Interviewing artists and reviewing exhibitions in Shanghai, London and Berlin where I am now based and open to freelance assignments.
Highlights include talking to Angela Bulloch about melancholy cauliflowers and her installation in the MoMA, to V&A exhibited Rui Matsunaga about re-imagining Dante’s Divine Comedy and a commission to write a short story to accompany John Moore Painting Prize winner Han Feng’s Berlin 2020 exhibition.
Selected examples
Artist interview for Ran Dian with Angela Bulloch. Bulloch is a Turner prize nominee and member of the Young British Artists, alongside Tracey Emin. “As corporations like Facebook thrive off toxicity and polarization, it is easy to forget that the creation of the world wide web was in part catalyzed by LSD trips into the ‘expanded consciousness’. These control-panels of constellations seem to me like a reminder of what ‘virtual reality’ can be at its best, what it was hoped to be in the 1960s: not something invasive and homogenizing, but expansive and elevating.”
Interview with John Moores Painting Prize finalist Rui Matsunaga for the Ran Dian magazine. Her works are exhibited in venues such as the V&A, UAL and SOHO house. “The etchings look as I had expected — like relics from mystic manuscripts — but I hadn’t realised how small and bright the oil paintings would be. Electric blue skies, luminous white pebbles and paintwork so fine she catches the disgruntled expression of a haggard moon in the space of a thumbnail.“
Exhibition review of Thao Nguyen Phan’s Becoming Alluvium. “In Britain, South-east Asia is packaged through the panoramic lens of big-budget travel documentaries, or the cropped and filtered Instagram squares of gap-year back-packers. Phan’s film may employ majestic, sweeping shots, and concern real and serious environmental and economic issues, but Becoming Alluvium is not a documentary.“
Li Jingxiong X Nik Kosmas
Sifang Art Museum, Shanghai Pop-up. “Jingxiong lost over 30 works when his studio burnt down in 2016. ‘Burned’ was made from the salvaged remnants. The charcoal colour of the objects was not total enough though, so Jinxiong enhanced the blackness. The result is velvety – a Black-Hole textured with a soft, static buzz“
Interview with artist Lu Yang “A hypnotic dance track fills the room. The noise is coming from a box TV in a stand encrusted with plastic gems and painted gold. The gold paint flicks onto the tiled floor in slapdash strokes. Inside the box a man performs a tribal dance. The video could be a 1960s documentary film, but then the bangs of his drum are absorbed by a dance beat and the scene erupts into a frenzy of color and fire.“
Alice Gee 