Magazine Project

The magazine project is the extension of photography project that is exploring the interesting and challenging way of looking, but rather than recording the past time, I try to add another medium - oil painting to intrude the photography and words of one magazine, thus making original photographs produce different possibilities of meaning by viewers' curiosity.  To some extent, the concept of John Stezaker is similar with this project, but by different way to give the original pictures new meanings.  Unlike Stezaker, his work is combined two pictures to create a new picture, my work is combined two different mediums – picture and oil painting, opening up new characters, relationships and meanings.  What’s more, I think, probably his work more relates to the old time but mine is concentrated to different uncertain possibilities of the future.   But the same thing of us is that we try to intrude the photograph to produce new meaning by different ways.  Just as he mentioned, ‘You can only get a feeling of the inviolable purity and sanctity of the emulsion of a photograph by violating it.’  In this project I think I am a conceptual structralist, try to say to the viewers ‘this is not that’ in terms of the original pictures and words of the magazine, thus making the overpaintings thought-provoking, aesthetically pleasing and utterly desirable.  

Magazine Project 3

Damien Hirst：Two Weeks One Summer at WHITE CUBE

'The void of painting is always a difficult thing. It's infinite really. There's no gravity in painting, so it's even more infinite than space.'

Painting has always been an important part of Hirst's oeuvre, but unlike the spot paintings and photorealist series which were made using a collaborative studio process, this body of work is altogether more personal: painted from life, by Hirst in his Devon studio.

With their bold handling of paint, accents of bright colour and sharply defined highlights, these works invoke a sense of the moment, a creative urgency. Different textures, depths of colour, tactility and paint application work to create beguiling images that collage various different emotive qualities, setting them apart from the conceptualism of Hirst's earlier work. As Manuela Mena has written in her catalogue essay: “Hirst creates his system of inextricably woven and flexible order... to create space: he is not tied to perspective, contrasts of light and shadow, planes of flat colours. He has addressed the subject of still-life with a code of expression that is entirely his own.”

Magazine Project 2

Catlin Art Prize 2012 at LONDONEWCASTLE PROJECT SPACE

I'm really into the work of Poppy Bisdee, who graduated from Wimbledon College of art.

Working with various recording and presentation technologies such as film and projection, Poppy Bisdee creates minimal sculptures and installations which reflect space and time, and emphasise the physical, sensory and temporal experience of the work. The viewer is a central element, and by mirroring their physicality through images, sounds and shadows, Bisdee brings into question their role as spectator, subject or performer.

Bisdee’s works are often a response to the space where they are to ultimately be experienced by the viewer, generating various site-specific works in both the white cube spaces, and spaces charged with a history. By emphasising the sensory quality of materials in her work, Bisdee aims to heighten the viewer’s awareness of their perceptive senses. Inspired by Eadweard Muybridge’s pioneering use of photography to capture movement and time, Bisdee uses lengths of film in a similar vein, reflecting the viewer’s movement in a length of time. This has led on to explorations using a length of film to direct the duration of the act of viewing.

Fascinated by light, space and time, Bisdee explores ways of capturing and depicting these minimal and ephemeral elements that make up an experience. For example, in 12.11.10 a space was photographed at one moment in time. This photograph is then projected back into the space; and, this held moment presented through the transience of light, is framed by the constantly advancing time of the present space.

Ron Mueck & Medley Tour London by Andy Hope 1930 at HAUSER & WIRTH

Mueck’s sculptures link reality to the world of folklore, myth and magic. ‘Woman with Sticks’, a sturdy, middle-aged woman struggling to contain an unwieldy bundle of sticks nearly twice her size, suggests a woman tackling the near-impossible tasks set in fairytales and legends. Completely naked, this woman represents the ‘eternal feminine’, a topic that fascinated artists such as Cezanne and Gauguin. Where these artists focussed on the idyllic model, Mueck uses hair, skin and a physical build far from the norms of classical beauty. This woman is active, not contemplative; vigorous and energetic, not delicate and demure.

The recent work ‘Youth’ is a boy wearing low-slung jeans and a blood-stained white T-shirt. With a look of incredulity reminiscent of Saint Thomas demanding to inspect the wounds of Christ, he pulls up his shirt to reveal an open stab wound in his side. ‘Youth’ is a portrait of the thoughtlessness of childhood; of a person not yet grown up who comes face to face with the incomprehensibility of mortality.

Mueck’s ‘Drift’ is a small-scale sculpture of a lightly tanned man sporting tropical swim shorts and dark sunglasses, lying on a lilo with his arms outstretched. Instead of floating in a swimming pool, ‘Drift’ is installed high on the gallery wall, seeming to disappear off into the distance. Held up only by a puff of air and a sheet of plastic, the precariousness of ‘Drift’ provokes questions of the brevity of life. Like many of Mueck’s works, both ‘Youth’ and ‘Drift’ tap into powerful and universal emotional states, enabling the viewers to create their own narratives.

Suspended in the centre of the gallery is ‘Still Life’, a dead chicken, stripped of its feathers, hung by its bound feet and enlarged to human size. Mueck’s title directly references the genre of still life, a subject that has given rise to a variety of artistic explorations of the bounty of nature and its consumption. But always in these works, and in Mueck’s ‘Still Life’, the fear of death acts as a balance to the fecundity of life.

http://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/1306/ron-mueck/view/

Berlin-based artist Andy Hope 1930 has developed a far-reaching and diverse iconography combining the worlds of comic books, science fiction and mythology with history, pop culture and literature. For his exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, ‘Medley Tour London by Andy Hope 1930’, Hope will present the ‘X-Medleys’: a new series of paintings that weaves together elements from his unique pictorial language. Displayed alongside new and re-invented installations, this body of work represents a significant progression in Hope’s practice, which develops with each stop on the artist’s ‘Medley Tour’.

A ‘medley’ is commonly defined as a piece of music consisting of several harmonically adjusted melodies taken from a musician’s entire repertoire. Likewise for the ‘X-Medleys’, Hope re-visits different iconographic elements which have played a major role in his oeuvre, as well as works from modernism and contemporary art. He then formulates these elements anew through a process of revision, erasure and dislocation, providing his audience with a fresh perspective with which to approach his new paintings, earlier works and his appropriated references. For example, Hope’s ‘X-Medley 2’ was inspired by Francis Picabia’s painting of a young couple sitting underneath a cherry blossom tree. Hope adopts this basic composition and superimposes his own symbols: the black mask from his depictions of Robin Dostoyevsky; the woman’s hair from his paintings of Hollywood starlets; and the dark shapes pulled from an earlier work showing a vacant room with empty frames.

With the ‘X-Medleys’, Hope takes one of his central themes – the manipulation of time – to a new level by intervening in his own artistic past. As Hope explains to John C. Welchman, this intervention enables him to return to the project of painting without ‘constructing new narratives and enlarging my sign system, without accumulating more references and going deeper into the labyrinth’. Hope reverse-engineers his practice, paring it down to its most fundamental elements and, in doing so, he creates a lexicon of his oeuvre, what Welchman describes as an ‘exit strategy’, which in turn pushes him forward.

For his exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, Hope has also remade and deconstructed his ‘Batman Gallery’.The first ‘Batman Gallery’ (2004) was an architectural interpretation of the eponymous superhero, his black cape solidified into one long, receding roof, which housed a gallery for a selection of Hope’s paintings. The re-visited version has been painted white and divided into several pieces to be displayed in different areas of Hauser & Wirth’s north gallery. Its soaring roof is suspended from the ceiling and the steps that once lead to the viewing area now lead nowhere.

http://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/1305/medley-tour-london-by-andy-hope-1930/view/