Film & Video (Film & Video)

Long Long Live (2013) takes the viewer to the setting of the Oasis Villa on Green Island, once a reform and re-education prison to house political prisoners during Taiwan’s martial law period. In black and white, Yao depicts the historical site as an eerie abandoned compound. Reflecting on the centenary of the HsinHai Revolution and the end of the Cold War, Yao questions the existence of an ever lasting dynasty or “transcendental Rules of History.” The soundtrack features a sole voice reverberating through loud speakers.

Photography (Photography)

The Breaks reflects Capistran’s interests in sampling and fusing different cultural, social, and historical sources. Growing up in an African-American community in Los Angeles, Capistran has long been influenced by hip-hop culture. The photographs in this print document him surreptitiously breakdancing on Carl Andre’s iconic lead floor piece after the guards at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art have left the gallery.

Painting (Painting)

White Minority , is typical of Capistran’s sampling of high art genres and living subcultures in which the artist subsumes an object’s high art pedigree within a vernacular art form. Here, Capistran humorously remixes the form and style of Frank Stella’s Black Paintings with California punk rock band Black Flag’s song title and logo (created by artist Raymond Pettibon). White Minority , then, appropriates, recontextualizes, and riffs on language and visual signs to unmoor notions of identity, power, and revolution.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The 10 $1 bills that make up From a Whisper to a Scream (2012) read like instructions in origami. From left to right, each bill is progressively folded up, step by step, into the shape of a gun. Both a scream and a whisper are capable of conveying the same content, if at drastically different decibels, the artist proposes.

Vallance’s Rocket is a vibrant picture in which masses of color and collage coalesce into a central vehicle, yet the whole surface seems lit with the roar of space travel. This varied use of media has enabled the artist to bring all of the life, energy, and objects he works with into a single image.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

As the video Datamosh begins to play, Yung Jake emerges out of a colorful, smoke-like background and breaks into rap. Malfunctioning green screens and pixelated digital mash-ups bleed into each other in a parody of the music video trope and specifically of the trend of ‘datamoshing’—a digital technique commonly used across this genre. The song’s lyrics distinctly borrow from the lexicon of rap, combining mentions of clubs, money and fame, with self-referential and humorous lines that literally describe the way in which the artist subverts the medium.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In his video work Beyond Geography , Li dramatizes the role of the artist-as-imitator to the point of sheer parody. Dressed to toe in the costume of a typical Discovery Channel adventurer-explorer, the artist dashes suavely through the uncharted jungle habitat of a primitive tribe. Li modulates his own voice in laughably accurate mimicry of the dubbed Discovery Channel protagonist familiar to Chinese viewership, daringly gulping fresh water from a river, expertly admiring exotic vegetation, and whimpering in fear of the dark sounds of the night (screaming, even, as he trips on a human skull) in an full-scale exaggeration of a nature show personality.

Photography (Photography)

The title of this series – Two videos, three photographs, several related masterpieces and American art – is paradoxical, suggesting the work is conceived in relation to its medium and a situation in art history and the region of the world in which it was made. Paradoxical but in the end, often true of the way in which art history is written. The presence of black men and the term “American Art” brings us back to Robert Mapplethorpe’s Black Book .

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

“To me, art equals responsibility”. That is probably why Alain Séchas creates works according to the human scale, immediately evoking the human body. But rather than using the human figure, he chose that of the cat: a round-eyed feline which never smiles.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The four-channel video installation Same Old Crowd departs from the documentation of an unknown city and takes place in an ambiguous temporal and spatial frame. Twelve characters (amateur actors hired by the artist) appear in black-and-white in highly stylized surroundings wearing patterned cloths. The identities or time period of the characters, all deprived of languages, are impossible to determine.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“Watching the films of Omer Fast confounds our expectations of the medium. 5,000 Feet Is the Best, 2011, is presented like a conventional big-budget Hollywood movie and has similarly high production values. Yet Fast frustrates the narrative element that Hollywood teaches us to expect: While stories unfold, repetitions and obscurities challenge the idea of a central controlling account.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Satirizing an airport security checkpoint, The Ecdysiast – Molt (Body Inspection) by Yao Qingmei offers a comedic and critical inquiry into the logics underpinning collective control and surveillance culture. The three channels of the video respectively feature a dancer (left), a chorus (middle), and a security inspector (right). The dancer and security inspector enact a mechanical burlesque performance that parodies the body inspection procedures implemented by airport security.

Installation (Installation)

Nugroho’s installations and performances have their roots in the shadow puppet rituals in Indonesia, particularly the Javanese Wayang tradition whose essence is in the representation of the shadows. Nugroho’s work both preserves traditional culture and offers a contemporary interpretation of it through his insertion of comical figures to comment on current social conditions. Moving Landscape includes characters such as a diamond-headed man, a UFO, and other items that appear frequently in Nugroho’s drawings and murals.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

In the work titled The Glossies (1980), an affinity for photography manifested itself before McCollum actually began to use photography as a medium. The Glossies are drawings, rectangular forms applied with blank ink and watercolors, which fill up the sheets parallel to the edges except for a small margin. Finally, the whole paper is covered with an adhesive plastic laminate, which gives it the shiny surface of a photograph.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Re: Looking marks a new phase in Wong’s work which connects his region’s history with other parts of the world. The video—located in an imagined contemporary Malaysian middle-class living room, a space of a fictive former imperial power—explores the precarious link between fact and fiction, fakery and authenticity by overlaying three believable, authoritative forms: a documentary, a website, and a realistic reconstruction of a contemporary home. It is rife with occidental colonial documents and exotic cultural artifacts—the trophy-evidence of Empire-making.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The wall installation Friction/Where is Lavatory (2005) plays off anxieties about time but utilizes sound to create a disconcerting experience of viewership: comprised of dozens of wall clocks sutured together, the work presents a monstrous vision of time at its most monumental. The clocks, however, are effectively broken, altered so that the second hand of each clock obstructs one another as they sweep across the face. Often combining a sense of physical incongruity and visceral displeasure with touches of humor and cruelty, Taiyo utilizes conceptual approaches as a means of challenging preconceived ideas about social organization.

Installation (Installation)

In Permanent Laughter (2011), dozens of portable compasses are scattered under a sheet of acrylic board, which is in turned covered with what appear to be the diffuse remains of an unidentified skeleton. Often combining a sense of physical incongruity and visceral displeasure with touches of humor and cruelty, Taiyo utilizes conceptual approaches as a means of challenging preconceived ideas about social organization. His work frequently interrogates how we organize space and time through discretely measured units, and in parodying that obsessively precise ways that we mark our very existence – through instruments that direct our bodily movements or denote our sense of time – Taiyo invites us to consider our relationship not just to devices but to our very sense of ontological being.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Report of the Legal Subcommittee is a print featuring a map of the stars, together with a found transcription of a recent United Nations meeting in which various international delegations declare frustration with their 40-year-old, ongoing efforts to devise a legal definition of outer space. This admission seems to hold a rich poetic potential, the human attempts to bureaucratize and control outer space seemingly frustrated by the sublime scale and mystery of its infinite depths.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“Product Recall” is a video perfomative pun on the action recalling memories in the form of a psychoanalytic session and the recall of faulty products from multinational corporations. Young enters a practicing psychoanalyst room and begins a session. Dressed in corporate business attire, Young encompasses both the corporation and individual.

Painting (Painting)

Madani works on a small scale and a large scale. This work is from a series of small paintings called Dazzle Men that take as their starting point the Dazzle patterns used by artists to camouflage ships during the First World War. Dazzle camouflage was designed to confuse the aim of U boat commanders.

Installation (Installation)

Matthew Darbyshire has made several Furniture Islands, all of which employ different objects and different color values. Furniture Island No 3 looks like a shop display tastefully arranged in complementary colours. Darbyshire’s use of colour is like that of a designer or a painter.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

As part of her project Chinternet Plus , a “counterfeit ideology” and parodic take on the strategy “Internet Plus” launched by Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang in 2015, the video work Post commentary, monetary likes, Morgan Freeman’s advice on reality gives an insight into Internet Culture in China. The brilliantly edited video by Miao Ying presents various scenes from a popular Chinese live-streaming platform together with extracts from a TV show featuring Morgan Freeman talking about “What Is Reality”. This work is exemplary of the artist’s practice, questioning, with a degree of humour, the sometimes dramatic consequences of the Internet as it consumes society.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Zeppelintribüne (2002) was shot near the Zepelintribune in Nuremberg, designed by Albert Speer, chief architect of the Third Reich. The 360-metre-long structure is part of a larger architectural complex called the Zeppelinfeld, which the National Socialist used for their marches and rallies. The Zeppelintribune was immortalized in the Leni Reifenstahl’s film-propaganda masterpiece the Triumph of the Will, a record of a 1934 Nazi Party rally.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Jet Folder & Data Tree (2013) offers a humorous take on how computer and screen-based technologies affect our relationship to the natural world. In a statement through his gallery, Gallery Yang, Lin remarks that “one day in 2010, I discovered that the folders in my computer began talking to me. So I created lots of empty folders with no content but name.” Lin’s print, by extension, functions as a collage in which screen-based media becomes part of the natural world, and vice versa.

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)

Lightning 01 (2014) parodies our contemporary relationship to screen-based media and the absurdity of aestheticizing boredom. The video depicts a computer user aimlessly taking photos of himself, seemingly numb to external stimuli or intervention. Set on a loop, the video produces the illusion of an endless state of bored selfies and disaffected gazes.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Class (2005) by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook challenges the viewer’s personal sense of morality and tolerance by depicting a classroom from hell. In the video, a woman, dressed in black with a white over shirt, stands in front of a long blackboard. The classroom’s rear walls and floor are covered in taut white fabric, given the room the sinister appearance of a sanitarium or a crime scene.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

A sly sense of humor is key in Pablo Helguera’s long-running Artoons series, one that includes ~1500 drawings made over ten years. It’s no secret that the artworld tends to take itself too seriously, so it’s no surprise that Helguera’s project has developed a large following over the past decade—providing much needed comic relief.. Helguera grew up making and exchanging drawings like these with his father and brother, but never made drawing a part of his public practice until in 2008, when he began periodically posting what came to be known as ‘Artoons’ on Facebook. The series caricatures and lampoons agents and events in the artworld, combining just enough visual reference along with a caption.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

A sly sense of humor is key in Pablo Helguera’s long-running Artoons series, one that includes ~1500 drawings made over ten years. It’s no secret that the artworld tends to take itself too seriously, so it’s no surprise that Helguera’s project has developed a large following over the past decade—providing much needed comic relief.. Helguera grew up making and exchanging drawings like these with his father and brother, but never made drawing a part of his public practice until in 2008, when he began periodically posting what came to be known as ‘Artoons’ on Facebook. The series caricatures and lampoons agents and events in the artworld, combining just enough visual reference along with a caption.