My exhibition

-Title: What makes a city shine at night?
-Exhibition text: Some say that Hong Kong has a best night view because of the colorful lights from tons of giant buildings, but others argue that Paris’ dim street lights make a even better view at night. Besides lights, some people think the best night view is when it’s quiet and no human interaction involves; others disagree. So, what do you think? Is one better than the other?
-Names of other participating artists: Katie Hung, Neil Hung
–Some images for the show

– This is a photographic show for my brother and myself. It’s kind of a documentation of places we’ve been to, yet, a share of great night views from various cities. I’d like to have this exhibition in Guggenheim Museum, New York City. The space is is particularly difficult to properly hang paintings in the shallow windowless exhibition niches that surround the central spiral. I’d like to divide photos from different cities into different categories and display each categories into different floors. I want to create a feeling of traveling along for viewers who walk from the bottom to the top of the building- almost like a global tour.

The categories will be: East Asia, West Asia, North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Australia, north and south pole.

Sub categories within will be black and white photos and colors; small size to large prints

The concept behind this exhibition: My brother and I love taking photos at night when we travel to new cities. We think that there are different elements and components making a night view attractive in different places. Some cities are shine by street lights, some by lights in buildings or more naturally, by sunlight (or moon light)…etc. Since not everyone could travel to these cities, we’d love to share our little discoveries!

The RISD Museum of Art presents Styrofoam

Just found this very cool artwork!

“PROVIDENCE, RI – The RISD Museum of Art presents Styrofoam, an exhibition of works by ten artists made of the commonplace material known for its light weight quality and wide application. The exhibition was organized by Judith Tannenbaum, Richard Brown Baker Curator of Contemporary Art. The artists in the exhibition are Heide Fasnacht, Tony Feher, Tom Friedman, Folkert de Jong, Steve Keister, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Pearson, Shirley Tse, Richard Tuttle, and B. Wurtz.

Styrofoam is not new to most artists as a material. Its cheap availability and malleability have made it a staple in the making of models and molds for casting. But today more artists are using it as a primary material or as subject matter in its own right. The exhibition presents a diverse group of artists who have found the material to be both inspiring and practical. Tannenbaum became interested in how artists were using styrofoam and foam products several years ago when she began to see it appearing more and more at galleries and art fairs. Since that time, she has discovered that there is a historical precedent by several established figures such as minimalist sculptor Carl Andre who created important works in the 1960s.

Since the 1960s, Richard Tuttle has produced an influential body of drawings, prints, artist’s books, paintings, and sculptural objects composed of humble, everyday materials such as wire, cloth, string, pins, cardboard, plywood, bubble wrap, and styrofoam. Works from his Lonesome Cowboy Styrofoam series (1988) will be included in the exhibition along with the related book that he produced.

The exhibition is not a comprehensive survey of styrofoam art but rather a cross-section of diverse approaches by artists of different generations. In the center of the exhibition stands The Piper, a life-size portrayal of Abraham Lincoln by the young Dutch artist Folkert de Jong that caught the attention of Tannenbaum at last year’s annual Armory Show in New York. “Ambitious and expressionistic,” the painted and carved styrofoam work further prompted Tannenbaum to assemble this exhibition of objects both large and small. Tannenbaum had been aware of the use of styrofoam by artists such as Richard Tuttle, Tom Friedman, Tony Feher, and Shirley Tse, but she soon discovered others who worked in it, including Heide Fasnacht, Bruce Pearson, Steve Keister, Sol LeWitt, and B. Wurtz. Some reuse pre-existing elements that they find unexpectedly in the course of their daily activities, whereas others start with large industrial sheets. The ways in which they adapt or transform the material, whether purchased or found, may or may not contrast with its original intended function.

Above the de Jong Piper hangs Fasnacht’s Exploding Airplane. Styrofoam’s near-weightlessness makes it a perfect medium to be installed aloft, and Fasnacht deftly explores its gravity-defying properties in this silver-painted installation that seems frozen in the midst of obliteration. Tannenbaum suggests that styrofoam’s challenges are also its assets. Taking advantage of the material’s lightness and cheapness, as well as the ease with which it can be shaped, today’s artists are carving, molding, casting from it, and assembling it into entirely new images and forms, and in the process are expanding the definitions of painting and sculpture.

Course Project

This is my recent project.

Title: Reflection of “history”

Mediums: Wood, charcoal, paper and mirrors

Concept: to remind older people and teach younger generation the historical event- The Great Chicago Fire in 1871

What has been missing? how does today’s world look like? what might it looks like before?

Provide a new way for people to think about what we know, what we read in textbook and what we don’t know.

Here are two badly taken pictures.

Cai Guo-Qiang

Artist’ site: http://www.caiguoqiang.com

“Cai Guo-Qiang was born in 1957 in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, China. Trained in stage design at the Shanghai Theatre Academy, his work has since crossed multiple mediums within art, including drawing, video and performance art. While living in Japan from 1986 to 1995, he explored the properties of gunpowder in his drawings, an inquiry that eventually led to his experimentation with explosives on a massive scale and to the development of his signature explosion events, exemplified in the series Projects for Extraterrestrials. Wildly poetic and ambitious at their core, these events aim to establish an exchange between viewers and the larger universe around them. His large-scale installations, which have drawn upon Eastern philosophy and contemporary social issues as a conceptual basis, utilize a site-specific approach to culture and history. Cai quickly achieved international prominence during his residence in Japan. Since 1995, he has lived in New York.

Cai was awarded the Japan Cultural Design Prize in 1995 and the Golden Lion at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999. In 2001 he received the Cal Arts/Alpert Award in the Arts. His solo exhibition at Mass MoCA won Best Monographic Museum Show, and Inopportune: Stage One won Best Installation or Single Work in a Museum from the International Association of Art Critics, New England in 2005. Two years later, he was awarded the 7th Hiroshima Art Prize. Cai also held the distinguished position as Director of Visual and Special Effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing and the Director of firework festivities for China’s 60th National Day in 2009.  That same year, he received the 20th Fukuoka Prize for Arts and Culture.

Cai was the subject of a large-scale retrospective titled Hanging Out in the Museum, which opened in November 2009 at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. In February 2008, his retrospective I Want to Believe opened at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York before traveling to the National Art Museum of China in Beijing in August 2008 and then to the Guggenheim Bilbao in March 2009.  Among his many other solo exhibitions and projects include Cai Guo-Qiang: Fallen Blossoms held jointly at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Fabric Workshop and Museum, 2009; Cai Guo-Qiang on the Roof: Transparent Monument, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2006; Inopportune, Mass MoCA, North Adams, 2005; Transient Rainbow, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002; Cai Guo-Qiang, Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai, 2002; APEC Cityscape Fireworks Show, Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation, Shanghai, 2001; An Arbitrary History, Musee d’art Contemporain Lyon, Lyon, France, 2001.  He curated the first China Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale, 2005, and organized and curated BMoCA: Bunker Museum of Contemporary Art, Kinmen, Taiwan, 2004. Along with DMoCA and UMoCA, BMoCA is one of three alternative art museums founded and curated by Cai in the series Everything Is Museum.

Most recently, Cai Guo-Qiang: Peasant Da Vincis, opened in May 2010 as the inaugural exhibition of the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai.  Another solo exhibition Cai Guo-Qiang: Travels in the Mediterranean is currently on view at Musée d’Art moderne et d’Art contemporain, Nice, France. In October, Cai created Odyssey, a permanent gunpowder drawing for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Installed at the Ting Tsung and Wei Fong Chao Arts of China Gallery as part of the museum’s ongoing Portals Project, it is one of his largest gunpowder drawings to date.”

This is one of the artist that inspired me in my imagine project-Explosion.

About 3 years ago, I went to see his exibition in NYC and thought it was very interesting how he presented bombs’ explosion by visual art.

When I first thought about my project, I was stuck because there’s limitation on exploding and firing in school. Therefore, I started to rethink my concept, and Cai Guo-Qiang’s ” I Want to Believe” show I saw few years ago just poped out in my mind. I started to think: maybe I don’t have to show how things explode, but to show the result of it or make an abstract piece of explosion.

Then this is how my project flows again…

Dan Havel and Dean Ruck

“

Founded in 1948, the Art League is one of the oldest non-profit visual arts organizations in Houston and is the first alternative art space in Texas.

But for some time, the Art League has generated relatively little interest amongst either the art crowd or the general public. Perceived (fairly or not) as more of a kaffeeklatsch for local artists of mediocre talent and ambition than as a dynamic organization with interesting programming, the Art League has, for over 30 years, quietly gone about its business of housing classes and exhibitions in a grouping of nondescript white houses in the Montrose. Over the years, there have been many abortive attempts to tear down those houses and make a grander architectural gesture; and it seems, finally, that this most recent attempt is actually going to come to fruition. To celebrate, the oft-disregarded Art League has sponsored what is the most exciting installation in Houston in recent memory.

They asked Dan Havel and Dean Ruck to do something fun with two little houses, scheduled for demolition to make way for a big fancy new building. Havel and Ruck’s transformation, titled Inversion, takes two of the Art League’s decrepit bungalows and literally blows a hole through the houses in a gesture that seems to turn them inside out. The exterior wood siding of the houses has been torn off and placed within the void. The siding has been laid in parallel strips that sometimes expose the natural wood but more often show off the painted face of the siding.

 

Dan Havel and Dean Ruck, vortex view of Inversion.

The result is an almost organic, funnel-shaped vortex, a wildly dynamic conversion of two otherwise completely static buildings. The funnel’s larger open end faces towards Montrose Boulevard, slowing pedestrian and car traffic to a crawl of gawking rubberneckers. An overwhelming urge to climb into Inversion is offset by a fear that the work is on the precarious verge of implosion. From the correct angle, the viewer can see completely through the work (and perhaps the only flaw with Inversion is that the funnel points curiously towards an exterior waterline of the adjacent building, rather than a blank wall). As the viewer makes his way around the building, open areas and windows allow him to see glimpses of the framework that supports the funnel. At the termination point in a small open courtyard, the viewer can turn and gaze back through the work towards Montrose Boulevard. Here at the termination point, the viewer fully realizes the scale and complexity of the work. In addition, the artwork has the effect of bring exposure to the often-overlooked Art League Houston.Founded in 1948, the Art League is one of the oldest non-profit visual arts organizations in Houston and is the first alternative art space in Texas.

But for some time, the Art League has generated relatively little interest amongst either the art crowd or the general public. Perceived (fairly or not) as more of a kaffeeklatsch for local artists of mediocre talent and ambition than as a dynamic organization with interesting programming, the Art League has, for over 30 years, quietly gone about its business of housing classes and exhibitions in a grouping of nondescript white houses in the Montrose. Over the years, there have been many abortive attempts to tear down those houses and make a grander architectural gesture; and it seems, finally, that this most recent attempt is actually going to come to fruition. To celebrate, the oft-disregarded Art League has sponsored what is the most exciting installation in Houston in recent memory.

They asked Dan Havel and Dean Ruck to do something fun with two little houses, scheduled for demolition to make way for a big fancy new building. Havel and Ruck’s transformation, titled Inversion, takes two of the Art League’s decrepit bungalows and literally blows a hole through the houses in a gesture that seems to turn them inside out. The exterior wood siding of the houses has been torn off and placed within the void. The siding has been laid in parallel strips that sometimes expose the natural wood but more often show off the painted face of the siding.

 

 

Dan Havel and Dean Ruck, vortex view of Inversion.

The result is an almost organic, funnel-shaped vortex, a wildly dynamic conversion of two otherwise completely static buildings. The funnel’s larger open end faces towards Montrose Boulevard, slowing pedestrian and car traffic to a crawl of gawking rubberneckers. An overwhelming urge to climb into Inversion is offset by a fear that the work is on the precarious verge of implosion. From the correct angle, the viewer can see completely through the work (and perhaps the only flaw with Inversion is that the funnel points curiously towards an exterior waterline of the adjacent building, rather than a blank wall). As the viewer makes his way around the building, open areas and windows allow him to see glimpses of the framework that supports the funnel. At the termination point in a small open courtyard, the viewer can turn and gaze back through the work towards Montrose Boulevard. Here at the termination point, the viewer fully realizes the scale and complexity of the work. In addition, the artwork has the effect of bring exposure to the often-overlooked Art League Houston.”

This kind of art piece actually remin me many other artists who sord of work on the same concepts/ideas.

The other day I was in the Museum and saw a piece, which was created by a female artist. This piece was a mix medium on canvas. It’s a 3-D pop out art, where the layers builing up on the canvas to creat a black hole when looking from the front view into the canvas…very interesting, def. check it out!

This is more related to what I’m think about doing now, which is to not necessary explode smething but to create a look/feelinig/result of explosion!

Ursula von Rydingsvard

“Ursula von Rydingsvard was born in Deensen, Germany in 1942. She received a BA and an MA from the University of Miami, Coral Gables (1965), an MFA from Columbia University (1975), and an honorary doctorate from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore (1991). Von Rydingsvard’s massive sculptures reveal the trace of the human hand and resemble wooden bowls, tools, and walls that seem to echo the artist’s family heritage in pre-industrial Poland before World War II. Having spent her childhood in Nazi slave labor and post-war refugee camps, the artist’s earliest recollections of displacement and subsistence through humble means infuses her work with emotional potency. Von Rydingsvard builds towering cedar structures, creating an intricate network of individual beams, shaped by sharp and lyrical cuts and glued together to form sensuous, puzzle-like surfaces. While abstract at its core, Von Rydingsvard’s work takes visual cues from the landscape, the human body, and utilitarian objects—such as the artist’s collection of household vessels—and demonstrates an interest in the point where the man-made meets nature. Von Rydingsvard has received many awards, including a Joan Mitchell Award (1997); an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1994); fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (1983) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1979, 1986); and exhibition prizes from the International Association of Art Critics (1992, 2000). Major exhibitions include Madison Square Park, New York (2006); the Neuberger Museum, SUNY Purchase, New York (2002); and Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York (1992). Von Rydingsvard lives and works in New York. ”

Artist’s website

A sculpture artist who works a lot with graphite and woods. Her works a lot of times have to do with environments- contrast most of the times.

She’s definitely an inspiration  of creating an burned-wood piece without really burning!

Her works are amazing, I wonder how she does all this!

Martin Klimas

http://www.martin-klimas.de/

“Klimas was born in 1971 in Singen, Germany. Martin Klimas destroys a lot of clay to make his art. Combining the silence of Eadweard Muybridge’s horse pictures with the association-rich composition of a still life, Klimas breaks recognizable objects so they become something else, and stops us just at the moment of transformation.”

Cornelia Parker

“For some years Cornelia Parker’s work has been concerned with formalising things beyond our control, containing the volatile and making it into something that is quiet and contemplative like the ‘eye of the storm’. She is fascinated with processes in the world that mimic cartoon ‘deaths’ – steamrollering, shooting full of holes, falling from cliffs and explosions. Through a combination of visual and verbal allusions her work triggers cultural metaphors and personal associations, which allow the viewer to witness the transformation of the most ordinary objects into something compelling and extraordinary. Lately Parker’s attention has turned to issues of globalisation, consumerism and the mass-media.

A solo exhibition of Cornelia Parker’s work Doubtful Sound was shown at Baltic, Gateshead in 2010. Solo exhibitions were held at Museo de Arte de Lima, Peru and Frith Street Gallery in 2008 and in 2007 her work was included in the inaugural exhibition of Tokyo’s National Art Centre. Parker had a major solo exhibition at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery, also in 2007. Other notable solo exhibitions include Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin; ICA, Philadelphia; Aspen Museum of Art, Colorado; Chicago Arts Club and the ICA, Boston. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1997. Parker’s work is represented in many international collections including The Arts Council of England, Tate Gallery, London and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.”

Designer Here!

http://craightonberman.com/

Craighton is an object designer in town who also teaches part time in SAIC.

This is Craig’s personal website, check it out!

Fischli and Weiss — the way things go

“In The Way Things Go 1987, a mesmerising array of household objects, including teapots, tyres, buckets and balloons, crash into one another in an absurd chain reaction powered by home-made explosions and collisions.”

Video on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXrRC3pfLnE

”

Since 1979 Peter Fischli and David Weiss have been collaborating on a body of work that combines, rearranges, or otherwise manipulates their daily experiences into something new and unexpected. Executed in a variety of media, including sculpture, film, and photography, their work playfully ignores the distinction between high and low art. The duo is perhaps best known for the 1987 film The Way Things Go, in which an improbable, Rube Goldberg–esque chain of events unfolds involving household objects and detritus in their studio.

Fischli and Weiss won the Golden Lion prize at the 2003 Venice Biennale for Questions, an installation of over 1,000 photographic slides on which existential questions the artists had collected over many years are handwritten. A retrospective of their work was held at Tate Modern, London in 2006, and traveled to the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Deichtorhallen Hamburg. The two artists live and work in Zürich.”

This is my start for the imagine progect. “The way things go” reminds me a lot of works with Chemistry and physics. I’m not quite sure if this is actually what I want to do for my final project, but def. to think about!