One night in the early 70s, young Japanese photographer Kohei Yoshiyuki and a fellow colleague took a walk through Chuo Park in Shinjuku, and encountered “something amazing”—a couple full on doing it.  It was this incident that launched one of Yoshiyuki’s most controversial projects: a series of grainy black-and-white photographs called The Park. Made during […]

The iconoclastic stance Charles Merrill takes as both an artist and activist goes far beyond the formalized calls of civic duty. “There is only so much you can do with paint on canvas,” he says. Nonetheless, Merrill continues to lay paint on canvas to express his perception of the violence permeating the increasingly intolerant attitudes […]

Circles were everywhere—red, blue, black, yellow, green—across the floor, on the walls, near the ceiling. Hung from the roof were five bicycle wheels painted the same colors through which a yellow dragon was flying. Below the dragon on the floor was a huge piece of white canvas splashed with similar circles. Another long piece of […]

Matilde Digmann: Thank you for taking the time to talk to me. I would like to start by asking you about the title of the work Love Songs? How does it correspond to the content and expression of the work? Mary Kelly: Well, the title is kind of unusual for me: in the past I’ve […]

Less Than Day, Or Night, my recent sculptural installation at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, continues to explore what I call “homemade futurism.” The piece is inspired by the final Cantos of Dante’s Inferno in which Dante, led by Virgil, enters the freezing central pit of hell. At the end, as the pair climb their way […]

Kate Clark’s taxidermic sculptures are disarming. With patience and skill, she marries sympathetic, sculpted human faces to animal forms, creating hybrid creatures that awaken in the viewer a sense of wonder while also encouraging somber rumination. Not long ago similar creations—mummified mermaids, mounted werewolves—filled circus side shows and toured natural history museums, providing audiences with […]

Johan Berggren: Right now we are sitting in an amazing house about 20 minutes away from inner city Stockholm. This is where you and Miriam Bäckström, also an artist, live. It’s a bit secluded but it must be very relaxing out here. How long have you lived here? Carsten Höller: About five years. We lived […]

Ain Cocke: Let’s just fuck the intellectual talk…. Let’s talk about sex. What was the first time you got laid like? Tell me if you want, but I’m just kidding. No tell me. Colter Jacobsen: I was in Rome; his name was Angelo and he was just that, an angel. He was a French/Italian who […]

Dressing the surfaces of Yvon Lambert’s project space with an uninterrupted stream of translucent words, and with a bichrome wallpaper of Chinese lotuses composed of dirty messages and comprising pornographic scenes, Tsang Kin-Wah debuted in New York last fall with new signature installations. Their underlying “anger” was calibrated toward an American audience—rants like FUCKINGWHITEAMERICANSUPERFICIALIST, DAMNTHEAMERICANSDAMNTHEMUSLIMS, […]

Wu Rijin, one of the main representatives of super-form visual art, recently finished a set of works entitled “City Series.” Using new visual language, and themes such as co-existing, restraining, destroying, and altering, this set of works concerns the excessiveness of contemporary culture. Combining signs of the city and the wolf totem—representing civilization counterbalancing nature […]