Author Archives: jolanta

Using spray paints, compressors and acrylic paints thinned to a viscosity level of 19, Katharina Grosse transforms the industrial looking Solvent Space Gallery into a carnival of colorful passages and abstract splashes and shapes. Evoking works by James Rosenquist and Judy Pfaff, Grosse’s wild lines and tangles overcome the Gallery’s relatively banal, sterile architecture. Katharina […]

Olle Jonsson used to be a farmer, but when milk prices crashed in Sweden in the 1990s, he sold all his stock, land, equipment, and animals to start a new kind of cultivation: sculpture. His rickety, rusty giant works have an appropriate connection to the land and its ancient stories. Scrap metal legends Elizabeth Heather […]

This is my third trip to Beijing to participate in the exchange program sponsored by the Pickled Arts Centre. I was met at the airport by Xiao Chen, one of Li Gang’s secretaries, and we took a cab back to the arts center. Li Gang was watching a calligrapher from Taiwan, Yang Tze Yung, create […]

At about 10:00 I went to my room and read some of the new de Kooning biography before going off to sleep. I was up early to try to coordinate a side trip to Shenyang. Four phone calls and five e-mails made me realize that I was going to focus on completing my work on […]

The exhibition "Sport" at the charmingly ramshackle Socrates Sculpture Park on the water in Queens reached a perplexing, almost dada (anti) climax this Saturday. On another boiling hot day, a dozen or so snowboarder dudes hung out, mostly shirtless, around Nicholas Arbasky?s "social sculpture" of several short snowboard ramps, apparently modeled on real ones ? […]

The Taliban gutted Afghanistan of its museums, monuments, artists, and dissidents. Under their rule (1996-2001) visual arts, music, television, photographs of people, and magazines were deemed illegal. Peshawar, Pakistan, a historical trading post right over the border from Afghanistan, became a center for refugees?Human Rights watch reported that by 2001 more than 2 million Afghans […]

"We’ll see a forest of chimneys from here" Mao Zedong, Beijing 1949 Fifty years ago the Chinese city was set to become an orderly grid of danwei–of small worker units packed about the bases of glorious factories. This low, even dispersion of workers would guard against potentially corrupting bourgeois downtowns. The skyline was to be […]

Tan Dun?s exhibition Visual Music at the Shanghai Gallery of Art is a sprawling, clamoring multi-media installation that defies categorization. Tan Dun is skilled at evading labels, but most people know him as one of the most successful contemporary Chinese composers. Raised in a rural town in the Hunan province and condemned to working in […]

The world?s most renowned architects are flocking to China, where they are building the world?s biggest skyscrapers, hotels, and futuristic model towns. Following the 1990s building boom, Chinese cities are again in a state of architectural foment. Government officials and developers are tearing down plodding Communist bunkers and rethinking the cookie-cutter chrome and glass towers […]

Pauline Doutreluingne: You first began with documentaries, and later in 1994 you founded the Living Dance Studio together. How did this story began? Wu Wenguang: You can think that film and dance are two media that are really far from each other, but they aren’t. Dance is like theatre: it’s about a space with different […]