03:55 minutes
Yang Song’s Die features a clay mask of the artist himself slowly dissolving into water. Clay returns to clay. Clay originates from and returns to earth, becoming a metaphor for life. Here influenced by the traditions of temples and Chinese burial customs, the simple gesture of creation-destruction explores questions of transformation to provide a vision of life cycle as nonlinear but continuous. The choice of materials echoes a fundamental divergence between Western and Eastern classical traditions of sculpture: if classical Western sculpture preferred materials like stone and bronze for their relative inflexibility while discarding clay for its malleability and fragility, classical Eastern sculpture commonly used clay as a primary material.
Yang Song was trained as a sculptor in both Western and Eastern traditions, which continue to influence his practice today. Yang’s sculptures often follow traditional methods, evoking ancient Buddhist status and the terracotta warriors of Xi’an yet leaving them unfired so they would crack and eventually crumble to dust. Similarly, Yang Song conceptually treats his videos and drawings as sculptures, specifically in their presentations. For him, a sense of permanence is intrinsic to sculpture beyond the sole materials that may span centuries. Yet, for the artist, inflexibility is not what gives sculptures a sense of eternity, but rather its fragility and transience inherent to our eternity and human condition.
This photograph of Martin Creed himself was used as the invitation card for a fundraising auction of works on paper at Christie’s South Kensington in support of Camden Arts Centre’s first year in a refurbished building in 2005...
Organizers decry last-minute cancelation of Hanoi EDM festival (via Tuoi Tre News) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles November 27, 2018 An EDM (electronic dance music) festival scheduled to take place just outside Hanoi from November 23 to 25 was asked to cancel only hours before its opening, despite sold tickets and foreign and local artists and volunteers already heading to the venue...
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Artist Wong Kit Yi’s A River in the Freezer combines directed and found footage to meditate upon glacial memory, cryogenics, and frozen fiction...
Archaeologists Find Evidence of Hallucinogenic Drug in Ancient Rome Skip to content A bust of Emperor Trajan surrounded by black henbane seends and flowers and a femur discovered by archaeologists (edit Valentina Di Liscia/ Hyperallergic ) Two new archaeological finds suggest Roman subjects at the northern edge of the ancient empire used a hallucinogenic and poisonous plant called black henbane, the effects of which were described by Greek philosopher Plutarch as “not so properly called drunkenness” but rather “alienation of mind or madness.” Dutch zooarchaeologists Maaike Groot and Martijn van Haasteren and archaeobotanist Laura I...
© 2023 All rights reserved - The Eye of Photography Olivier Culmann, URSSAF Normandie, site du Havre @ Olivier Culmann Le Havre, Seine-Maritime, Normandie, France 10/05/2023 © Olivier Culmann / Tendance Floue @ Thomas Jorion @ Sidonie Van Den @ Isabelle Scotta @ Carlo Lombardi S From October 21st to January 7th, 2024, for its 14th edition, 25 international photographers, both established and emerging, can be discovered in an open-air exhibition tour throughout the city, on the beach, and indoors at Point de Vue and Les Franciscaines...
Commissioned for the 2012 Whitney Biennial, Hearsay of the Soul (2012) is Werner Herzog’s ode to the landscape paintings of the 17th-century Dutch artist Hercules Segers...