Photography (Photography)

Office Lady with a Red Umbrella restages a figure from a 1980 postcard made from a photograph from 1950’s. The retro-glamor of the 1950s style is restyled devoid of the original context of a Hong Kong street scene, where the “office lady” is walking on Queens Road of the Central district. With the “office lady” facing away from the viewer with a bare background, an introspective tone is created in Leung’s restaging while highlighting the red umbrella resonating with a red pencil skirt emblematic of the identity of the professional urban woman when Hong Kong was under British rule.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

This work exemplifies George Pfau’s interest in zombies and liminal embodiment. In different ways, zombies are present here as an icon of coming apart, yet they retain a persistent thereness. In Zombie Examined, the frayed edges of the body are undone by a clinical look, rather than a visual effect.

Photography (Photography)

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.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

This work exemplifies George Pfau’s interest in zombies and liminal embodiment. In different ways, zombies are present here as an icon of coming apart, yet they retain a persistent thereness.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Rabbithole by Chitra Ganesh is a digital animation that refigures a fundamental plot device in myths and fables. Referencing iconic folklore such as Alice in Wonderland, the Odyssey, and the Mahabharata, Ganesh’s video illustrates the story of a hero’s journey and transformation that is not driven by the glory of violent conquest or saving a damsel in distress. Ganesh’s short video features a colorful style of illustration specific to the artist’s comic works.

Painting (Painting)

Liu Yin’s cartoon-like paintings and drawings explore the ambivalences of love, nature, and consumerism. Their scenes belong to the realm of childhood dreams, expressing both desire and anxiety through delicate colors and playful figures.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

For many years Tripp has been involved in reviving Karuk ceremonies that had been discontinued for decades, he developed his signature abstract style, based in Karuk design, ceremonial regalia forms, and related cultural and political iconography. The two works in the KADIST collection are a continuation of these forms with in the medium of sculpture.

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.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Arseniy Zhilyaev (born 1984 in Voronezh, Russia) is an artist, writer and political activist who lives and works in Moscow and Voronezh. Zhilyaev’s artistic practice poses questions about the ?ultural production in the postsoviet condition. To trace Arseniy Zhilyaev’s work, one should span from the avant-garde of the 1920’s to the ‘shock therapy’ of the 1990’s in Russia.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Situated in German-occupied Belgium at the end of World War I, Y ou Make Me Iliad by Mary Reid Kelley focuses on the story of two. characters: a Belgian prostitute working near the frontlines and a young German soldier charged with monitoring the brothels. Harboring literary aspirations, the soldier goes in search of material to complete his novel.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Silver & Gold combines video, performance, and original costumes into a self-proclaimed “filmformance” that evokes the legendary filmmaker Jack Smith and his tribute to 1940s Dominican movie starlet Maria Montez in a magical and joyfully twisted exploration of race, glamour, sexuality, and the silver screen. Taking Smith’s interest in Hollywood’s obsession with the reproduction of the exotic as a point of departure, Bustamante embodies Miss Montez. Here, video and the body function as both material and subject in her bizarre search for the new bejeweled body part that is at once her curse and oracle.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

This work exemplifies George Pfau’s interest in zombies and liminal embodiment. In different ways, zombies are present here as an icon of coming apart, yet they retain a persistent thereness.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Edith Dekyndt looks at the waters of the Dead Sea, that become almost an abstract undersea landscape. The exceptional physical qualities of this salt water make this an unusual study: depth, weightlessness floating, where the presence of salt eradicates any possible life form. Dekyndt films the emptiness and the supposed absence in this sea, in which we can, however, notice an immense richness of movements and colors due to light variations of light.

Painting (Painting)

Liu Yin’s cartoon-like paintings and drawings explore the ambivalences of love, nature, and consumerism. Their scenes belong to the realm of childhood dreams, expressing both desire and anxiety through delicate colors and playful figures.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Lessons of the Blood by James T. Hong pieces together interviews, extensive archival and field research, and TV footage addressing Japan’s use of biological warfare and experimentation on Chinese prisoners during World War II, as well as the revisionism of the Japanese government and Chinese survivors’ attempts to live with this horrific history and to find justice. Co-written, directed, edited and produced with Yin-Ju Chen, whose work is also represented in the Kadist collection, Lessons of the Blood is a meditation on propaganda, the ways in which national mythologies can literally infect and poison the most vulnerable among us, and the legacy of World War II in China, presented through the testimonies of survivors, academics, medical experts, nationalists and activists. The film locates its genesis in the publication of the New History Textbook in Japan in 2000, which infamously glossed over the Japanese Empire’s wartime atrocities, sparking rage and violent protests in China and South Korea in 2005.

Photography (Photography)

Ha Tae-Bum’s “White” series, started in 2008, begins with photographic images from the mainstream media depicting sites of conflict or crisis. The artist eliminates human presence, miscellaneous details, and all color from the images, then “rebuilds” them into quiet, achromatic models with thin white paper. Once complete, the models are photographed in a nearly identical composition as the original image.

Photography (Photography)

In his series Tsugi no yoru e (Onto the next night) , 2010, Yamatani gives viewers access to the wild world of young rockers and skaters. He prints their idiosyncratic life in ferrotyped gelatin silver prints. Using this forgotten printing process to depict his generation, he manages successfully to reevaluate a classic approach with a fresh understanding of it.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Haunted by You documents Taiyo Kimura’s struggle to use a record player, satirizing the normal actions of everyday life in order to question the meanings that underlie ordinary modes of living. The performance narrative unfolds upon the circular movements of the turntable. A chicken’s leg replaces the turntable’s arm.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Eric Dizambourg’s film presents a bucolic and ludicrous world used as a background for a character who is an actor as well as a performer. This character comes and goes throughout the countryside, the barn and an urban setting, a world of odds and ends where objects often seem to be used for other purposes than their original ones.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

This is a poignant and humorous self portrait that turns the camera on the artist’s own physical inability to cry. With non-stop cascades of “tears” coming down from his eyes, the impact of the work is in the contrast between the still image of the artist and the constant movement of the waterfalls flowing down. An image of impotency, it is also a beautiful “moving picture” in the formal sense.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Tectonic Model is made from a number of leather bound books piled up in different formations that resemble architecture on top of a sawhorse desk. Tiny cranes of about ten centimetres in height are attached to the top of the books, which have their tassels laid out. The intricately balanced arrangements, with some books standing free and upright, gives the impression that the cranes might have stacked the books themselves by lifting the tassels.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

This untitled drawing was part of Sung Hwan Kim’s solo exhibition Sung Hwan Kim: A Still Window From Two or More Places , which took place in tranzitdisplay in Prague, Czech Republic in 2010. tranzit.cz is part of a network working independently in Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovak Republic, and Romania since 2002. Such doodle-like drawings are often crucial components of Kim’s performances. The imagery of faces, heads, snakes, and serpentine paths are recurring motifs in the artist’s drawing practice.

Photography (Photography)

The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale. These photographs present a series of urban landscapes and assembled Foucauldian structures of the present. Du sees the Tower of Babel as a continually reinvented narrative that warns people of “dangerous tendencies in the present time.” Du’s Babylonian towers resurrect from fallen rubbles of religious history in grand scale to focus on modern crises of civilization.

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.

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.

Retired Pillar represents the death and deterioration of legacy of colonial Shanghai. The silicon Corinthian column lays horizontal upon its pedestal, inflating and deflating in the rhythm of difficult breathing, as if exhausted by its lifelong labor. Shan comments on the deterioration of the influence of French colonialism within Shanghai as well as the adoption of Western forms of architectural decoration as symbols of wealth and power.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The video 9000 PIECES by Euan Macdonald was filmed at a musical instrument factory in Shanghai where 90 percent of the pianos that they manufacture are exported around the world, and only 10 percent are “finished” and can be labeled “Made in the US (or) Europe.” The video captures an intricate network of mechanisms as they interact with each other, their rhythmic movements resulting in an intense choreography and a cacophony of metallic sounds dramatized by Macdonald’s editing. As the shot widens it reveals the process we see unfold: a piano being vigorously tested by a factory machine designed to determine the endurance of the instruments. Contrary to what is often relayed, the work has nothing to do with Chinese factories or fast changing global economies.

Painting (Painting)

Liu Yin’s cartoon-like paintings and drawings explore the ambivalences of love, nature, and consumerism. Their scenes belong to the realm of childhood dreams, expressing both desire and anxiety through delicate colors and playful figures.

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.