On September 22 at 11:00AM – 12:15PM PST, John Ziqiang Wu will speak online as part of Otis College of Art and Design’s Fine Arts Visiting Artist Lecture Series. Click below register for the event. Wu will speak about his experiences as a painter and teacher, and the intersections between art and learning. He currently operates an art tutoring studio, Learning Art & Art Learning Studio, with his wife.
Marking the reopening of SculptureCenter in Long Island, New York, Thursday 24 September is the opening of “Liquid Circuit”, TISHAN HSU’S first museum survey exhibition in the United States. After a celebrated summer at the Hammer Museum, the exhibition lands on the East Coast with over fifty of his most representative works. “Tishan Hsu: Liquid Circuit” is organized by SculptureCenter, New York, and is curated by SOHRAB MOHEBBI, Curator-at-Large, with KYLE DANCEWICZ, Interim Director. Also look out for Hsu speaking at Boston University’s Tuesday Night MFA Lecture Series on October 20.
Rei Hayama’s collaboration with Zai Tang (SG), Dormant Soil / Concrete Reflections (2020, 5.1 channel sound, 2 channel video) in now on view at the 2020 Busan Biennale “Words at an Exhibition —An Exhibition in Ten Chapters and Five Poems”, from September 5 through November 8, 2020. Hayama and Tang’s collaboration is featured in Chapter 3 of the biennale, and is a collaborative response to the poem Haeundae Texas Queen Kong by Kim Hyesoon. This marks the first collaboration between Rei Hayama and Zai Tang with their respective foundations in film and sound. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Their approach aimed to triangulate between Hyesoon’s text, Rei’s image and Zai’s sound, navigating towards a third space in the middle. Rei and Zai initially engaged in a parallel process: In response to the personal affects and thematic resonances each of them felt from Hyesoon’s poem, both of them collected material from their respective surroundings of Yokohama and Singapore.
The biennale was directed by Jacob Fabricius, and it is located by the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan and hosted by Busan Metropolitan City, Busan Biennale Organizing Committee.⠀
Artist Jes Fan is fascinated by the beautiful and the repulsive. His exploration of the contrast between them leads him to question our standards of beauty, shaped as they are by consumerism. “In the age of Teslas and Brazilian waxes, everything has to be smooth and [without corners]. Beyond feminine beauty, in architecture you see highly digitally rendered curvature,” he says. “Why are we thinking about beauty without edges? It stoops to consumerist needs, it’s a very accessible idea of beauty.”
As an artist and art educator, JOHN ZIQIANG WU finds himself at the nexus of two industries severely impacted by the pandemic. He and his wife, Yinan, co-founded and run an art-tutoring workshop in Chino, east of Los Angeles, while John continues his practice that revolves around different conceptions of art found in society. For the June Art Fair, which is being hosted online during August 20–31 by Hauser & Wirth on its website, Empty Gallery is presenting ten of Wu’s recent watercolor paintings from a 2019–20 residency at the Hammer Museum as well as the early months of the pandemic. ArtAsiaPacific caught up with Wu on the phone last week to talk about his interest in teaching art and in learning other people’s stories.
Sammlung at TOWER MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Berlin runs August 22 through May 30, 2021, featuring works from their collection including TISHAN HSU’S Cordless (1989). “The exhibition highlights works dating from the early 1960s to the present, including some of the museum’s newest acquisitions.” Hsu’s earlier works examine how the pressures of an increasingly technological world acted on the body of the individual subject.
Empty Gallery is pleased to present our inaugural presentation of works by Los Angeles-based conceptual artist and educator, JOHN ZIQIANG WU at this year’s online edition of June Art Fair. The fair opens on August 20 and will be on view through to August 31, and is co-hosted by Hauser & Wirth and ArtReview Magazine. Founded as an independent project by galleries VI, VII (Oslo) and Christian Andersen, (Copenhagen), June Art Fair is an initiative led by pioneering galleries working at the forefront of contemporary art. It is a platform to promote the work of emerging artists and to encourage rediscovery of more established but under-recognized figures.
A photograph by DIANE SEVERIN NGUYEN, Coral Offspring, is now in an online exhibition When Sun Comes Out hosted by our friends at Blank Forms NYC through September 18, 2020. The show is their “first benefit exhibition including works by over 40 artists, nearly all of whom are collaborators or friends of the organization.”
Right before the pandemic hit the U.S., C. SPENCER YEH adopted a cat: Mikki. His photograph, Mikki’s Mansion, is featured in the New York gallery Carriage Trade’s new exhibition: Social Photography VIII (until September 20). Check out Yeh’s print for sale at in the link below.
Through video, installation, sculpture, poetry, performance and archival documentation, the works on view explore constructions of self and nation by sifting through the unstable terrain of the past. Drawing on histories and archives of feminist, queer, and Third World liberation movements and responding to the uneven forces of neoliberalization, the artists suggest the pursuit of a new life that is concomitant with new ways of being together. Curated by the 2019–20 Curatorial Fellows of the Whitney Independent Study Program,”After La vida nueva” consists of an expanded catalogue, available for download, and an online component, hosted by Artists Space, where a weekly series of “spotlights” of different works in the exhibition will include screenings, archival documents, images, and text. On view August 7 – August 31, 2020.