Sculpture (Sculpture)

For this floor based work, Gomes has taken two lengths of bamboo and tied them together using linen thread. The work is self-supporting and stands in a crack or a hole in the floor. The work suggests precariousness, frailty as well as humanity through its verticality, and its gentle sinuous form, referencing perhaps the work of Giacometti.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints. Though simple, each contains a nested stack of historical and self-referential quotations. Both black-and-white prints depict a version of Ligon’s 1988 painting, Untitled (I Am A Man) , which declares the words of the parenthetical in blocky black letters.

Photography (Photography)

Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc. (2010), which takes as its point of departure the political context of the 1950s and the Cold War, when American interests in Taiwan overlapped with the Chinese civil war. Cooperating with the Chinese Kuomintang, the American CIA established something called Western Enterprises, an agency whose main tasks included training an anti-Communist National Salvation Army (NSA) for a surprise attack on Communists in mainland China and establishing Taiwan as a base for anti-Communist operations in Southeast Asia. Narrated from the point of the view of the artist’s father, once a member of the NSA, the project interweaves personal experience with historical events.

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.

Photography (Photography)

Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc. (2010), which takes as its point of departure the political context of the 1950s and the Cold War, when American interests in Taiwan overlapped with the Chinese civil war. Cooperating with the Chinese Kuomintang, the American CIA established something called Western Enterprises, an agency whose main tasks included training an anti-Communist National Salvation Army (NSA) for a surprise attack on Communists in mainland China and establishing Taiwan as a base for anti-Communist operations in Southeast Asia. Narrated from the point of the view of the artist’s father, once a member of the NSA, the project interweaves personal experience with historical events.

Photography (Photography)

Michigan Central Station is part of a larger photographic series, Detroit Photos , which includes images of houses, theaters, stadiums, offices, and other municipal structures. Continuing his fascination with failed modernist utopias, Douglas depicts Michigan Central Station as a monolithic, almost prison-like structure lording over a desolate landscape. Once the hub of industrial transportation, the station is now devoid of any human activity and lies fallow, surrounded by train-less tracks and vegetation-less ground.

Photography (Photography)

Created for the tenth Lyon Bienniale, in Days of Our Lives: Playing for Dying Mother, Wong’s ongoing negotiation of postcolonial globalization takes aim at French society. Named after an American daytime soap opera that been running for over forty years, Days of Our Lives is a series of six photographs that explore contemporary Europeaness. Here, domestic, everyday scenes drawn from French paintings in the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon——preparing food, relaxing, reading and playing music, giving charity to the poor, being evicted from home, or going off to War—are reenacted by Muslim Nigerians, Iranians, Turkish, and Buddhist Burmese minorities.

Photography (Photography)

Days of Our Lives: Reading is from a series of work was created for the 10th Biennale de Lyon by the artist. It marks a new dimension of his ongoing effort to negotiate with the postcolonial reality across the world, with a unique interventional strategy to deal with the French society. Named after a soap opera in U. S. which has been running practically everyday for over 40 years, Days Of Our Lives is a series of six photographs which explores this new Europeaness.

Photography (Photography)

The print Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam (2010) features an Asian Buddhist monk and an American Navy Solider on board the Mercy ship –one of the two dedicated hospital ships of the United States Navy– sitting upright in their chairs and adopting the same posture. In the background, the steel pillars creates a division of space implying a separation the two men according to their geographic regions of origin or residence, their vocations, their ethnicities, and their attitudes toward war. Yet, the mirrored body language of the two characters also suggests their reconciliation into a dialogue perhaps characterized by the protagonists’ physical and spiritual conversation.