© » KADIST
Vincent Leong
The photograph Exquisite Eco Living is part of a larger series titled Executive Properties in which he digitally manipulated the images to insert iconic buildings of Kuala Lumpur in the view of derelict spaces also found in the city. This images reflect on a dystopian future of the country, perhaps drawing parallel with the political changes in Malaysia.
© » KADIST
Yin-Ju Chen
One Universe, One God, One Nation was inspired by Hannah Arendt’s analysis of space exploration and by the astrological horoscope of Chinese political and military leader Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975). Chiang was born with the sun in Scorpio and at the Ninth House, moon in Aries, and ascendant in Capricorn, signifying an individual who is headstrong, intense, and persistent, with a desire for leadership. Yin-Ju juxtaposes images of outer space, war, and subservient masses, calling attention to how the dictator’s violence and charismatic power over the crowd was predicted by his particular astrology.
© » KADIST
Oscar Munoz
In Ante la imagen (Before the Image, 2009) Muñoz continues to explore the power of a photograph to live up to the memory of a specific person. Since a photograph is fixed, it cannot encapsulate the spirit of someone who is gone. Muñoz etched onto the surface of a mirror an appropriated historical image, a daguerreotype from 1839.
© » KADIST
Yin-Ju Chen
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
This work includes sketches for Extrastellar Evaluations , the project she produced at Kadist. Extrastellar Evaluations introduces Plato’s mythical state of Atlantis as the theoretical birthplace of conceptual art. Well-known and obscure epistemological notions from the annals of cosmology and mysticism guided and informed her research in the Bay Area during the Kadist residency at the beginning of 2016.
© » KADIST
Tuan Andrew Nguyen
This work presents the image of an immolated monk engraved on a baseball bat. The flames surround him eroding the extremity of the bat. The delicate sculpture refers to the sacrifice of the Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, who immolated himself on June 16th 1963, in reaction to the discrimination and the repressive politics of the Diem Catholic regime (regime installed by the Americans) towards the Buddhists.
© » KADIST
Yin-Ju Chen
Extrastellar Evaluations is a multimedia installation produced during Yin-Ju Chen’s residency at Kadist San Francisco in the spring of 2016. Chen’s project departs from a 19th century theory popular within Western biogeography that posited the existence of a “lost land” or ancient continent called Lemuria that had sunk beneath the Indian and Pacific Ocean due to cataclysmic geological change. As a result, its inhabitants, the Lemurians, found refuge in Mount Shasta, California.
© » KADIST
Fang Lu
In the work Cinema , Fang Lu explores in a meticulous yet un-dramatic — almost casual — way of how “the self” in our today’s life is a controlled and staged construction of oneself. What appears at first sight to be a not unusual performance of self-choreography, becomes at a second glance a disturbing portrait of a – female – persona brought to life under contemporary conditions of attractiveness, anxiety and narcissism. Unlike her previous works, which duel more on the internal, surrealistic human conditions, this seven-channel work elevates the individual relationship with its socio-political environment to a more recognizable and appealing set of behavioral actions of self-awareness and self-inflicted anguish.
© » KADIST
Yin-Ju Chen
Through a semi-fictional approach, Extrastellar Evaluations envisions a version of history in which alien inhabitants, the Lemurians, lived among humans under the guise of various renowned conceptual and minimal artists in the 1960s (Carl Andre, Mel Bochner, and James Turrell to name a few). If humans interpreted and appropriated the geometric-shaped works they created as conceptual and minimalist artworks, the objects were in fact transmission devices the Lemurians used to report back on human actions to their mother planet. The video takes the form of a channeled message from Adama, High Priest and spiritual leader of the Lemurians.
© » KADIST
Joachim Koester
Tarantism is the name of disease which appeared in southern Italy, resulting from the bite of a spider called Tarantula. This bite caused various symptoms, such as nausea, difficulty to speak, delusion, excitability and agitation. The victims suffered then from convulsions and the only way to heal them was to engage in a frenzied dance, as it was believed.
© » KADIST
Koki Tanaka
This artwork was part of a group of projects presented in the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013. These videos show several participants from different backgrounds gathering to create and object or an action. For this video, he brought together five Japanese poets from different movements and styles.
© » KADIST
Zarouhie Abdalian
The first iteration of Flutter was specifically conceived for the Pro Arts Gallery space in Oakland in 2010, viewable from the public space of a sidewalk, and the version acquired by the Kadist Collection is an adaptation of it. The work consists of a mirrored structure with a hidden motor that vibrates every so often. In this play of mirrors, the viewer first encounters their reflection, but in time the vibration distorts the image, making self-recognition impossible and suggesting the fragility of identity.
© » KADIST
Yee I-Lann
PANGKIS by Yee I-Lann is a looped video performance. The work is named after the triumphant warrior cry, an animistic guttural call, which punctuates the traditional Dusun Sumazau dance. For this work, the artist collaborated with Tagaps Dance Theatre, a group of young dancers whose practice merges traditional and contemporary styles.
© » KADIST
Richard T. Walker
let this be us is a single-channel video by Richard T. Walker featuring the artist himself roaming around the wilderness of a deserted landscape, sporadically humming a melody, strumming a guitar, or playing a few notes on a keyboard. As he traverses between striking locations we see him carrying large photographic prints of the same landscape that he is treading, which he then rests onto tripods so that the horizon in the photograph seamlessly matches that of the real landscape. As we hear the music, Walker comes in and out of view, dissipating into the landscape as his body becomes invisible, hidden behind the photographic prints.
© » KADIST
Doug Aitken
The version of Frontier acquired by the Kadist Collection consists of a single-channel video, adapted from the monumental installation and performance that Aitken presented in Rome, by the Tiber River, in 2009. In this film, Aiken’s allusion to “the frontier” and iconic imagery like the cowboy suggest that the American West Coast as a cultural construction. These notions are reinforced by two key elements in the film: its protagonist, the iconic West Coast artist Ed Ruscha, and its reference to the cinematic and the experience of the movie theater.
© » KADIST
Yee I-Lann
Sarcastically titled to call attention to the problematic notions underlying colonialism, this photograph shows hundreds of Native Malaysians seated quietly behind one of their colonial oppressors. The artwork belongs to Yee’s series Picturing Power (2013) that deals with the destabilizing impacts of neo-colonialism and globalization on Southeast Asia’s history. Yee approaches the aesthetics and politics of the ethnographic gaze with both irony and humanity, challenging the modes of seeing inherent to the British colonization of Malaysia.
© » KADIST
Nalini Malani
Memory: Record/Erase is a stop-motion animation by Nalini Malani based on ‘The Job,’ a short story by celebrated German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht. Brecht’s story follows a poverty-stricken family during the German depression, as the central character, Frau Hausmann, is forced to impersonate her late husband to procure his job as a nightwatchman to support her two children. Despite her exceptional performance during the job, and even after receiving public commendation for catching a thief, when eventually her identity is discovered during a factory accident she is forced into a precarious existence where she resorts to selling herself to get by.
© » KADIST
Lynn Hershman Leeson
Lynn Hershman Leeson’s genre-bending documentary Strange Culture tells the story of how one man’s personal tragedy turns into persecution by a paranoid, conservative, and overzealous government. Through interviews, scripted acting, and illustrations, Hershman Leeson outlines the series of absurd events that led to New York state’s case against the former SFAI Associate Professor and artist Steve Kurtz. By closely following Kurtz’s story, Hershman Leeson reveals a strange ripple effect of the Bush administration’s destructive policies.
© » KADIST
Nalini Malani
Malani draws upon her personal experience of the violent legacy of colonialism and de-colonization in India in this personal narrative that was shown as a colossal six channel video installation at dOCUMENTA (13), but is here adapted to single channel. The video is largely silent until violent crashes and female voices overwhelm the viewer, portraying the inner voice of a woman who is brutally gang raped. Malani addresses the fatal place of women in Indian society and the geo-politics of national identity.
© » KADIST
Mario Garcia Torres
In Up All Night, Waiting for the Chelsea Hotel Magic to Spark My Creativity Mario García Torres constructs and documents a hypothetical scene, situating himself within a lineage of artists and creatives that used to congregate at the historic hotel. The long-exposure capture depicts García Torres at multiple stages of brainstorming, devising, and introspection, his ethereal figure connected with artistic giants of the past. Yet, there is also an insipid tone beyond mere insomnia or frustration at the lack of being able to garner inspiration.
© » KADIST
Ming Wong
Making Chinatown (2012) is a remake of Roman Polanski’s 1974 classic neo-noir film Chinatown . According to Wong, the latter is a “textbook” of Hollywood filmmaking . In Ming’s version, he plays all four main characters portrayed originally by Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston, and Belinda Palmer, shooting against a backdrop of a film set reproduced as wallpaper in a gallery space.
© » KADIST
Yoshua Okón
Fridge-Freezer is a 2-channel video installation where Yoshua Okón explores the darker side of suburbia, d escribed by the artist as “ the ideal environment for a numb existence of passive consumerism and social a nd environmental disengagement. ” Filmed at display homes in the suburbs of Manchester in the United Kingdom, the video features real-estate agents clad in bright-red blazers enthusiastically describing features of the ‘dream home’ as they walk through different rooms. A couple of additional elements, a couch and neutral soft carpet, recreate the domestic setting and immerse the viewer in the unfolding scenes.
© » KADIST
Mauricio Ancalmo
War Footage is a series of wall-mounted works composed of 16mm film leader, tightly bound to flag-shaped panels by the artist. In their monochrome simplicity — some white, some black, one red — they bring to mind Rauschenberg’s minimalist paintings from the 50’s; the shape and repetitive figuration bring to mind Jasper John’s later flag paintings. Modifications to the blank leader – holes, letters, random dots and dashes – were created by the machinations of previous Ancalmo pieces.
© » KADIST
Gimhongsok
To explore the boundaries between artwork and audience, Gimhongsok created a series of sculptural performances in which a person wearing an animal costume poses in the gallery. Bunny’s Sofa is a continuation of this series, but with a different twist. Instead of hiring a real person to dress as the animal, Gimhongsok placed a mannequin inside the rabbit costume.
© » KADIST
Lynn Hershman Leeson
Using the seminal 1958 film Vertigo as a launchpad, Lynn Hershman Leeson explores the blurred lines between fact and fantasy in VertiGhost , a film commissioned by the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco. VertiGhost features the re-creation of select scenes from Vertigo (which takes place in San Francisco), documentation of the life of a painting by Amedeo Modigliani in the Legion of Honor’s collection that was enshrouded by questions of authenticity, as well as interviews—including with the original film’s star Kim Novak— about the construction of realities in life and art. By thoughtfully overlaying these conversations and events, Hershman Leeson distills complex conversations around identity and authenticity into concise insights in just over 12 minutes.
© » KADIST
Xiaoyun Chen
In the video work Drag, a man in a dark room pulls on the end of a rope. In midst of sounds of heavy breathing, the camera presents alternating scenes of a man and the shadow of a man wearing a long, pointed hat cast against a wall. Insinuating a sinister mood, the man and the shadow struggle to control the scene through alternating tugs and releases of a rope.
© » KADIST
Hiraki Sawa
Hako (2006) depicts a mysterious and dystopic landscape where the world becomes flat: distance between different spaces, depth of field and three-dimensional perceptions are canceled. Interiors of a Victorian doll’s house, a rippled seascape, a palm tree forest, and a gravel seashore are superimposed, morphing into each other. The hermetic narrative is charged with psychological and mythological aspects.
© » KADIST
Fang Lu
No World is an action-filled video work filmed inside an abandoned museum in the Songzhuang area outside Beijing. Without using any dialogue, Lu created an artificial scenario where she instructed actors with a list of tasks to gesturally mime scenes from news and journalistic images outside China. Through an intuitive self-trained mimicry, these acts simultaneously became moves in a game as well as a daily routine.
© » KADIST
Fang Lu
Canton Novelty by Fang Lu captures the adventure of a group of three girls, Ruohan, Lily and Zoe on a summer vacation in Guangzhou, China. Throughout the course of the trip, they film themselves with their cell phones singing in a karaoke room, shopping at a hardware store, sitting at a park, hanging out in a hotel room and exploring a neighborhood looking at vacant apartment ads. Although their days may seem uneventful, the girls seemingly discover the ability to perform impossible “miracles,” including cooking a full pot of rice from three grains, summoning objects to appear and disappear, and turning off street lamps on command.
Xiaoyun Chen
- location: Hangzhou, China
- year born: 1971
- gender: male
- nationality: Chinese
- home town: Hubei Province, China
Mario Garcia Torres
- location: Mexico City, Mexico
- year born: 1975
- gender: male
- nationality: Mexican
- home town: Monclova, Mexico
Lynn Hershman Leeson
- location: San Francisco, California
- year born: 1941
- gender: female
- nationality: American
- home town: Cleveland, Ohio
Yin-Ju Chen
- year born: 2011
- gender: female
- nationality: American & Taiwanese
Fang Lu
Fang Lu uses intimacy as a place for self-expression in her videos and draws out mundane moments from everyday life as a strategy to heighten one’s awareness of existence from the rest of the world...
Joachim Koester
- year born: 1962
- gender: male
- nationality: Danish
- home town: Copenhagen, Denmark
Yee I-Lann
- location: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
- year born: 1971
- gender: female
- nationality: Malaysian
- home town: Sabah, Malaysia
Koki Tanaka
- location: Los Angeles, California
- year born: 1975
- gender: male
- nationality: Japanese
- home town: Tochigi, Japan
Nalini Malani
- year born: 1946
- gender: female
- nationality: Indian
- home town: Karachi, Pakistan
Cerith Wyn Evans
- location: London, United Kingdom
- year born: 1958
- gender: male
- nationality: British
- home town: Llanelli, United Kingdom
Rodney Graham
- location: Vancouver, Canada
- year born: 1949
- gender: male
- nationality: Canadian
- home town: Vancouver, Canada
Haegue Yang
- location: Berlin, Germany & Seoul, South Korea
- year born: 1971
- gender: female
- nationality: Korean
- home town: Seoul, South Korea
Desiree Holman
- location: Oakland, California
- gender: female
- nationality: American
Ho Tzu Nyen
- location: Singapore
- year born: 1976
- gender: male
- nationality: Singaporean
- home town: Singapore
Trisha Donnelly
- location: New York, New York
- year born: 1974
- gender: male
- nationality: American
- home town: San Francisco, California
Ming Wong
- location: Berlin, Germany
- year born: 1971
- gender: male
- nationality: Singaporean
- home town: Singapore
Doug Aitken
- year born: 1968
- gender: male
- nationality: American
- home town: Redondo Beach, California
Ranu Mukherjee
- location: San Francisco, California
- year born: 1966
- gender: female
- nationality: Indian
Hu Yun
- location: Shanghai, China
- year born: 1986
- gender: male
- nationality: Chinese
- home town: Shanghai, China
Oded Hirsch
- location: New York, New York
- year born: 1976
- gender: male
- nationality: Israeli
- home town: Kibbutz Afikim, Israel
Oscar Munoz
- location: Cali, Colombia
- year born: 1951
- gender: male
- nationality: Colombian
- home town: Popayán, Colombia
Hiraki Sawa
- location: London, United Kingdom
- year born: 1977
- gender: male
- nationality: Japanese
- home town: Ishikawa, Japan
Mauricio Ancalmo
- year born: 1983
- gender: male
- nationality: El Salvador
Richard T. Walker
- location: San Francisco, California
- year born: 1977
- gender: male
- nationality: British
Brian Bress
- location: Los Angeles, California
- year born: 1975
- gender: male
- nationality: American
- home town: Norfolk, Virginia
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1990-1999
Rodney Graham
1991Ponderosa Pine IV belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that live in Northern California...
Nalini Malani
1996Memory: Record/Erase is a stop-motion animation by Nalini Malani based on ‘The Job,’ a short story by celebrated German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht...
Rodney Graham
1996Tree on the Former Site of Camera Obscura (1996) belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that lives in Northern California...
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2000-2009
Mario Garcia Torres
2004Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art...
Mario Garcia Torres
2005Mario Garcia Torres films a game of Charades among professional actors guessing the former North Korean dictator’s favorite Hollywood films...
Hiraki Sawa
2006Hako (2006) depicts a mysterious and dystopic landscape where the world becomes flat: distance between different spaces, depth of field and three-dimensional perceptions are canceled...
Joachim Koester
2006Physical and mental exploration have been founding elements in Joachim Koester’s research for several years...
Xiaoyun Chen
2006The image of rusted nails, nuts and bolts as shrapnel sandwiched between a fried Chicken burger highlights the contrast between decadence and destruction...
Xiaoyun Chen
2006State Terrorism in the ultimate form of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood features a portrait of the artist wearing a zipped utilitarian jacket reminiscent of a worker’s uniform, with one arm behind his back as if forced to ingest a bundle of stick—a literal portrayal to the definition of fascism...
Joachim Koester
2007Tarantism is the name of disease which appeared in southern Italy, resulting from the bite of a spider called Tarantula...
Lynn Hershman Leeson
2007Lynn Hershman Leeson’s genre-bending documentary Strange Culture tells the story of how one man’s personal tragedy turns into persecution by a paranoid, conservative, and overzealous government...
Gimhongsok
2007To explore the boundaries between artwork and audience, Gimhongsok created a series of sculptural performances in which a person wearing an animal costume poses in the gallery...
Trisha Donnelly
2007Untitled is a black-and-white photograph of a wave just before it breaks as seen from the distance of an overlook...
Dinh Q. Lê
2008Hill 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...
Cerith Wyn Evans
2008Untitled (Perfect Lovers + 1) by Cerith Wyn Evans takes as its starting point Felix Gonzales-Torres’s seminal work Untitled (Perfect Lovers) , in which two clocks were synchronized and left to run without interference, the implication being that one would stop before the other...
Oscar Munoz
2009In Ante la imagen (Before the Image, 2009) Muñoz continues to explore the power of a photograph to live up to the memory of a specific person...
Doug Aitken
2009The version of Frontier acquired by the Kadist Collection consists of a single-channel video, adapted from the monumental installation and performance that Aitken presented in Rome, by the Tiber River, in 2009...
Koki Tanaka
2009Walking Through is one of a series of videos—sometimes humorous, often absurd—that record the artist’s performative interactions with objects in a particular site...
Yoshua Okón
2009Canned Laughter was Okón’s response to an invitation from Ciudad Juárez , Mexico, where artists were asked to create works based on their experience of the city...
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2010-2019
Zarouhie Abdalian
2010The first iteration of Flutter was specifically conceived for the Pro Arts Gallery space in Oakland in 2010, viewable from the public space of a sidewalk, and the version acquired by the Kadist Collection is an adaptation of it...
Mario Garcia Torres
2010In Up All Night, Waiting for the Chelsea Hotel Magic to Spark My Creativity Mario García Torres constructs and documents a hypothetical scene, situating himself within a lineage of artists and creatives that used to congregate at the historic hotel...
Mauricio Ancalmo
2010War Footage is a series of wall-mounted works composed of 16mm film leader, tightly bound to flag-shaped panels by the artist...
Koki Tanaka
2010Tanaka’s unique understanding of objects and materials is reflected in the four photographs that document his Process of Blowing Flour ...
Haegue Yang
2010In addition to Yang’s signature drying rack and light bulbs, Office Voodoo includes various office supplies like CDs, paper clips, headphones, a computer mouse, a stamp, a hole puncher, a mobile phone charger...
Desiree Holman
2010Reborn, 2010 is a three-channel video by Desiree Holman that questions ideas of motherhood and the maternal instinct...
Yin-Ju Chen
Drawing & Print
2011(Drawing & Print) This work includes sketches for Extrastellar Evaluations , the project she produced at Kadist...
Ana Teresa Fernández
Drawing & Print
2011(Drawing & Print) The artist writes about her work Borrando la Frontera, a performance done at Tijuana/San Diego border: “I visually erased the train rails that serve as a divider between the US and Mexico...
Ranu Mukherjee
2011Conceived as a large-scale mural-like projection, Color of History, Sweating Rocks is a neo-futuristic, hybrid film that combines cinematic language, collage, animation, and inventive forms to highlight the plight of the peoples of the Sahara—and refugees in general—who have been displaced by oil-mining....
Ho Tzu Nyen
2011The Cloud of Unknowing (2011) is titled after a 14th-century medieval treatise on faith, in which “the cloud of unknowing” that stands between the aspirant and God can only be evoked by the senses, rather than the rational mind...
Vincent Leong
2012The photograph Exquisite Eco Living is part of a larger series titled Executive Properties in which he digitally manipulated the images to insert iconic buildings of Kuala Lumpur in the view of derelict spaces also found in the city...
Tuan Andrew Nguyen
2012This work presents the image of an immolated monk engraved on a baseball bat...
Nalini Malani
2012Malani draws upon her personal experience of the violent legacy of colonialism and de-colonization in India in this personal narrative that was shown as a colossal six channel video installation at dOCUMENTA (13), but is here adapted to single channel...
Oded Hirsch
2012Oded Hirsch’s video work Nothing New (2012) utilizes seemingly absurdist tropes to raise more trenchant questions about communal action and collective identity in modern day Israel...
Xiaoyun Chen
2012The lengthy titles in Chen Xiaoyun’s work often appear as colophons to his photographs that invite the viewer to a process of self realization through contemplating the distance between word and image...
Koki Tanaka
2013This artwork was part of a group of projects presented in the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013...
Yee I-Lann
2013Sarcastically titled to call attention to the problematic notions underlying colonialism, this photograph shows hundreds of Native Malaysians seated quietly behind one of their colonial oppressors...
Brian Bress
2013Blindseye Arranger (Max) (2013) features a greyscale arrangement of rudimentary shapes layered atop one another like a dense cluster of wood block prints, the juxtaposition of sharp lines and acute angles creating an abstracted field of rectangular and triangulated forms composed as if in a cubist landscape...
Xiaoyun Chen
2014The central point of Vanishing Point is the most direct physiological reaction of the body to the environment...
Yoshua Okón
2015Fridge-Freezer is a 2-channel video installation where Yoshua Okón explores the darker side of suburbia, d escribed by the artist as “ the ideal environment for a numb existence of passive consumerism and social a nd environmental disengagement...
Yin-Ju Chen
2016Through a semi-fictional approach, Extrastellar Evaluations envisions a version of history in which alien inhabitants, the Lemurians, lived among humans under the guise of various renowned conceptual and minimal artists in the 1960s (Carl Andre, Mel Bochner, and James Turrell to name a few)...
Haegue Yang
2016A steel clothing rack adorned with turbine vents, Moroccan vintage jewelry, pinecones and knitting yarn, these heterogeneous elements are used here to create an exotic yet undefined identity within the work...
Lynn Hershman Leeson
2016Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba...
Lynn Hershman Leeson
2017Using the seminal 1958 film Vertigo as a launchpad, Lynn Hershman Leeson explores the blurred lines between fact and fantasy in VertiGhost , a film commissioned by the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco...
Yin-Ju Chen
2018Extrastellar Evaluations is a multimedia installation produced during Yin-Ju Chen’s residency at Kadist San Francisco in the spring of 2016...
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2020-2029
Yee I-Lann
20207-headed Lalandau Hat by Yee I-Lann is an intricately woven sculpture evoking the ceremonial headdress worn by Murut men in Borneo...
