roll away, roll away

Every now and then I will feature my own art work, because, because… DAMN IT - it’s my blog!


So with no further ado, here’s an image from my disaster series of 2000.

This is titled “Landslide.” I was thinking of Monty Python’s “run away, run away” and thought of “roll away, roll away” during a landslide or a speeding truck on the highway.

Also at that time in Taiwan, stores didn’t sell disposable sponge paint rollers, so if you wanted to replace a roller, you always had to buy a new one with a metal handle. I had many paint rollers around my house as a result.

Interventions & Inspirations - Part II

The Singapore group Kill Your Television performed Design for Death in 2004. Here is an image of Rizman Putra performing, courtesy of http://www.killyourtelevision.info/ .

This small image is courtesy of IT Park, the famed alternative art space in Taipei, here exhibiting Tsong Pu's installation of tape measures and snoring beds, to symbolize the aging body.

Interventions & Inspirations

This wonderful image is from http://www.pyuupiru.com/ . Pyuupiru is one of the artists who agreed to be in my exhibition titled "Interventions and Inspirations" that unfortunately had to be cancelled due to lack of funding.

The artists all agreed, but then no funding, hence a cancelled/postponed exhibition. Too bad! I wanted to show that exciting art is being created in Asia. If anyone is interested to sponsor this exhibition, please contact me via comment.

Here's my curatorial statement:

“Interventions and Inspirations” is an exhibition of conceptual art by artists based in China, Singapore, Korea, Japan and Taiwan and include works that stir up society with works that are pure poetry.

Artists: Singapore: Kill Your Television, a multimedia performance group who blurs the boundaries between media and art. China: Peng Yu and Sun Yuan provocatively relate to society. Korea: Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Flash animations of word jazz poems in several languages. Japan: Pyuupiru combines obsession with costume making. Taiwan: Tsong Pu is a visual poet while Wu Mali uses an art vocabulary wielding it like a social activist’s megaphone to rally the masses.

What separates us from other species is the possession of two powerful cognitive tools: the capability to intervene and the capacity to imagine. The world’s history is dynamically shaped both positively and negatively by interventions and inspirations.

The practice of agriculture can be seen as an early and broad-sweeping intervention that dramatically changed the course of society. Then there are those solo acts by courageous individuals who did not follow conventional thought, but followed their own inner voices. Individuals such as Rosa Parks sparked a movement, the Civil Rights Movement in the USA, just by her intervention of sitting on a restricted bus seat.

An intervention is an interference that changes a situation. Euphemistically a military intervention is an invasion, while a family intervention involves a group of people stopping their loved one from his chemical dependency. An art intervention challenges the status quo and shakes up commonplace thinking, while also simultaneously inspiring viewers to effect change in their own lives.

Inspiration allows one to dream and to reach for the stars. Advancements in science, medicine, arts and society all started off with a dream. Without being able to dream, one will not want to get out of bed in the morning. The capability to dream and to feel inspired is what makes us look forward to tomorrow.

By juxtaposing these two cognitive tools in an art exhibition, “Interventions and Inspirations” seeks to encompass the wide-range of thought in conceptual art that is currently happening in Asia and brings together 8-10 compelling artists and 4 provocative writers for an exhibition that will long be remembered.
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Taiwanese artist Yao Jui-chung 姚瑞中

Taiwanese artist Yao Jui-chung 姚瑞中 created a prolific output of ink drawings with gold leaf on handmade paper during his 3 month summer residency at the international Glenfiddich artist residency in Scotland. The framed results can now be seen at IT Park, Taipei, until December 8.

Yao's drawings that channel Scottish mythology while merging the dramatic Scottish highlands with the techniques of Chinese landscape painting are sublime.

Here, in “Wonderful: The Holy Ridge under the Milk-way” (photo courtesy of the artist) a figuratively-shaped mountain that is formed by intensely worked black ink scribbles show the erratic, quick hand movements by the artist.

Gold leaf rivlets stream forth from mysterious inner mountain sources. This huge mountain range dwarfs a red-cloaked figure who appears to be one with nature, enjoying the heavenliness of the scene.

Exploring the intricate traditions and modes of perspective of Chinese landscape painting can lend itself to some exciting new discoveries as Yao recently found out.

Food for Thought

Now that curators are getting top billing that is equal to artists, isn't it about time to start publishing their birthdates along with the obligatory artists' birthdates?

Why is it only artists whose birthdates get published in catalogs and press releases?

What is the reasoning behind that? That a young person is a natural genius and an older person has lived experience. With that reasoning, why aren't the birthdates of curators, critics, directors, etc. published in promotional materials?

The Fine Art of Criticism

What’s black and white and ‘read’ all over? A newspaper. Get it?

English language newspapers, at one time, published the best in arts criticism: dance, classical music, fine arts, architecture and drama. But those days are long gone.

Terry Teachout writes about how valuable newspaper criticism was in the 20th century: “… a considerable number of the most significant collections of criticism published in the 20th century, including Virgil Thomson’s The Musical Scene (1945), Edwin Denby’s Looking at the Dance (1949), Kenneth Tynan’s Curtains (1961), and Hilton Kramer’s The Age of the Avant-Garde (1973) consisted in large part of newspaper reviews.” http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm?id=10980

Are English language readers no longer interested in the arts or reading cerebral criticism? What happened? Is celebrity gossip taking over our brains?

Aging: Getting Older by the Minute

As the populations of industrialized nations get older (i.e. the world’s baby boomers), aging is a hot topic these days. Computer scientist turned bio-geneticist Aubrey de Gray proposes an incredible thesis that if the muck can be cleaned out of our cells (the mitochondrial DNA), then we can live to be 1000 years old, that’s an extra 900 years or so. He believes we have the capability of finding a cure for aging. Imagine.

Traditionally artists staved off aging by having sought immortality through their artworks. There are notable artists who dealt directly and honestly with aging in their work: Picasso who tried holding onto his potency, Gilbert & George in elderly bodies but with still young lust at heart and John Coplans who is known for graphic black and white photo closeups of his aging body. The Tang Dynasty poet/painters musing about life in their old age. Female artists, hmm? Society doesn’t actually encourage the menopausal “crone” to express herself, so not many women seem to make art about their aging bodies – even an artist such as Louise Bourgeois: in her 90s and she’s still stuck on her childhood. Only Hannah Wilke comes to mind, but she was also focusing on the transitory states of sickness and health.

In this day, where grants, residencies and gallery programs focus on the emerging and the young artist, it is visionary to see the artists who tackle these universal ideas of aging. Especially, now that we are living longer, it is puzzling why there is not much more art about aging. Culturally, this is developed society’s major taboo. Aging equals impending death, and no one really wants to be reminded of such a mortal truth.