Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera is the first major retrospective on the artist, co-organized by the Chrysler Gallery and NYU’s Grey Art Gallery. Bringing Tseng’s body of work to the fore is an important and overdue project; his career was regularly eclipsed by his friends, whose trajectories characterized the 1980s New York City art market boom, most notably Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Performing for the Camera not only reveals Tseng’s mastery in deploying humor and farce to explore intersections of global politics and personal identity, it also reminds us that the most revealing critiques of American culture often do not come from within.

Tseng Kwong Chi. New York, New York (World Trade Center), 1979, from the East Meets West series; gelatin silver print, printed 2014; 36 x 36 in. Courtesy of Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc., New York

Tseng was born in Hong Kong in 1950. His father had served in the Nationalist army in the war against China’s Communist revolutionaries and later fled to escape the new regime. When Tseng was a teenager, his family immigrated to Canada. He went on to complete his art education in Paris and then moved to New York City in 1978.[1] This international upbringing no doubt informed the project for which the artist is probably best known, East Meets West (1979–1984), later called the Expeditionary Series. In all of the self-portraits that compose this series, Tseng photographs himself standing in front of major landmarks in the Western world, including Niagara Falls, Mount Rushmore, the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, the Eiffel Tower, the Brooklyn Bridge, Disneyland, and the World Trade Towers.

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Shotgun Reviews are an open forum where we invite the international art community to contribute timely, short-format responses to an exhibition or event. If you are interested in submitting a Shotgun Review, please click this link for more information. In this Shotgun Review, Forrest McGarvey reviews Ryan Wallace: LD50 at Romer Young Gallery in San Francisco. 

Ryan Wallace. LD50, 2015; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco.

In his first solo show at Romer Young Gallery, New York artist Ryan Wallace has filled the space with junk. Wallace has accumulated a hoard of construction materials­—Hydrocal, plaster, Plexiglas, lead, enamel, tape, and more—into his new sculptures, paintings, and a site-specific installation for LD50. Swinging freely yet comfortably between the poles of chaos and order, composed and unintentional, Wallace’s process seems intuitive. Yet the repetition of the materials betrays their grungy disposition to present a tight body of work that forfeits the chaotic in favor of a more structured approach.

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From our partners at Art Practical, today we bring you a review of 28 Chinese at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Author Jing Cao notes: “The best works in 28 Chinese take as their subject [a] tension between material conditions and ideological constructs—between things and meanings—to offer new ways of observing the contemporary condition.” This article was originally published on June 25, 2015.

Zhang Huan. To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond, 1997; chromogenic print on Fuji archival paper; 40 ¾ in x 60 ½ in. Courtesy of the Rubell Family Collection, Miami. © Zhang Huan.

28 Chinese at the Asian Art Museum features works by three generations of contemporary Chinese artists, produced between 1994 and 2014, on loan from the Rubell Family Collection. Anchoring the exhibition are pieces from the contemporary canon, for instance Ai Weiwei’s A Ton of Tea (2007), a cubic sculpture of compressed tea leaves, and Zhang Huan’s To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond (1997), a photograph of an attempt to use human bodies to raise a body of water by one meter. These works, displayed on the second floor amid traditional ink landscapes and blue and white porcelain, represent iconic experiments by Chinese artists engaging with modernist sculpture and performance art.

The exhibition’s newer works, which dominate the first-floor galleries, vary somewhat in quality and lack a clear, unifying theme. Organized by medium, with oil paintings in one gallery, video art in another, this portion of the show mirrors the fractured state of China’s current art landscape and asks viewers to draw their own connections. Several works within this group explore materials in new and interesting ways.

Read the full article here.

There is a profound stillness in Carla Jay Harris’ photographs—her framing and shooting style emits a pervasive calm that quiets the anxiety of her subject matter. Harris’ ability to create silence amid moments of emotional upheaval is eerie, tense, and evocative. Two bodies of work portray people and places in the midst of economic and cultural change; Dirt, Dust, Sand, Concrete (2012–2015) shows Smithfield, Virginia, amid a corporate buyout, and Culture of Desperation (2012) portrays a struggling record company during lean times.

Carla Jay Harris. Teresa Cooper 1947, 2012; archival pigment print; 20 x 30 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Carolyn (2012) is part of the Dirt, Dust, Sand, Concrete series that creates a photographic essay of Smithfield, Virginia, and its residents. (The artist was born and raised in Smithfield, and much of her family still lives there.) The town’s only industrial engine, Smithfield Foods, was bought out by a Chinese conglomerate. The subject of Carolyn, a woman well into the later stages of her middle age, presumably named Carolyn, glances sidelong, not into but at the camera, from a slightly elevated position while sitting on her elegant wood-framed and needlework patterned couch. With the smallest hint of a knowing smile, mixed with the benevolent skepticism of an old friend or family member, she rests with neatly cut and straightened hair and her sturdy arms folded.

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Startup culture is ripe for satire. The tech industry’s social and economic dominance makes it a necessary target, and its penchant for jargon-heavy, wildly inflated rhetoric makes it an easy one. Mike Judge’s HBO sitcom, Silicon Valley, deftly picks the low-hanging fruit, but it hardly needs to. The elevator pitches of most weak-to-average startups on the venture-capital trail, quixotically ascribing revolutionary potential to the most banal of products, all but ridicule themselves (at least to people outside of the industry). This raises the question: Given an industry that already trades in hyperbole, is satire still an effective strategy for cutting through ideology?

Simon Denny. All You Need is Data: The DLD 2012 Conference REDUX Rerun, 2013; installation view, Petzel Gallery, New York. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.

The art world allows for more nuanced and challenging modalities of representation than mainstream media outlets like HBO do. The artist Li Liao, for example, took a job at the notoriously exploitative Foxconn factory in China, which produces parts for Apple products, and then exhibited his uniform, ID card, labor contract, and an iPad—the object of his labor—as a work titled Consumption (2012). While not offering much to look at, Li’s work succeeds in concretizing an experience on the production side of the technology industry, images of which can be hard to believe. Taking another perspective, Simon Denny’s exhibition The Innovator’s Dilemma, now at MoMA PS1, trains its gaze on the rhetoric of startup culture, which the artist shows to be itself one of the industry’s most important products, albeit an ethereal one. Denny’s work could easily register as satire, but it is not. It holds up a mirror, the effect and purpose of which are not easy to ascertain.

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In a small, dark gallery at the back of the Phoenix Art Museum is a thoughtful exhibition of artworks with a global interest in subjects often left unspoken. A mysterious low rumbling of vibrating glass sets the stage for Hidden Histories in Latin American Art: Teresa Margolles’ La Búsqueda (The Search) (2014) is an installation consisting of glass panels plastered with missing-persons posters transported from Ciudad Juárez. Margolles’ work focuses on the women murdered in one of Mexico’s fastest-growing cities, and the glass panels evoke the urban sites where families search for their lost daughters, sisters, and mothers. Each woman has a story, and a family that is desperately trying to locate her.

Graciela Sacco. Enfrentados (serie Tensión Admisible), 2011; photographic inlay on wood, installed on wall. Courtesy of Diana Lowenstein Gallery and Artist.

The work of the six Latin American and Latino artists in Hidden Histories personalizes the staggering statistics of displaced, marginalized, and murdered individuals, both historically and presently. Using commonplace materials, these artists attempt to give voice to those who have been silenced or forgotten. At the front of the gallery, a broken wooden barricade overlaid with an image of Argentinian protesters confronting military police juts outs from the wall. Graciela Sacco’s Enfrentados (serie Tensión Admisible) [Confronted (Admissible Tension Series)] has a fractured barrier and an air of resistance; it stands as the lone positive response to the struggle against injustice.

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Northward light fills the gallery upon entering Marion Belanger’s exhibition Rift/Fault. The exhibition, currently on view at Haverford College, contains roughly two dozen pairings of photographs drawn from Belanger’s decade-long investigation into the geography and geology of an unseen tectonic boundary: the North American Continental Plate. Along the edges of the plate lies the Mid-Atlantic Rift in Iceland, bisecting and pulling the small nation apart, and the San Andreas Fault in California, which has long held a special place in America’s popular imagination.

Marion Belanger. Rift #51 (Geothermal Pipes Alongside a Road at Hengill, Iceland), 2011; Fault #26 (North Shore, Salton Sea, CA), 2012; archival pigment print; 18.5 x 14.8 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Atrium Gallery, Haverford College.

Belanger’s photographs depict bright, spare, and brutally captivating landscapes along the plate’s edges. Initially shot on 4×5 and 6×7 inch film, the negatives were scanned to produce large color prints, which are hung in pairs: an image from the Icelandic Rift above (or next to) an image from the San Andreas Fault. Their arrangement causes the exhibition to be “read” like a book. Each pairing, carefully collated by Belanger, creates a subtle parataxis between what is seen and the implication of deeper geologic movements.

The photographs document domestic architecture and infrastructure, highlighting odd silhouettes where land meets sky. Similarities between the two sites begin to accumulate. The bleached California light mirrors the illuminating, misty white skies of Iceland. The same pale light gives the spare colors their punch. The interplay between the literal subjects of individual photographs, which Belanger aptly describes as raw, empty, mundane, and ordinary, draws sharp contrast to the content of the work. Cues leading the viewer deeper are sometimes subtle (a small crack in a cement wall), and at other times overt (a gaping maw where a house once stood). In other photographs, there is no visible indication of the tectonic movements beneath the earth’s surface. Depicting a sleepy suburb or a hiking trail on a foggy morning, this last subset, when seen in relation to the whole, feels terribly haunted. As Belanger remarks in her statement, “The monotone housing developments built on top of the fault seem to deny the existence of the unstable earth below the surface. The ordered built environment ignores the actuality of the land, a dangerous disconnect.” In these shifting registers, the quiet work finds its edge.

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