Author Archives: jolanta

My works continue to show a variety of lifestyles, either partly current experiences or partly reminiscences. Of great fascination to me is man’s socio-economic and political behavior, which has influenced my direction of work over the years. These works are rendered in a variety of media, including bronze, concrete, polyester, plaster, resin, waste materials, and […]

The birth of photography can be traced to the camera obscura, a device dating all the way back to 400 B.C. Originally conceived of as an enclosed box with a tiny hole on one side for light to pass through, the camera obscura became the de facto aid for landscape painters who sought to transcribe […]

Leafing through notes, the critical juncture for this project began to germinate in the summer of 2007. It was just when Shi Jin-Song had finished a three-person show at the Today Art Museum, Nine Trees, and he took me to Beijing’s eastern suburbs for a look at the place where his works are being manufactured. […]

In autumn 2005 I had just finished a giant installation at Exit Art, part of its Traffic exhibition. Essentially a sloped ceiling coated in 12,000 colorful toy cars, this piece was ostensibly a wry, humorous take on global warming. But as the show wore on I began to feel uneasy. I wondered—can art really walk […]

Looking at my daughter’s impressive collection of toys, I was reminded of the only toy I had while growing up. It was a ball. A small, fist-sized ball with a wavy pattern. That small ball played an instrumental role when I first learned how to paint. I painted it white and used it as a […]

Through the use of video and photography, much of my work seeks to examine both psychological and visceral aspects within the nature of subjectivity. I have been exploring issues of mortality and identity, through the context of the performative. My video work portrays given gestures, “acted-out,” directly to the camera/viewer, which are, most often, recorded […]

My work for the past seven years has been revolving around the notions of sexuality and identity. Although during the initial years of my art education it seemed drawing and painting were my strongest visual platform, photography and performance became increasingly my area of focus, and the perfect ground to explore all these questions and […]

By now, Liu Zheng’s photography is well known among contemporary art circles, as well it should be—prior to this summer, his most critically acclaimed series, The Chinese, was exhibited at Yossi Milo Gallery over three years ago. In the years since, these understated portraits of contemporary Chinese society have been compared to the work of […]

I was doing the “dollar” thing when more and more people came to know me. But I had done quite a few performances before that, for example Red Flag Canal, where I dyed a section of the railroad red. Such works bear strong cultural features of contemporary China. People ask me why I dyed the […]

The representation of drawing within the scope of fine art is still a marginalized genre that appears most prominently in street art and comics. Loaded at the Phatory gallery of the East Village offered me the chance to present a small selection of drawings and paintings by Saul Chernick and Ernest Concepcion. Drawing upon vernacular […]