Modern Art

20 Unusually Awesome Art Mediums

“20 Unusually Awesome Art Mediums”

by Alice Yoo via “My Modern Met”

“This post is dedicated to the idea that creativity can flow out of any of us. Everywhere you look these days, you see people turning something quite ordinary into something unbelievably extraordinary. Like Yuken Teruya who delicately carves commercial paper bags and transforms them into magnificent miniature trees or Maurizio Savini who turns Hubba Bubba into high art, these artists are the ones who remind us that the best kind of art isn’t the most complicated, it’s the kind that leaves us with an experience.

Eden Project [Via WebUrbanist] Medium: Colored Pencils

iri5 [Link] Medium: Post-it Notes

ih8gates [Link] Medium: Kodaimai Rice

Coming Exhibition: Bharti Kher~ Not All Who Wander Are Lost

“Bharti Kher:

Not All Who Wander Are Lost“

Who:

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

When: July 1, 2015 – January 31, 2016 (Hours Vary)

Where:

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
25 Evans Way
Boston, MA 02115

More Information: Here.

Bharti Kher is the sixth artist-in-residence invited to create a temporary site-specific work for the Museum’s façade. Kher’s project reflects on maritime travel, highlighted by her interest in mapping and typography and references the migration of people in Africa, the Middle East and Europe. Kher uses bindis, a popular forehead decoration worn by women in India, and a signature element in her work, to map demographic movement in an abstract way.

Bharti Kher’s (b. 1969, England) is an art of dislocation and transience, reflecting her own, largely itinerant life. Born and raised in England, the artist moved to New Delhi in the early 1990s after her formal training in the field. Consequently, the concept of home as the location of identity and culture is constantly challenged in her body of work. In addition to an autobiographical examination of identity, Kher’s unique perspective also facilitates an outsider’s ethnographic observation of contemporary life, class and consumerism in urban India.

Presently, Kher uses the bindi, a dot indicative of the third eye worn by the Indian women on their foreheads, as a central motif in her work. Bharti Kher often refers to her mixed media works with bindis, the mass-produced, yet traditional ornaments, as “action paintings.” Painstakingly placed on the surface one-by-one to form a design, the multi-colored bindis represent custom, often inflexible, as well as the dynamic ways in which it is produced and consumed today. The artist is also known for her collection of wild and unusual resin-cast sculptures and her digital photography.

Study Abroad Artwork Showcased in Graham Center

“Study Abroad Artwork Showcased in Graham Center”

**by Ray Boyle via “FIU“**

Giovanni

This summer Eliane Pinillos braved dehydration and sickness to scale the Great Wall of China looking for the perfect scene to paint. Today, her art is on display in the Graham Center.

“This is awesome!” she said of seeing her and her peers’ work in a public space. “I mean, I don’t really consider myself much of an artist, but it’s pretty great to have it showcased.”

This week, the Graham Center Art Gallery houses more than 35 paintings and drawings from study abroad students. They will be on display until Nov. 21.

Pinillos, a speech pathology major, was among two groups of students who participated in David Chang’s summer study abroad programs, one in France, the other in China. Chang is a professor in the College of Education and director of art education.

“I feel very honored and I’m very happy and blessed that I had professor Chang because he’s so knowledgeable,” Pinillos said. “I think that he’s the person that really made this whole experience what it was because without him I would be lost.”

For Chang, the most important aspect of the trip is for his students to learn why artists like Monet and Van Gogh painted, rather than how to paint like them. He brings the students to Monet’s home and the Great Wall of China so they can feel their surroundings instead of “just taking a picture in front of the Eiffel Tower” as he puts it.

“I choose the sites based on the emphasis of the program. If I talk about the development of 19^th century art, then I would choose sites the impressionist painted,” he said. “It’s an immersive program, even though it’s a short period of time. We’re not just going as a tourist.”

Daniella Martinez met Pinillos during the study abroad to France last year. Both came away from the experience knowing they wanted to go to China this year.

China presented a completely different culture from France, from the United States and from Martinez’s native Colombia. It was modern, fast-paced and, she found, impersonal.

“Everyone just kind of wants to go where they want to go and that’s it,” Martinez said of the constant movement and quick interactions, which contrasts with the generally slower-paced lifestyle she knows in Colombia. . .

Coming Exhibition: Future Returns

“Future Returns: Contemporary Art from China”

08 Jin Yangping, “The Mirror of City No.1”, oil on canvas, 200 x 265 cm, 2011

Who:

Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum

Michigan State University

When: Oct. 28, 2014 – March 8, 2015 (Hours Vary)

Where:

Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum
547 East Circle Drive
East Lansing, Michigan 48824

More Information: Here and Here.

Over the past three decades China has experienced profound socioeconomic changes that have prompted calls to revisit, reconsider, and redefine the nation’s identity. Although there remains a strong local understanding of Chinese history and heritage, the homogenization of the country’s urban geography and the rapid dissipation of rural life have dramatically altered the cultural landscape. Future Returns: Contemporary Art from China explores the impact of these transformations by bringing together works by contemporary Chinese artists that address China’s metamorphosis from a traditional society into an ultra-modern nation-state.

The pertinent question in today’s China is whether the country’s distinct traditions and values can continue to play a role in its development. The future of China cannot be predicted, yet the psychology of “change, change, change” that pervades the everyday lives of the Chinese allows for a multitude of possibilities. Only in the pursuit of these new potentialities will China be able to build on its distinctive culture. The focused selection of paintings, photographs, installations, and digital art in this exhibition showcases the vision of both emergent and established practitioners who have contributed to China’s celebrated artistic community. Through their works, Future Returns highlights the emergence of a new China, one that is not constrained by closed readings of the past.

Artists and filmmakers featured in the exhibition include: Chen Weiqun, Dong Jun, Geng Yi, He Yunchang, Jiang Ji An, Jin Yangping, Jizi, Li Junhu, Lin Xin, Liu Lining, Meng Baishen, Miao Xiaochun, Pei Li, Qu Yan, Sui Jianguo, Su Xinping, Tian Bo, Wang Chuan, Wang Huangsheng, Wang Yang, Xia Xiaowan, Xu Bing, Zhang Yanfeng, Zhou Gang, and Zhou Qinshan.

New Broad Exhibit Showcases Range, Diversity of Art in China

“New Broad Exhibit Showcases Range, Diversity of Art in China”

by Matthew Miller via “Lansing Journal”

Broad Art Museum 4.jpg

“What’s wrong, I think, is the position of the dragon.”

Wang Chuan was gesturing at one of his own photographs, an image of a bright golden statuette of a dragon — a potent image in Chinese culture, a symbol of the nation itself — presiding over a collection of grimy soup pots.

“This is a stew,” he said, meaning the contents of those pots. “This is in a popular restaurant in a suburb of Beijing. It’s run by the farmers who don’t do farm work anymore. This is the wrong place.”

Wang’s dragon photos, part of “Future Returns,” an exhibition of Chinese contemporary art that opened last month at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, are on their face an exploration of the hapless fate of a cultural icon.

In one image, a long costume used in the traditional dragon dance sits crumpled on the back of a three wheeler. Another shows coins tossed for luck onto the image of a dragon at a temple, all of the smallest denominations.

But, in a broader sense, they are a mediation on the erasure of tradition in a fast-changing country.

“Gradually, people begin to care if the tradition is too quick to be erased by the modernization and the development of the economy and the incoming of the culture from the Western world,” Wang said. “The pace of vanishing of all the old things is shocking.”

The exhibition, which includes the work of more than two dozen artists, is the first brought to the museum by Wang Chunchen, a respected art critic and head of the Department of Curatorial Research at the CAFA Art Museum at the Central Academy of Fine Arts China in Beijing who is also an adjunct curator for the Broad.

“China is changed greatly in the past three decades,” Wang said, as he took a group of journalists, artists and translators through the exhibition last month. “So the art I selected her represents, stands for that kind of change, culturally, socially, psychologically.” . . . .