Dr. N Song belongs Ozawa’s body of work The Return of Dr. N in which he follows a humorous fictional character based upon the historical figure Dr. Hideyo Noguchi who researched yellow fever in Ghana in 1927. Though Dr. Noguchi was known for his unruly temper and behavior and many of his discoveries were erroneous, he was widely revered in Japanese society. Ozawa’s Dr. N story explores links between Japan and Africa, past and present, fact and fiction, through the commissioned work of Ghanaian painters and musicians working in popular African styles.
Ozawa Tsuyoshi is a Japanese conceptual artist who constructs satirical takes on history. He often draws upon 1970s and 1980s Japanese history—the time of his childhood and Japan’s rapid economic growth. He co-founded with Chen Shaoxiong and Gimhongsok the artist collective “Xijing Men,” meaning people who come from the fictitious state of Xijing. Each of the artists consider historical events through images, installations, and performances.
In his evocative Landscape Paintings, McMillian uses second-hand bedsheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point...
At first glance, Cityscapes (2010) seems to be a collection of panoramic photographs of the city of Istanbul—the kind that are found on postcards in souvenir shops...
Untitled (Wheelchair Drawing) is a ten-foot photo transfer of the image of a wheelchair with burning embers in its seat...
Haendel’s series Knights (2011) is a set of impeccably drafted, nine-foot-tall pencil drawings depicting full suits of armor...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
Blind Spencer is part of the series “Blind Stars” including hundreds of works in which the artist cut out the eyes of Hollywood stars, in a symbolically violent manner...
Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title...
In this work the artist stages a humorously violent “intervention” against male-dominated cultures of art production in present-day China...
In the video installation A Gust of Wind , Zhang continues to explore notions of perspective and melds them seamlessly with a veiled but incisive social critique...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race....
Kwan Sheung Chi’s work One Million is a video work depicting the counting of bills...
Mario Garcia Torres films a game of Charades among professional actors guessing the former North Korean dictator’s favorite Hollywood films...
Like many of his other sculptural works, the source of I am the Greatest is actually a historical photograph of an identical button pin from the 1960s...
Hill of Poisonous Trees (three men) (2008) exemplifies the artist’s signature photo-weaving technique, in which he collects diverse found photographs—portraits of anonymous people, stills from blockbuster films, or journalistic images—cuts them into strips, and weaves them into new composition...