Sculpture (Sculpture)

Blindfold Receptor (caterpillar-yellow) by Leelee Chan is inspired by the camouflaging nature of the peppered-moth caterpillar. In 1800s Europe, during the industrial revolution, light-colored moths evolved into a darker color after trees in their habitat darkened by the polluting soot. Today, due to rapid human changes to the environment, caterpillars can adapt even before they metamorphose into moths, mimicking the colour of the branches they inhabit.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The series of drawings Cancha Abierta (Yellow Series) derive from a project in which Jesús ‘Bubu’ Negrón worked with the community of El Rosario, located in the region of Beni, Bolivia, approximately 500 meters away from the Mamoré River. Due to a major flood that affected the vicinity–the largest recorded to date–the location had been practically buried under mud. One of the most distressed areas was the basketball court, which was buried underneath three feet of mud.

Installation (Installation)

Named after a book that artist Shubigi Rao read growing up, The Yellow Scarf explores the history of the Thuggee cult in India in relation to the colonial British administration that ‘discovered’ but also ultimately exterminated this cult of assassins. The modern term ‘thug’ is said to be derived from Thuggee. Rao’s fascination with the Thuggee is interwoven with her parallel research into the strangler tree, found throughout South and Southeast Asia.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Set some time in the future, Sofía Córdova’s multi-channel film installation GUILLOTINÆ Wanna Cry, Act Yellow: Break Room imagines a public that worships pop stars and revolutionary leaders equally. The three channels of the video blend visual materials from pop culture, politics, news, and fine art, as well as choreographed dancers miming quotes from philosophers, reality television stars, radical political figures, and YouTube comment sections. Intermittently, they are interrupted or obscured by archival footage of press conferences, rallies, revolutions, invasions, and uprisings from the last century.

Photography (Photography)

According to Viktor Kochetov, Meeting with the awaited guest / Yellow Bows is the first hand-colored print he ever made. Although this might well be a part of the artist’s mythology, this image perfectly demonstrates the methodology the Kochetovs used in their work. The snapshot itself was created during a journalistic assignment to document the meeting between a WWII veteran and school children in the Kharkiv region.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Truong Cong Tung’s Journey of a Piece of Soil (2013) and its accompanying object-based installation of the same name (2014) consider the function of ritual in larger modes of collective engagement and cultural production. In examining how spirituality inflects social engagement, Truong’s contemplates the juncture at which the rational beings encounter the unexplained while also suggesting how embodied practices offer vital conduits for experiencing new modes of consciousness. The video features a man dressed in camouflage fatigues with a blue cap tilling a patch of red-clay soil amidst a green-stalk covered patch of land.

Photography (Photography)

Zhang Kechun’s photographic series The Yellow River documents the effects of modernization along the eponymous Yellow River, the second longest in Asia. The Yellow River is considered the cradle of Chinese civilization but also poses a great threat, as the river is capable of breaking its banks at any time. Inspired by the novel River of the North by Zhang Chengzhi, the artist travelled on a fold-up bicycle through eastern China’s Shandong province, where the river discharges vast amounts of water into the sea, before slowly tracing it westward over several month-long trips heading to the river’s source near the Bayan Har Mountain in Qinghai.

Photography (Photography)

Zhang Kechun’s photographic series The Yellow River documents the effects of modernization along the eponymous Yellow River, the second longest in Asia. The Yellow River is considered the cradle of Chinese civilization but also poses a great threat, as the river is capable of breaking its banks at any time. Inspired by the novel River of the North by Zhang Chengzhi, the artist travelled on a fold-up bicycle through eastern China’s Shandong province, where the river discharges vast amounts of water into the sea, before slowly tracing it westward over several month-long trips heading to the river’s source near the Bayan Har Mountain in Qinghai.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Braga’s video work Provisão (2009) opens with a still shot of a clearing in a forest, shoots of grass emerging from a muddy brown patch of seemingly dry and barren earth. As the camera fades to black, the viewer hears the repeated sound of a shovel striking dirt. The camera fades back to the clearing and zooms in on a shirtless man digging up the ground.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Flag (Thames) 2016 depicts a small section of the Thames River—one that is adjacent to the Palace of Westminster in London—as an algorithmic representation on an LED panel. The river color is vividly represented with reflections of buildings along the riverbank, including Big Ben. At the center of the scene sits a simulated gasoline spill.

Painting (Painting)

Juego de Banderas (a play on words that loosely translates to both set of flags and game of flags) is a triptych of modified Colombian flags by Antonio Caro. Although the yellow, blue and red stripes on the first flag are faithful to the original, the second flag at the center has been modified to feature the word Colombia, emulating the typography and white-on-red design of the iconic Coca-Cola brand. Caro’s first version of this logo was a 1976 graphite drawing, and he has since produced several variations in different materials.

Photography (Photography)

Zhang Kechun’s photographic series The Yellow River documents the effects of modernization along the eponymous Yellow River, the second longest in Asia. The Yellow River is considered the cradle of Chinese civilization but also poses a great threat, as the river is capable of breaking its banks at any time. Inspired by the novel River of the North by Zhang Chengzhi, the artist travelled on a fold-up bicycle through eastern China’s Shandong province, where the river discharges vast amounts of water into the sea, before slowly tracing it westward over several month-long trips heading to the river’s source near the Bayan Har Mountain in Qinghai.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Presented as part of a recent group of works titled The Paradox of Healing, Rhombus for Healing No. 2 by Sandra Monterroso brings together several of the artist’s interests: the use of ritual and medicinal elements; the conciliation of Western and indigenous formal languages; and more recently, sewing as a recognition and celebration of her maternal lineage. The series as a whole and this painting in particular continue her interest in textiles as visual references and cultural tools to address her native Guatemala’s complex political and cultural histories.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Marepe (an acronym for Marcos Reis Peixoto) is from northeastern Brazil, and his sculptures and installations are steeped in its culture, traditions, festivals; his personal memories associated with his birthplace; and his interactions with European culture. Periquitos (Parakeets, 2005) is a cartoonlike giant television with a screen made of four vertical strips of blue, yellow, green, and red acetate. There is a recurring figure on the screen, which is taken from a photograph of the artist at age six.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Hama Goro works with a traditional method called the Bogolan technique, which is inspired by a method used in Mali to color clothes. The ingredients of the various colors originate from natural products such as clay, leaves and bark. The colors had a symbolic significance and were used during ritual ceremonies.

Painting (Painting)

Bread and Roses takes its name from a phrase famously used on picket signs and immortalized by the poet James Oppenheim in 1911. “Bread for all, and Roses, too’—a slogan of the women in the West,” is Oppenheim’s opening line, alluding to the workers’ goal for wages and conditions that would allow them to do more than simply survive. Thomas’ painting includes several black, white, brown, yellow, and red raised fists—clenched and high in the air in the internationally recognized symbol of solidarity, resistance, and unity.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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.

Painting (Painting)

In this untitled acrylic painting, Tessa Mars explores the long-lasting effects of colonialism on the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, particularly in terms of female vulnerability and resilience. Drawing on her interest in retelling stories of her native country, and confronting the past and the present, Mars portrays her cultural essence and heritage by imagining spiritual spaces that connect people and land across time. With a pictorial practice that highlights pastel colors, the divinisation of the figures on the canvas and the spiritual elements within the composition ultimately enhance the narrative of her Caribbean ancestry while conflating the distinctions between autobiographical and historical events.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

I don’t remember is a video by Yung Jake that combines his passion for both music and the visual arts. As per several of his works the video borrows from the vernacular of rap and relies on the aesthetic and stylistic qualities of music videos. A humorous interpretation of the rap and hip hop genres, the video combines scenes from urban settings and snapshots of a party as the artist raps in a drowsy monotone about having forgotten the wild night.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa’s performance Illusion of Matter establishes a dream state through a composition of motifs that were drawn from the artist’s childhood memories. Ramírez-Figueroa recreated the components of the dream as giant props made out of polystyrene, and set in a colorful yellow and orange mise-en-scene. Throughout the performance, the props and set are activated and demolished by children under the artist’s direction.

Photography (Photography)

“In the 1980s I started using coloured paper backdrops, one of which was yellow. You can see they never reached the floor. I used them for colour and black-and-white photography.” Hashem El Madani.

Painting (Painting)

Figueiredo’s succinct forms are rendered in bright hues of yellow, red, green, and blue, with white and black defining positive and negative spaces within the overall geometry. His Revelos are part painting, part relief, and part sculpture—they separate from the wall, creating spatial complexities within their bounds, and imply movement through the simplicity of their shapes. Though based on the shape of a simple square, each Revelo animates beyond that limitation, the folded and layered canvas sheets, the cuts and slices of contrasting paints creating movement from stasis.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Adam is an emblematic work within Jean-Charles de Quillacq’s oeuvre. The artist has created a number of pieces entitled Adam , referring to original man, incarnated in multiple objects at once. Materially, Adam is a fluorescent yellow walking rope with an epoxy coating on one side, rendering the structure rigid, demonstrative of his sculptural practice which is both conceptual and sensual.

Installation (Installation)

Each day, Yuji Agematsu smokes a pack of cigarettes and wanders the streets of New York City looking for trash. Needless to say, he finds it everywhere: bottle caps, gummed hair, translucent miscellany, sick feathers, hot pink plastics, unknown, and more. The varied bits are then constellated by the artist in cellophane cigarette wrappers—modest vitrines for his steady collecting habit.

Painting (Painting)

Untitled (Boom Box, Double-Sided) by Mary Ann Aitken is representational painting of a boom box on an unconventionally long canvas painted on both sides, to mimic the scale and appearance of the actual appliance. Known for going against trends, Aitken often favored dimensions, such as the square, that were otherwise considered out of style in contemporary painting. In this double-sided painting, one side depicts the titular boombox set up—a boxy cassette player, flanked by a pair of stereo speakers in front of wood panelling.

Installation (Installation)

In the 1980’s, while browsing Parisian fleamarkets, Barbara Bloom stumbled into an anonymous watercolor (dating to around 1960) in one of Paris’ fleamarkets, probably a study made by an interior designer for a bedroom. The artist found the image to be typically Parisian. The watercolor, framed under a mat made of cardboard, had color tests on its margin, elements that Bloom discovered when she raised it.

Painting (Painting)

What Color is Luke Murphy’s outstanding digital painting that elegantly loops in nonstop motion. The artist cleverly usurped the familiar signage of brightly scrolling words that we ordinarily see calling out to advertise a Bodega or sidewalk cart’s fast food. In a DIY manner, Murphy constructed the extra-luminous LED panel screen and also wrote the code that sets the pace and pattern of the flowing words.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Filmed underwater, this is the third video in Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s “Memorial Project” series which began in 2001. The title already implies the cultural complexities about to be ironically unravelled: Ho Chi Minh is parodied and Okinawa (where this was filmed) was a battle site in Japan during World War II which then became an American training base during the Vietnam War. To a remix of James Bond movie tracks composed by Quoc Bao, no less than thirty divers in wet suits and full gear advance against the water resistance armed with cartridges of color.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the film Hustle in Hand (2014) we observe secret negotiations carried out between two characters with only their torsos visible in the frame— negotiations that consider fetishizations, meaning and symbolic value of the body and flesh. Money, food, appearances, and consumption: the viewer is pulled into a round of transactions, a rumination on our society in which art occupies a coveted position. The film’s rhythm is suddenly interrupted by the appearance of a green polyhedron that, once licked by one of the mysterious protagonists, becomes golden yellow, a magical event accompanied by an intense swelling of violin music.

Painting (Painting)

ChinaCapital: Dream, Hot Land, Interstellar Colonization by Pu Yingwei addresses a complicated phenomena of intertwined influences from different political powers, capital forces, and ideologies in the reality of China. The background of this painting is taken from an image of a Russian stamp featuring a space odyssey during the Cold War with the US. The composition juxtaposes colors from the Chinese national flag (red and yellow) and the US national flag (blue and red), echoing the current “cold war” between China and the U. S. Usually found surrounding a big star on the Chinese national flag, the 4 stars are here rearranged into a single line, symbolizing the artist’s wish for a decentralised and equal society.