Miao Xiaochun opens at Arario New York March 4th, 2010

Fullness, 2008, Digital Print on Canvas, 135 x 253cm

Arario New York is pleased to present Microcosm, an exhibition of more than twenty works in three dimensional animation, multi-panels, digital paintings, drawings, and embroideries. As one of the most representative artists of China’s new media art, from early realism photograph to 3-dimensional work, Miao Xiaochun has always focused on the humanities, history and reality from a sociological and art historical perspective. The latest series of works employs the most advanced computer technologies, using classical paintings as a foundation of visual structure to create outlandish modern montages of virtual reality. In views of subjective definitions toward historical images, Miao Xiaochun’s Microcosm is based on Netherlandish master Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delight. He reinterprets the traditional Chinese idiom ‘Looking up the Sky from the Well’ to ‘Looking down the Well from the Sky’ (the literal translation of ‘Microcosm’). If the idiom ‘looking up the sky from the Well’ is used to describe a person with limited sight and knowledge struggling to comprehend the essence of life, ‘Looking down the Well from the Sky’ offers an image of a person located in a macro environment open to examining with a micro-lens but also struggling an all expansive understanding. Microcosm is not created to recover the very truth of historical images, rather it is transformed and deducted with implied meaning within the image system, an effort to deconstruct the internal meaning of history and create psychological medium analysis. It recreates modern images in the tangled relations among reality and virtual world, familiarity and strangeness, intimacy and alienation, ego and non-ego. C-print photographs, drawings, digital ink and wash painting, embroideries and other works expand the technique of expression and the limitation of materials, taking the 3-dimensional effect as a medium and utilizing the character of one medium to recover, translate, imitate, mix another. Miao Xiaochun was born in China and studied at Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing where he currently teaches. He also attended the Kunsthochschule in Kassel, Germany. The artist has shown his works at Alexander Ochs Gallery in Berlin, Osage Gallery in Singapore and Walsh Gallery in Chicago. His works have also been exhibited at Le Grand Palais in France, Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo in Brazil, Groninger Museum and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in the Netherlands, Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation Vienna, ZKM Karlsruhe in Germany, Art Museum Bern and Museum of Art Lucerne in Switzerland, Victoria and Albert Museum in U.K., Smart Museum of Art Chicago and Seattle Art Museum in U.S.A.

Contact info@ararionewyork.com for more information. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Saturday 10-6pm and by appointment.

Nalini Malani at Musee Cantonal des Beaux-Arts opens March 19th

Musee Cantonal des Beaux-Arts

20 March to 6 June 2010

Public opening Friday 19 March 2010 at 18.30

Nalini Malani is one of the most important contemporary artists on the Indian subcontinent. The museum is bringing together a huge retrospective of her works of the past 15 years – paintings, video installations, shadow theatre, and theatrical collaborations. Since the 1990s Malani has presented her depiction of the women’s revolt in a country first torn between the legacy of colonialism and the ideal of third-world socialism, then dragged by globalisation into rapid political and economic transformation. Making use of figures drawn from myths, tales and religions of very different cultural background (Cassandra, Alice in Wonderland, Akka, etc.), she describes scenes depicting war, orthodox fanaticism, the consequences of capitalism, and the destruction of the environment in a narrative outpour that might well be described as epic.
Malani’s work is produced in cycles or polyptychs, using multiple-projection video installations. Her world is transparent and fluid, constituted by visible overlays. Nothing is fixed or set, everything is in a continual state of metamorphosis. In a maelstrom of elementary colours – blue, red, yellow – she builds up a profusion of figures, bodies and disparate elements taken from the most diverse animate and inanimate worlds: fragments of machines, planes, tadpoles, larvae, worms, foetuses, winged creatures, monsters, and anonymous and recognisable figures, all liquid, permeable bodies. In Malani’s work, blood-vessels, bones, brain and internal organs float outside the body, both volatile and exploded (as a result of the Splitting), and thus a network of multiple contacts, an “interface” in today’s terms, where the I and the Other no longer form a legitimate antinomy.

Inbai Kim at Doosan Gallery



The Promise of Loss in Brooklyn Rail

It would be an understatement to say that Iran exists in turmoil largely due to internal conflicts. The ideological separations occur on two levels: within the Islamic community there are historical differences between the Shiites and the Sunnis. This we know. However, what has come into international prominence in recent months, given the aftermath of what many believe to have been a bogus election, is the tension between “the Islamic Republic of Iran and the idea of Persia,” (to quote the catalog essay of the exhibition, The Promise of Loss: A Contemporary Index of Iran) which constitute strong differences between orthodox and liberal positions within the fabric of Iranian society. In either case, this “continuous face-off” has been more or less the mainstay over the past 30 years. In addition, it would appear that forces from the outside have had a tendency to exacerbate these conflicts, either by taking advantage of the disjuncture (as in the Iran-Iraq War) or by lacking a clear understanding of the history from which these conflicts evolved. In our highly mediated, politicized era, this conundrum has found little respite. Internal political conflicts emanating from within the region are never easy to discern, particularly when interpreted from the outside. Ambiguity filters through the news media, and, in the process, oversimplifies the reality. As a result, the unreality is heightened through the rhetoric of confrontation. It is a power play on all sides perpetuated through heavily invested globalized networks. Conflicts are instantly “branded” and the consequences of this branding are authorized by “the news.” The question is: whose news?

Read the rest here.