Ocula Conversation Pierre Huyghe: The Artist as Director Pierre Huyghe is a producer of spectacular and memorable enigmas, with works that function more like mirages than as objects. Abyssal Plain (2015–ongoing), his contribution to the 2015 Istanbul Biennial, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, was installed on the seabed of the Marmara Sea, some 20 metres below the surface of the water and close to...
Ocula Report MoMA Expansion: Once the Modern, Always the Modern 29 Nov 2019 : Mohammad Salemy for Ocula In the early decades of its existence, New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), founded in 1929, transformed from a philanthropic project modestly housed in a few rooms of the Heckscher Building on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, to an alleged operating node in the United States' cultural struggle during the cold war, and one of the...
Ocula Insight | Video Hans Hartung and Art Informel at Mazzoleni London (1 October 2019-18 January 2020) presents key works by the French-German painter while highlighting his connection with artists active in Paris during the 50s and 60s. In this video, writer and historian Alan Montgomery discusses Hartung's practice and its legacy.Born in Leipzig in 1904, Hans...
Michael Goedhuis is delighted to present a selection of works for this year’s The Salon Art + Design fair. Our focus is on Chinese contemporary ink works on paper, represented by artists such as Wei Ligang, Qin Feng, Wang Dongling, Yang Yanping, Yao Jui-chung, Leung Kui Ting and Zeng Shanqing.
China is the oldest surviving civilisation on earth, and Chinese contemporary ink works, from calligraphy and paintings to photography and video, express the continuation of this vast past in ways that are meaningful for society today both in China and the West.
Calligraphy is the sublime and central achievement of China and has been practised for hundreds of years by millions of Chinese, for whom it is a method of achieving the harmonious integration of mind and body.
Painting, together with calligraphy, poetry and music, constitutes one of the four key traditional arts of China and is an extension of the art of calligraphy. It is, therefore, like calligraphy, linked to the sacred prestige of the written word.
Today’s ink artists are deeply aware of the classical canon and its aesthetic and moral imperatives and have carefully studied the old masters - as Picasso and Cézanne studied Raphael, Poussin, Velázquez and others, in order to formulate their own revolution for their work to be meaningful for the world of today.
Very many different stylistic approaches have evolved over the past 30 years. Works now range from those that, at first sight, look quite traditional but in fact embody powerful, fresh aesthetic initiatives, via those poised delicately in an intermediate style, to those that are unambiguously avant-garde. But all of the best contemporary practitioners have a common purpose… to create works that do not jettison the great cultural legacy of the past in formulating a language that addresses the intellectual, cultural and social issues of today.
