Sampling at the Contemporary Arts Center

Be ready to spend a few hours at the Contemporary Arts Center to discover or rediscover twenty-four artists from far places like China, South Africa or closer to home Louisiana, gathered for Prospect.3: Notes for Now. The works were selected by Frank Sirmans, the Artistic Director of the biennial (now officially a triennial), due to their power to incite a reflection on "the everydayness and the strangeness of the world around us, to bridge fissures in the past-present and to imagine the possibilities of an interconnected future".
The three floors at the CAC are filled with paintings, videos, photographs, installations, and the visit can start or end anywhere. Each artist is assigned an area, with the exception of Analia Saban whose works are randomly dispersed throughout the exhibition. I started in the oval room where Yun-Fei Ji's wall paintings depict a modern tale of population displacement and urbanization on a backdrop of droughts, starvation, pollution and political corruption. On the second floor, two geometric abstract painters set across each other initiate a conversation. McArthur Binion's paintings are characterized by monotonous colors and labor intensive repetitive marks on the canvas. They represent erasure and rebirth through delicate compositions, legacies of the menial work.  Hayal Pozanti on the other hand, transforms the dullness of technology into a new language of organic shapes, bringing life and fantasy to a boring reality. Following these, Douglas Bourgeois's figurative paintings seem easy to interpret. Like a magician, he transports common souls into a perfect world of artificial happiness and transforms their dreary surroundings into fantastic landscapes. Next, Sophie Lvoff and Lisa Sigal are focusing on the local scene, respectively with photographs and through architectural adventures.
Tank, 2014, Glenn Kaino's installation is attracting visitors with corals in clear water glowing in a bluish light. A lengthy wall text describes the work and provides a cue to the title. The cumbersome technology required to keep the corals alive undermines the project which is focused on the oceans' pollution, especially by the military, a subject somewhat off the exhibition's theme. The show gets back on track with Joe Ray's work, a thought provoking juxtaposition of symbols followed by the images from Thomas Joshua Cooper, a photographer of light.
Among the four videos displayed (two on second and two on the third floor) Mohamed Bourouissa's Temps Morts, 2009, held my attention with its depiction of grey, fuzzy, pixelated Paris's outskirts, reflecting the malaise of marginalized populations. On the same floor, one can see Felliniesque photographs from Pieter Hugo, staged scenes by Pushpamala N., the Cyndy Sherman of India, or the installation from Manal Al Dowayan, a historical view of a culture born from the oil boom.
Leaving through the first floor, one cannot miss the installation from Lucia Koch, giving a new outlook on the street through colored glass. The works selected to represent Theaster Gates in the hall include Civil Tapestry-4, 2011, an accumulation of fire hoses previously used during civil unrest, and two monochrome paintings made with tar and rubber playing with the light reflections.
The number of works and artists make such exhibition challenging for the viewer. Political with Charles Gaines, poetic with Thomas Cooper, feminist with Pushpamala N., epic with Yun Fei-Ji..., but one realizes that the works have been selected carefully to fulfill the goals clearly stated by the curator.

photographs by the author:

"The Family Drone", 2014, Hayal Pozanti
"TC/0168.13 (Anthropophagst Wading in the Artibonite River", 2014, Firelei
"Mood Disorder", 2014, Lucia Koch

Two Chinese Artists at Prospect.3

Liu Ding is a conceptual artist still living in Beijing while Yun-Fei uses traditional painting techniques  and currently lives between Beijing and Brooklyn.
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Liu Ding: "Born in 1976 in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province, Liu Ding is a Beijing-based artist and curator whose work investigates the various mechanisms and rules of the art system. With curatorial work as a crux of his artistic practice, many of his projects engage the notion of an artwork and the audience in unique ways. Starting in 2008, his project the Liu Ding’s Store discusses and presents the various mechanisms that lend to the formation of value, both visible and invisible in the art system." ( The Collective Eye)
In July 2012, Liu Ding participated in the launch of the Tate Modern’s new experimental program, The Tanks and had his first solo exhibition in the United States at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. Liu has shown his works at art institutions including the Tate Modern (UK), Turner Museum (UK), Kunsthalle Wien (Austria), the Astrup Fearnley Modern Art Museum (Norway), the Sao Paulo National Museum of Art (Brazil), the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (Germany), the RasquArt Center (Switzerland), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Italy), and the Seoul Municipal Museum of Art (Korea), among others. He’s a participating artist of the 8th Taipei Biennale in September 2012. In 2009 he was chosen to represent China at the 53rd Venice Biennale in a group exhibition titled See a World in Grain of Sand. His project, Little Movements: Self-Practices in Contemporary Art, as initiated and curated in collaboration with Carol Yinghua Lu, was exhibited at the OCT Contemporary Art Terminal in Shenzhen in September 2011.

His works can be seen on the website of the Urs Meile's gallery.


Yun-Fei Ji born in 1963 in Beijing, China, was raised on a collective farm during the Cultural Revolution and grew up listening to the ghost stories and folk tales from his grandmother. He studied traditional painting techniques with mineral pigments on mulberry paper in the style of Song Dynasty landscape painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing where he obtained a BFA.
In 1986, he moved to the States on a Fulbright College fellowship and earned a MFA from the University of Arkansas.
Ji states, “I use landscape painting to explore the utopian dreams of Chinese history, from past collectivization to new consumerism.”

 In 2005, Ji was Artist-in-residence at Yale University where he conducted extensive research with the institution’s scholars.  He received the 2006 American Academy Prix de Rome Fellowship and Residency and was also later the 2007 Artist-in-residence at the Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art in London.  Ji’s work has been presented in solo museum exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; Rose Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham; Peeler Art Center, DePauw University, Greencastle; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.  In 2012, Ji’s work was the subject of a solo presentation at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, China.

Ji’s work has been exhibited in solo and group shows throughout the United States and Europe including the 2012 Biennale of Sydney, the 2011 Lyon Biennale, and the 2002 Whitney Biennial.  In 2008, his work was featured in Displacement: the Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art, an exhibition of four Chinese artists which originated at the Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, Illinois and toured nationally. His work has been featured in publications including The New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Modern Painters, and Artforum, and in major public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn. Yun-Fei Ji currently lives and works between New York, NY and Beijing, China.   

Yun-Fei is represented by the James Cohan Gallery

link to a NYTimes article
interview with Yun-Fei
MoMA