Change is much more painful than progress, yet infinitely more rewarding. Imagine if Guston decided to continue with his muted abstractions? Imagine if he succumbed to the pressure of expectation from dealers and collectors? Then I imagine he would exist as a marginal abstract expressionist who rode the wave of America’s first great art movement. […]

Over the last nine years, New York City has grown to be my favorite city. The island of Manhattan alone has such a dense, mysterious network of man-made structures soaring fifteen hundred feet aboveground and digging 800 feet below. The five boroughs of New York are connected by more than 35 bridges and tunnels that […]

For me, the first encounter with the aesthetics of terror took place in front of the TV. Growing up in Tel Aviv, one could not help seeing images of state and underground terror on television. During the 1990s, when the phenomenon of Palestinian suicide bombers first emerged, it had a distinct visualization—suicide bombers’ videos. These […]

For the past several years I have been working on a series of cartographic installations comprised of layers of hand-cut paper, light, and shadow. These constructions depict aspects of the world which we cannot normally see: a microscopic organism, an image from the depths of our interior anatomy, a labyrinth of pipes and systems buried […]

Meaning is deduced from presences: the presence of sound, of speech and language, of sight, of touch. Subtract a familiar presence—for example, the element of sound—and you are left with the perplexing space of absence, as it flirts with the urge to interpret. Silence is perhaps the most traumatic signifier of absence, and, when present, […]

During her studies at the academy, Yu has always been commended by teachers like Tang Hui and Cao Li on her works. She took pleasure in exploring various artistic styles, especially in the world of portraits. She admires Rembrandt, Ingres, and Durer, whose portraits are exemplary for their detail and precision. On the other hand, […]

There has been a public debate—at times a very heated and rancorous debate—between contingents of the Catholic Church and the arts community of Cologne, Germany. The community that commissioned and installed Gerhard Richter’s radiant stained glass windows in the Cologne Cathedral, commissioned architect Peter Zumthor’s scrupulously designed, meditative masterpiece, the Kolumba Museum, and have now […]

The nude is an art, an expressive form, a cry of freedom, a call to beauty. The nudes of Luccia Lignan talk to us about sensuality. Her women are sensitive and relaxed. They are grateful to be alive, and they demonstrate this gratitude in their body language. Despite being very conscious of their charms—their voluptuous […]

Every work of art embodies the worldview of its creator and simultaneously reveals a facet of the collective mind. As Marcuse said, "Art is a metaphysics in a moment." Considering Modernism and Post-Modernism, the importance of mystic and visionary states of consciousness have been downplayed or ignored by most artists, critics, and curators. Picasso’s Cubism […]

Gao Shan and I both tend to believe life itself is far more important than art. But it’s getting clearer that life is oftentimes not the way we’d like it to be. We don’t have too much of a choice in life and the infinity of the universe is just a delusion. We choose to […]