Author Archives: jolanta

When Chinatsu Ban paints schoolgirls in their underpants they look like little Japanese dolls that lost their Kimonos. Ban is not preoccupied with the Japanese Lolita cult like Aya Takano, who paints overtly sexual girls in underpants. Mostly, Ban puts underpants on elephants instead. But she is still occupied with cuteness and youth, and what […]

Entering a vast, soaring, controlled space, quietly lit by warm rectangular spotlights and focused by eastern music, we feel our blood pressure lower, mood relax, judgment cease. We walk a colonnaded wooden aisle past suspended, uncluttered sepia photographs of closed-eyed, adolescent Buddhist monks leaning gently against kneeling, untethered elephants. Girls swathed in white Indian fabrics […]

"Culture Vulture" is a diverse group show that highlights art that employs popular culture as a visual starting point. Each artist in the show utilizes current and familiar visual symbols–appropriating them, toying with them, and reinventing them–though some do this with more originality than others. The curatorial statement includes a quote from Carl Andre that […]

� Organized by the Ministry of Culture and Information, Gia Ding Park, Ho Chi Minh City, has for the first time hosted a sculpture residency and exhibition. On this occasion the event is to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the liberation of Saigon and the reunification of Vietnam. As many as 40 artists were invited […]

War is business, show business. Last night I watched a rented copy of Gettysberg, the epic Civil War drama. I was amazed to see that, even when the opposing armies were both on the verge of collapse, desperately low on food and ammunition, they always had their fife and drum corps-uniformed in flashy outfits, pennants […]

Gallery Kin turns out to be portable, a concept rather than a space. After the interest generated by their underground "SHOW1," the three founders went overground and used "SHOW2" to initiate a new gallery in Lisbon, "Terceira Andar." Although not artistically bound, these three artists exhibit a certain commonality: they share a distaste for the […]

For those not very familiar with the Chinese new documentary movement, the director Wu Wenguang-known as the leading figure of the Urban Generation of filmmakers, and spokesperson for the ‘on location’ aesthetic-is the eye behind the camera that is creatively coordinating avant-garde dance performances at one of the largest contemporary arts events in Beijing, the […]

With von Neumann’s "Theory of Automata" (brought than to public fruition as AI) popularization in the mid-50s, the very last distance resisting human conceptual boundaries had been covered. And with phusis and techn� (natural and artificial) being swallowed up into the same complexity of the evolutionary process, a third category of discursive practice has opened […]

Seven days a week, The New York Times covers the art scene. Aside from "art news" (prices, prizes, museum expansions, etc.), the biggest share of that coverage discusses contemporary art as defined by Duchamp, when he suggested that anything can be art if the artist says it is. I agree that anything can be art, […]

Like everything else in New York City that has become iconic because of the peculiarity of the activity and the place that bred it, street art–once populating walls, bridges, and the mythic subway trains–has changed into something else entirely. Today, much that we label "street art" probably has its origins in rarified art schools and […]