Sean Raspet

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*Scent molecule formulation Diffuser*, 2018

Image courtesy of the artist and Bridget Donahue.

*Deformulation*, 2015

Image courtesy of the artist and Société.

*Atmospheric Reformulation (Oxygen 18 Isotope)*, 2015

Image courtesy of the artist and Room East.

*New Flavors and Fragrances*, 2014

Image courtesy of the artist and New Galerie.

*Hydrocarbon Reformulation (Reconstituted Crude Oil with 2-Point Resolution: Molecular Weight Average)*, 2014

Image courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman Gallery.

*Residuals*, 2014

Image courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman Gallery.

Sean Raspet’s works have often consisted of liquid chemical formulations of artificial flavor and fragrance molecules. More recently his works have involved food, nutrition, human metabolism and human cellular development via stem cells. He is a flavor and fragrance chemist and co-founder of the algae-based food company Nonfood. His practice prioritizes movement away from the specialized art economy, in favor of endeavors that circulate in the economy-at-large, utilizing prevailing modes of production––such as mass-produced products and proprietary molecular structures.

Raspet’s work has been exhibited at the The Artist’s Institute, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco; M Woods Museum, Bejing; Societé, Berlin; the 9th Berlin Biennale; Bridget Donahue, New York; SculptureCenter, New York; and The Kitchen, New York, among others.

Education

2011-2014

MFA, University of California, Los Angeles

2007-2008

Whitney Independent Study Program, Whitney Museum of American Art

2002-2003

BFA, Sculpture, Rhode Island School of Design

2001-2002

Fine Art, Goldsmiths College

Public Collections

The Hammer Museum

The Rubell Family Collection

Public Projects

2019

IF THE SNAKE, Okayama Art Summit 2019, Okayama Japan (Pierre Huyghe, Artistic Director)

2018

Rhizome Seven on Seven 2018, with Francis Tseng

Rhizome Seven on Seven Beijing (10th Anniversary), with Francis Tseng

2017

Second Vienna Biennale, Artificial Tears, MAK Vienna

2016

9th Berlin Biennale, Berlin various venues

Texture Map (Normal) J01 - J04 Smoking or Bus Shelter, Jardin des Plantes, Paris (public sculpture organized by FIAC)

Solo Exhibitions

2019

New Molecules and Stem Cell Retinoid Screen, Empty Gallery, Hong Kong (with Kiara Eldred and Shengping Zheng)

2018

Structure, The Artist’s Institute

Receptor-Binding Variations, Bridget Donahue, New York

2016

Soylent R&D Promotional Trade Show Booth, Frieze New York Art Fair

2015

Arche Apeiron, Minibar, Stockholm, Sweden (with Eva Löfdahl)

Calculus of Negligence, Room East, New York, NY (with Marte Eknæs)

Xyzzy, Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles, CA (with Kelly Akashi)

Deformulation, Société, Berlin, Germany

2014

Residuals, Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, CA

Untitled (Registration/PIN: G0009296/78GY76DM; G0009297/99ER43TB; G0009298/39ZL54SJ), New Galerie, New York

New Flavors and Fragrances, New Galerie, Paris

2013

Entity∆: Advance Viewing (featuring 2Registration::(ÒUntz'tled (Police Incident (7[c])) 6, (((2007-2012) 2007-2011. Ó) Ó) 2012) 2012 - 2013), Appendix Project Space, Portland, Oregon

2012

Untitled (Sublet), Bund Deutscher Architekten, Berlin

2011

Binder, Société, Berlin

2010

As If Written In, The Kitchen, New York

20/02, Max Hans Daniel, Berlin

2008

The Ones We Work For, Daniel Reich Gallery, New York

The Generations, Daniel Reich Gallery, Chelsea Hotel Space, New York

Group Exhibitions

2018

I Was Raised on the Internet, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

74 million million million tons, SculptureCenter, New York

Supplies and Demands, The Bolsky Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles

2017

DIS “Thinkspo” opening event at de Young Museum, San Francisco (in collaboration with Nonfood)

Heart of the Tin Man, M Woods Museum, Beijing

99 Cents or Les, Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit

EXO EMO, Greene Naftali, New York

2016

War Games (curated by Benjamin Godsill), Moran Bondaroff, Detroit, MI

ESPERANTO, curated by CURA, Rowing Projects, London, UK

Vinny Dotolo Summer Group Show, M+B, Los Angeles, CA

Le temps de l’audance et de l’engagement – De leur temps, Institut d’art contemporain Villeurbanne, Villeurbanne, France

2015

1,000 Islands, Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong

Office Space, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA

In the Flesh Part l: Subliminal Substances, Martos Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

PAVILLON DE L’ESPRIT NOUVEAU 2.0, The Swiss Institute, New York, NY

Take Me (I’m Yours), Monnaie de Paris, Paris, France

…Looking down at myself from the second floor of an Italian restaurant in the Catskills…, American Medium, Brooklyn, NY

Any Human Measure, M + B Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

DIDING – An Interior That Remains an Exterior?, Künstlerhaus KM–, Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz, Austria

Castles Burning, Room East, New York

2014

Passive Collect, Chin’s Push, Los Angeles

Scars of Our Revolution, Yvon Lambert, Paris

Strauss Bourque-LaFrance, Caitlin Keogh, Sean Raspet, Pam Lins, Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of, C L E A R I N G, New York

+/-, The Artist’s Institute, New York

2013

Time Machine, Fonds M-ARCO, Marseilles, France

Digital Infinity, Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco

Rematerialized, New York Gallery/New Galerie, New York

Brand Innovations for Ubiquitous Authorship, (organized by Eva and Franco Mattes), Carroll/Fletcher, London

2012

Brand Innovations for Ubiquitous Authorship, (organized by Artie Vierkant), Higher Pictures, New York

Domino Effect, Catherine Bastide, Brussels, Belgium

Motion, Seventeen Gallery, London

In Practice: You never look at me from the place from which I see you, Sculpture Center, New York

Images Rendered Bare, Vacant, Recognizable, Stadium, New York

Jannic Yoray, Jeanette Mundt, Sean Raspet/ Gruppenaustellung 3, Société, Berlin

Synthetic Vertigo, Elaine, Basel

BCC#8, Control Room, Los Angeles 2011

Forms and Inflections, Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco

Untitled Document, Tony Wight Gallery, Chicago

Discursive Arrangements, or Stubbornly Persistent Illusions, (curated by Timothy Hull and Lumi Tan) Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York

2011

Forms and Inflections, Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, CA

Untitled Document, Tony Wight Gallery, Chicago, IL

Discursive Arrangements, or Stubbornly Persistent Illusions, Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York, NY

2010

A Relative Expanse, Curated by Maxwel G. Graham, Renwick Gallery, New York, NY

The Morning News, Curated by Lumi Tan, BE-PART Contemporary Art Center, Waregem

2009

RU-486 at Artisterium, (curated by Benjamin Godsill), T’bilisi, Republic of Georgia

Exhibition, 211 Elizabeth St., New York

Convention, (curated by Ruba Katrib), MOCA Miami

If the Dogs are Barking, Artist’s Space, New York

To One Whose Love was Service, with Amir Mogharabi, Daniel Reich Gallery

1999, Ten Year Anniversary Show, China Art Objects, Los Angeles

The Shape of Things to Come, The Saatchi Gallery, London

A Starting Point: Intrude Art & Life 366, (retrospective exhibition selected from projects over the past year), Zendai MOMA, Shanghai

2008

Intrude: Art & Life 366, (curated by Biljana Ciric)

Zendai MOMA, Shanghai

Palm Beach Biennial, Gavlak, West Palm Beach

PDF (curated by Summer Guthry, Lumi Tan and Nicholas Weist), Various Locations

Without Walls, Museum 52, New York

Poster Project, Nine Things, Frankfurt

Whitney ISP Studio Practice Exhibition, New York

2007

Ilya Lipkin, Sean Raspet, Ned Vena, (organized by Arnd Seibert) Cohan and Leslie, New York

Untitled (Perfect Lovers), BC Project Room, New York

The Way Things Are, Daniel Reich Gallery, New York

Inaugural Exhibition, Museum 52, New York

2005

Cynisme, Atelier Ford, Geneva

2004

Cardboard Motherboard, Numbers Gallery, London

Writing and Publication

2016

“Towards an Olfactory Vocabulary System” Future Anterior, Columbia University (forthcoming) Artforum, Artist’s Artists

Raspet, Sean W. "Formulation 0.10." Berlin Biennale. Berlin Biennale, 08 June 2016

2013

Raspet, Sean, thehighlights.org,

“2GFR24SMEZZ2XMCVI5L8X9Y38ZJ2JD 25RZ6KW4ZMAZSLJ0GBH0WNNVRNO7GU 2MBYMNCWYB49QDK1NDO19JONS66QMB 2RCC26DG67D187N9AGRCWK2JIHA7E2 2H1G5TYMNCWYM81O4OJSPX11N5VNJ0″

Raspet, Sean, theivorytower.tv: “Beyond the Critical Economy: Kathryn Bigelow from Art & Language to Point Break”

(Untitled Sublet(2)) Sublease Template, Shifter Magazine

2010

"IMG MGMT: Untitled", Artfcity.com, October 11th

"No" INPUT Journal, 2 , (2010): pages 226 - 241

2009

"*: Example Contract", Art Economies beyond Pattern Recognition, ed. Biljana Ciric, Shanghai: Osage, 2009, 100 - 105

2008

Raspet, Sean "No", Farimani, Issue 1, (2008), pages 159 - 172

2007

A Parody of Existence, Artist Book


2024-11-26	Taro Masushio Folds the Fictional In on Itself, by Jaime Chu in Spike Art Magazine
	Amid his exhibition at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong, the Japanese bricolage photographer presents art as helping us sit with the discomfort of the unknown. In the last essay he published before passing away on 23 October 2024, Gary Indiana wrote about photographs: “We all live at least one or two lives that we subtract from our biographies. Areas of un-revisited, unhealed pain or such monumental nothingness that they’re not worth remembering. Then, infrequently, some evidence turns up, often photographic evidence. You are seized, suddenly, by a grisly species of curiosity.” Born in Japan and now living in New York, artist Taro Masushio’s exhibition “Pass” at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong is replete with photographic evidence, but contains little of facts and does not reward undue curiosity. Masushio’s reprinting of his father’s amateur travel photography on the cardboard of care packages shipped across the world from father to son conjures a haptic, material intimacy mediated by impersonal logistics networks. A series of sparing, high-contrast still-life photographs catalogues enigmatic objects sourced intuitively from his father’s belongings and the artist’s own collection – a book of Rimbaud’s poetry, a pair of male Ainu figurines, testosterone supplements, photo paper, a darkroom safe light. The effect is disruption of the impulse towards certainty in meaning-making, the recognizable objects utterly drained of their indexicality, despite their unambiguous familial, autobiographical, and sexual connotations. 更多…
2024-11-16	Taro Masushio, Pass, by Wong Binghao in Mousse Magazine
	“Just as he is uninterested in entrenching binaries of fact and fiction, resistance and capitulation, or authorship and appropriation, Taro Masushio is likewise wary of identitarian overdeterminations and the corollary imperative to verify and reveal any singular “truths” behind his photography. He sets himself the task of resisting the medium’s claims to the indisputable legibility of subjects in front of or behind its lens. His latest show at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong (all works 2024), juxtaposes two types of photography—UV prints on found cardboard and more traditional still lifes—to complicate the medium’s supposed technological purchase on truth and transparency. It highlights his proclivity for playful formal experimentation when faced with the camera’s potential for capture, which has often proven symptomatic of the colonial hunger for knowledge, order, and coherence. Through his shrewd sequencing of images, the artist seems to suggest that the medium of photography holds the capacity to conceal and equivocate, despite its presumed indexical fidelity to the “real.”” 更多…
2024-11-14	Para Site 2024 Benefit Auction
	Empty Gallery is pleased to support Para Site’s 2024 Benefit Auction. The works by Doris Guo & Weili Wang and James T. Hong are available to view on 9/F of H Queen’s in Hong Kong through 17 November, the silent auction will continue through November 20, 10.30pm HKT. 更多…
2024-11-06	H.G. Masters on James T. Hong at Empty Gallery
	In issue 141 of ArtAsiaPacific, deputy editor H.G. Masters covered James T. Hong’s Apologies, which was on view at Empty Gallery from June through August 2024. 更多…
2024-11-05	Intermissions: Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork & Laetitia Sonami at Renaissance Society, Chicago
	At the Renaissance Society, Gork develops a new project for the Intermissions series in collaboration with performer, sound artist, and electronic musician Laetitia Sonami. Directly engaging with this unique setting, Gork introduces new physical elements into the empty gallery space, positions multiple sound sources, and experiments with the room’s unusual acoustics. For two days, Sonami and Gork mobilize and shape the sound within this environment across various listening zones. Visitors are free to come and go during the durational performance. Curated by Karsten Lund with Michael Harrison Special thanks to Meyer Sound, Berkeley, CA. 更多…
2024-11-05	Vunkwan Tam collaborating with Winsome Wong and Annisa Cheung, HICCUP, Tai Kwun, Hong Kong
	On the weekend of November 8-9, Winsome Wong will present ‘Love Song: the bittersweet crumbs of having them at home’ in collaboration with Vunkwan Tam and Annisa Cheung, at Tai Kwun’s HICCUP, a festival of body and sound co-presented by Tai Kwun Contemporary, Contemporary Musiking Hong Kong (Sound Forms), and Per.Platform. For the full schedule, see the link below. 更多…
2024-11-01	Doris Guo, The Jar at K4, Oslo
	Doris Guo’s solo presentation, The Jar, is on view November 1st through 24th at K4 in Oslo, a non-profit gallery space for video art and moving image. The exhibition is open on Saturdays and Sundays, please see the link below for further details. “The starting point of this exhibition was based on my desire for having always wanted to make a horror movie. At many periods of my life, especially busy and stressful ones, I take comfort in throwing on any horror movie, cheesy and predictable with familiar sounds and jump scares. Amongst the many horror tropes one might experience, I particularly get a lot of enjoyment out of police and military being utterly useless. It’s an assumed, natural fact of the characters and by the general audience. I wanted to set my horror movie in a particular style of housing in the Pacific Northwest.” 更多…
2024-10-26	Cici Wu, Travel Star Between Ceasing and Arising, Scheusal Berlin
	Cici Wu’s solo exhibition Travel Star Between Ceasing and Arising is now on view at Scheusal Berlin from October 26th onwards.
2024-10-25	Jes Fan, Sites of Wounding: Interchapter, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York
	Jes Fan’s debut New York solo exhibition is now on view at Andrew Kreps Gallery’s 55 Walker space through December 20, 2024. In his practice, Fan employs the often invisible substances that shape our experiences with the world to explore the often malleable ways in which biology, ecology and identity intersect. Working in close collaboration with biologists, farmers, and medical universities, Fan’s transdisciplinary projects examine how sculpture can be used as a tool to unravel material from its accumulated history. The exhibition continues Fan’s episodic project Sites of Wounding, first initiated in 2020. A pool of boiling soy milk is positioned at the gallery’s entrance, and utilized as a projection surface for a visceral video documenting a homemade endoscopy. Upon looking at the congealed skin-like surface of the white liquid, the viewer is not offered a reflection, but instead offered an interior view of the artist’s body. This underscores a larger interest in Fan’s work, of collapsing the membrane that demarcates the external body from an internal space. New sculptures belonging to the project’s second chapter are informed by Fan’s research into Agarwood trees, as well as an interest in how injuries are capable of generating new meaning. Native to Hong Kong, the trees produce a fragrant resin in response to stress, and trauma. In the healing process, the tree’s fibers harden, building density and structure around the wound. To create sculptures in this chapter, Fan 3D prints CT scans of his own musculature and combines traditional techniques such as glass-blowing. Mimicking the formal qualities of the infected Agarwood tree, these abstracted forms point to the transformative potential of trauma carried by the human body. A punctured freestanding wall furthers this inquiry, inviting viewers to peer at the sculpture embedded within it. 更多…
2024-10-09	Jes Fan in Scientia Sexualis at ICA Los Angeles
	Scientia Sexualis is an ambitious group survey of contemporary artists whose works take up the fraught relationship between sex, gender, and science. Organized by Jennifer Doyle (Professor of English, University of California, Riverside) and Jeanne Vaccaro (Assistant Professor of Transgender Studies and Museum Studies, University of Kansas), the exhibition is realized as part of the ambitious collaboration across arts institutions throughout Southern California known as PST ART: Art & Science Collide led by the Getty. It runs from October 5, 2024 through March 2, 2025. Featured artists include: Panteha Abareshi, Dotty Attie, Louise Bourgeois, Nao Bustamante, Andrea Carlson, Demian DinéYazhi’, Nicole Eisenman, El Palomar, dean erdmann, Jes Fan, Nicki Green, Oliver Husain & Kerstin Schroedinger, Xandra Ibarra, KING COBRA (documented as Doreen Lynette Garner), Joseph Liatela, Candice Lin, Carlos Motta, Wangechi Mutu, Young Joon Kwak & Gala Porras-Kim, Cauleen Smith, P. Staff, Joey Terrill, Chris E. Vargas, Millie Wilson, and Geo Wyex. 更多…