Ocula Report 58th Venice Biennale: May You Live In Interesting Times 24 May 2019 : Mohammad Salemy for Ocula The 58th Venice Biennale, May You Live In Interesting Times (11 May–24 November 2019), certainly benefitted from low expectations, given the lacklustre curatorial of the previous edition, when different segments of the show were conceptually framed with titles like 'Pavilion of Joys and Fears' and 'Pavilion of Colours'. Add to this the...
Ocula Conversation Zheng Bo Hong Kong-based artist Zheng Bo's social, ecological, and community-engaged art practice has, in recent years, focused on moving beyond a human-centred perspective to an all-inclusive, multi-species approach. He takes up marginalised plants and communities of people as subjects in his large-scale interventions, which reintroduce wildness into...
Ocula Report Auckland Art Fair 2019: Conversations Extended 24 May 2019 : Sherry Paik for Ocula The weather was clement for the annual Auckland Art Fair (2–5 May 2019), which was again at The Cloud on Queens Wharf. This year's edition was a get-together of 41 galleries, mostly from around Auckland and across New Zealand, with 5 spaces hailing from Sydney and the rest from Cook Islands (Bergman Gallery), Hobart (Michael Bugelli Gallery),...
Chambers Fine Art is a gallery specialising in contemporary Chinese art located in New York and Beijing. It was established by Christophe W. Mao in New York in 2000. Recognising the need for a gallery that would serve as an authoritative source of information on the latest developments in the rapidly growing contemporary art world in China, Mao named his gallery after Sir William Chambers, the celebrated British architect who was a leading exponent of Chinese principles in garden design in the late eighteenth century. During the first seven years, artists including Lu Shengzhong, Hong Hao, Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen had their first solo exhibitions in the USA. Since then a younger generation of artists including Wu Jian’an, Zhao Zhao, Fu Xiaotong, and Guo Hongwei has added different perspectives to the gallery profile. Since 2009 the gallery has occupied premises at 522 West 19th Street, a block that is noteworthy for a concentration of new buildings by Frank Gehry, Shigeru Ban and Jean Nouvel as well as proximity to the High Line, the former elevated railway track that has become a much admired public park. Now in its second decade, Chambers Fine Art has become one of the essential destinations for all those interested in the latest and best coming out of China.
Yi Xin TongImmortal Caverns: New Peacock Pavilion I 仙人洞：新孔雀馆 I, 2015 Archival pigment print
Song Dong And Yin XiuzhenAuthority, 2013 Wood, paint, 24k gold leaf, sewn felt buildings
Xie Xiaoze Princeton University Firestone Library (2941.1567) 普林斯顿大学图书馆(2941.1567), 2017 Oil on linen
Xie Xiaoze Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library (A965) 埃维利建筑与艺术图书馆, 2019 Oil on linen
Ocula Conversation Lam Tung Pang and Abby Chen Born in Hong Kong in 1978, Lam Tung Pang is known for his paintings and drawings on plywood, along with site-specific installations, sound works, and videos that embody relationships between humans, nature, and the built environment. In the large-scale painting Centuries of Hong Kong (2011), for instance, which is housed at the Legislative Council...
Ocula Report China’s Post-Intranet Artists Get Personal 27 Apr 2019 : Sam Gaskin for Ocula China's post-80s artists are no longer all that 'young', nor do they much need that moniker. With the oldest of that generation fast approaching 40, to call them young would be misleading given how rapidly many of them rose to prominence during the tail-end of China's foreign collector-powered art boom and subsequent influx of domestic collectors....
Ocula Photolog ADAA | The Art Show 2019 4 March 2019 'Organized annually by the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA), The Art Show offers intimately scaled and thoughtfully curated presentations of the highest quality—fostering active conversations with gallerists, new relationships, and close looking at works by artists from a variety of genres, practices, and national and international...
Ocula Insight Moving between her bases in the United States and China, Qinmin Liu questions the structures that define her identity through long-form, playful projects. The farcical nature of the elitist lifestyle synonymous with the global art market is the focus of her ongoing project 'AngelHaha', the first artist-run airline. The 'dream-driven business' was...
Related Press Sydney Biennale modestly comes of age with moments of curatorial brilliance The Conversation : 16 March 2018 If a 21st birthday "coming of age" observance can be applied to cultural events, 2018 marks the launch into adulthood of the Biennale of Sydney. In some ways Sydney's biennale was a precocious child, turning its back during infancy on mainstream Eurocentric art in favour of exploring its local geographic region, early on including...
Related Press Picturing Ai Weiwei in Istanbul Hyperallergic : 5 January 2018 In an era where superstar Chinese artist Ai Weiwei feels ubiquitous, this past summer I experienced the full extent of that reality over the course of two months. After attending a New York preview for his new film about migrants, Human Flow (2017), I traveled to Israel to visit a major exhibition of his work at the Israel Museum in West Jerusalem,...
Related Press Journeys without Arrivals: Chinese contemporary artist Qiu Zhijie at Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève Art Radar : 20 December 2017 Running until 18 January 2018, Qiu Zhijie: Journeys Without Arrivals focuses on the work of the artist Qiu Zhijie, who made waves for his satirical, often tongue-in-cheek calligraphic maps of the world. The Beijing-based artist is known for producing enormous, overwhelming ink maps, which often provide an underlying commentary that weave physical...
Related Press Mining Mineral Structures with Watercolor and Sediment Hyperallergic : 6 November 2017 Beijing artist Guo Hongwei is a master of watercolor technique, able to create convincing, almost photographic, results from this most minimal medium. He is also a collector of sorts, using his skill to assemble taxonomies of natural elements: leaves and butterflies, rocks and crystals.
