From the series of essays Ritual Practices by Elaine Smollin On the road from Frankfurt-am-Main to Leipzig, departing Hessen into Thuringia, a vast heap of salt towers above the passerby. This inert, looming, giant byproduct of industry dwarfs the relevance of anything nearby. The power of its sheer enormity stuns the senses, pressing the [...]
Dale ChihulyGlass Sculptures at Fairchild Tropical Botanic GardenPhoto by Gustavo Taborda by G. & G. Taborda Miami’s largest art event of Art Basel this year is infused into the city itself, transforming it to become an art playground, where artists, galleries, art organizations from all over the world have invited the public [...]
The female body is sometimes best depicted by curvy lines in black ink on white paper, as Qian Shaowu seems to tell us. Well known for his massive heroic sculptures and calligraphy, Qian’s paintings at the group exhibition “Ink and the Body” at Ink Studio in Beijing constitute a more intimate look into his body [...]
Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2014 Contemporary art often crosses the line of pure art expression or craft. It contributes to building a culture, thus encompassing many different creative fields, such as film making, literature, political issues, and even spirituality. At the recent 11th Ubud Writers Readers Festival in Indonesia, we experience art [...]
From the Series of Essays Ritual Practices by Elaine Smollin It’s common to see the ideals we project through visual means fall away from their central aim, which is, to provide a testament to life unmediated. And so it is, that if an image fails our abilities to provide its abstraction, the conditions we [...]
Chinese artists have been pushed from one village to another, evicted from here to there. They disperse and come together again and again. The story of Yuan Ming Yuan Artists Village in the western part of Beijing began in the 18th century as the oldest center for the arts in China. In [...]
The Museum of Modern Art in Dubrovnik, according to Croatian tourist brochures, schedules an important local artist during the busy summer months. No more details were given but I decided to go anyway. The short walk from the walled old city circled around a beach where hundreds of people were taking a dip in the [...]
Internationally renowned contemporary artists John Wood and Paul Harrison have brought a subtle British humor to the Colombian city of Medellin with a major exhibition at the Antioquia Museum, an anthology of drawings and videos they have made for the past 20 years. According to the curator Nydia Gomez, humor is the main resource of [...]
An afternoon visiting photography exhibitions around Beijing can take you to a China that you have rarely seen, surreal landscapes on the earth's far flung places, and the contrast of men and machine inside a French car factory in the mid-30s. Portrait - Ma Che Three Shadows is the first contemporary art space [...]
Twister (Park Avenue Paper Chase), Aluminum, 12′ high × 12′ diameter, 2014. 66th Street on Park Avenue. For four months, midtown Park Avenue in New York has been taken over by swirls of energy in layers of glistening aluminum and fiberglass, a symphony of seven apparently random installations that invite the public [...]
