Film & Video (Film & Video)

Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda remake a clip from the 1970s they found on the internet, and without really changing this archive material, displace it by imitating the staging and the acting with scrupulous precision. The slightest details are reproduced identically with great minutiae. The facial expressions are absurd, the prim attitude makes no sense.

NFT (NFT)

Ian Cheng’s project 3FACE is based on a model that is derived from both the artist’s extensive readings on psychology and cognition, and his own intuitive understanding of how people function. 3FACE positions the process of minting a generative NFT as a metaphor for personality development. While part of a series, because of the responsive coding, each NFT is unique and is informed by the contents of the owner’s wallet.

NFT (NFT)

Ian Cheng’s project 3FACE is based on a model that is derived from both the artist’s extensive readings on psychology and cognition, and his own intuitive understanding of how people function. 3FACE positions the process of minting a generative NFT as a metaphor for personality development. While part of a series, because of the responsive coding, each NFT is unique and is informed by the contents of the owner’s wallet.

Installation (Installation)

The work Calendars is composed of 1001 images of deserted public areas in Singapore printed on pages of a calendar set from the year of 2020 until 2096. Yet Chong photographed these public spaces (shopping centers, museums, MRT stations and schools) between 2004 and 2010. Calendars continues Hong’s conceptual investigation of the intersections between time, space and situation.

NFT (NFT)

Ian Cheng’s project 3FACE is based on a model that is derived from both the artist’s extensive readings on psychology and cognition, and his own intuitive understanding of how people function. 3FACE positions the process of minting a generative NFT as a metaphor for personality development. While part of a series, because of the responsive coding, each NFT is unique and is informed by the contents of the owner’s wallet.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Takeshi Murata developed an interest in space inspired by his architect parents. OM Rider features the artist’s characteristic absurdist humor and aesthetics–a mélange of highly attuned lighting and composition (in homage to Ken Price), with retro modeling and minimalist, almost antiseptic spaces.

Photography (Photography)

Yosuke Takeda gives the viewer brightly colored views, each of which he has searched out and patiently waited for. He gives light a density in the precise moments he captures—a forest’s leaves shimmering in the early morning, a street’s reflective surface radiating color at night, luminous blinds drawn over an apartment window. He achieves his distinctive effects by using an old, second hand analog-era lens that he attaches to his digital camera.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

If one had been guessing at Takeshi Murata’s criticism of American consumerist culture up until watching Infinite Doors , it would be solidified after hearing the announcer from The Price is Right squawk prizes one after the next. In the two minutes of the film’s runtime, can count the word “new” used twenty-eight times, and “car”—the holy grail of prizes on that show—used eight times. The bodacious women introduce free prizes, the doors slide open repeatedly, and the crowd cheers with an insatiable appetite in a clear signal of an American propensity for numbing overconsumption.

Installation (Installation)

For The Reverse Sessions , the artist reversed the order in which instruments are usually created, taking the sounds of a collection of ethnic musical instruments from The Dahlem Museum as the starting point. The artist used the audio recordings of live performances that he wrote and directed, to collaborate with instrument makers on imagining and building the objects that could have generated these recordings. Without involving any images, Atoui proposed to engage with sound directly — contrary to the path of ethnomusicology that studies the shape and mechanism of an instrument with an emphasis on its cultural and social context.

Installation (Installation)

30 Proposals of Flag explores the relationships between signs, meanings, aesthetics, and nations. The artwork consists of 30 flags layered together and hanging from the ceiling. Each flag is illustrated with Jao’s rendition of a possible coat of arms derived from Taiwan’s economic and political history.

Installation (Installation)

Categorized as low-level literature, a “Love Stories” book is a romantic popular fiction of proletariat China, read mainly by teenagers, students, and young workers. These novels were mostly written by Taiwanese and Hong Kong writers in the 1980s to the 1990s to meet the cultural needs of the new social classes before being imported into China after the Chinese economic reform in the late 1980s. As contemporary China industry developed, a large number of workers became readers of this new pulp fiction.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The video “Shangri-La” refers to the mythical city of James Hilton’s novel “Lost Horizon” written in 1933 and is exemplified in a film by Frank Capra which speaks of eternal youth in a city of happiness. In 1997, a small town in an agricultural region of central China near the Tibetan border was proclaimed as the place that inspired Shangri-la. Thereafter, a dozen other cities in the same area have claimed to be paradise on earth, prompting a marketing battle without mercy, raging on until the government’s intervention.

NFT (NFT)

Ian Cheng’s project 3FACE is based on a model that is derived from both the artist’s extensive readings on psychology and cognition, and his own intuitive understanding of how people function. 3FACE positions the process of minting a generative NFT as a metaphor for personality development. While part of a series, because of the responsive coding, each NFT is unique and is informed by the contents of the owner’s wallet.

Painting (Painting)

With a habit of reading eight to ten books at the same time, Chong paints his two-foot tall novel covers through referencing an extensive reading list (accessible on Facebook) he has kept since 2006. Entitled “Bibliography (1): The Lonely Ones,” the list outlines representations of solitude that has been imposed on individuals or communities. Chong divides these archetypes into three over-arching notions: the Hide-away, the Castaway and the Prisoner.

Installation (Installation)

O (for various skies) by Jesse Chun is a two-channel video sculpture that decentralizes American colonial narratives about the moon through “unlanguaging”—a methodology that the artist has conceptualized for unfixing language. The project disrupts bureaucratic documents pertaining to the United States government’s lunar colonization and militarization, such as The Lunex Project of 1958 and Project Horizon of 1959, through methods of visual, semiotic, and sonic (mis)translation and abstraction. Chun redacts the found texts, transforming them into concrete poetry, while interweaving lesser known Korean folklore about the moon, such as the precolonial Korean women’s moon dance ( ganggangsullae ) and shamanistic ritual dance for ushering the departed into another world ( gildakeum ).

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The absurd condition of human survival under environmental degradation and geonational balkanization is taken as a starting point for WA’AD by YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES. The work’s premise is a confessional narrative emerging from a Palestinian astronaut on a desperate international flight mission to colonize Mars. That there is also an Israeli astronaut on the same mission plays into the complexities of the landed history of ethnic antagonism between Israel and Palestine, which has stretched on for centuries.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

To the syncopations of a jazzy soundtrack, Korean words in white against a black background flashes between an English dialogue in black text against white ground. Comprised of curt lines such as “forever” “failure” “to live,” the Korean forms non-sequiturs and double entendres to the English script following a line of questioning between a detective and a victim telling a meandering story surrounding a bullet being in a wrist, going to hospital, traveling to Japan, and the discovery of a love triangle. This narrative of a potentially grave situation is told in a nonchalant manner.

Installation (Installation)

The Absolute Restoration of All Things is a collaboration by artist Miguel Fernández de Castro and anthropologist Natalia Mendoza. For this project, Fernández de Castro and Mendoza researched the 2014 court case that shut down Penmont Mining’s operations in the middle of the Sonoran desert. The lawsuit was brought to court by the “ejidatarios” (communal land holders) of El Bajío, Sonora, who claimed that their territory was illegally occupied and exploited, causing an irrevocable environmental impact on their land.

Photography (Photography)

Au non de la liberté (Tiko drink Kumba drunk) is a photographic series by Zacharie Ngnogue and Chantal Edie that considers the correlation between those who hold power in Cameroon and how their actions affect the populations they rule in often compromising ways. “Tiko drink-Kumba drunk” is an adage that is commonly used in the Southwest province of Cameroon to speak of how one’s actions affect others. Civil liberties are next to non-existent in Cameroon, the law is lawless, and structured in a way that is intended to attack its citizens’ human rights.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Historically, blondeness has been a signifier for desirability and beauty, speaking to “purity” — the purity of whiteness — like no other bodily attribute except, perhaps, blue eyes. In the twenty-first century, blondeness is the look desired by American presidents, pop stars, rappers, television announcers, Hollywood celebrities, the boy next door, and some Asian Americans, African Americans, white Americans, Arab Americans, and LatinX Americans. The desirability of blonde hair has no genre boundaries, no pronoun limitation, and no class limit.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Mohawk, the emblematic Frontier river in the period of American colonisation, is here a cable of data transmission, and the 7 Sultans Casino is a virtual destination, one of the three hundred online casinos hosted by the servers located in Kahnawake, a small native american indian reserve to the south of Montreal. Incorporating poker, challenges to the law, a struggle for the control of a new territory where the stakes are high, our film ‘La Nouvelle Kahnawake’, between fiction and documentary, pushes these analogies with the Western to explore both our relationship to the figure of the ‘Indian’ and the confusion of our perception of space that new information technology has brought about. As the artists state: “We are neither anthropologists nor journalists.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Salomania sees choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer and artist Wu Tsang rehearse scenes from Valda’s Solo , a chapter of a film Rainer made in 1972 after having seen women perform the dance of the seven veils in Alla Nazimova’s 1923 silent film Salomé . The script is based on the Biblical New Testament story of the Jewish princess Salomé, who in the Christian tradition has been depicted as an emblem of feminine seduction and danger. In the twentieth century, her character was made popular through English playwright Oscar Wilde’s famous theater piece, Salomé .

Installation (Installation)

Part of a series entitled “Looking at Listening”, 2011, the piece invited the spectator to experiment and consider sound as a kinetic and synesthetic process, where multiple experiences and senses can cross. The presented photographs were selected from the New York Public Library and found in an archive called ‘Listening,’ with the sub-genres ‘town meetings,’ ‘investigation,’ ‘audiences 1960–1970’ and ‘conversation.’ Taking the photographs from the city’s archive of frozen moments of audio exchange, Arakawa and Tcherepnin give sound and movement back to past moments. In each of the photographs, people are listening in different situations—public, and private.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

One of John Wood and Paul Harrison’s earliest works, Device features Harrison performing a series of actions, assisted by the titular ‘devices’, that use physics to force his body into unusual and uncomfortable positions. Maintaining his signature deadpan expression throughout the video, in one scene Harrison is thrusted into the air by a slowly inflating balloon until only his feet are visible in the frame, while in another he levitates in diving position with the help of a pulley system. Wood uses his body and specially-designed props created by the artist duo to explore the space of the screen in hilarious, and sometimes clumsy or violent, ways.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Fade In (the whole title of the film is actually the entire five page script) is a collaboration with the Danish artist collective Superflex (group of freelance artist–designer–activists committed to social and economic change, founded in 1993 by Jakob Fenger, Rasmus Nielsen and Bjørnstjerne Christiansen). There are several time layers to understand the story behind this film. In 1601, the San Jago set sail from Goa for Lisbon; the cargo included the first consignment of South East Asian porcelain destined for the European market.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Beyond Guilt the two artists create a portrait of our generation in three parts. In Tel Aviv, in confined spaces such as toilets or bar of hotel rooms, they create situations in which participants answer questions and describe themselves. Camera in hand, there is little editing in their works, leaving a rather crude result.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

3-Legged is an early video work by John Wood and Paul Harrison in which they appear with their legs tied together (as one would do in a three-legged race). Wood and Harrison stand together in a narrow alcove built into their studio, dressed similarly in grey long sleeve shirts and jeans. Facing a tennis ball machine that is almost completely out of view, with only the barrel of the machine protruding from the bottom of the frame, they hobble back and forth across the alcove attempting to avoid the tennis balls launching toward them, with varying degrees of success.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Nepal and China signed an agreement for the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2017. The BRI is a strategy that was set forth by China in 2013 to expand its influence by building a network of economic corridors around the globe. BRI projects in Nepal include the Kathmandu-Kerung Railway, the Galchhi-Rasuwagadhi-Kerung 400 kilovolt transmission line, the 762 megawatt Tamor hydroelectric dam, and the 426 megawatt Phukot Karnali run-of-the-river hydropower project.

Photography (Photography)

While still living in New York, shortly after the nuclear power plant disaster, Shimpei Takeda heard an NPR interview with a survivor living in temporary housing in Fukushima. He noticed that the dialect was similar to that of his grandparents. Straightaway he went back to Japan and turned to camera-less photographic techniques to capture otherwise unseen interactions of materials and light.