Robert Colescott (1925-2009) RIP

George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware painted by Robert Colescott.

Artist, age 100, unveils new work

As they say, age is just a number.
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Here is artist Hans Enri, who was born 100 years ago, unveiling a new art work for the UN.
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If this isn't inspiring, then I don't know what is.
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Read here for the details and photo info:


http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2009/06/06/100_year_old_swiss_artist_unveils_mural_at_un/?comments=all

Taiwan's gender equality

The Venice Biennale recently opened and Taiwan has had its own pavilion since 2001. Since its inception the Taiwan Pavilion has exhibited a fair representation of female artists. But unfortunately, not this time around.
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The unintentional humorous title Foreign Affairs, a subject which the organizers are well versed in, had me chuckling.
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The four male artists representing Taiwan this year are HSIEH Ying-Chun, CHEN Chieh-Jen, Chien-Chi CHANG, and Cheng-Ta YU.
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For more info:http://www.tfam.museum/

53rd Venice Biennale 2009 - Internet Pavilion

It's that time of year again, for the opening of the prestigious Venice Biennale, the granddaddy of international art exhibitions. However, the nationalism of the Venice Biennale is a bit irksome to me. Art should be able to transcend national borders, shouldn't it?
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One pavilion that doesn't represent a nation is the Internet Pavilion, initiated by artist Miltos Manetas, curated by Jan Aman and produced by Art Production Fund.
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http://www.PadiglioneInternet.com and http://www.Biennale.net

First figurative sculpture found

A newly discovered sculpture is said to be the oldest figurative work (36,000 years old) in existence. But that is not the marvel.

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Scientists think this sculpture shows a shift in the early human brain and perhaps coincided with complex language. Since there is no audio from that time period, there is only the visual image to make such deductions.

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Read here for more info:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/05/oldestsculpture/
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Some reader comments refer to this sculpture as early porn, while art historical texts often refer to these prehistoric fecund females as a relic of fertility or goddess worship. What do you think?

Zaha Hadid's Guangzhou Opera House

What's going on with well-known architects' projects in China?

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Here Zaha Hadid's Opera House in Guangzhou is in flames.

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Read here for the details:

http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/daily-news/zaha-hadids-guangzhou-opera-house-goes-up-in-flames/5201855.article

The 7th Taishin Arts Awards

The 7th Taishin Arts Awards:
The Best Visual & Performing Arts in Taiwan 2008

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W i n n e r s A n n o u n c e d

Photo courtesy Jun-Jieh WANG

Photo courtesy Capital Ballet Taipei

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The 7th Taishin Arts Awards was awarded to the best visual and performing arts in Taiwan for the year 2008. The award ceremony took place on May 2, 2009 at the Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture.
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The international jury included: Tai-Song CHEN Art Critic (Taiwan); Du HUANG Senior curator, Beijing Today Art Museum (China); Christiane PAUL Adjunct curator, New Media Arts of Whitney Museum of American Art (USA); Yu-Pin LIN Associate Professor of Drama Department of Taipei National University of the Arts (Taiwan); Liuyi LI Director/Playwright, Beijing People’s Art Theatre (China); 如果看起來會讓人頭昏, 還請妳不吝給我建議Joseph SEELIG Director, London International Mime Festival (UK); Hiroko NISHIMURA Producer, Tiny Alice Theatre / The Asia Little Theatre Exchange Network (Japan); and Anita MATHIEU Director, Rencontres Chorégraphiques Internationales, Seine-Saint-Denis (France).
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The prestigious annual prize recognizes the best of Taiwanese visual art and performing arts. Besides the Performing Arts Award and the Visual Arts Award, each worth NT $1 million, there is the Jury’s Special Award for NT $300,000.

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The winner for the Visual Arts Award is Jun-Jieh WANG (王俊傑) for his installation David Project III: David’s Paradise “whose sophisticated visual language does not just pursue an aesthetic of technology, but rather emphasizes the service of technological methods to the needs of the concepts of art.”
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The winner for the Performing Arts Award is Capital Ballet Taipei’s Surround, (台北首督芭蕾舞團 ) “a powerful, contemporary, high quality dance production. It explores the reality of life in today’s world, the place of the individual in society, his isolation, self-doubt and need to communicate.”
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The Jury’s Special Award went to Tien-Chang WU’s Shock˙Shot (吳 天章) where “perfection and imperfection, as well as, classical and kitsch, reflect on each other in interesting ways. His affecting work reintroduces an element of humor that seems to have vanished in today’s Taiwan.”
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The Taishin Arts Award exhibition opened April 25, 2009 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei and features the work of all the 15 finalists who were shortlisted by a local jury. A published catalogue is available.
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The Taishin Art Foundation nurtures the arts and works within both the local and art communities to build greater understanding for the arts.
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Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture
15 F, No. 118, Sec 4, Ren-ai Rd., Taipei 106, Taiwan
Tel:+886-2-3707-6955　Fax:+886-2-3707-6958　
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http://www.taishinart.org.tw/
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For Further Info on the Winners:
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王俊傑 Wang Jun-Jieh Project David III : David’s Paradise
Bio
Award-winning media artist Jun-Jieh WANG is a pioneer of video art in Taiwan. A graduate from the HdK Art Academy in Berlin, Wang has exhibited in prestigious shows such as the Venice Biennale, and the Asian Art Triennale. Wang is also accomplished as a curator, exhibition and stage designer. He gained acclaim as Staging Visual Director for the National Symphony Orchestra’s Taiwan premiere of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Wang’s notable curated and designed exhibitions include "Navigator: Digital Art in the Making" (National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, 2004), "Vivienne Westwood" (Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2005), and "2006 Taipei Biennial: Dirty Yoga" (Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2006).
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Project
Jun-Jieh WANG’S David Project III: David’s Paradise is a large-scale video installation shown at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (Sep 27- Nov 16, 2008) and is the third part of a trilogy created in memory of Wang’s deceased friend that includes Untitled 200256 (two-screen synchronous installation, 2004) and Condition Project II (three-screen interactive installation, 2005).
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David’s Paradise consists of a video projected synchronously on five huge screens (390 x 219 cm), with a 12 second delay on each successive screen. Installed in a blue painted room, the screens allude to a folding screen, while the installation itself strays away from the conventional ‘black box’ viewing of video works.
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Shot in high-definition digital video, the work included lengthy post-production work to create digital special effects. The non-narrative projection depicts a man, or a specter of a man, walking across a lawn and through various rooms in a home. Certain objects like a chair float effortlessly in space. The film-like quality and slow-moving imagery creates an artificial world that evokes alienation in contemporary urban life, while the combination of real and illusory images conveys the ambiguity and the mystery of the co-existence of body and soul in the lived environment.
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The technical tasks created by Wang, along with a team that included digital effects, sound, and 3D animation designers, act as the bridge to turn real-life experience into art, thus allowing viewers to contemplate spiritual meanings in everyday life. Memory, desire, time and space are also some of the themes evoked in the work.
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台北首督芭蕾舞團Capital Ballet, Taipei Surround
Bio
Capital Ballet, Taipei was founded in March 1990 by Chin-Fong HSU and Shu-Hui LEE who are now the Troupe Principal and Artistic Director. The company has produced over 30 ballet works, danced close to 400 performances, and in recent years have included modern dances into their repertoire.

In Taiwan, it was the tradition of dancers to perform from the canon of western classical ballet. Therefore Capital Ballet, Taipei thought it imperative that Taiwan has its own ballet. So in order to create a unique Taiwanese ballet, the company choreographs their own dances; some of their outstanding works combine traditional ballet with Taiwanese Aboriginal dance.
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Project
Capital Ballet, Taipei performed Surround at the Experimental Theater on October 10, 2008. Surround is a new modern ballet work that explores the concept of space and time, while specifically referring to the various stages of one’s life.
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Surround is based on a clear theme, while a simple movement or a series of movements connects the dancer to the various locations, both to the physical site such as the stage set and to the metaphorical stages of life. These connections of theme and movement are strengthened by the use of furniture, specifically, tables in the set design. A table is a common-place object but in Surround symbolizes much more. Not only are tables used to create an architecture of the stage, they are also used to convey emotion. The dancers move, up-end and assemble the four wooden tables, transforming them into various manifestations such as a room, a bed, an island, a wall, a train and then back to the original form as table.

The simplicity of the stage design and emotional quality of the music and lighting allows for the dancers, whose fluid movements create diverse shapes, textures and directions, to allude to our passages of life, in other words, our movements through time and space. Most importantly is that the theme, expression and dance movements are easily accessible to the general audience.
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吳 天 章 Wu Tien Chang SHOCK.SHOT
Bio
Tien-Chang WU received his BFA from Chinese Culture University in 1980. Wu has exhibited widely around the world, including prestigious group exhibitions such as the Taipei and Venice Biennales and a solo exhibition titled Tien-Chang WU: The Introduction of Taiwan’s Contemporary Art Vol. 2 at MOMA Contemporary, Fukuoka, Japan in 1997.
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Over the past decade, Wu who was trained as a painter, changed his creative form and method from composite media to a combination of photography and computer design. Even though Wu adopts the tools of the new digital age, he strives to maintain a balance with creativity and aesthetics.
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Project
Tien-Chang WU’s solo exhibition SHOCK.SHOT took place at the Main Trend Gallery from November 15 to December 13, 2008. On display were eight large digital images (240 x 343 cm) with retro settings, garish color and costumed heavily made-up actors that conjured up a gloomy atmosphere of performance in a theater of the mind.
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Among the eight pieces of works, Day A Good That Is All Right, Never Relax Morning and Night, and The Blind Men and The Street were on display for the first time. Day A Good That Is All Right shows twin dwarf female scouts who carry an injured fat woman on a stretcher. Facing the camera, these three women smile. Such a situation seems true, but paradoxical.
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Wu uses staged photography in his work. During the process, he is no longer the painter working in solitude, but becomes a director organizing a group of people, arranging details such as costumes, props, settings, and actors. The work also entails a combination of photography and computer manipulation. Each work begins with 50-70 snapshots and then these shots are digitally broken into small pieces, deformed, and then reshaped. In order for the imagery to look seamless, Wu uses his painterly concepts, plus his computer mouse, to connect these shots seamlessly and precisely.
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