Cai Guo-Qiang
Cai Guo-Qiang's work crosses plenty of mediums including drawing, installation, explosion event, and performance. His artworks respond to culture and history and establish an exchange between viewers and the larger universe around them. His explosion art and installations are imbued with a force that transcends the two-dimensional plane to engage with society and nature. Cai's practice draws on a variety of symbols, narratives, traditions and materials including Fengshui, Chinese medicine, shanshui paintings, science, flora and fauna, portraiture, and fireworks. Cai is among the first artists to contribute to discussions of Chinese art as a viable intellectual narrative with its own historical context and theoretical framework.
His work "Sky Ladder" inspired me a lot, it is an ambitious dream —a 1,650-foot ladder of fire climbing into the skies, connecting heaven and earth, not only expresses what he felt for his grandmother but also shows a kind of common intention of human that wants to get in touch with the sky.
Annie Cattrell
Annie Cattrell was born in Glasgow and studied Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art, University of Ulster and Ceramics and Glass at the Royal College of Art.
Her practice is often informed by working with specialists in neuroscience, meteorology, engineering, psychiatry and the history of science. This cross-disciplinary approach has enabled her to learn about cutting edge research and in-depth information in these fields. She is particularly interested in the parallels and connections that can be drawn within these approaches in both art and science.
I am curious about Annie 's way of work--how she collaborates with those scientists? which part of her work involved scientists? there is just few information about her I could found, I will keep doing research about her artworks.
Katie Paterson
Katie Paterson was born in Glasgow 1981 and now lives and works in Berlin and Scotland. Collaborating with leading scientists and researchers across the world, Katie Paterson’s poetic and conceptual projects consider our place on Earth in the context of geological time and change. Her artworks make use of sophisticated technologies and specialist expertise to stage intimate, poetic and philosophical engagements between people and their natural environment. Combining a Romantic sensibility with a research-based approach and coolly minimalist presentation, her work collapses the distance between the viewer and the most distant edges of time and the cosmos.
Katie's work shows a peaceful looking but strong inner-emotion, I can also feel her sense of responsibility for this society as an artist.
Wednesday Campanella
Wednesday Campanella (水曜日のカンパネラ) is a Japanese music group formed in 2012 combining musical elements of the EDM, J-Pop, and Hip Hop genres. The trio consists of KOM_I, Kenmochi Hidefumi, and Dir.F.
I have watched their live show three times in Beijing and Shanghai, I was shocked by their experimental performances, including the lyrics and the stage design. Those lyrics seem to sound meaningless, but the soundtrack maker intentionally writes the lyrics in that way. The singer KOM_I appears alone on stage, the live performances are known for her high energy performances which makes extensive use of the audience, props, and the entire venue space. She often goes into the crowd, climbs ladders and platforms, and crowd surfs in a zorb ball for the song "Momotarō".
Creative, interactive, playful, eco-friendly... theses are my feelings about Wednesday Campanella, their shows could always bring me into a sense of doubt and make me refocus on those plain but precious things:the flowing wind, the soft textile, rains, flying insect, the tinnitus sound...by watching their show I feel alive and brave, and get satisfaction in getting a life.
Martha Rosler
Martha Rosler, whose work centers on the everyday and the public through a woman's perspective, feminism, social justice, and the separation of public and private life. Her topics range from the media to war, architecture to the environment, to housing, street sleeping, and transportation systems. In the 1970s, Rosler created a number of classic works in feminism video art, such as "Semiotics of the Kitchen" (1975), which gave Rosler a lot of recognition in the field of feminism art and video art. The six-minute video was seen as a satire on traditional female roles in modern society. In that video, Rosler was filming a very stilted cooking show, she introduced to the audiences all her kitchen supplies, waving and named them from the letters a to z, her movements were very intense in the introduction. “My art is a communicative act,” Rosler(2015) says, “a form of an utterance, a way to open a conversation.” She expresses her frustration with the family through her intense gestures, replacing the domesticated meaning of kitchen tools with vocalized words of anger and frustration. At that moment, the kitchen, as a home space, was changed into a spirit field of resistance. What she unfolds is a meditation on women, family and space. “Semiotics in the kitchen” has thus been particularly valued by contemporary feminists. Rosler’s attempts were undoubtedly successful and has a far-reaching significance, her performance which makes use of everyday objects endowed those humble things with progressive significance in terms of social issues.
Maja Ying Lin
In 1981, at 21 and still an undergraduate, Lin won a public design competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, to be built on the National Mall in Washington D.C. Her design, one of 1,422 submissions, specified a black granite wall with the names of 57,939 fallen soldiers carved into its face (hundreds more have been added since the dedication), to be v-shaped, with one side pointing toward the Lincoln Memorial and the other toward the Washington Monument. The memorial was completed in late October 1982 and dedicated in November 1982.
According to Lin, her intention was to create an opening or a wound in the earth to symbolize the pain caused by the war and its many casualties. "I imagined taking a knife and cutting into the earth, opening it up, and with the passage of time, that initial violence and pain would heal," she recalled; the design was initially controversial for several reasons: its untraditional design, Lin's Asian ethnicity, and her lack of professional experience.
I admire Maja’s cross-border and cross-ethnic views, “As an artist” she once said, “a kind of separation from politics has become my basic goal of this design. I don't want to highlight the theme of war by praising the struggle or forgetting sacrifices. I just hope that people can clearly remember the cost of our lives for war.”
Her work and the pursuit of art resonated strongly in my heart. I think her design reflects a wider range of humanitarian thoughts, reminding us of what we are experiencing and what we should never forget.
I can’t help thinking, how long will it take her to find such a form: simple, poetic, direct to people's hearts, but without leaving a trace?
She is like a very patient scientist, constantly working hard. I’m surprised to find that her creation is based on ‘boring’ data investigation and scientific research, involving various subjects such as nature, history, sociology, mathematics, geometry, geography, topography, and so on. She does a lot of reading, interviews, data collection, data analysis, and scientific interpretation for each work. Interviews with authoritative organizations such as NASA and Geological Survey are her essential homework. For one single small interior work, it may take her 8 years to finish researching and figuring out how to do it.
Maya once said, "I think my whole life is all about loving nature." In 1959, she grew up in the "forest hut" in Athens, Ohio. Throughout her childhood, she was accompanied by woodpeckers, thrushes, bunny and raccoons. She gave names to every hill around her. The love of nature is the driving force behind her career and ideals in her life.
kouichi okamoto
Kouichi okamoto, experimental musician, product designer. From musicians to designers, Okamoto's stuff is mostly simple and small, but the ideas are always amazing. This album, Called Random, is made up of 99 5s syllables.
This CD only works when played in 'random play' mode on a CD player. It has various scales included in the 99 tracks and when played randomly, the CD will automatically create unpredictable melodies leading to an endless combination of tracks.