Photography (Photography)

Charwai Tsai’s photograph documents her Hermit Crab Project installation upon the construction site of gallery Sora in Tokyo. Tsai placed live hermit crabs and shells in a sandy enclosure at the site, writing fragments of The One China policy and the Taiwanese Independence statements on each shell. As the hermit crabs moved and swapped shells, they formed new connections between the statements.

Installation (Installation)

In her recent work, Biernoff is interested in investigating fictions and fantasies embedded in the remnants of consumer culture (for example magazines) or through ephemera such as postcards and old photographs. Although the imagery present in her work might seem nostalgic upon first encounter, Biernoff’s complex tableaux often reveal the artist’s skeptical look towards her subjects matters. They Were Here (2010), constitutes a clear example.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Sun Xun’s lushly illustrated, dynamic short film Mythological Time is a dreamy chronicle of rapacious industrial development, the mythical qualities of state propaganda, and the constancy of change, as experienced by an unnamed coal mining town. While it is not named in the film itself, the town at the center of Mythological Time is a re-imagined incarnation of Sun’s hometown of Fuxin, in the northern Chinese province of Liaoning. Sandwiched between North Korea and Inner Mongolia, Fuxin is a poor coal-mining region that used to contain one of China’s largest open-pit mines and has historically been the site of significant conflict, thanks to its rich mineral resources.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Pianoiss . . . issmo (Worse Finish)

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Sun’s animated film 21 Ke (21 Grams) is based on the 1907 research by the American physician Dr. Duncan MacDougall who claimed the measured weight of the human soul to be twenty-one grams. Sun used this episode—which was not fully recognized by the scientific community—as a point of departure for his depiction of a dystopian world in which the narration of history and notion of time are interrupted. Because each frame was drawn by hand with crayon, it took Sun and his animation studio team a few years to complete this thirty-minute film of a surreal journey through mysterious cities, plagues of mosquitoes, broken statues, cawing ravens, waving flags, and flooded graveyards.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Based on historical prophecies and fantasy, the artist creates apocalyptic scenarios that posit an enigmatic world plagued by social, political, and environmental upheaval. Untitled (Set of Six Drawings) (2012) is an intricate watercolor of a child sitting cross-legged with its head stuck inside a giant mask resembling a duck head covered with eyes. It looks like a scene snatched from science fiction or a surreal dream; it is tempting to see in it some kind of warning sign, or an ominous vision of the future.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Destilaciones ( Distillations , 2014) is an installation composed of a group of ceramic pots, presented on the floor and within a steel structure. Copper pipes run through the perforated ceramics, evoking the design of an oil purifier. The work is a direct reference to the history of the Peruvian coastal town of Lobitos.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Although seemingly unadorned at first glance, Yang Xinguang’s sculptural work Phenomena (2009) employs minimalist aesthetics as a means of gesturing towards the various commonalities and conflicts between civilization and the natural world. Comprised of rudimentary planks of wood hammered together into a rectangular form, Yang’s work uses reclaimed materials from everyday life and seems deliberately in conversation with Arte Povera, the art movement that originated in Italy during the late 1960s where practitioners produced art from found and common materials as an act of resistance against the decided commercialization of the art world through market economies. Yang, by extension, pays close attention to his materials in attempt to release the forms within them rather than impose his own.

The two drawings in the Kadist Collection are part of a larger series entitled Las Mariposas Eternas (The Eternal Butterflies). They are studies for two large sculptures that explore the role of monuments and emblems in the configuration of Latin American national identities. The first drawing reproduces an equestrian statue of Juan Lavalle, one of Argentina’s independence heroes.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Camil has made numerous paintings and photographs of halted projects along Mexico’s highways (she calls them “highway follies”), and of abandoned billboards that look like theater curtains dramatizing failed capitalist strategies. (Espectacular, the colloquial Spanish term for “billboard,” also translates more literally as “spectacle,” and of course recalls Guy Debord’s famous 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle .) In Mexico, the urban landscape has been taken over by billboards; they are totally integrated into the landscape.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Dash shapes, manipulates, and molds the materials herself, as the works becomes something of a physical archive. Through these delicate and time-consuming processes, the artist’s bodily interaction with the material becomes clear, with marks of its making and traces of the artist’s hand embedded in the surface of her quiet compositions.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Last Postcards is a series of three small double-sided paintings on plywood in which Biernoff imagines the last communications from explorers lost in the wilderness. Biernoff’s choice of Everett Ruess, Percy Fawcett, and the conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader is particularly telling. On one level, the Last Postcards analogize the nineteenth-century explorer with the contemporary artist who looks for purpose in their work.

NFT (NFT)

Hand Palm Echo 1 is a digital animation based on Christine Sun Kim’s staircase mural at The Drawing Center in New York (10 March – 22 May, 2022). Sun produced this NFT from a still image of the animation that features a drawn notation of the sign “echo” in American Sign Language. Visually the black and white image depicts two side by side mounds, one labelled ‘Hand’ and the other labelled ‘Palm’.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Untitled (Grate I/II: Shan Mei Playground/ Grand Fortune Mansion) is part of a series drawn from architectural objects that mark the boundary of public and private spaces Wong encountered while strolling in Hong Kong. Intrigued by the accidental preservation of historical building material by renovations and rebuilding, Wong began paying attention to the experience conveyed by layered forms accreted to affect the visual historicity of a space. The geometric forms in the piece are welded together as a composite replica of a metal grate from a children’s playground next to Wong’s studio, a security grate door from his apartment complex, and the latticework that holds an air conditioner from an electronic store, and a front grate from an elementary school on his bus route.