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...
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...
Kwan Sheung Chi’s work One Million is a video work depicting the counting of bills...
Drawn from the widely circulated images of protests around the world in support of women rights and racial equality, the phrase I can’t believe we are still protesting is both the title of Wong Wai Yin’s photographic series and a reference to similar messages seen on protest signages...
For I use to eat lemon meringue pie till I overloaded on my pancreas with sugar and passed out; It seemed to be a natural response to a society of abundance (1978), also known as the Bodybuilder series, Martinez asked male bodybuilding competitors to pose in whatever position felt “most natural.” They are obviously trained in presenting their ambitiously carved physiques, but their facial expressions seem comparatively unstudied...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
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...
The Simpson Verdict is a three-minute animation by Kota Ezawa that portrays the reading of the verdict during the OJ Simpson trial, known as the “most publicized” criminal trial in history...
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...
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 voids in Baldessari’s painted photographs are simultaneously positive and negative spaces, both additive and subtractive...