LMNY's BLOG

Exhibitions Phoenix: Xu Bing at the Cathedral Opening March 1, 2014 Over the course of two years, pioneering Chinese contemporary artist Xu Bing culled detritus from construction sites across the rapidly changing urban landscape of Beijing, and transformed it into his most monumental project to date:  Phoenix  (2008-10). A feat of engineering and ingenuity, Phoenix  is composed of two birds, a male called  Feng  and a female called  Huang .  Feng  and  Huang —each weighing 12 tons and measuring 90 and 100 feet long, respectively—are now coming to the Cathedral. They will hang suspended in the Nave, two majestic birds in perpetual flight beneath its celestial ceiling. Photo: Marion Kahan Creating the phoenixes was a tortuous process, requiring flexibility at every turn. Describing the coming-into-being of  Phoenix , the artist explains: “The method is unsophisticated, like Chinese lanterns. At the same time it is also in keep...

XU ZHEN ARTIST COMMISSION: XU ZHEN (MADEIN) Xu Zhen  (b. 1977, Shanghai) has been chosen as the  commissioned artist for The Armory Show 2014 . A “chameleon of concept," he has built an extensive body of work that includes video, installation, performance, and photography. From theatrical merry pranks to quieter works playing on human sensitivity, Xu Zhen has developed a repertoire confronting social-political taboos within the context of contemporary China and beyond. For this edition of The Armory Show, Xu Zhen has put his mark on key aspects of the fair’s look and feel. Paintings from his  Under Heaven  series, in which a pastry chef’s icing applicator is used to apply pigment to support in temptingly delicious impasto, has graced Armory Show collateral in the months leading up to the fair and on-site. These paintings, their title both a literal translation of a Chinese word meaning “the whole world" and a joking reference to Jeff K...

Jiang Shuo  was born in 1958, Beijing. She studied sculpture at the Central Academy of Arts and Design, which is now under Tsinghua University. Jiang, as the first female sculptor in China, completed her master degree in 1985 and started her career in teaching sculpture at the Central Academy until 1989. Jiang, with her husband Wu Shao Xiang, emigrated to Austria and worked at their joint studio there. Jiang's works have been widely exhibited around the world, especially in Europe.  The sculpture that you are interested is titled  Great Jump , it is one of her Red Guards Series. The Red Guards work follows in her folk art style but with the injection of a political theme to grab people's attention. The almost faceless guards with their wide-open mouths recall the period of turmoil in China when the spouting of slogans and mindless indoctrination was the path to survival. The sarcasm continues for the materialization that these red guard criticized during the Revolutio...

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Yun-Fei Ji in his studio, 2007. Parasol Unit, London, January 2007. 季云飞于工作室，伦敦Parasol Unit，2007年1月 Photo: Tara Darby / Modern Painters Magazine 摄影：Tara Darby / 《Modern Painters》杂志 Yun-Fei Ji Saturday, July 31st, 2010, 14: 30-16: 30 Jing’an Room, 800 Show (Dutch Cultural Center) No. 800 Changde Road, Shanghai THE BUND FORUM presents an artist talk by New York-based Chinese painter Yun-Fei Ji. Starting with the artist’s latest work, in the format of a traditional hand scroll The Three Gorges Dam Migration commissioned by Museum of Modern Art New York, Ji will discuss his ten-year exploration around the theme of the Three Gorges Dam Project in which Ji uses landscape painting to express the utopian ideals of Chinese history from past collectivization to new consumerism. At the talk, Ji will also speak about his life and experience as a Chinese artist in New York, a city that has embraced many of his Chinese peers like Ai Weiwei, Cai Guo-Qiang, and Xu Bing. The event takes place...

Frankfurt, Germany - In conjunction with China’s appearance as Guest of Honour at the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair, the Schirn will be showing, for the first time ever in the West, the spectacular Chinese sculptural group Rent Collection Courtyard (Chin.: Shouzuyuan). This ensemble of more than 100 life-size figures is among the most important works in modern Chinese art history, and is firmly embedded in China’s collective memory. Created as a site-specific installation in Dayi in 1965 by teachers and graduates of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, the group of figures soon became a model artwork of the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966. Over the following years several variations of the work were made and exhibited throughout China, only one of which survives today. This is a mobile travelling version made in 1974–78 from copper-plated fibreglass at great expense, and is located in the art museum of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, central China. In a drama...