Lin TianMiaou (林天苗)

The Same (All the Same)  /  colored silk threads,
synthetic skeletons, and metal constructions  /  dimensions variable  /  2011

They  /  resin and colored silk thread  /  40cm x 40cm  /  2011

  The Same (One and the Same)  /  linen cloth, cotton cloth, silk cloth,
silk threads; wood frame, synthetic skeletons  /  each 101cm x 182cm x 17cm  /  2011

Endless  /  fiberglass, silk, mixed media  /  dimensions variable  /  2004

Lin TianMiaou originally hails from Taiyuan, Shanxi province in China, and has had an incredibly successful career since the early 1990s.  Her background as a textile designer is heavily apparent in her sculptures, and although many western critics consider this evidence of a feminist thread in her work, she insists otherwise.  Have a look at her work here and decide for yourself!

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Although I've really enjoyed writing about art from all around the world, I've decided to narrow my writing focus to Korean and Japanese art.  I will still use this blog to fulfill my original intent of introducing readers to artists from different countries every week, but entries will rely primarily on images rather than text.  Just a heads up!

Rodrigo Torres

From the series Uns Trocados, cut and pasted banknotes, dimensions variable, 2010 

From the series Uns Trocados, cut and pasted banknotes, dimensions variable, 2010

From the series Uns Trocados, cut and pasted banknotes, dimensions variable, 2010

Poder, cut and pasted banknotes, dimensions variable, 2010 

Estádio Barcão, cut and pasted banknotes, dimensions variable, 2010 

Rodrigo Torres hails from Brazil, and has recently been gaining recognition for his collages compiled from meticulously cut banknotes from all over the world (some defunct, some still in use).  If you've never thought of currency as a work of art before, here's your chance to see what you've been overlooking.  

Torres cuts individual design elements from the notes -- intricately engraved portraits, patterns, flourishes, borders, etc. -- isolating each of these elements and transposing them into new situations to imbue them with entirely different meaning.  Proud chins thrust towards the horizon become sightless severed heads; applauding spectators become gleeful witnesses to gruesome battles; portraits of political and historical figures are obscured or ejected from their frames and replaced by more subtle symbols of national identity.  

In some of his pieces, Torres seems to hint at the relationships between money, corruption, and international power struggles, but he is at other times more concerned with displaying the craftsmanship so often overlooked as we go about our daily business with cash in hand.  To give you an idea of what I mean by craftsmanship: the printing of U.S. currency involves numerous engravers, each of whom specializes in a specific element of the design, such as text or portraiture.  I'm not entirely sure this applies elsewhere, but having considered the wide range of design elements used on the bills used in most countries, I'll assume it does.  With that in mind, Torres's work has the nice effect of liberating the individual artist's work from the collaborative whole and simply allowing us to appreciate the craft involved.

Torres studied painting at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro) and was nominated for the PIPA prize in 2011.  You can see more of his work on his Flickr page, and even hear a little bit about his process in this video posted on the PIPA website.

Bouchra Khalili

Left: Mapping Journey #2, DVD still, 2008
Right: The Constellations Fig. 2, silkscreen print, 40x60cm, 2011

Left: Mapping Journey #7, DVD still, 2009
Right: The Constellations Fig. 7, silkscreen print, 40x60cm, 2011

The Constellations Fig. 1, 
silkscreen print, 40x60cm, 2011 

Bouchra Khalili's work is visually sparse, but encapsulates so many layers of meaning that it took me a good portion of the day to ponder before I really felt I was ready to write about it.  Born in Casablanca, Morocco in 1975 and raised both there and in France, she now works in locations throughout the Mediterranean, where she finds most of her subjects -- exiles, illegal immigrants, people always in transit. The majority of her recent work shows a concern with the complicated and risky process of migration in the modern political landscape, but she also takes on the more optimistic task of revealing the linguistic diversity of the Mediterranean -- from mutually unintelligible dialects of Arabic in North Africa to unique turns of phrase that could not exist without the crossing of borders and the sharing of languages.

As someone who is naturally drawn to maps of all kinds, I was immediately drawn to her Mapping Journey series and the screen printed series of "constellations" that accompany it.  She begins each piece by intentionally getting lost near one of many clandestine passages for illegal immigrants (Marseilles, Ramallah, Bari, Rome, Barcelona and Istanbul, to name a few) and awaiting the chance appearance of a subject -- someone asking for directions, or perhaps offering to help her find her way.  She then has each subject trace the route by which they managed to arrive at their current location.  It is never a straight line, never a short journey from point A to point B.  It often involves years of waiting at checkpoints, waiting on paperwork, being turned away, deported, ready to do it all again to escape from whatever caused you to leave in the first place (Khalili never asks about motives, so we can only focus on the journey).  We never see the subject, either.  We only see a hand put pen to paper and hear a voice describe the journey, its dialectical qualities revealing bits and pieces about the narrator, but never enough to distract us from the core of the narrative.  

Although the screen printed "constellations" seem secondary to the video footage, they speak to the sense of geographical detachment that must accompany these neverending journeys from place to place.  One can exist in a place for decades without ever truly belonging, and this seems to be a perpetual dilemma for Khalili's subjects.  But the story of where they came from and how they got to where they are now, as documented quite clearly and without flourish through these "constellations," will always be an undeniable part of their identities.

What I find most interesting about Khalili's work, though, is its portrayal of a geography distorted by territorial disputes and political ambitions.  Although geography itself makes it nearly impossible to travel from place to place in a straight line (aircraft generally excluded), political borders have further complicated human travel for millennia,  continually molding the ways in which we are allowed to experience the world.

You can find out more about Bouchra Khalili's work at the Galerie of Marseille website or via this article in Frieze Magazine.

Guido Mocafico

Nature morte aux poissons (from the series Natures mortes de table), 57x64 cm, 2004

Nature Morte à la Grenade  (from the series Natures mortes de table), 62x50 cm, 2005

Omnia Vanitas (from the series Vanites), 56x43.5 cm, 2007

Lampropeltis pyromelana (from the series Serpens), 2003

I'm sure some of you have noticed some of Guido Mocafico's amazing photographs of boxed snakes floating around lately on the internet.  They're certainly not new, and I'm not sure from whence this sudden surge in popularity came from after nine years (the Serpens series was completed in 2003), but I do think they're wonderful.  I'd like to think I could show these to some of the ophidiophobic people in my life and change their minds forever, but I'm not sure it would work out that way (You'd keep this as a pet -- you'd even wear it around your neck, wouldn't you?  No?  Not even with the right outfit?).

But the snakes aren't the point here.  They're stunning, but it's the banquet and animal still life pieces that really get me.  What's uncanny about them is how easy it is to forget what you're looking at.  They're photographs, but they just look like really good still life paintings done in the style of 17th century Flemish masters like Willem van Aelst and Willem Claeszoon Heda.  It's an impressive inversion of the usual "Oh my God, it looks like a photograph!" reaction to photorealistic drawings and paintings.  I realize that some might dismiss this as technically less impressive than a painting that looks like the real thing, but having attempted to light and photograph a few of my own sculptures, I can assure you that this isn't the case.

Guido Mocafico lives and works in Paris, was born in Switzerland, and is of Italian descent.  Bam!  I just covered three countries.  But I'm going to count him as a Swiss artist for my own purposes.  You can view more of his work at his website, guidomocafico.com 

Aleksandra Waliszewska

Untitled, 2011

Untitled, 2012

Balustrada, 2012

Untitled, 2012

Aleksandra Waliszewska is a Polish artist living and working in Warsaw.  I found out about her work via this post on Monster Brains three years ago, and I've thought about her work about once a week ever since then.  Her works in gouache (on paper, I believe) are stylistically rough -- pencil marks and slivers of white show through the paint.  This seems utterly appropriate, though, as I imagine her waking up from the middle of a dream and jotting the scene down on paper before all of its subtleties and weird atmospheric details escape her, then perhaps getting back under the covers and waiting to complete another sleep cycle so she can get up and do it all over again (she claims to produce about two of these per day).  That's all conjecture on my part, but these do look like the sorts of things that can only be accessed by dreaming and subconscious thought, don't they?  Things that show up often in Waliszewska's paintings include friendly goats, bleeding girls, flesh-eating monsters, faces melting and broken out in boils, and massive cats and spiders that appear to be up to no good.  I'll let you decide for yourself whether her works are disturbing, but it's hard to deny they're intriguing at the very least.

Aleksandra keeps a Blog, a Flickr, and a Tumblr, but I recommend visiting her Tumblr account here as she seems to update it more frequently than the others.

Jin Minwook (진민욱)

Boundaries, painting on silk, 90x129 cm, 2012

Boundary Between Dream and Reality (installation view), painting on silk, 118x141x4cm, 2011-2012

No information was listed for this piece on the artist's webpage,

and I don't recall the title, but it was one of my absolute favorites.

Sweet!  I think I may be the first to write about Jin Minwook in English, which means a lot of you will be seeing something new here.

After finishing up a teaching contract in Busan, South Korea, I decided to devote a week to exploring Seoul.  I went to about twenty galleries during that time, and while I discovered a lot of fantastic work there, Jin Minwook's work at Gallery Dam touched on some of my favorite themes: monsters, fauna, and psychology.

In her work, Jin focuses on the emotional struggle of the individual in the midst of a rapidly changing society.  Since the Korean War, South Korea has rapidly grown into an industrialized nation with a powerful economy and strong ties to the west.  But industrialization brings with it an obsession with wealth and individualism, not to mention isolation due to its tendency to move people from smaller communities to large urban centers where connecting with others is not generally a priority.  Korean society is still struggling to adjust to these new dynamics, and Jin's work bears witness to this through its imagery of tangled snakes and many-headed dogs struggling amongst  themselves in barren landscapes.  The human psyche behaves in much the same way -- in a social landscape devoid of interpersonal connections and support, it warps and turns against itself, leading to inner struggles in the form of mental malaise and a fractured sense of self.

Critical analysis aside, Jin's paintings on silk panels are amazing fun to look at, with their lush variations in color and hue and careful attention to textural detail.  They simultaneously recall the centuries-old tradition of silk painting in Korea and the European/North American style of zoological illustration that thrived throughout the 18th century.  I really wish her the greatest success, if only for the selfish reason that I would relish the opportunity to see her work again here in the United States!

Jin Minwook was born in Seoul in 1980, and received a BA in painting at Ewha Women's University in 2003.  She went on to receive her MFA at The China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 2009.  She's currently working towards her PhD at Ewha Women's University.

Note: I realize that the images above are way too small, but these were the best I was able to find online.  I will do my best to find some high-resolution images of Jin's work in the near future.