Takashi Murakami7271996Synthetic polymer paint on canvas board, three panels

Takashi Murakami7271996Synthetic polymer paint on canvas board, three panels

This piece features Mr. DOB, Murakami’s creation inspired by anime. The wave in the background is suggestive of the famous Japanese wood-block prints of Japanese artist Hokusai.

HokusaiThe great wave off Kanagawa

Hokusai’s 36 views of Mount Fuji

See all 36 here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYiL1dDM3Gg

Takashi MURAKAMI"Tan Tan Bo Puking - a.k.a. Gero Tan" 2002Acrylic on canvas mounted on board

One of the most acclaimed artists to emerge from postwar Asia, Takashi Murakami—“the Andy Warhol of Japan”—is known for his synthesis of fine art and popular culture, particularly his use of a boldly graphic and colorful anime and manga cartoon style.

Murakami became famous in the 1990s for his “Superflat” theory and for organizing the paradigmatic exhibition of that title, which linked the origins of contemporary Japanese visual culture to historical Japanese art.

Takashi Murakami, Kaikai Kiki News 2001 Acrylic on canvas

His output includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, animations, and collaborations with brands such as Louis Vuitton. “Japanese people accept that art and commerce will be blended; and in fact, they are surprised by the rigid and pretentious Western hierarchy of “high art’,” Murakami says. “In the West, it certainly is dangerous to blend the two because people will throw all sorts of stones. But that’s okay—I’m ready with my hard hat.”

Murakami’s collaboration with Louis Vuitton

Takashi MurakamiFlower ball (3D)2002, Acrylic on canvas mounted on board,

Takashi Murakami(1962- )

Born in 1962 in Tokyo, Takashi Murakami attended the Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music and majored in Nihonga, the “traditional” style of Japanese painting that incorporates traditional Japanese artistic conventions, techniques and subjects. Though he would go on to earn a Ph.D. in Nihonga, he gradually became disillusioned with the field’s insular, highly political world.

Takashi Murakami(1962- )

“History is History.Now is now.Forget about History.Now is Happy.”

“We want to see the newest things. That is because we want to see the future, even if only momentarily. IT is the moment in which, even if we don’t completely understand what we have glimpsed, we are nonetheless touched by it. This is what we have come to call art.”

Luis Camnitzer

Luis Camnitzer

Luis Camnitzer

Memorial2009

Portfolio of 195 digital prints

Luis Camnitzer

Luis Camnitzer's 195-part artwork, Camnitzer replicates the Montevideo telephone directory, in which he has meticulously inserted the names of the Disappeared in Uruguay. During the military dictatorship that ruled the country between 1973 and 1985, nearly 300 Uruguayans were victims of forced disappearances.

Luis Camnitzer Working with lists of names culled from public resources, Camnitzer used digital techniques to create space in the ready-made phonebook and added lines of type, resulting in the reappearance of hundreds of names that are now indistinguishable from the names in the original phonebook. In this way, Camnitzer renders useless the very action of list-making and counting–political or otherwise. At the same time, the work levels roles of target and perpetrator, victim and survivor, prisoner and liberated.

Luis Camnitzer(1937- )

Artist, critic, educator, and theorist Luis Camnitzer was born Germany and moved to Uruguay when he was a year old. In 1964, he founded the New York Graphic Workshop with artists Liliana Porter and José Guillermo Castillo, and in 1971 helped establish New York’s Museo Latinoamericano, and a splinter group, Movimiento de Independencia Cultural de Latino América (MICLA). The Uruguayan artist’s work underscores the fact that art history is written by those in power, and tends to exclude certain accounts.

Camnitzer’s installation Art History Lesson no.6 (2000) is made up of ten slide projectors ranged around the gallery space, each one casting an empty rectangle of light onto the wall. It was featured in the Under the Same Sun Exhibition at the Guggenheim in 2014, which was a survey of Latin American Art. Though the show raised the question of what exactly is “Latin American Art?”

Luis CamnitzerArt History Lesson no.62000Slide projectors

Camnitzer’s work points to the fact that Art History is written by those who are in power, which tends to exclude stories, narratives, and dialogues from non-European countries. This work’s empty projectors present viewers with a space within which to imagine and potentially write their own narratives.

Luis Camnitzer“The point of art should be to treat the public (students and visitors) as the artists’ colleagues, not as consumers. We should involve them in the thought process without allowing them to dismiss something in a couple of seconds just because they didn’t like or understand what they saw….

…I should confess that I am increasingly less interested in art and more interested in education. The social impact of a piece of art hanging on a wall is relatively small, while the effect of a major change in sharing knowledge in schools is relatively big.”

SONG DONG

Breathing1996Color photography

SONG DONG

Breathing1996Color photography

These twinned photographs record two actions performed by Song Dong in Beijing during the winter of 1996, on New Year’s Eve. Alternately laying face down in Beijing’s Tian’anmen Square (famous for recent political history in China) and then on the frozen surface of Houhai Lake (one of the man-made lakes fringing the Western edge of the Forbidden City), in each case Song simply breathed for 40 minutes onto the surface in front of his face.

SONG DONG

Breathing1996Color photography

In the sub-zero temperatures of those winter nights his warm, moist breath formed a crust of ice on the flagstones in the former location, but reportedly had little effect on the lake’s thick ice. By the morning all trace of these activities had disappeared leaving these photographs behind as their record.

SONG DONG

Breathing1996Color photography

@PS1 MoMA in Queens

SONG DONG Broken Mirror2005video

In Broken Mirror, Chinese conceptual artist Song Dong destroys one reflective scene to reveal another, shattering the viewer's conception of reality and juxtaposing China's modern cityscape with its traditional landscape. Using a succession of images, the artist exposes a rapidly modernizing China and explores notions of transience and illusion in contemporary society.

Song Dong

Beijing-based Song Dong (b. 1966, Beijing, China) has emerged from a strong Chinese avant-garde performing arts community and developed into a significant contemporary art figure in the progression of Chinese conceptual art. Song graduated from the fine arts department of Capital Normal University in Beijing in 1989. His work, which is often in collaboration with his wife and fellow Chinese artist, Yin Xiuzhen, ranges from performance and video to photography and sculpture. Song explores notions of impermanence and the transience of human endeavor.

Eating Landscape2005 DVDtotal running time: 00:07:07.

SONG DONG“The medium of video is elemental. It produces moving images and sounds that cannot be touched. It has no shape but provides a strong light and can be projected onto any objects.”

Rabih MrouéThe Fall of a Hair Part 3: Blow Ups2012Pigmented inkjet prints

Rabih MrouéThe Fall of a Hair Part 3: Blow Ups2012Pigmented inkjet prints

In these photographs, it should be noted that these guns are not props. The images are not set up. These are actual weapons held by actual people. These photos were taken by Syrian activists during the country’s civil war. Many of them were taken by mobile phone cameras. They took these photos and shared them on the internet with social networking sites to show the world what the Syrian media can not, due to the censorship by the Assad regime. It is said that one of the men in the installation shot his photographer.

Rabih Mroué (born 1967 in Lebanon) is an actor, director, playwright, visual artist, and a contributing editor of The Drama Review (TDR) as

well as a co-founder and board member of the Beirut Art Center (BAC), Beirut. In 2010 Mroué was awarded an Artist Grant for

Theatre/Performance Arts from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, New York and the Spalding Gray Award.

Rabih Mroué Trois Affinches (On Three Posters)2000Video-performance by Rabih Mroué and Elias Khoury Ayloul Festival, Beirut,

Rabih Mroué’s truly stellar video Three Posters tackled head-on both the politically symptomatic issue of the reorientation of the Lebanese resistance movement from progressive to fundamentalist and the role of video itself in the representation of the civil wars. Aside from that, though, the works in the show paid scant heed to how a uniquely self-reflexive and reality-probing activity such as art can provide irreplaceable insight into political conflict.

I could have been with any name.I could have been merely a number with no name.

I could have been a persona, which exists in a work of art.I could have been entirely fictional.

I could have been an image or a plot in a movie sequence, with a narrative structure.

I could have been in any location at any time,if Catherine had not shouted out my name twice, Rabih!, Rabih!