colorful toy cars, this piece was ostensibly a wry, humorous take on global warming. But as the show wore on I began to feel uneasy. I wondered—can art really walk […]

Looking at my daughter’s impressive collection of toys, I was reminded of the only toy I had while growing up. It was a ball. A small, fist-sized ball with a wavy pattern. That small ball played an instrumental role when I first learned how to paint. I painted it white and used it as a […]