Retired Pillar represents the death and deterioration of legacy of colonial Shanghai. The silicon Corinthian column lays horizontal upon its pedestal, inflating and deflating in the rhythm of difficult breathing, as if exhausted by its lifelong labor. Shan comments on the deterioration of the influence of French colonialism within Shanghai as well as the adoption of Western forms of architectural decoration as symbols of wealth and power.
Jin Shan is an installation artist who uses humor, satire, and play to comment upon social and political power dynamics within contemporary China. He bases many of his works upon cultural symbols revered as the masterpieces of civilization from the Classical and Renaissance eras in order to deconstruct their ideals and expose the dynamics of power, ethics, and belief they maintain.
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...
In line with Hernández’s interest in catastrophe, Vulnerabilia (choques) is a collection of images of shipwrecks and Vulnerabilia (naufragios) collects scenes of car crashes...
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....
In Captain X , Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner, is limply draped over a large boulder in what looks like a hostile alien environment...
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...
Untitled (San Francisco) was made in Idaho in 1984 and was facetiously dedicated to Henry Hopkins, the then director of the San Francisco Museum of Art who added “modern” to its name...
In One Must , an image of a pair of scissors, accompanied by the words of work’s title, poses an ominous question about the relationship between the image and the text...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
Bread and Roses takes its name from a phrase famously used on picket signs and immortalized by the poet James Oppenheim in 1911...
Paint and Unpaint is an animation by Kota Ezawa based on a scene from a popular 1951 film by Hans Namuth featuring Jackson Pollock...
The voids in Baldessari’s painted photographs are simultaneously positive and negative spaces, both additive and subtractive...