Leah Oates: What is your background, and when did you know you would be an artist? Vadana Jain: I was born in Queens, but we flew back to India often while I was growing up to visit family. It was such a change from New York City, with animals grazing everywhere and rag carts and […]

The Mesocosm is the mediating space between the Absolute and the Material, a place where the real, imaginary, and symbolic coexist. Sites become states of being, and different realities collide and cooperate. The landscape is reconfigured as an environment for a new transculture, a utopian construction, a metaphor for consciousness. These paintings are constructed from […]

I began photography because I wanted to satisfy an urge I had to create visual stories. I began in December 2008 when I graduated from Temple University. I had just received two degrees in film and English, but my thirst had not been quenched. I wanted a faster and more efficient way of telling the […]

Anything is likely to be the subject of my drawings. I mix a conglomeration of different subject matter within the same space: global, local, political, cultural, swine flu, economic crisis, Europe, morning coffee, surveillance society, East-West, war on terror, universal health care. My art combines cartoons, graffiti, and art brut. Humor, irony, and cultural references […]

Zhu Xian: In recent years, some of the projects you did in Asia—such as Celebrating the World, Game Table, Fu Dao/Fu Dao—Upside-down Buddha/Arrival at Good Fortune—bear a strong relationship to your above-mentioned ideas. My feeling is that these projects are half joyful and half sorrowful, making people not know whether to laugh or to cry. […]

London-based painter Ben Pritchard’s newest exhibition, Days, in Long Island City could easily be overlooked, considering the madness of New York Gallery Week, which took place in early May. While most of the focus was on Chelsea and the Lower East Side, I found myself on a Friday at Pritchard’s opening in Long Island City. […]

I am interested in the areas where separate items are evident, and also areas that complicate into mush, personal/collective narratives, and exploring how these stories can be distilled into works. Every identity has a universal weight in its particularities; of course Romanian identity has its own spice and a very rich background that enlivens very […]

Zheng Lu’s art can be defined as “interpreting non-existence.” “Interpretation” refers to “reading or reading aloud.” The sculptures are composed of Chinese characters from poems or passages, so as to establish the connection between the artistic charm of the poem or the passage and the theme of the work. “Non-existence” derived from the hollowed-out works’ […]

My entire existence feels like a permanent vacation. Reality is photogenic in itself to me. I never find myself in search of a subject, as subjects never cease to come my way. There are only not enough photo films, not enough time, not enough space, and never enough funds to grasp it all. Funny enough, […]

In classical Chinese literature, the character represents many things: books, the written word, and the act of writing itself. Much of my work relates to shu (book) in its various permutations. Those whose culture embraces Chinese characters (i.e. people in Greater China, Korea, and Japan) have such respect for shu and consider it so sacred, […]