Steve Lafreniere: Who are the men in these drawings? Jeff Davis: They are more symbolic than anything, but even what I loosely identify them with will sometimes shift within a single drawing. I do think of them as archetypal, though, and as me. SL: The totem-pole clusters of trees, figures, and cartoon faces are like […]

Michael Hakimi is a Berlin-based artist and Simone Neuenschwander is a curator at Kunsthalle Basel. Hakimi’s exhibition Roof will be on view there until mid-November. Simone Neuenschwander: Many of your works have an abundance of abstract forms and ornaments that remind one of cultural, political, or daily signs. They appear in your pictures as well […]

Gerald Davis: So what is preoccupying you these days? Jared Buckhiester: I’ve just been making work and enjoying my summer. Finally signed up for Netflix and been working my way through old movies I’ve wanted to see. Also, I just started taking classical ballet at the Alvin Ailey School, which has been surprisingly satisfying. GD: […]

One can only marvel at the voracity with which the demons of the New York gallery/museum scene have scrupulously resurrected some of the lost souls of the 1960s after paying no attention to them for 45 years and allowing them to grow old and gray while children were given license to spread their excrement on […]

Spencer Finch is a New York–based artist and Susan Cross is a curator at Mass MoCA. Finch’s solo show What Time is it on the Sun?, which Cross curated, will be on view at Mass MoCA until March 31, 2008. Susan Cross: In one of the new pieces made for MASS MoCA, A Few Days […]

Chi-Rund Tseng on Wang Ya-hui Wang Ya-hui , a young Taiwanese artist who won the 2007 Loop Award in Barcelona, has worked mainly in video since 2002. In the 2006 Shanghai Biennale, Wang Ya-hui’s work Sunshine on Tranquility was installed on the top floor of the museum. Richard Vine, editor of Art in America described […]

Let Me Introduce Myself is the second line of an email KimSu Thelier received earlier this year from someone claiming to be her younger half-brother in South Korea that she never knew she had. It is the first in a series of five email messages that inspired Thelier’s installation at the White Dot Gallery on […]

Ulrike Münter on Xia Xing In 2004, Chinese artist Xia Xing (born in 1974 in Shihezi, Xinjiang province, now living in Beijing) started a picture chronicle, wherein he paints from front-page photographs from issues of Xin Jingbao (New Beijing News, published since November 2003). These photographs, reporting about remarkable events—more or less faithfully to details—are […]

Jade Franklin on Guo Wei Born in 1960, Guo Wei was six years old when Mao Zedong declared his campaign to rid China of “bourgeois liberalism”—that infamous period in Chinese history known as the Cultural Revolution. He was alive during the material shortages, the dictated restrictions, and the ever-present apprehension that characterized this time, but […]

Jane Tippet on Tu Hongtao What is the essence of contemporary Chinese art? Is there such a thing as a fundamental core in this ever-changing and evolving genre? In 2005, the iconic artist Yue Minjun asserted, “Modern Chinese art devotes most of its attention to reality. And as almost every artist reaches out his antennae […]