you can view additional images from selected exhibitions at https://arthurjhuang.work/exhibitions/
290 cm x 658 cm x 700 cm, Ink, Paper, Acrylic, 2017
290 cm x 658 cm x 700 cm, Ink, Paper, Acrylic, 2017
0.5 cm x 100 cm x 100 cm, Ink, Paper, 2017
31 cm x 10 cm x 10 cm, Ink, Acrylic, 2017
21 cm x 14.8 cm each, Ink on Paper, 2015 to present, (Over 800 drawings to date)
35 x 35 cm, Ink, Eggshells, Paper, 2017
6 cm x 79.4 cm x 90 cm, Ink, Eggshell, Acrylic, 2017
135 cm x 280 cm x 210 cm, Ink, Eggshell, String, 2016
Ink, Glue, Eggshells, 8 cm x 6 cm x 6 cm, 2016
5 cm x 3 cm x 3 cm, Ink, Gesso, Correction Tap, Eggshell, 2016
Over the weekend, I came across an image of Ron Mueck's new installation "Mass" which is part of the National Gallery of Victoria Triennial in Melbourne, Australia. It struck me very viscerally with the same intensity and fascination as seeing Patricia Piccinini's work, although there is a very different emotional lingering. Both being Australian sculptors, I may have to explore the contemporary Australian sculpture scene more deeply.
You can find more images from the installation at Colossal.
As I have found myself engrossed in horror, the supernatural, the unexplainable and, speculative fiction this year, there is a particular resonance to this installation for me. To reinforce this resonance, my current devouring of Cixin Liu's trilogy, The Three-Body Problem, has conferred even more timeliness for me.
The NGV Triennale runs through April 18, 2018, so there is still time for me to book a flight to Melbourne and make my first trip to Australia.
The end of the year has always been a challenging time for me and many others that I know. I always get crushed under the weight of expectations for the year that has passed and the year ahead.
New Year's resolutions are always made and invariably broken. So last year, I was introduced to a new approach to reflecting upon the year that has gone by and thinking about the year to come. It takes the form of the YearCompass.
For me, the YearCompass is a twenty-page workbook that allows you to reflect upon various aspects of your life without the weight of expectations and thinking of each year as a single definable time period. There is a sense of continuity as you work through the pages of the workbook. Once it is complete, you can give yourself a sense of closure on the present year and also know that you have given thought to the upcoming year without a list of things that you need to check off.
After completing my YearCompass for 2016/2017, I carry it with me so that I can look at it anytime I feel the need to locate myself. In putting together the YearCompass, I also find that it motivates me to take more regular periods of reflecting on where I am.
You can find the YearCompass PDF at www.yearcompass.com
With the end of the year fast approaching, I have been spending the last month or so sending out various applications for exhibitions, residencies and grants. At the moment I have sent off five applications and received one rejection. I am expecting to hear back about the Santo Foundation Individual Artist Grant this week which provides grants of $5000 and $1000 to three and five artists respectively. In addition to that I have submitted exhibition application for Shiseido Art Egg and Site:Brooklyn - Black and White which I expect to hear back from in January. I also submitted my first artist residency application to the Albers Foundation which I also expect to hear back from in January/February.
The application process has always been an exercise in procrastination for me. There is the revision of your curriculum vitae and artist statement. I have updated versions of both, however I do my best to tailor the length and content of the C.V. and the artist statement which requires thought and consideration rather than the speedy cut and paste. In addition to that, I have to go through my image archive of works and decide on the best image for each work in my portfolio. I have been doing this on the fly and this makes the process rather tedious as I have to search through my photo library to find the desired image. With these last few applications, I finally have a collection of images that I am happy to use for submissions. The details of each work such as title, size, medium, and year is also another source of administrative work that I am not particularly excited to tackle. Pricing is also another hurdle.
On the plus side, working on various applications helps me to define my current studio practice by reflecting on the progression of my work over the last two years. It also allows me to better characterise my studio practice in words and ideas as well as helping to refine my thoughts about my progress as well as where I would like to move towards in the future.
There are a number of applications that I definitely plan to tackle before the end of year which includes the Studios at MASS MOCA artist residency, the SVA MFA Art Practice Artist in Residence, and the Working Artist Grant. There are another handful of applications which I am leaning towards submitting, but have not fully committed to such as the Setouchi Triennale 2019 Open Call, the LACMA Art and Technology Lab Call for Projects, the Open Call for Emerging Curators at Hong Kong's Para Site, and the 6th Tokyo International Mini-Print Triennale at Tama Art University.
As with all applications, I hope there is good news at the end of the process, but I also take comfort in the knowledge that each application that is prepared and submitted provides an opportunity to put my studio practice into sharper and sharper focus.
Over the course of this year, I have devoured hours and hours of podcasts. My attention span has been less than ideal for reading novels. Short stories and starting a lot of different books seem to be norm as far as reading goes. I have also used audiobooks to circumvent holding a book only to wake up to my drool wrinkling the pages or being rudely snapped awake by the book landing in my face at the start of slumber. Reading is not a multi-tastable activity which is a good thing and a bad thing for me. I enjoy getting caught up in a story, but I am not a person who can get completely lost in a book. I am constantly aware of the page number, the time of night, etc. Audiobooks offer the opportunity for multi-tasking, but the challenge lies in the stretches of time where I get distracted and realised that I have let pages and pages of narrative pass in and out of my ears without registering the content.
The last couple years have been filled with lots of studio work and I needed something besides music to keep me going. Music works well enough, but I also seem to gravitate to the well-worn music which does not distract me from the tasks at hand. With a new album or artist, I feel compelled to put more attention towards listening as a way to satiate my curiosity.
The first podcast I started listening to was Dan Carlin's Hardcore History and the episodes are epic in length for the podcast world - usually clocking in at 4 - 5 hours per episode. 2 hours is the shortest that I've seen for his podcasts. This was two or three years ago and when I listened to all the episodes available, I stopped listening to podcasts until early this year.
The first podcast that I listened to was Crimetown which was about former Providence mayor Buddy Cianci whom was in office during my graduate school years at RISD. After that I started exploring the world of podcast and rapidly worked my way through a number of different podcast horror stories and mysteries including Homecoming, Darkest Night, Tanis, The Black Tapes, Rabbits, Archive 81, The NoSleep Podcast, Alice Isn't Dead, Welcome to Nightvale, Lore among others.
From there I expanded my interests to include a wide range of topics. Here are some of my current favourites - LeVar Burton Reads, Ear Hustle, SFMOMA's Raw Material, I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats, Song Exploder, Heaven's Gate, The Nod, and Uncivil. Rather than tell you about each of the podcasts, I encourage to click on the links and take a listen.
I also managed to plow through 30 or so podcast episodes recommended by Hyperallergic which also expanded my podcast universe and I have begun picking and choosing from a new selection of podcasts.
You can find their first list of 20 art and culture podcast episodes from 2016 here.
They also published a second list with an additional 11 art and culture podcast episodes this past September which you can find here.
I think that podcasts serve multiple purposes for me. The topics and length of the podcast help me were to fit a particular podcast into my day.
For one, you can listen to short episodes ranging from 15 - 30 minutes for all those times in between or at the gym. I also enjoy learning little tidbits of information during these shorter podcasts. The longer podcasts give me a chance to dive a bit deeper into topics and work well in the studio as it gives me a good sixty minutes of focus time. The serial podcasts are great for giving me something to look forward to as well as invest more in the story or the knowledge.
I headed over to Okuno building in Ginza-itchome to see a few exhibitions. I started off at Gallery Nayuta to see nihonga by Aya Shiina. Here is an image of one of my favourite works from the exhibition. I love her detailed rendering of wood textures in her paintings. I got a chance to also talk with Aya Shiina whom also studied biology at university and then made the transition to fine arts a number of years afterwards. The exhibition "Atami" runs through tomorrow, December 9th.
From the Gallery Nayuta website
From there both Gallery Nayuta's and Gallery Camellia's gallery directors recommended heading to the 3rd floor to see the etchings by Nagoya-area based printmaker Mayuka Wakui at Gallery Kobo. She takes an experimental approach to her printmaking as she explained all the different ways she created the series of different prints for the exhibition. She also mentioned that she spent two months in France for printmaking. There were quite a few pieces that resonated with me and my Daily Drawings and made me think more and more that etching is probably the best approach for me to translate my work to printmaking. This is an image of the work that is on the exhibition postcard, although the digital image does not quite do the actual print justice as the orange is much more luminous. You can see more of her work at her website's gallery page. Her exhibition at Gallery Kobo also runs through Saturday, December 9th.
From Gallery Kobo, I headed back up to the fifth floor to see Makoto Umemura's exhibition "The MECHANICALs - High grade cells" at Gallery Camellia. I met Makoto Umemura during my "Everyday Circuits" exhibition at Gallery Camellia and I remember seeing images of his hand-rendered mechanised/steam-punked animals and buildings. It was great to see the work up close to see the detailed work he makes on washi. His exhibition runs through Sunday, December 10th. Below is the exhibition postcard with an example of his work.
From there, I headed back on the subway and all the way back across Tokyo to Nishiogikubo to see Ryoko Sugizaki's solo exhibition at Galeria Aoneko. I met her at hasu no hana this past summer when she came to the Endless Dialogue exhibition to pick up some newspapers from hasu no hana director, Kazue Fukuma, for her work. I saw Sugizaki's work in person for the first time in August at a group exhibition at Galeria Aoneko and I was immediately enamoured with this piece.
She uses the text and photographs of the newspapers to create amazingly detailed sculptures of various dinosaurs. She does not use paint, but rather uses the color that comes from the newspaper's text and photographs to create color in her works. The exhibition is filled with so many different species of dinosaurs and her work takes me back to my childhood when I was also fascinated with dinosaurs. There is a gallery talk and reception on Saturday from 4 pm which will features a guest collector who is 11 years old, but quite an expert on dinosaurs. He saw Sugizaki's work in August and used his savings to buy one of her pieces. It sounds like an fun event, but I wanted to get to the show as soon as possible so that I could have my pick of pieces. I knew back in August that I wanted to buy one of her pieces and I can happily say that I now own the piece you see above. I am looking forward to having it on my studio desk so it can look on as I make new works. Ryogo Sugizaki's exhibition recently opened and runs through Sunday, December 17th and I highly recommend seeing the exhibition!
After this exhibition, I wanted to head to the Tama Art University Alumni Small Works exhibition to see the works of Junko Kikuchi. I met her earlier this year in the Okuno building and she was responsible for introducing me to the Koganei Artfull Action NPO this summer. Through her introduction, I was able to conduct an extensive workshop on the memory of smell and sounds in collaboration with Artfull Action at the Musashikoganei Middle School. More on that in a later post.
I had it in my mind that the exhibition was in the Omotesando / Aoyama area so I would head there through Shinjuku. But once I looked up the exhibition information, I realised it was back on the other side of Tokyo nearer to Ginza. So, I hopped back on the train across Tokyo to Jinbocho and the Bunpodo Gallery. This is the 20th exhibition of small works by Tama Art University alumni. There were a wide variety of works to see from paintings, functional objects, printmaking, and sculptures. Overall, the printmaking works were the most interesting for me as some of the works' sensibilities resonated with me. I finally got to see Junko Kikuchi's work in person after seeing her works and works-in-progress on social media. I have acquired a deep fondness for apples over the last few years and I could not resist picking up one of her handcrafted apple accessory straps. There was one green apple left and I immediately gravitated to that one as it reminded me of a frequently used remedy for alleviating migraine pain. This exhibition also runs through Saturday, December 9th.
After seeing the exhibition, I took a look around Bunpodo and picked up some notebooks and also discovered new colours of the super thin 0.03 Copic Multiliner pens to use for my drawings. There was a maroon, olive green, and denim blue which I immediately bought to add to my collection. I ended up spending enough money at Bunpodo to receive an advent calendar from a Belgian chocolatier. So I ended the day with new drawing tools, chocolate, and another artwork to add to my collection.
There will be some more gallery hopping on Sunday for the Tamagawa Open Atelier weekend event and hopefully enough energy and time to see the Akiko Ikeuchi exhibition in Jiyugaoka.
Since the close of the Nakanojo Biennale 2017 in October, studio activity has slowly been winding down as 2017 comes to a close. There are have pages and pages of mental meanderings about the last two years of intense studio activity. Rather than bore and confuse you with cluttered and disjointed thoughts. I am going pull excerpts out from the writings to share here in digestible bits.
One of the things that I am looking forward to is exploring the ideas that have come up in the process of making work as well as discussing work over the last two years. I have literally hopped from exhibition to exhibition without the usual time to reflect, digest, and synthesise new ideas as deeply as I would like.
From this bit of writing, you can see the paths I would like to travel over the next year in my studio.
"...With regards to the Memory Walks, I have this idea of using all the data from 2017 in an On Kawara fashion to make Memory Walk drawings on a single eggshell. Each day of Memory Walks would be separated by a layer of acrylic medium coated the day before after making the drawing. I also have an interest in returning to the variations that I explored in the HAGISO exhibition. Drawing, covering, drawing, covering, etc. and then scratching away. Deleting everything. I also have an interest in exploring variations on the Memory Walk Cells beyond the uniform size and stacked form.
With the Daily Drawings, I have plans to continue them in 2018, but again, I feel like 2017 is going to be a data collection year for the Daily Drawings project. I have a longer term idea that the second iteration of the Daily Drawings Network would be the piece I would make for the 2019 Nakanojo Biennale. I am interested in exploring the reasons for making the Daily Drawings that I make at any given time. This becomes one of those research intensive projects which may lead absolutely nowhere. My desire to remain analogue and intuitive about the process may be a stumbling block. My recent Daily Drawings on vellum offer a chance to play around with some of these experimental approaches to understanding my drawings. In some ways, this may be the opposite of what artists who create cosmologies do. Do their marks and images have meaning before then hit the paper/canvas? Is it through mark making that these marks and images gain meaning and/or a role in the cosmology? I think what I am trying to do is deconstruct my Daily Drawings as a way to see if there is an underlying cosmology. I am convinced that there is an underlying cosmology, but I am not sure if I am ready to do the work that I need to reveal this cosmology. I also might not like what I find. Beyond this large scale idea which would really be ideal for a residency, I am thinking of doing more studio based drawings pulling from my experience over the last two years with the Daily Drawings as I find myself less and less satisfied even with one hour of train commuting time. The appearance of painting is certainly a possibility.*
Yoshiko Saito - "Position 2017 -hana-" at Musee F`
"UnJapan" with Utako Shindo, Kazuna Taguchi, Hiromaru Mori at Kanzan Gallery
"Photography + Trains = Moving Images" with Taira Ichikawa, Daisaku Ozu, Shunzo Seo at Kamata Soko
Takashi Kuraya - "photographic violence" at hasu no hana
Michiko Fujita - "Works for light and space" at the Chigasaki City Museum of Art
Nami Hirao - "one day" at kitoit and kiik
The exhibitions above all closed last weekend. But...
Yuko Mohri - "Grey Skies" at Fujisawa Art Space runs through January 28, 2018
- Yuko Mohri's exhibition composed of new works, a collection of previous works in a new configuration and an new installation just opened last weekend. Highly recommended and well worth the one hour train ride from Tokyo.
The group exhibition "Perspectives for the Future - noise" with 41 artists exploring the theme of "noise" opened today at Art Space Muni in Morioka in Iwate Prefecture. The exhibition's first stop was at gallery TEN in Yanaka, Tokyo in early November. For this exhibition, I created screens for two prints while listening to a brown noise and blue noise generator. The exhibition runs through December 21st.
