Xu Di

Lure of the Body is the continuation of my previous series, Vivid as Fruit. All the still objects, plants, and dead bodies are transformed from seafood that infuses my work with life. They seem to own soul and body. Yet, deformed by violence, these objects become dead after all. These dead objects have wounds, viruses, and bacteria, which are presented in the texture of seafood.

In Vivid as Fruit, the viruses, wounds, dead objects, and abscesses are beautiful and cruel at the same time. I finally found that the festering wounds have invaded the depths of the skin. They have penetrated the body and begun to gnaw at our heart—dead objects have become some sort of spectacle in commercial society, a spectacle that has rooted in our mind. We sadly realize what we really lost is the sense of pain.

The body in ordinary life produces cruelty and absurdity in our mind. The imaginary misery comes from nowhere. But we’re protected by awareness, which is the imaginary fear that occurs when we are faced with the unknown future. However, it is lost; it has been overwhelmed by abscesses sugarcoated as fresh fruit and amazing delicacies in the world. Seafood is the mainstream consumer product nowadays. It is difficult to keep, subject to fluctuating prices, and is considered an expensive consumption item. The series shows the distorted value of consumption. To where will our earthly pleasures lead us? And who understands destruction? I can only tell you that everything I do, I do it for love.

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Simion Cernica

In today’s (post) Society of the Spectacle, where a historical art approach has failed to process satisfactory reality and to generate dynamic forms of specific language, the need to question the status quo of the arts and the artist is essential. Attempting to understand the historical, cultural, and political context can lead to an awareness that can be the conceptual base for research, production, and artistic acquisition of knowledge.

For me, the process of creation is a conscious and deliberate progression from start to finish. I begin to assemble aesthetic and ideological constructions by researching in a journalistic style. Working mainly with video/film, photography, installation, documented performance, but also with collage, painting, mixed media, and objects, I try to avoid Mannerism and common redundancies of the mediums.

When working with photography, I like to move freely without artificiality. I use the inner power of images from found or instant images that ask to be recorded. These images are also associated with ideas or concepts, which are carefully pre-selected or even staged visual constructions that reveal their own purposes on or through display, or require a conceptual combination of text.

I prefer simple film structures, impromptu street situations, or some times deliberately complicated narratives and performances executed for the camera, which are all filtered conceptually and reference art video and film history. I use mostly friends or strangers as actors, either recruited or found on the spot. In script-based video or controlled improvisation, I mainly focus on reenactments and post-YouTube aesthetics using recent or twentieth-century history, simplified or intensely repeated and exaggerated in order to refocus and challenge the viewer. I am currently working on a video series featuring some autobiographical and specific violent historical changes over the past 30 years in Romania and the U.S.

The whole journey of moving images gathers in episodes that seem to form parts of a bigger multimedia project or a personal video library divided on sectarian cinematic criteria that generate a continuous script.

My works, whether single, part of bigger installations, improvised, or created through the lengthy process of collecting information and processing artifacts, can be reduced to solitary symbols or connected to a broader ‘communication network’. This can, in turn, become of part of a (textual) construction that will remain alive and independent, taking the form of dry aphorisms or points of support for future trails.

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Sasha Bezzubov, interviewed by Leah Oates

Leah Oates: Why did you become an artist, and what do you think the function of an artist is in society?

Sasha Bezzuvov: I became an artist probably for the same reason many people become artists. What other activity allows a grown-up to spend entire days walking around their house in underwear without the disgrace of being considered unemployed.

As to the artist’s function in society—I see an artist as a small businessman, creating objects people collect for pleasure, for investment, or for reasons inscrutable. Sometimes these objects and the world they bring forth resonate within an art community and make people think and feel in unexpected ways. Visual art rarely reaches a massive audience; when it does it is in ways grotesque and distorted, think Pollack or Warhol. So any attribution to art’s influence needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Art’s function in society is little more than insignificant.

On a personal level, as someone who makes photographs, I derive great pleasure and meaning from thinking about the world and trying to find ways to represent it. It engages my mind and body in ways little else can. That for me is sufficient.

LO: Your work focuses on disaster sites, where nature and also humans have affected their environment. How did you come to focus on these themes?

SB: I was watching the news, and there was a program about an aftermath of a hurricane in Florida. The program showed typical American suburbs, cookie-cutter gated communities that are shorthand for the dystopia of the American dream. The usual order, peace, and mundanity of the suburb were suddenly ruptured by a cataclysmic event. The natural disaster ruptures this world and its attendant architecture of pretense. For instance, I made a photograph of a seemingly solid door, but which in fact has a hollow core. The bottom portion of the panel was torn off by a hurricane to reveal the honey comb-like structure such doors are made of. To me it’s a symbol of the seemingly solid world we live in.

I started to conceive of this work in the late 1990s, before the idea of climate change, global warming, and the increase in climate-driven catastrophic events reached the general public. At the time I had a strong feeling that these events had become more frequent and more devastating. The images I saw on the news left me a bit frustrated and uninformed. I wanted to be there to see and understand what actually happens after a natural disaster. This gave birth to the idea of making photographs after such events with a large-format camera that would describe in great detail what happens to houses and roads and trees after a hurricane or a wildfire. The first place I photographed was Bhuj in India after an earthquake in 2001.The two series of photographs that resulted, Things Fall Apart (2001-2007) and Wildfire (2003-2007), were made with a sensibility that is part Romantic, part Environmentalist.

The Romantic artist sought ancient ruins, through which to contemplate the fragility of all things. Rome, a kind of open-air laboratory of ruins, was often the culmination of the Great Tour. The French traveler Chateaubriand wrote, “It is thus that we are warned at each step of our nothingness, man goes to meditate on the ruins of emptiness, he forgets that he himself is a ruin still more unsteady, and that he will fall before these remains do.” In my mind though, a more relevant ruin for someone alive today, is the sight of a natural disaster. These ruins not only invite us to contemplate the nature of impermanence, but will hopefully nudge us to face our own culpability.

Most scientific community now agrees that climate-driven “natural disasters”—wildfires, hurricanes, and tornadoes are largely due to forces that are caused by rapid climate change, which is in turn caused by us, pumping great amounts of fossil fuels into the atmosphere as we have done since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Because these changes are in essence human-driven, you and I are ultimately responsible for the destruction these natural disasters cause.

LO: How is it for you on a personal level to be in areas where there has been so much destroyed. Is there a reason you do not photograph the people who have been affected, and what do you think the destroyed landscape can tell us about humans’ relationship to the environment?

SB: It is incredibly transporting to be in these places. There is no greater experience of the Sublime than a cross section of a city or miles of a burned forest. It is difficult not to be in awe of the power that turns the solid matter of our civilization into a grotesque curio. Wandering through scenes where objects of great familiarity have been so radically transformed has always made me feel like I was one of the last inhabitants on earth, like the characters in the novel The Road. I somehow survived the Big One, though only temporarily, and am now witnessing our world’s last exhalation. A disaster ruptures the infrastructure, makes the roads impassable, electricity absent, food and shelter not easily available. It makes you realize how completely dependent we are.

When I started working on these projects, I did include people in the photographs. When I looked at the work later, I found that the people had a normalizing effect on the scene; their presence implied to me that things are returning to stability, what is broken will be repaired and so on. The use of the human figure as a marker of hope is a trope in photojournalism; it seems to say that we will overcome, and this is something that I have some doubts about. So, not photographing the people affected is a conscious decision. I wanted these photographs to further the feeling of demise, not qualify them with a sense of hope.

The decision to limit the scope of these photographs to “natural disasters” as opposed to say, destruction caused by war, was compelled by a desire for the work to be somewhat open-ended. War photographs have an impossibly reductive message—war is evil, some party is to blame, this must be stopped, etc. My ambition was to look at destruction almost as a thing without agency, without somehow forgetting that we are the agency. The title for the series, Things Fall Apart, taken from W. B. Yeats’ poem seems to imply a work of indifferent entropy.

LO: Do you travel a lot to places around the world to photograph? Please elaborate.

SB: I travel mostly because I can’t work at home. I’ve been a bit of a nomad most of my life, and I am most motivated to work when on a move, when time feels precious, when I am surrounded by things strange and new, when I am away from the usual business of life. It has been both a blessing and a curse, but I no longer try to fight it.

LO: You just had a baby who is now over a year old. How has having a child affected you and your work?

SB: Having a child made me very tired, and has probably shaved a good ten years off my life. Though I love him to bits, I still do not understand why humans reproduce. I keep hearing that it gets easier, but I have yet to experience this. I now have enormous admiration for artists and all others who continue to create after children. It is a great miracle.

LO: Who are your favorite artists and why?

SB: Patti Smith for singing her heart out. Edouard Manet for painting the modern life and pissing off the Academy. Thomas Struth for showing the middle way. Also, J.M. Coetzee, Phillip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and the South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho to name just a few.

LO: What advice would you give to artists/photographers who are just starting out, and who want to get their work into shows or fairs?

SB: Ask yourself if your work really contributes anything of value to this world. If the answer is yes, it should give you enough conviction to knock on some doors and write some e-mails.

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Brian Wallace, curator at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at the State University of New York, New Paltz, interviewed by D. Dominick Lombardi

D. Dominick Lombardi: On the outside looking in, it appears to me that the big city museum has a tendency toward the blockbuster exhibition since they are angling to attract a large population base that is both indigenous and transient (tourists), whereas regional institutions, especially one like the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, which is situated on college campus, looks to have a responsibility to attract and educate your student base, as well as a local population that is scattered and remote. Yet, I see a very big plus side with the smaller regional museums that can take greater risks with shows that are more challenging to the viewer as you move outside of the “sure thing,” and perhaps, deal with issues like the environment, which your institution seems to be thinking about quite often.

Brian Wallace: There is a tension between the character of the regional museum and that of the university museum; effective regional institutions must harness the rootedness of the former and the inquisitiveness of the latter in their approach to audiences and programs. So, more and more, I see regional academic museums doing important work on local manifestations of national or international developments: our organizations can tell stories about and to local people, and add important, specific information to current debates about past, recent, and current artistic and academic practice. I also see these organizations working in various partnership modes—one-time, project-based, tactical collaborations to long-term, multi-institutional, strategic efforts—as a way to formulate interdisciplinary investigations of both familiar and less well-known aspects of the region’s art and culture. At the Dorsky Museum, for example, we’ve worked with our campus colleagues, a historical district, the village government, and private businesses on a summer-long project that places small artists’ studios around campus and town. We’re also working with several other organizations in the region on making collection databases—and the objects in those collections—more accessible to administrators and audiences.

DDL: This is a very potent “outreach” component you are talking about, which makes institutions like yours far more connected to your community, and that is great. Let’s call this your general underlying trend—to do what you can to help blur the line between community and institution. Do you see any trends with regard to the ways in which art is presented and displayed that further solidify the link to the community?

BW: The best outreach is organic; that is, it’s based upon, but it extends—perhaps in unexpected ways—questions about existing conditions.

Two examples: first, many regional museums host regular juried shows of regional work; like other institutions, we have tweaked the format of our annual show by emphasizing thematic consistency, by selecting outside curators with international experience with emerging artists, and by inviting SUNY New Paltz faculty and staff (formerly excluded, out of concern regarding conflicts of interest) to submit to the show. It’s worth dwelling on this latter point: changing conditions in academia means that art departments no longer have a handful of well-established artists who wouldn’t even be interested in a regional group show; art departments now are populated by greater numbers of part-time and non-tenure-track faculty who live in the region, who are active, engaged artists, and who are interested in participating in a regional group show. There are half dozen artists in our Hudson Valley Artists 2009: Ecotones and Transition Zones exhibition who teach here; their work is an integral part of the overall show.

Second, as a curator, it’s my great privilege to constantly scan and select from the field of artistic/creative activity in the region (and my great challenge to remain extremely sensitive to people and ideas while managing to operate as an effective and reliable administrator). So, 18 months ago, I was at a Center for Photography at Woodstock portfolio review, and Greg Miller presented me with the couldn’t-be-more-local-and-has-global-implications idea of photographing both banks of the Hudson from New York City to Albany. This idea—the brainchild of Scenic Hudson writer Reed Sparling—became a commissioned project consisting of an exhibition of two 80-foot-long prints with vintage and contemporary views of the two riverbanks, a publication produced with the assistance of the Open Space Institute and the Furthermore Foundation, and a trove of great stories about borrowed rides on borrowed boats and sudden storms on the Hudson, epic photo editing sessions, and astounding feats of physical endurance and technical savvy. The result is an historical document and a conceptually dense photographic work; other “outcomes” include new networks of area artists, experts, supporters, and audiences.

DDL: Having a sense of the regional artist pool is key, whether it be from the immediate area, or the adjunct art staff on campus. What about guest curators?

BW: There’s a long (and complicated, and contested) history of artists, intellectuals, collectors, and other people with a strong interest in the arts traveling to and living in this region. We’re taking advantage of this often hard-to-spot expertise by inviting a diverse group of people to organize selected exhibitions, events, and other programs at the museum in the coming years. Through these relationships, we hope to maintain a lively debate about regional art and regional issues, balancing a sense of place with a sense of discovery, and balancing an awareness of history with an awareness of new developments.

The post Reaching Out appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Mircea Nicolae

One day I left my house and visited a park during a time of my life when things were not going very well. It inspired me and I soon began to do different things in the deserted spaces. I started to visit these places because of the powerful impact that these abandoned places had on my senses.

My project started as a form of therapy and it was extremely important to me as a person. It was also a way of staying in touch with someone I loved. Gradually things changed, people surrounded me, and in the end, my interior monologue dissipated to some extent.

Usually I place the things I do under the name of intervention. One always works on a context that changes in the end, whether this happens in the street, inside a gallery, in front of a public, or within the general art system.

Between July 2008 and July 2009 I had a home gallery in the living room of the apartment where I live with my mother and sister. At the end of the 10 exhibitions that took place, all of the exhibits were given to the public through a raffle or tombola process. Through this gesture, I was trying to criticize two types of behavior (I was bothered by the gallery circuit in Bucharest). One was the evident lack of interest for the exhibited work coming from the people who were present at the openings; the other was preferential socializing, based on the different power relations on the local art scene.

After my home gallery closed, I continued to work on my own and to support the work of other young Romanian artists through my curatorial projects. In 2009, I won a six-month residency at the Romanian Cultural Institute in Venice, which I turned into an exhibition opportunity for young Romanian artists, who were selected via an open call.

The name of the project was Young Romanian Art, and it took place between July and November 2009, in the New Gallery of the Romanian Institute in Venice. It was made up of a series of 14 one-week exhibitions that were trying to promote the work of 33 young Romanian artists during the Venice Biennial 2009.

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Mihal Iepure-Górski

If I were to mention two important moments in my formation as an artist, those would be the time I spent in Bilbao on a stipend studying video and performance, and the Jaan Toomik exhibition in Bucharest I saw shortly after coming back to Romania. They were both significant in the sense that they underlined my breakup with what I had been studying in sculpture at the university. They weren’t shocking or strongly revealing but they encouraged me to continue making art in a direction that was realizing more and more for me at the time. I haven’t and still do not consider myself a performance artist. However, I did start off by making short videos, or taking photographs, documenting short performances.

I enjoy making work in an unprompted type of way, without any rehearsal or additional takes; this way the work has the impression of the result being unrepeatable. And that feels somewhat good. Still, putting out new work is difficult. It has to do with feeling responsible for releasing something that might be improper or “wrong.” Therefore I try staging things as less as possible. If my intervention is minimal then there is less blame involved. I am also usually having someone else taking the shot or recording the video.

Lately, I am more and more interested in the “usefulness” of my work. A “Gotta serve somebody” (Bob Dylan) thing, not religious, mostly ethical. One of my latest projects started with the idea of picketing an art institution and/or an event. Eventually I gave up the picketing idea and got left with this banner with statement: “Absence from the art scene doesn’t mean I’m not here.”

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Edward Rubin

If ever there was a middle-of-the-road exhibition, (read Sandra Bullock minus the Jesse James scandal), this Whitney Biennial is it. In an effort to pull off an “Obama Change” and ostensibly please everybody, traditional, nattering, nabob art critics included, guest curator, Francesco Bonami, and Whitney senior curatorial assistant, Gary Carrion-Murayari, with a few standout exceptions, turned what is usually a messy and colorful cacophony of coloratura voices all fighting to be heard, into a relatively tame, and well-ordered blue-haired lady, one that lacks color, speaks mostly in low hushed tones, and prefers dressed-down matinees rather than paparazzo-fueled red carpet openings.

Outwardly the change in tailoring is obvious. There are fewer artists on view than usual. Most of the films and videos are on one floor, and art that one could call entertaining, compelling, brave, gay, cutting-edge, obscene, or breaking-new-ground, if appearing at all, has been kept to a minimum. The change du jour is on the 5th floor. Here, celebrating the 75th edition of the Whitney Biennial are 50 works, many textbook-famous, culled from past biennial and annual exhibitions. It is interesting to note that the first biennial held in 1932 boasted the work of 358, predominately male artists. This biennial, politically correct to a fault, seems to have bent over backwards to equally balance gender, generation, and various artistic practices, among the 55 exhibiting artists.

While the curators claimed to have scoured the country in search of artists that truly represent the year 2010, “We thought that geographic boundaries and limitations would help to build a more defined exhibition. We stopped at the Pacific Ocean, the Mexican border, the Atlantic coast, and the Canadian border,” the majority of the artists selected for the biennial live in the art cities of New York (31), Los Angeles (11), and Chicago (4). Most of the works on view are from the collection of the artist, while some 60 percent are listed as courtesy of their gallery. Underscoring the mind-set of the biennial the curators go on to write, “We looked to Hawaii, but without success; we did not feel too bad, though, since Hawaii is celebrated by leaving the coolest artist of all in the White House.”

In an exhibition with so few works, and so much space to contemplate them in, it is easy, at least initially, as some works take longer to register, to separate the diamonds from the costume jewelry. As usual, thinking of the last two biennials, the strongest works fall into the video category. Perhaps this is because both eyes and ears are forced to focus. Josephine Meckler’s wordless video, transferred to DVD, Mall of America (2009), a cultural indication of what this country is about, is an otherworldly examination of conspicuous consumption in saturated hues of red, blue, and yellow. Slowly panning a near peopleless mall from stores displays, to escalators, to an amusement rides, with eerie music in the background, one would think we were in some kind of wax museum rather than a shopping mall that plays host to 40 million people a year.

On the other end of the spectrum, loud and brassy, is Marianne Vitale’s in-your-face video Patron (2009). Staring directly into the camera, the filmmaker and performance artist, obviously having a grand old time, spends some eight minutes screaming a litany of commands to the viewer. Ironically welcoming us to “the Future of Neutralism,” she orders us to stand up, open our mouths, recite tongue twisters, and spit at the ceiling. On the more contemplative side, quoting a Joseph Beuy’s 1972 performance piece is Bruce High Quality Foundation’s ambulance-cum-hearse installation We Like America and America Likes Us (2010). YouTube video clips, Hollywood movies, and new media flash across the front window while a poetically scripted female voiceover, treating America variously as a lover, a family member, and a friend, exposes the strengths and weaknesses of our country, which in no small way turn out to be ours as well.

Occupying the same gallery as the hearse is Lorraine O’Grady’s The First and the Last of the Modernists (2010). Simple, subtle, and tellingly clever by half, 75-year-old O’Grady, the oldest artist in the exhibition, in a series of photographs taken at different times during their short lives, compares the meteoric rise and fall of Michael Jackson to that of Baudelaire. She could have chosen Elvis, or for that matter, any one of us and made the same point. On the gruesome shock and awe side, adding a bit social relevance, as well as blood and guts, like Spike Lee’s Hurricane Katrina film When The Levies Broke, which was shown in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, the work of two photojournalists have been added to the mix. Stephanie Sinclair’s series, Self-Immolation in Afghanistan: A Cry for Help (2005) document women who, in acts of desperation set themselves on fire, while Nina Berman’s series Marine Wedding (2006/2008), commissioned by People magazine, follows the heart-wrenching life of Ty, whose face was blown off during a suicide bomber’s attack. Both are painful to look at.

Also drawing attention to the body, perhaps the subtheme of the biennial, are the videos of Jesse Aron Green, Rashaad Newsome, and Kelly Nipper. In Artzliche Zimmeregymnastic (Medicalized Indoor Gymnastics, 2008), Green, using 16 male performers to execute 45 exercises taken from an 1858 “health and vigor of body and mind” book, one used well into the 1920s as a guide to moral behavior. In Untitled (New Way), 2009, Newsome using dancers known for their voguing abilities (the dance had its origins in New York’s gay ballroom culture during the 1960s and 1970s) recorded their various dancing styles. Through the process of editing, which removed these performances from their historical context, the artist created a new dance composed entirely of abstract movements. In Nipper’s, somewhat similar video, Weather Center (2009), dancer Taisha Paggett emulates the stylized gestures and movements of early modern dance pioneer, Mary Wigman.

One of the most unexplainably satisfying works of art on view, arguably more arts and craft than art, is Jessica Jackson Hutchins’ obsessively collaged installation Couch For a Long Time (2000). Going back to the theme of Obama, I understand her point; as a touchstone the image of Obama is hard to avoid. Hutchins has covered her childhood living room couch with hundreds of photos of Obama taken from newspapers. Resting on the couch are several ceramic sculptures. Two are vessels, and two resemble severed limbs. As one critic wrote about her work, “steeped in a California funk attitude, her papier-mâché sculptures and collages share a crass aesthetic and a preoccupation with the thin line between disaster and success that disguise a genuine attempt to convey ideas about communion, fear, and loneliness.” The same thing can be said about much of the work in this year’s biennial.

The post When Less Replaces Mess appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Jill Smith

Putting Renaissance sculptures at the forefront of her paintings, Stefania Mainardi’s work turns these ancient characters into the paintings’ primary subject matter, making them the focal points in each piece. Painted in such an attentive, detailed way these painted statues possess a vitality that makes them appear closer to life. Finding those warm tones in the ordinarily cold marble sometimes gives the viewer a way to find a slight flush in that silent stone, and maybe even imagine a pulse underneath that still surface. The color palette Mainardi uses for these aged statues is quite unique. Though describing something existing as a single color, Mainardi finds an array of tones and colors that generate an entire spectrum of shades. One is able to find reds, blues, yellows, and any combinations there of. This feature in Mainardi’s work displays her technical skill as a painter, and adds a certain dynamism to her work, adding a radiating life to an otherwise stoic object.

In some of her pieces the facial features and the entire head of the statues are not there, just the central part of the body. There seems to be an opposite effect of her blushing tones, a reinforcement of the fact that this is a statue being viewed. The proud, staged poise of the figures reiterates its theatrical intent and unreal presence. Regardless of the varying characters’ vivacity, there is something in the broader picture that ties all of the artist’s pieces under her own aesthetic. Whether as cold as stone, or flushed with life, these statues and her work consistently possess a character that is all of Mainardi’s own.

The juxtaposition of the human figure with geometric and architectural elements is a theme that remains constant throughout all of Mainardi’s works. In some there is only some flatly spread paint cleanly contained within geometric shapes, somewhat referential to Mondrian’s work. In others, there is the same flat application of paint, but with some subtle gradation and movement to and from different shades. There is also some general construction of an architectural setting in the background. In a few, it even seems to allude to a similar time and place (as the statues). Set against Roman arcs, pillars, and columns, these statues appear right at home, with the exception of the flattened description, distancing itself from the figures, existing in a much more contemporary time. This kind of approach to painting was something that arrived many years after the classical periods, making Mainardi’s combination of her painting technique and subjects a rather unusual mix. This visual—the divergence of subject matter and background, the aesthetic gap between object and environment—is the main weight behind Mainardi’s paintings. The pairing of these two aesthetics is surprising and establishes a wavering experience for the viewer. Produced solely from components of the Renaissance era, Mainardi’s work is expected to put forth an archaic and classical quality. However, the artist’s decisions in her unique dissections of the subject matter contest to that notion and put forth a different kind of feeling, with objects floating, completely ungrounded and taking repetitious rhythms in a sort of contemporary style. These pieces speak in a modern tone despite their antiquated subjects. The aligned, recurring architecture could perhaps be referential to the ancient times, but with Mainardi’s ungradiated style, slick and clean, the architecture becomes part of another period in time.

Mainardi’s paintings muse and fuse the classical and the modern, the portrait and the landscape, the flat and the defined. These pieces communicate an entanglement of time, the old meeting the new and a general clashing and meshing of foils.

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Laura Aguilar

I am a visual artist who primarily works with photography, although I have tiptoed in video and performance art as well. I have been engaged in public service through the work that I have done with at-risk youth through the juvenile correctional system at the California Youth Authority, among others. I like the idea of tip-toeing in my discipline; it suggests that I am willing to explore different themes, approaches, and ideas. Since 1985 I have been exhibiting my photographic artwork locally, nationally, and now, internationally.

My journey as an artist is both personal and political. I highlight the sociological by showing a world composed of individuals (including myself) who are varied, assertive, and intimate. I have concentrated on identity, culture, and outsider status. This has generally resulted in my work reflecting on issues such as gender, size, and people of color. A lot of my past work was concerned with the body, my own and others. As you can tell from my work, I have an interest in how large vessels move within increasingly compact societies, both physically and intellectually.

Over the last few years I have begun to experiment through photography with how the body moves. This has also led me to begin investigating the spiritual aspects of the body and how it rejuvenates through nature. I am in search of images that convey balance, grace, and serenity. This is obviously a shift in my own perceptions and desires, moving from urban portraiture to a larger idea of seeing ourselves in the ever expanding and shifting relationship to the nature. In a way, I was always moving towards a culture, but now the definition of what it is has profoundly shifted for me. I was always defined (and profoundly accepted) by the identity markers that were given to me, Chicana, female, lesbian, working-class, etc. But, now I am expanding those ideas to include a larger worldview that positions me as a central part in the landscape of nature.

These images have also served as a form of empowerment and acceptance for the audience and myself. Women taking ownership of their bodies and allowing forgiveness of self as a form of healing is one of the ways in which I have approached my work. It is as much formal experiment as it is a societal gift.

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Shen Yi

My work mainly comes from my own personal experience. When people look at my work, I hope they will first be moved, and then they are forced to think. If my work compels them to do that, I consider it a success. I came back to China in 2008, and this is the first group of people who interested me. They are teenage migrants who work in typical urban professions. They live in dormitories provided by their employers. With very low wages, life is tough. Yet they are open and filled with dreams of their own. I wanted to depict this group, but a simple documentary isn’t enough for me, so I looked for solutions between documentary and surrealism. The entire series took over half a year to complete.

All characters and settings are real, except the light markings, which I draw on the spot with a flashlight. There are two reasons for the dark night setting. First, these young people work until very late in the evening, which made it possible to do the light effects. Secondly, their existence and their living condition to me are dark and depressing. Yet, their strength and energy are extraordinary; this explains what “light” stands for here. On this consumerism-driven world their simple existence sheds light, just like the light markings in each image. I started with a series of still photography, and then went on to edit a short film with the images.

“Ne Zha” in the Chinese work title is a legendary character in Chinese literature. He is a kid hero, someone with supernatural powers. He is filled with wisdom, and has all sorts of interesting “gadgets.” Ne Zha was my favorite character as I was growing up. When I came up with the Chinese title, I thought of a film by director Cai Ming-Liang, the English title of which was The Neon God, which shared the same Chinese title as my work. It sounded perfect for this series, so I borrowed it. God is the one who governs everything. There is a level of conflict and irony, because these young people who are called the Neon God, are governed by life, left with very little choice. With certain romanticism, I want to give them back their supernatural power so they could determine their own life and future.

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