Expectation is seldom a good idea. I arrived at John Alexander’s retrospective at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts without prior knowledge of his work except for a few five-inch-sized reproductions I’d seen on Artnet.com. (True to my generation, I am an unabashed participant in the magical method of “just google it.”) Online I saw […]

My focus is the message conveyed in the artwork instead of the form of the piece, whether it is an oil painting, a traditional photograph or digital photograph. What matters to me the most is the thought in it. Or shall I say, the emotions, which are intertwined with my life experience. As for the […]

The distinctions between noise, sound, and music is central to my work.  I rationalize these distinctions as the perceptual nuances between hearing and listening as modes of auditory reception. Through lo-fi yet seemingly complex assemblages and installations, I attempt to isolate moments where noise is perceived as sound and sound is perceived as music. Noise, […]

Bricks in China have a long history. The traditional golden brick was for royalty use only. Everything about the material and production was extremely meticulous. A fine golden brick had a melodious sound when tapped, smooth as silk when touched. That was why one golden brick was worth a fortune. The word “golden” didn’t mean […]

My work frequently incorporates common, everyday things. Many of these things are what we call fanshii in Japanese, a word that originates from Japan’s great admiration for Western culture. Fanshii things are said to be odd (in that they are neither Western nor Japanese), kitschy, girlish, and tacky. Living in Japan, I am very familiar […]

Almost four decades after its creation, Mikhailov’s Sandwich series was on view at Barbara Gross Galerie in München, Germany a year ago. Created during the late 1960s and 1970s, this series represents the poetic side of Mikhailov’s early conceptual work. Overlapping motifs lead to multifaceted interpretations, in which ironic allusion to food shortages, gloomy living […]

The photographers of 1978 were searching for new visual territory. By that year, with Diane Arbus dead for more than half a decade, the decisive moments captured by the likes of Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand over the past three decades had been depleted of fresh potential. Street photographers, it seemed, had run out […]

In an era when the police can be summoned if you so much as produce a camera on a children’s playground, Julia Fullerton-Batten has made life deliberately difficult for herself. The London-based artist’s latest project focuses on the taboos of life in a teenage girls’ school. Bullying, humiliation, and occasional moments of sympathy can all […]

Tal R’s exhibit Adieu Interessant was featured at the Contemporary Fine Arts Gallery in Berlin as part of the German capital’s citywide gallery weekend this past May. The Israeli-born Danish artist displayed ten large-format collages on two floors of the David Chipperfield designed space. The canvases in Adieu Interessant resembled abstract compositions from afar, two-dimensional […]

I have always been fascinated by the notion of the animal—as a symbol, but more significantly, as a kind of physical entity. Bataille, in "Theory of Religion," talks about a space he calls “animal intimacy”—a conceptual space or age that has existed before the age of human production/consumption, which introduced a fundamental hierarchy. But he […]