Nuevo Dragon City is a reenactment of a historical event from 1927 in which six Chinese were either trapped or voluntarily hid themselves inside a building in northern Mexico. Working with this unsettled mystery, De La Torre’s video inquires into the historical and continuing tensions between Chinese and Mexicans. As such, Nuevo Dragon City depicts a symbolic act of self-entrapment in which six untrained actors of Chinese descent silently blockade themselves inside in an empty Tijuana storefront. As they close off the outside world, their surroundings and actions become a powerful commentary on the social reality of immigrants.
Sergio De La Torre has worked with and documented the manifold ways in which citizens reinvent themselves in the city they inhabit, as well as the site-specific strategies they deploy to move “in and out modernity.” De La Torre often collaborates with his subjects, resulting in both intimate and critical reflections on topics like housing, immigration, and labor. De La Torre approaches these individuals not as victim-subjects, but as people who have attempted to reexamine the meaning of their actions in the context of shifting global conditions.
In 1977, as an already-established artist best known for his films, Bruce Conner began to photograph punk rock shows at Mabuhay Gardens, a San Francisco club and music venue...
Unlike many of his earlier films which often present poignant critiques of mass media and its deleterious effects on American culture, EASTER MORNING , Conner’s final video work before his death in 2008, constitutes a far more meditative filmic essay in which a limited amount of images turn into compelling, almost hypnotic visual experience...
The video 9000 PIECES by Euan Macdonald was filmed at a musical instrument factory in Shanghai where 90 percent of the pianos that they manufacture are exported around the world, and only 10 percent are “finished” and can be labeled “Made in the US (or) Europe.” The video captures an intricate network of mechanisms as they interact with each other, their rhythmic movements resulting in an intense choreography and a cacophony of metallic sounds dramatized by Macdonald’s editing...
A photograph of a tin box full of marijuana simply titled Green Box, speaks to the constantly changing status of the substance–once taboo or illicit, now a symbol of a growing industry in Northern California...
This is not in Spanish looks at the ways in which the Chinese population in Mexico navigates the daily marginalization they encounter there...
The West Hollywood Artist Who Immortalised LA’s Golden Boys | AnOther A new exhibition in New York showcases the work of Kenneth Kendall, an artist who sculpted James Dean, Marlon Brando and more in the bohemian atmosphere of late 20th-century Los Angeles February 06, 2024 Text Miss Rosen Back in the 1950s, Hollywood’s fabled Melrose Avenue was still a sleepy street home to cabinetmakers and print shops catering to the local community...
This is not in Spanish looks at the ways in which the Chinese population in Mexico navigates the daily marginalization they encounter there...
Lam Tung Pang created Sketches from train ride Chicago to San Francisco during his travels through the United States researching American curatorial strategies for representing traditional Chinese painting in museums and cultural institutions...
In Hsu’s work, Colonia China (2014), the artist documents a Chinese cemetery of Costa Rica’s Limón Province, along the country’s Caribbean coast...
Chinese restaurants have been a familiar feature of Swedish cities since the late 1970s, embodying the foreign and the exotic...