A mesmerizing experience of a vaguely familiar yet remote world, History of Chemistry I follows a group of men as they wander from somewhere beyond the edge of the sea through a vast landscape to an abandoned steel factory. Using long shots and atypical settings, Lu Chunsheng enigmatically refers to a distant history while conveying the sense of dislocation wrought by successive stages of modernization. The combination of elaborate landscape shots from the suburbs of Shanghai and Lu’s signature style of spare and minimally crafted acting offers a surreal view of human behavior in spaces marked by the hulking remnants of China’s extraordinary development.
The painting Index (Tokyo) includes an image of a protest march in Japan. There is some humor in this image and also cultural contextual confusion and displacement, embodied in the painting. The protest we can see on the clipping is against two things : 1)recently the Japanese government revised the constitution (some say illegally) so that the right to collective self-defense is possible; this basically re-militarizes Japan ending decades of pacifism and this sparked the largest public protests in recent years and 2) the protestors are also marching against re-starting nuclear power plants in Japan post-Fukushima.
Ana Roldán’s Displacements works use images taken from a 1970s exhibition catalogue for an exhibition called The Death in Mexico. Using pre-Columbian objects and other artifacts from Mexican history, the exhibition aimed to explore various representations of death in the Mexican cultural tradition. Roldán’s works begin with these rich black-and-white photographs and break them apart into fragments, slicing and dismembering the artifacts they depict.
Making Chinatown (2012) is a remake of Roman Polanski’s 1974 classic neo-noir film Chinatown . According to Wong, the latter is a “textbook” of Hollywood filmmaking . In Ming’s version, he plays all four main characters portrayed originally by Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston, and Belinda Palmer, shooting against a backdrop of a film set reproduced as wallpaper in a gallery space.
Since the beginning of his career, Minamikawa Shimon has made work that deviates from conventional painting and other formats...
A mesmerizing experience of a vaguely familiar yet remote world, History of Chemistry I follows a group of men as they wander from somewhere beyond the edge of the sea through a vast landscape to an abandoned steel factory...
Ana Roldán’s Displacements works use images taken from a 1970s exhibition catalogue for an exhibition called The Death in Mexico...