© » KADIST
Yin-Ju Chen
One Universe, One God, One Nation was inspired by Hannah Arendt’s analysis of space exploration and by the astrological horoscope of Chinese political and military leader Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975). Chiang was born with the sun in Scorpio and at the Ninth House, moon in Aries, and ascendant in Capricorn, signifying an individual who is headstrong, intense, and persistent, with a desire for leadership. Yin-Ju juxtaposes images of outer space, war, and subservient masses, calling attention to how the dictator’s violence and charismatic power over the crowd was predicted by his particular astrology.
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Fang Lu
In the work Cinema , Fang Lu explores in a meticulous yet un-dramatic — almost casual — way of how “the self” in our today’s life is a controlled and staged construction of oneself. What appears at first sight to be a not unusual performance of self-choreography, becomes at a second glance a disturbing portrait of a – female – persona brought to life under contemporary conditions of attractiveness, anxiety and narcissism. Unlike her previous works, which duel more on the internal, surrealistic human conditions, this seven-channel work elevates the individual relationship with its socio-political environment to a more recognizable and appealing set of behavioral actions of self-awareness and self-inflicted anguish.
© » KADIST
Yin-Ju Chen
Extrastellar Evaluations is a multimedia installation produced during Yin-Ju Chen’s residency at Kadist San Francisco in the spring of 2016. Chen’s project departs from a 19th century theory popular within Western biogeography that posited the existence of a “lost land” or ancient continent called Lemuria that had sunk beneath the Indian and Pacific Ocean due to cataclysmic geological change. As a result, its inhabitants, the Lemurians, found refuge in Mount Shasta, California.
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Yee I-Lann
Sarcastically titled to call attention to the problematic notions underlying colonialism, this photograph shows hundreds of Native Malaysians seated quietly behind one of their colonial oppressors. The artwork belongs to Yee’s series Picturing Power (2013) that deals with the destabilizing impacts of neo-colonialism and globalization on Southeast Asia’s history. Yee approaches the aesthetics and politics of the ethnographic gaze with both irony and humanity, challenging the modes of seeing inherent to the British colonization of Malaysia.
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Richard T. Walker
let this be us is a single-channel video by Richard T. Walker featuring the artist himself roaming around the wilderness of a deserted landscape, sporadically humming a melody, strumming a guitar, or playing a few notes on a keyboard. As he traverses between striking locations we see him carrying large photographic prints of the same landscape that he is treading, which he then rests onto tripods so that the horizon in the photograph seamlessly matches that of the real landscape. As we hear the music, Walker comes in and out of view, dissipating into the landscape as his body becomes invisible, hidden behind the photographic prints.
© » KADIST
Lynn Hershman Leeson
Lynn Hershman Leeson’s genre-bending documentary Strange Culture tells the story of how one man’s personal tragedy turns into persecution by a paranoid, conservative, and overzealous government. Through interviews, scripted acting, and illustrations, Hershman Leeson outlines the series of absurd events that led to New York state’s case against the former SFAI Associate Professor and artist Steve Kurtz. By closely following Kurtz’s story, Hershman Leeson reveals a strange ripple effect of the Bush administration’s destructive policies.
© » KADIST
Yee I-Lann
PANGKIS by Yee I-Lann is a looped video performance. The work is named after the triumphant warrior cry, an animistic guttural call, which punctuates the traditional Dusun Sumazau dance. For this work, the artist collaborated with Tagaps Dance Theatre, a group of young dancers whose practice merges traditional and contemporary styles.
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Nalini Malani
Malani draws upon her personal experience of the violent legacy of colonialism and de-colonization in India in this personal narrative that was shown as a colossal six channel video installation at dOCUMENTA (13), but is here adapted to single channel. The video is largely silent until violent crashes and female voices overwhelm the viewer, portraying the inner voice of a woman who is brutally gang raped. Malani addresses the fatal place of women in Indian society and the geo-politics of national identity.
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Mauricio Ancalmo
War Footage is a series of wall-mounted works composed of 16mm film leader, tightly bound to flag-shaped panels by the artist. In their monochrome simplicity — some white, some black, one red — they bring to mind Rauschenberg’s minimalist paintings from the 50’s; the shape and repetitive figuration bring to mind Jasper John’s later flag paintings. Modifications to the blank leader – holes, letters, random dots and dashes – were created by the machinations of previous Ancalmo pieces.
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Xiaoyun Chen
In the video work Drag, a man in a dark room pulls on the end of a rope. In midst of sounds of heavy breathing, the camera presents alternating scenes of a man and the shadow of a man wearing a long, pointed hat cast against a wall. Insinuating a sinister mood, the man and the shadow struggle to control the scene through alternating tugs and releases of a rope.
© » KADIST
Ana Teresa Fernández
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
The artist writes about her work Borrando la Frontera, a performance done at Tijuana/San Diego border: “I visually erased the train rails that serve as a divider between the US and Mexico. I painted them sky blue, creating a “Hole in the Wall” This deconstruction of “feminized” work explores the difficulties in reconciling both low wages and undervalued work via social and political infrastructures, confronting issues of labor and power. The images that I myself perform, present a duality: women dressed in a black tango dance attire while engaging in de-skilled domestic chores; the surreal within non-fiction.
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Mario Garcia Torres
In Up All Night, Waiting for the Chelsea Hotel Magic to Spark My Creativity Mario García Torres constructs and documents a hypothetical scene, situating himself within a lineage of artists and creatives that used to congregate at the historic hotel. The long-exposure capture depicts García Torres at multiple stages of brainstorming, devising, and introspection, his ethereal figure connected with artistic giants of the past. Yet, there is also an insipid tone beyond mere insomnia or frustration at the lack of being able to garner inspiration.
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Ming Wong
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.
© » KADIST
Fang Lu
No World is an action-filled video work filmed inside an abandoned museum in the Songzhuang area outside Beijing. Without using any dialogue, Lu created an artificial scenario where she instructed actors with a list of tasks to gesturally mime scenes from news and journalistic images outside China. Through an intuitive self-trained mimicry, these acts simultaneously became moves in a game as well as a daily routine.
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Haegue Yang
A steel clothing rack adorned with turbine vents, Moroccan vintage jewelry, pinecones and knitting yarn, these heterogeneous elements are used here to create an exotic yet undefined identity within the work. Following Haegue Yang’s 2010 anthropomorphic series Medicine Men, this sculpture appears as a shamanic objet or being. It is mobile and can be activated.
© » KADIST
Nalini Malani
Memory: Record/Erase is a stop-motion animation by Nalini Malani based on ‘The Job,’ a short story by celebrated German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht. Brecht’s story follows a poverty-stricken family during the German depression, as the central character, Frau Hausmann, is forced to impersonate her late husband to procure his job as a nightwatchman to support her two children. Despite her exceptional performance during the job, and even after receiving public commendation for catching a thief, when eventually her identity is discovered during a factory accident she is forced into a precarious existence where she resorts to selling herself to get by.
© » KADIST
Joachim Koester
Tarantism is the name of disease which appeared in southern Italy, resulting from the bite of a spider called Tarantula. This bite caused various symptoms, such as nausea, difficulty to speak, delusion, excitability and agitation. The victims suffered then from convulsions and the only way to heal them was to engage in a frenzied dance, as it was believed.
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Lynn Hershman Leeson
Hershman Leeson’s documentary, Women Art Revolution (W. A. R.) draws from hundreds of hours of intimate interviews with her contemporaries—visionary artists, historians, curators and critics—who recount their fight to break down the barriers facing women both in the art world and society at large. The film features an original score by Carrie Brownstein, formerly of the band Sleater-Kinney.
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Mario Garcia Torres
Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art. For him, this is a way of rethinking the tradition in a more personal way, to have a grip on events of recent history and examine them with a curiosity, both critical and sensual. The artist emphasizes the fact that new ideas and meanings may arise from these archaeological narratives.
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Ranu Mukherjee
Conceived as a large-scale mural-like projection, Color of History, Sweating Rocks is a neo-futuristic, hybrid film that combines cinematic language, collage, animation, and inventive forms to highlight the plight of the peoples of the Sahara—and refugees in general—who have been displaced by oil-mining.
© » KADIST
Dinh Q. Lê
Hill of Poisonous Trees (three men) (2008) exemplifies the artist’s signature photo-weaving technique, in which he collects diverse found photographs—portraits of anonymous people, stills from blockbuster films, or journalistic images—cuts them into strips, and weaves them into new composition. The title of the series is translated from the Khmer phrase Tuol Sleng , which literally means a poisonous hill or a place on a mound to keep those who bear or supply guilt, and the photographs came from the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia, a former prison where at least 200,000 Cambodians were executed during the reign of the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. In this particular image, three men stand against the backdrop of what looks like a prison interior.
© » KADIST
Xiaoyun Chen
State Terrorism in the ultimate form of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood features a portrait of the artist wearing a zipped utilitarian jacket reminiscent of a worker’s uniform, with one arm behind his back as if forced to ingest a bundle of stick—a literal portrayal to the definition of fascism. The title alludes to the Pre-Raphaelite notion of a brotherhood based on “truth to nature.” Censorship of the mouth and indigestion of freshly cut stalks, central to Chen’s language of tree branches, feeds back provocatively to the title’s suggestion of “state terrorism.” However, one must resist seeking symbolic meaning in the image as Chen’s focus is on the direct visual impact of the absurd act portrayed.
© » KADIST
Desiree Holman
Reborn, 2010 is a three-channel video by Desiree Holman that questions ideas of motherhood and the maternal instinct. The video features a group of women as they tenderly cradle lifelike baby dolls atop their rocking chairs. Although at first, the video might appear as a celebration of the maternal bond, the scene soon becomes eerie and unsettling as we see milk spilling out of the mothers’ mouths.
© » KADIST
Yoshua Okón
Canned Laughter was Okón’s response to an invitation from Ciudad Juárez , Mexico, where artists were asked to create works based on their experience of the city. Okón focuse d on Ciudad Juárez as a site for many ‘ maquiladoras ’ ( factories) and on its role within the global context. A mixed media and video installation , the work takes the form of a fictitious factory that produces canned laughter for sitcoms.
© » KADIST
Oded Hirsch
Oded Hirsch’s video work Nothing New (2012) utilizes seemingly absurdist tropes to raise more trenchant questions about communal action and collective identity in modern day Israel. In the video, a fallen parachutist hangs tangled by his own lines, suspended between two electrical towers in a surreally desolate landscape of overgrown fields in the Jordan Valley of Israel. A group of over a hundred men and women approach the towers, working with almost mechanic efficiency to free the parachutist from the power lines overhead.
© » KADIST
Erin Shirreff
Erin Shirreff’s A. P. series of prints investigates how objects are “constructed” at the level of the image. For each composite photograph, Shirreff fabricates two sculptural forms from what appear to be metal or plaster, although the precise materials are unidentified. Her sculptures resemble miniature architectural models or renderings of buildings as-yet-to-be fully conceptualized, both elemental and elegant in their use of sharp angles and clean lines.
© » KADIST
Hu Yun
This research-based artwork acts as a memorial to early twentieth century European exploration of China. An antique open suitcase reveals a pile of rubbings and an air-dried peony, while projected photographs of the Chinese landscape appear as a slideshow on the gallery wall. The artifacts refer to a 1908-1909 expedition of naturalists, missionaries, and colonists to the west of China, which ended abruptly with the death of one of the travelers by unusual circumstances.
© » KADIST
Xiaoyun Chen
The lengthy titles in Chen Xiaoyun’s work often appear as colophons to his photographs that invite the viewer to a process of self realization through contemplating the distance between word and image. Near his studio, Chen often walks over fallen branches in late autumn and sense their existence. Thus, his placing them in diverse contexts builds a “narrative Ariadne’s thread” where the branches become “the language of things” intertextually cohering his oeuvre.
© » KADIST
Rodney Graham
Ponderosa Pine IV belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that live in Northern California. The photograph is framed upside down; these “inverted trees” follow Graham’s early experiments with the camera lucida, a room-sized pinhole camera that dates back to ancient times and which he has used to photograph trees from various regions. Through these works Graham looks back at the history of photography while making the viewers aware of their own retinal experience.
Xiaoyun Chen
- location: Hangzhou, China
- year born: 1971
- gender: male
- nationality: Chinese
- home town: Hubei Province, China
Mario Garcia Torres
- location: Mexico City, Mexico
- year born: 1975
- gender: male
- nationality: Mexican
- home town: Monclova, Mexico
Yin-Ju Chen
- year born: 2011
- gender: female
- nationality: American & Taiwanese
Lynn Hershman Leeson
- location: San Francisco, California
- year born: 1941
- gender: female
- nationality: American
- home town: Cleveland, Ohio
Fang Lu
Fang Lu uses intimacy as a place for self-expression in her videos and draws out mundane moments from everyday life as a strategy to heighten one’s awareness of existence from the rest of the world...
Yee I-Lann
- location: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
- year born: 1971
- gender: female
- nationality: Malaysian
- home town: Sabah, Malaysia
Koki Tanaka
- location: Los Angeles, California
- year born: 1975
- gender: male
- nationality: Japanese
- home town: Tochigi, Japan
Joachim Koester
- year born: 1962
- gender: male
- nationality: Danish
- home town: Copenhagen, Denmark
Haegue Yang
- location: Berlin, Germany & Seoul, South Korea
- year born: 1971
- gender: female
- nationality: Korean
- home town: Seoul, South Korea
Cerith Wyn Evans
- location: London, United Kingdom
- year born: 1958
- gender: male
- nationality: British
- home town: Llanelli, United Kingdom
Nalini Malani
- year born: 1946
- gender: female
- nationality: Indian
- home town: Karachi, Pakistan
Rodney Graham
- location: Vancouver, Canada
- year born: 1949
- gender: male
- nationality: Canadian
- home town: Vancouver, Canada
Richard T. Walker
- location: San Francisco, California
- year born: 1977
- gender: male
- nationality: British
Ranu Mukherjee
- location: San Francisco, California
- year born: 1966
- gender: female
- nationality: Indian
Hiraki Sawa
- location: London, United Kingdom
- year born: 1977
- gender: male
- nationality: Japanese
- home town: Ishikawa, Japan
Tuan Andrew Nguyen
Tuan Andrew Nguyen is an artist and filmmaker, one of the three founders of The Propeller Group created in 2006...
Oded Hirsch
- location: New York, New York
- year born: 1976
- gender: male
- nationality: Israeli
- home town: Kibbutz Afikim, Israel
Doug Aitken
- year born: 1968
- gender: male
- nationality: American
- home town: Redondo Beach, California
Oscar Munoz
- location: Cali, Colombia
- year born: 1951
- gender: male
- nationality: Colombian
- home town: Popayán, Colombia
Ming Wong
- location: Berlin, Germany
- year born: 1971
- gender: male
- nationality: Singaporean
- home town: Singapore
Desiree Holman
- location: Oakland, California
- gender: female
- nationality: American
Hu Yun
- location: Shanghai, China
- year born: 1986
- gender: male
- nationality: Chinese
- home town: Shanghai, China
Ho Tzu Nyen
- location: Singapore
- year born: 1976
- gender: male
- nationality: Singaporean
- home town: Singapore
Mauricio Ancalmo
- year born: 1983
- gender: male
- nationality: El Salvador
Brian Bress
- location: Los Angeles, California
- year born: 1975
- gender: male
- nationality: American
- home town: Norfolk, Virginia
Trisha Donnelly
- location: New York, New York
- year born: 1974
- gender: male
- nationality: American
- home town: San Francisco, California
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1990-1999
Rodney Graham
1991Ponderosa Pine IV belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that live in Northern California...
Nalini Malani
1996Memory: Record/Erase is a stop-motion animation by Nalini Malani based on ‘The Job,’ a short story by celebrated German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht...
Rodney Graham
1996Tree on the Former Site of Camera Obscura (1996) belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that lives in Northern California...
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2000-2009
Mario Garcia Torres
2004Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art...
Mario Garcia Torres
2005Mario Garcia Torres films a game of Charades among professional actors guessing the former North Korean dictator’s favorite Hollywood films...
Xiaoyun Chen
2006State Terrorism in the ultimate form of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood features a portrait of the artist wearing a zipped utilitarian jacket reminiscent of a worker’s uniform, with one arm behind his back as if forced to ingest a bundle of stick—a literal portrayal to the definition of fascism...
Joachim Koester
2006Physical and mental exploration have been founding elements in Joachim Koester’s research for several years...
Xiaoyun Chen
2006The image of rusted nails, nuts and bolts as shrapnel sandwiched between a fried Chicken burger highlights the contrast between decadence and destruction...
Hiraki Sawa
2006Hako (2006) depicts a mysterious and dystopic landscape where the world becomes flat: distance between different spaces, depth of field and three-dimensional perceptions are canceled...
Lynn Hershman Leeson
2007Lynn Hershman Leeson’s genre-bending documentary Strange Culture tells the story of how one man’s personal tragedy turns into persecution by a paranoid, conservative, and overzealous government...
Joachim Koester
2007Tarantism is the name of disease which appeared in southern Italy, resulting from the bite of a spider called Tarantula...
Trisha Donnelly
2007Untitled is a black-and-white photograph of a wave just before it breaks as seen from the distance of an overlook...
Gimhongsok
2007To explore the boundaries between artwork and audience, Gimhongsok created a series of sculptural performances in which a person wearing an animal costume poses in the gallery...
Dinh Q. Lê
2008Hill of Poisonous Trees (three men) (2008) exemplifies the artist’s signature photo-weaving technique, in which he collects diverse found photographs—portraits of anonymous people, stills from blockbuster films, or journalistic images—cuts them into strips, and weaves them into new composition...
Cerith Wyn Evans
2008Untitled (Perfect Lovers + 1) by Cerith Wyn Evans takes as its starting point Felix Gonzales-Torres’s seminal work Untitled (Perfect Lovers) , in which two clocks were synchronized and left to run without interference, the implication being that one would stop before the other...
Yoshua Okón
2009Canned Laughter was Okón’s response to an invitation from Ciudad Juárez , Mexico, where artists were asked to create works based on their experience of the city...
Doug Aitken
2009The version of Frontier acquired by the Kadist Collection consists of a single-channel video, adapted from the monumental installation and performance that Aitken presented in Rome, by the Tiber River, in 2009...
Oscar Munoz
2009In Ante la imagen (Before the Image, 2009) Muñoz continues to explore the power of a photograph to live up to the memory of a specific person...
Koki Tanaka
2009Walking Through is one of a series of videos—sometimes humorous, often absurd—that record the artist’s performative interactions with objects in a particular site...
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2010-2019
Mauricio Ancalmo
2010War Footage is a series of wall-mounted works composed of 16mm film leader, tightly bound to flag-shaped panels by the artist...
Desiree Holman
2010Reborn, 2010 is a three-channel video by Desiree Holman that questions ideas of motherhood and the maternal instinct...
Mario Garcia Torres
2010In Up All Night, Waiting for the Chelsea Hotel Magic to Spark My Creativity Mario García Torres constructs and documents a hypothetical scene, situating himself within a lineage of artists and creatives that used to congregate at the historic hotel...
Haegue Yang
2010In addition to Yang’s signature drying rack and light bulbs, Office Voodoo includes various office supplies like CDs, paper clips, headphones, a computer mouse, a stamp, a hole puncher, a mobile phone charger...
Koki Tanaka
2010Tanaka’s unique understanding of objects and materials is reflected in the four photographs that document his Process of Blowing Flour ...
Zarouhie Abdalian
2010The first iteration of Flutter was specifically conceived for the Pro Arts Gallery space in Oakland in 2010, viewable from the public space of a sidewalk, and the version acquired by the Kadist Collection is an adaptation of it...
Ranu Mukherjee
2011Conceived as a large-scale mural-like projection, Color of History, Sweating Rocks is a neo-futuristic, hybrid film that combines cinematic language, collage, animation, and inventive forms to highlight the plight of the peoples of the Sahara—and refugees in general—who have been displaced by oil-mining....
Ana Teresa Fernández
Drawing & Print
2011(Drawing & Print) The artist writes about her work Borrando la Frontera, a performance done at Tijuana/San Diego border: “I visually erased the train rails that serve as a divider between the US and Mexico...
Ho Tzu Nyen
2011The Cloud of Unknowing (2011) is titled after a 14th-century medieval treatise on faith, in which “the cloud of unknowing” that stands between the aspirant and God can only be evoked by the senses, rather than the rational mind...
Yin-Ju Chen
Drawing & Print
2011(Drawing & Print) This work includes sketches for Extrastellar Evaluations , the project she produced at Kadist...
Nalini Malani
2012Malani draws upon her personal experience of the violent legacy of colonialism and de-colonization in India in this personal narrative that was shown as a colossal six channel video installation at dOCUMENTA (13), but is here adapted to single channel...
Oded Hirsch
2012Oded Hirsch’s video work Nothing New (2012) utilizes seemingly absurdist tropes to raise more trenchant questions about communal action and collective identity in modern day Israel...
Xiaoyun Chen
2012The lengthy titles in Chen Xiaoyun’s work often appear as colophons to his photographs that invite the viewer to a process of self realization through contemplating the distance between word and image...
Tuan Andrew Nguyen
2012This work presents the image of an immolated monk engraved on a baseball bat...
Vincent Leong
2012The photograph Exquisite Eco Living is part of a larger series titled Executive Properties in which he digitally manipulated the images to insert iconic buildings of Kuala Lumpur in the view of derelict spaces also found in the city...
Yee I-Lann
2013Sarcastically titled to call attention to the problematic notions underlying colonialism, this photograph shows hundreds of Native Malaysians seated quietly behind one of their colonial oppressors...
Brian Bress
2013Blindseye Arranger (Max) (2013) features a greyscale arrangement of rudimentary shapes layered atop one another like a dense cluster of wood block prints, the juxtaposition of sharp lines and acute angles creating an abstracted field of rectangular and triangulated forms composed as if in a cubist landscape...
Koki Tanaka
2013This artwork was part of a group of projects presented in the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013...
Xiaoyun Chen
2014The central point of Vanishing Point is the most direct physiological reaction of the body to the environment...
Yoshua Okón
2015Fridge-Freezer is a 2-channel video installation where Yoshua Okón explores the darker side of suburbia, d escribed by the artist as “ the ideal environment for a numb existence of passive consumerism and social a nd environmental disengagement...
Haegue Yang
2016A steel clothing rack adorned with turbine vents, Moroccan vintage jewelry, pinecones and knitting yarn, these heterogeneous elements are used here to create an exotic yet undefined identity within the work...
Yin-Ju Chen
2016Through a semi-fictional approach, Extrastellar Evaluations envisions a version of history in which alien inhabitants, the Lemurians, lived among humans under the guise of various renowned conceptual and minimal artists in the 1960s (Carl Andre, Mel Bochner, and James Turrell to name a few)...
Lynn Hershman Leeson
2016Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba...
Lynn Hershman Leeson
2017Using the seminal 1958 film Vertigo as a launchpad, Lynn Hershman Leeson explores the blurred lines between fact and fantasy in VertiGhost , a film commissioned by the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco...
Yin-Ju Chen
2018Extrastellar Evaluations is a multimedia installation produced during Yin-Ju Chen’s residency at Kadist San Francisco in the spring of 2016...
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2020-2029
Yee I-Lann
20207-headed Lalandau Hat by Yee I-Lann is an intricately woven sculpture evoking the ceremonial headdress worn by Murut men in Borneo...
