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. The drawings incorporate both traditional and contemporary Chinese landscape techniques to reflect on the memory, history, and aesthetic practices of the Chinese laborers who played a prominent role in the American westward expansion. By representing the Western landscape according to Chinese aesthetics, Lam calls attention to the distortions and cultural specificity of American representations of the Western landscape and non-Western cultures.
Lam Tung Pang uses both traditional and non-traditional Chinese ink techniques and materials for his landscapes, referencing notions of collective memory that relate to specific sites. Lam’s coming-of-age coincided with drastic social changes, a result of his homeland’s decolonization from constitutional monarchy and new allegiance to China in a short span of time. Traversing between the media of painting, site-specific installation, sound and video, Lam’s playful practice arises from a curious imagination that recombines traditional iconography and vernacular materials, innovating with a myriad of found objects and images to form new practices that are often experimental in nature. Lam’s works engage the themes of collective memories and fleeting nostalgia, which articulate an ongoing negotiation of the overlapping city-state’s reality. In his allegorical landscapes, journeys and sceneries become essential passages connecting time and distance, longing and loss.
Palo Enceba’o is a project by José Castrellón composed of three photographs, two drawings on metal, and a video work that creates a visual and cultural analogy between the events of January 9th, 1964 in Panama City and the game of palo encebado carried out in certain parts of Panama to celebrate the (US-backed) independence from Colombia...
His large installation entitled The Museum of Proletarian Culture (2012) looked at the changes in artistic practice that have occurred in Russia throughout the last thirty years – from the amateur art of the late Soviet era to the commercialized post-Soviet cultural practices and the more recent self-expression via contemporary social networks...
With a habit of reading eight to ten books at the same time, Chong paints his two-foot tall novel covers through referencing an extensive reading list (accessible on Facebook) he has kept since 2006...
Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc...
Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc...
Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc...
Searching for We’wha is composed of five photographic triptychs combining photographs from the American West (New Mexico and Arizona) with excerpts from American Indian poetry in an attempt to reconstruct imaginary aspects of the life of We’Wha, a famous member of the Zuni tribe, who was born male but who lived a feminine gender expression...