Richard Diebenkorn. Oldie but a goodie.

Whenever I really like something these days, It is either really contemporary, or from the 60's or earlier. This Diebenkorn caught my eye the other day - I had never seen this one before - and I figured I would throw up a couple images to remind myself of all the terrific, straightforward, and kinda passe yet undeniably interesting, art he has pumped out.

Albuquerque, 1951
Oil on canvas, 40 x 50 in. (101.6 x 127 cm)
Purchase, Washington Gallery of Modern Art Collection, 1968.



and representative of his best-known work...
Cityscape I (Landscape No. 1)
1963
Oil on canvas
60 1/4 x 50 1/2 in
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Qiu Zhijie. An artist I'd like to learn more about

An Asian Studies conference is coming up in Colorado. I am presenting on the changing definition of appropriation, and how Asian artists are, in their own way, modifying notions of cultural appropriation through their art. With all the political baggage that goes along with Chinese artists, though, I am having a hard time finding Chinese artists that comfortably fit in with what I am going to talk about. Basically, I am looking for artists who demonstrate a proficient understanding of Eastern and Western art and culture, and use that understanding to enrich their art. Understandin Chinese art and artists is complicated by Tianamen Square/ dissidents/ anti-academic/ communism/ etc. Someone may consider themselves Chinese, but have not exhibited or lived in Chinese since getting the boot in 1989. Are they making Chinese art?
This does not seem to be an issue with most, just some of the most publicized "Chinese artists". With Qiu Zhijie, it is not an issue. I hope to fit him in, but he does not seem to have what I am looking for. All the same, his work is worth a gander.

Allegory (one of three, may also be referred to as Bridge. from artists' website (see link above). This does not typify his work, though, so do not stop here.

Nothing should be simple, right? Here is a video of Qui at work. It is in Spanish, and he speaks Mandrin. He does give english a go in the middle there, though.

Kim Joon. tats 'n ass

Tattoos mean different things to different people. Who's sporting tattoos in North America? Everybody, it seems. WW2 vets of the Atlantic campaign have those faded blue anchors: their ship name and number blurred beyond recognition. Thirty-somethings, and younger seem to have had a thing for twisty, abstract lines, celtic flourishes, and intertwining barbed wire-type designs. The men have them around their all-too-often soft arms, while the ladies bare the rear runway peeking out just above the low beltline. Then there are the individuals who really saw tattoos as art - faces mix into romantic landscapes, meet up with animals of all sorts, the names of lost loved-ones (with dates like a living memorial) and people they admire. A friend of mine recently got flowers under each of her arms, filling up the little space left that has not been inked, her face and hands aside. basically, for a few generations, tattoos have been visible and commonplace. The fringe, the rebels, the outsiders, the hard-core fight society through new forms of body art (new to my culture, anyway) - scarring, branding, plastic bumps and ridges inserted under the skin. For body "high art", search for Orlan. IF you get grossed out easy, have a garbage can at the ready. She goes to some crazy lengths when she uses her own physical body as a canvas.

To sum up... Western culture has a history with tattoos.
Asia, on the other hand, has a much different history. When you see a person with a far-out ink job in Korea, it means a completely different thing than it does here. Tattoos in Korea (likely most of asia) mean gangster. And there is nothing typically subtle about gangster tattoos. Typically multicoloured figures and animals swirl all down the back, letting everyone know that the bearer is not the type of dude that should be messed with. If a korean gangster movie is to be believed, the pain control associated with spending hundreds of hours getting inked makes elaborate tattoos a badge of honour of sorts. "Normal" people simply don't get tattoos. Bad boys and other such rebels? maybe. Is this changing? of course it is, but it have decades to do before it is even close to mainstream

With that in mind, the work of Kim Joon seems quite a trip. How different the interpretation of his work must be to those of his homeland. Do Koreans even see it as a tattoo; something that is under the skin and permanent, or are they immediately seeing it as a covering - a costume of a different culture?
Tattoos to us, if I may speak for North Americans, are permanent things. They are a part of you - they make up or express parts of an identity. There is no going back from a tattoo - even if someone does got one of those new removal procedures, ther is still a remnant of that old person (like if a friend loses, or more frequently, gains a lot of weight. You cannot help but recall what once was there. It is still there, in a way). The idea of inking the name of a lost relative or friend onto the body takes on such a profound meaning if you think about it in this way: they may be gone, but their trace still exists. They have left an indelible mark, personified in ink.

Henna, i would say, is more common in South Korea. A week of rebellion right after freshman exams - Cool! Suntanning has only in the last couple of years become ACCEPTABLE in Korea, as has the bikini. Dark or blemished skin was left behind when Korea became the first class nation it has become. Peasants and country folk get tanned, civilized people do not. Or something like that.

With all that in mind, i associate the advertising angle in some of Kim's works with looking at his own culture for inspiration. Going back to the comment I made about koreans seeing tattoos as skins or layers (a gangster outfit), rather than a true identity, this could be seen as, as we in the West use tattoos to present elements of ourselves to others, Koreans do this through other means - one of the most popular being fashion.


party-prada
c-print
120cm x 120cm (cm)
2007


bird land-swarovski
90cm x90cm c-print 2008
All the images are taken fromKim Joon's website, where yo ucan also find lots more images.

Li Wei

For ten years, the art world has been going nuts for "Chinese art". As a result, demand has soared, leading to the pool of genius becoming rather thinned with third-rate individuals from China looking to cash in on the lucrative market. Li Wei is not one of the hoard: he creates snazzy, interesting, and fun art that has some substance behind the playful veneer. Most iteresting to me is his awareness of Western art principles and art history, and his use of such information in his work.


Let's slide off-topic for a bit

A question I always toy with is, What makes a work of art specific to a place or people or whatever? This unsettlingly, leads to an ever-increasing range of further questions..
Just what the hell is Chinese art, or Western art, or Islamic art? What makes Chinese art different from other forms of art?
In this day and age, of interconnectivity, of a global village, of an internatinal art scene, is there such a thing as appropriation? Just what am I entitled to call my own, my identity? Am I able to add to this personal identity through education and experience?

The artists being looked at this week hopefully address these questions through their art. Comments will be placed, seemingly out-of-place, demonstrating how these works of art answer the questions listed above. This blog is not so much for others, but more as a visual diary of what is feeding my papers, and inspiring my art production.


Back to Li Wei.
Believe it or not, Li Wei asserts that the images he produces are executed without the aid of digital mainpuation: he uses mirrors and wires to hide his tricks. It seems that every article makes a big deal out of this - the fact that he doesn't use photoshop. If someone can tell me why this is important, please let me know.
The images themsleves are wonderful. A lot of contemporary art produced in China comes off as grand, hard, either very soft or very sharp. Lots of people. Cai Guo-Qiang drawing with gunpowder. Gu Dexin with rotting fruit and vaginas in the back of heads. Song Dong licking everything. Cao Fei's ambitious factory workers. This follows in that vein, without the grandiose-(and obvious)-in-your-face-ness found in the works of Sui Jianguo and, the granddaddy of them all, Wang Guangyi.

Li Wei's works often offer up someting legible to both an Eastern and a Western audience. The link to kung-fu-type movies is easily discernable. the "tricks" are accomplished using camera tricks and wires, giving the individuals who appear in the images the grace and poise of superhuman powers. Have you noticed that difference before, between hollywood and HK movies? There is nothing graceful to be found in the abilities of the Hulk or Spiderman: they still possess a weight that allows our mind to better buy in to the fakery. Superpowers of the East, if I may call it that, extend to balance and weight and focus, allowing for such a picuture as that directly above.

So, the top picture.. .. to what are you relating it? Yves Kline's jump from a second story window, maybe? Has 9/11 ruined your eyes, and all you see are world trade center jumpers? Do you see a perceive a population drunk on the vertigo of a society growing at an unbelievable pace, sometimes stumbling, sometimes stumbling to their deaths?
"My artistic language is universal and deals with themes about contemporary politics and society using symbols understood by everyone in every part of the world." says Li Wei, as quoted from the dailymail.co.uk

Other elements of the work also put it on the fence, as to which tradition it is following. The works are a mix of both performance and photography. This blurring of medium is traditionally found in Western works, though have become quite commonly found in the employ of Chinese artists who use video (think of Xu Zhen, and his fake expedition to Everset. In fact, think of all his video work, which is very performance-driven).

These images seem amateur and grand at the same time, and offer a lighthearted and understandable look at Chinese society of the early 21st century.



Li Wei's homepage

Buddha's Birthday...

..is just around the corner.

I hate how blogs are all about the writer

how self-indulgent blogs are - my opinions, my stuff, through my eyes. I promise it will all be about you-you-you when I get back. Here are some of my finished pieces. One of my professors gave me his opinion. In the first work he liked ONE LINE. But it is a pretty kickass line.. The line is on the left side of the pants. It goes thick, streaky/strong/thin, then thick again. I think he would have liked it if I cut it out and threw the rest away, because we hurried onto the next one, which he preferred for its varied handling of the ink and the composed handling of the various handling's.. this doesn't make a lot of sense unless you are looking at the work, i guess. (for those of you who do not know, you can click on the images to see a larger version)

Jump #2 (the one that got the thumbs up)







Jump #1(the one in which there is only a single effective line)












a sketch. One of many












One of my classes that I take (undergrad classes) is all about drawing with a brush. The weather is nice, so we tend to go on these far-flung day trips for some outdoor sketching. Typically following at least an hour on the subwayI emerge from the underground with a small group of fellow students to some small mountain or park, where we will draw whatever we are told to sketch. Last Tuesday we were told to draw pine tree branches. The following day I get a text message (everyone has a cell phone in korea, so profs will sometimes communicate by text message - COOL!) saying that there is a homework assignment - we have to do up our sketch in the studio. The somewhat appealing sketch is followed by the painstakingly finished work. Basically, my technique is pitiful, as I have not been taught any tricks, and I have never really practiced ink painting before. Grad students with whom I share a studio with will often walk up, sorta snicker, and then demonstrate some little trick to do this or that. All in all it has been a successful way for me to learn - try, fail, be humbled, tutored, encouraged (often at this spot i return to the beginning) and finally find success.

Children's Day/Hospital Day

The plan was to take some pictures of the craziness that is Children's day in both Japan and South Korea (in fact, in japan, children's day has become a full week long holiday). Instead, i went to the hospital.

I have some weird growth on one side of my face. It began as a small reddish, itchy spot and spread over three days to turn one side of my face into a hard, hot, swollen elephant man-type disfigurement. ok - that may be a little over the top, but I got endless questions, lots of stares, and many recommendations on what to do next.

the evening of the second day I went to the pharmacy.the old woman there gave me a a korean knock-off version of that pinkish anti itch stuff. It occurred to me as I was leaving, rather disappointed in the diagnosis, that I see her HUSBAND sitting behind the counter during the day, meaning that some old bat who just happens to be married to a pharmacist feels that its OK for her to give out medical advice while here husband eats dinner or whatever. That buuurned me, and, like dirt in the wound, the pinkie stuff didn't help at all.

third day, children's day. Hospitals are mostly private affairs in South Korea and, armed with my wife's Blue Cross travel coverage, I headed out to Yonsei University's absolutly beautiful hospital. Spacious, impeccaably clean, and manned by people in full suits, I headed to emergency with my friend Miwa, a japanese girl studying at Hong ik. A quick wait and we sign in. after a short lunch, we headed back to the waiting room, but there was no waiting! Thirty minutes after arriving, and on a busy holiday, i see a nurse.
So far I am impressed! Then the snow job begins - urine test, blood test, x-ray (I put my foot down on that one. Christ; i have an isolated infection!)and spent over two hours hooked up to an IV drip after getting two needles of what I assume was an antibiotic. I slept most of the time away, and awoke just before the doctor came to talk to me. A full blood and urine test had been run in the time I was sleeping there, (how long does it take in canada, like, two weeks?)and the doc had news

Now, what is the most scary question you can be asked by a doctor? give up? it's this.. (in sort of rough english)

do you know Herpes?

..Now what's going through my head is; how did I get Herpes in Korea, and how am I going to explain to my wife that I got an STD while "doing reserach" an Hong ik university..

the reality was that it was just a missphrased question. After I shakily mumble, "umm, err yes, i do know herpes, it a a umm STD, correct?" He restates the question, "no, i mean, have you ever had herpes?"

a sigh of relief.

"no"

To add to the awkwardness of the situation, as I face one way, talking to the doctor in Konglish about my meds (and another appointment the following day), the nurse is taking the needle out of my arm. either carelessness or the masssive sudden rush of adrenaline caused by the herpes scare resulted in one of those squirting blood situations i believe, because when i turned back, there was a long line of blood droplets across the floor.

The result? no result - maybe an allergic reaction, maybe an infection. so, i get meds for both.
Hopefully tomorrow is just as amusing.

*update* How long does it take to fill a prescription in super-efficient Korea? Less than two minutes. In that time, three different meds were sorted, put into individual packages (each labelled), and put on the counter, where a pharmacist ran over the particulars. Basically, in the time it took to root through my wallet for the money, the drugs were good to go. Fantastic.

the North Korean story

..this story may not be as exciting as you may have hoped. Sorry.

North Koreans do not escape all that often, but there are a fair number of them now kicking around the South. Arriving with no money, typically in so-so health (they ARE noticeably shorter than their Southern brothers and sisters), a distinctive accent, and a rather atypical educational background means that they are stuck with shit jobs, and often distrusted. Like all small pockets of foreigners anywhere in the world, they run with members of their own circle. So, it was no surprise that, as people appeared at the party my art buddy invited me to at his sister's small apartment, they all from the "Northern Side" of the wall(북안) of this divided country.

My buddy Ho min is forty i think. Looking through his photo album was quite a treat - the black and white pictures look like black and white pictures from South Korea of 40 years ago - the clothes are very traditional, furniture and decoration is strange - nut the y are not that old at all. They are mostly images from the late 80's and 90's (A positive way of looking at it is that the people of North Korea did not have to suffer through the terrible fashions of that time period. Small consolation, i know). the break in photos and change to colour leads me to believe that he arrived with his sister (if I understood correctly, his father, tragically, drowned on the journey) about ten years ago. There were some new arrivals, too. I guess that one of them recently arrived via the fortified and mountainous Northern region separating the North and the South, when those escaping in the past favour working there way to mongolia or SE asian countries where they can often find ways to South Korea. I get the impression that there are many groups, mostly religion-affiliated, that help smuggle North Koreans out of the North and through China. China's policy is to return those who have escaped back to their country of origin, which no doubt lead to certain repercussions. Craziness.
But, all in all, they are very similar to South Koreans in nature - they eat a lot, drink too much, and plan future celebrations before the present one ends. A couple guys got incredibly smashed on cheap grape juice with alcohol in it, and I managed to leave before I got dragged out to Karaoke and what would likely have been hours and hours more of drunken debauchery. I now regret passing on the opportunity, but the sweet crap wine was already carving a huge hangover into my brain.
Here is a picture of the group of us. This picture as taken at dinner, before the group arrived. Ho min is next to me. His art (his studies began at a university in Pyongyang) is in the article below.

People and art in the graduate oriental painting section

two of Dong im's works


these two sketches are b Ho min (my N.Korean buddy - his work is really traditional because, well, Pyongyang doesn't exactly have a flourishing contemporary art scene). click on the pictures to see the finer details.



One of the dozens of works in Jung sue's space




So, if you are like me, you are looking at these and trying to find a way into the art. That has been a big problem for me here - a lot of our ideas of what makes art "contemporary" (or appealing, or good, or whatever)is absent from these works. Concept, for example: hardly any "concept" is present.
Even though i feel that this type of work can hardly be considered contemporary, I have seen magazines of huge exhibitions of Contemporary oriental painting. North East Asian countries seem to share a strong interest in oriental painting that manages to remain relatively free from the impact of the art movements around it. What I can make of oriental painting is that it is the personal style and technical know-how that puts one artist or artwork above another. Age too: the Confucius doctrine of respect for elders and teachers leads to the mature, long-practicing artists monopolizing the awards tables - it's like figure skating in that respect. The whole practice of this form of art is self-contained and continues no matter what happens in other art forms extraneous to it - follows its own rules, has its own influences, is shown in specific galleries. That being said, oriental painting cannot avoid influencing artists more in step with global perceptions of art. That appropriation leads to art that we can look at and evaluate using the appreciation system we have developed over our scholastic lifetimes. Much of this art (art that is "oriental painting"-ish, though is not really oriental painting) would never make its way into these contemporary oriental painting exhibits, because they do not fit the evaluation system.

confused? me too, and I have to have a work ready two weeks from now for an upcoming exhibit in June. Back to work.

Art - do people really care?

The video below looks at the work of Luc Tuymans (which is worth getting to know, if not outright worshipping). he could drag his works behind the car on the way to a gallery and still get hundreds of thousands for them. But, what happens when he puts his work out in the street, on a concrete wall? out of context, how is his work viewed? the video reveals...



I also typed up a big long debate about how art should do more to entice the viewer, but it sounded cheezy, so just enjoy the video.

Screw Mathematics

read this tube of toothpaste closely. Somebody needs a better translator

목켸 The monkey man

..수,당,송,원,면,청..

..Soo, Dang, Song, Won, Myun, Chung..

I had a brief lesson about the different periods in Chinese history. I asked a studio-mate about a book he was reading that traced the history of chinese painting, and ended up in a discussion about a few of the works.
This was done by an artist with a name that sounds like "Monkey" after you translate it into Korean, and further degrade it into English. He worked in the Song dynasty, which falls in about 1200AD. The balance between detailed areas, and completely empty areas I find interesting in this work, as is the easy manner in the execution.

Calligraphy class

Turtles and more turtles



the history of the symbol for turtle, as taken from various original sources. The childlike quality that the works possess are part of the style that an artist tries to capture when executing these symbols, as Professor Song demonstrated when he began his demonstration by smashing a brush loaded with ink onto a sheet of rice paper, violently working his way through one of the symbols, leaving rips through many spots of the practice paper. The class applauded.

Professor Song is a character. His classes typically begin with an hour of him running through a lesson - he sets up to demonstrate something, then starts talking, brush still in hand. then he'll make like he is going to demonstrate, only to dip the brush in the ink, hover over the paper, and return to talking. His english is terrible, but he loves to pop in english words while he is talking, just to make me feel comfortable. If he goes a while and doesn't come up with an english word, he pauses to ask me and the class what the english word is for whatever he is talking about, so he can add that to his vocabulary. He is amusing, patient, and friendly.
Here he is helping me,


and here is a little work he did for me, based on the turtle pages. The jealousy of the other students was palpable as he signed it and gave it to me.

Work for the sake of it

Recently felt that I was not getting any real work done. I go through page after page of paper, practicing how to make a line, trying to duplicate what I see in other works or in real life, and then trying again. I talked to a friend who studied oriental painting. She said that, for the first year, she did nothing but grind ink and coloured pigments, and was allowed to only make single brushstrokes on a page. A whole YEAR of single strokes, over and over. I am beginning to understand why.
Anyway, practice is not really work, and I was starting to get the feeling that my peers were wondering when I was going to produce any more than crappy chinese letters and shaky sketches of trees. So I did the sketch above to simply have something to look at in the studio. I was told that it was timid. Supposedly the one below is better, but I still can't entirely figure out why.

Basically, everyday is like trying to figure out a puzzle for which I have not been given the guiding rules - its like being given a five-star Sudoku to solve without being told that you cannot use each number more than once in a row.

I am starting to make some good connections. I have met this Chinese guy named Ryang Sung Kim(김량성), or Curtis, as he intruduces himself to English native speakers. He is fluent in Korean (his parents are of Korean descent), and comfortable in English and Japanese. He is studying Western painting at Hong ik University, and has good ties to the Chinese contemporary art scene. He is currently curating an exhibition of 50 asian artists for a show in Beijing. He is also going to introduce me to a sculpture professor at the university the week. His art is similar to my tighter work, and I hope to do some work with him, or to see how we can help each other out in the future. I am also setting up appointments with various other professors at the university for this week and next. Connections, connections, connections.

Finally..

..found what I was looking for. And even though I did not get to see Professor Kim Ho Seok (김호석) today, because I opted to eat lunch instead (the class ran until 1pm, and he was likely to be more concerned with filling his stomach than engaging in a conversation about his art with a foreigner with poor korean-speaking ability), I will likely arrange the opportunity to meet sometime in the future.



From what I understand, he was born in the 50's, and has spent the bulk of his career doing ink drawings of traditional houses, portraits, and peasants. Boring. Then, about five years ago he changed directions, and started interpreting the lives of the people of northern asia in his wonderfully composed, confident, sketches. Remarkable in their absolute mastery of line - the speed, pressure, flow, bleed, colour, consistency, thickness and weight of each is made to look easy and everyday. the works shown here are mostly just details. If you do not click on the images to see the larger versions, you're missing out.

SEMA Selected emerging artists 2008

Located right outside the walls of a wonderful little palace is Seoul Museum of Art. Pardon the lack of names - On the museum website, in both korean and english, there is no list of the participants! I have a brocure kicking around somewhere, and if i can find it, i will update accordingly.


Our first no-name artist does these wonderful paintings. built of layers of movement, the depth surges forward and receedes, especially in this specific one, which appreas abstract. Others were much more obviously "something", like layers of outlines of a horse, for example, and the easily-recognizable subject sorta ruined it for me.




Emerging artists possess that quirky ability to surprices sometimes, and finding an interesting and fresh way to show basic geometric shapes after the 20th century is quite the trick.


Projected into the corner of the gallery space, and with the corner rebuilt so it juts back out into the viewers' space, is a slowly-progressing video. Every few seconds a small change or two can be detected - something will be added or taken away. I wonder if the changes are pre-programmed, or if maybe they are random, or better yet, somehow an external force is making the changes?

The Good Stuff
Somewhere in the middle of the exhibition was all the best stuff. This body of work was a series of crazy-thin lightboxes. the images, about six feet across, were made of tiny photographs of urban settings that shared a specific colour. In this case, the subject was powder-puff blue garage doors and storefront protectors, the kind that typically roll up or swing open.



While some rock n' roll song that sounded similar to a rough old rolling stones song played in the background, three videos on high speed and in reverse showed a handphone, and ipod, and a hand-held videogame starting as dust and getting a reverse-grinding to emerge whole and functional again.



The crappiest of protests, this artist displayed a collection of videos of short-lived, ineffective protest. repeatedly dragging a mop over his words to keep them from evaporating, the artist silently goes about protesting high tuition, American soldiers, and the Free Trade Agreement that has been coming into effect in South Korea (causing drastic changes) as people continue with their lives, oblivious to the words on which they tread.



A satirical ten-minute video looking at the us of the word "White House" in South Korea. A symbol of power, the name has been confiscated by those with wedding halls, restaurants, and karioke businesses. Some know that there is a White House in the US, in which the president lives and works, and some do not. (The consensus reached in the video is that, associating a business with the White House does not seem to affect patronage one way or the other)

Adina edwards' new work

My buddy Adina. We exhibited our works together in mid-March. I was responsible for writing a critique of her work, but found little to criticize. The condom bed functions really well as a stand-alone piece. she debated putting up drawings with it, but correctly settled for the bed and the bed alone. Her work is concerned with social responsibility and harm reduction. Aids and STD's run rampant through through the low-class sex trade, and Adina has put together a piece that opens that seedy world to debate among the art-versed. It presents a new face of the use of the bed in the history of art, where it is most typically used as a prop-device for some too-young Venus.
and yes, those are hundreds of hand-stitched condoms.

cold in Calgary

So I got a copy of China Art Book. It is not everyday that you find a book about Chinese artists.. ..written by two Gremans. It is kickass, though, and recommend the purchase to anyone interested in Chinese Art. It is kinda important, and there is nothing really out there about it, aside from superficial introductions in big galleries, in the West. More attention should be paid to the crazy cool stuff coming out of China, Japan, and South Korea. Taiwan too, I am more recently learning, has some impressive stuff to show the world.

from the book, I have found certain artists expecially deserving of a look (though it is trycky to find anything (in english, at least) about some of them.

sun xun
does animations, other stuff. likes mosquitos, but i do not know why. quoted as saying "each image is a negation of the previous one", which I thought is an interesting way to think about animation. It contrasts highly with my recent interest in Japanese Metabolism, which deals with capturing various speeds in the same time.

liu ding
likes strange lighting. most of his stuff kicks ass, but he did this one thing with artists reproducing works in 2005 that I think sucks ass

wang qingsong
i wish i had thought of that.

Zhou chunya
is sort of doing the same thing a lot. but the painting is so good, that it really doesn't matter. I saw his stuff in Seoul about five years ago, and really wish I had bought a work - it would be worth significantly more now, if i could part with the enchantingly-slick liquidy-oil paintings of dogs.

cai guoqiang
like zhou, has been around a while. Surprising, considering he works with gunpowder.

Good art Link

The First Post
has a really good art site - lots of links to chinese artists, too.

pic is from the site.