Arthur Ou, View 8, 2013. Courtesy of the artist

April 28 – June 9, 2013

Brennan and Griffin is pleased to present its first solo exhibition with Arthur Ou.

Ou’s work is rooted in photography, although he has explored notions of the photographic through other mediums, such as sculpture. This show departs from Ou’s recent photographic seascapes and gestural alchemical interventions by transposing the sensibilities of both into an engagement with painting.

Opticality is a porous term that assumes divergent meanings when considered within the realms of painting and photography. While a photograph is necessarily a stubborn index to light, through an “optic,” the optic in painting is retinal and therefore calls upon the mind image. One could also describe this difference as a dynamic between the indexical and the experiential. Ou’s new paintings interpolate friction within this overlapping and relational space. Through painting, an alternate path emerges where he extends and expands upon his interests in photographic latency, the analog, and abstraction, which he has previously addressed in his work.

In addition to the paintings, a ring binder on a custom-made table contains nearly one hundred contact prints made from four-by-five inch negatives is also on view. Made within the past year, the images here range widely from multiple-exposed pictures of ocean rocks, portraits of the artist’s wife, studio experiments, and photographs of the Wittgenstein House, which Ou made while on a trip to Vienna in January. These unedited “studies” reveal a diaristic view, like an artist’s notebook, or an inventory of trajectories, ideational investigations, and other possibilities. Perhaps a contrapuntal counter to the imageless paintings, these contact prints open up a latitudinal space from the paintings as a space for contemplation.

Arthur Ou has exhibited internationally, most recently in Photography Is Magic!, curated by Charlotte Cotton, as part of the 2012 Daegu Photography Biennial in Daegu, Korea, and has been featured in publications including Aperture, Blind Spot, Art in America, and The Photograph As Contemporary Art (2nd edition). He has published critical texts in Aperture, Afterall, Artforum, Bidoun, Fantom, Foam, Words without Pictures,and X-Tra. He lives and works in New York. Ou’s work is concurrently on view at P!, 334 Broome Street, New York.

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Emerging in the late 1960s, Arte Povera, literally poor art, described a generation of artists committed to exploring the aesthetics of ephemeral and accessible materials while working outside of a ferociously consuming market in an effort to dissolve boundaries between an elite art and a collective experience. In “Notes For a Guerrilla War”, the manifesto that outlined the intentions of the original movement, Germano Celant wrote:

“Over there is a complex art, over here a poor art, committed to contingency, to events, to the non-historical, to the present… to an anthropological viewpoint, to the ‘real’ man, and to the hope (in fact now the certainty) of being able to shake entirely free of every visual discourse that presents itself as univocal and consistent. Consistency is a dogma that has to be transgressed, and the univocal belongs to the individual and not to ‘his’ images and products.”

By nature, this movement is neither time specific nor rooted in the particular conditions of its day. Rather, these are sentiments that can be applied to the desire to create objects of simple and intrinsic value, free of pomp and circumstance. It reminds us that we should not allow history to confine art to its predetermined conclusions nor reductively categorize works in an imposed lineage. Instead, we are called to look at the works as the assemblage of our surroundings, rooted in the honest structure of an artist’s chosen materials.

Neo Povera is curated by Harmony Murphy and includes works by Ana Bidart, Karla Black, Jed Caesar, Joshua Callaghan, Tara Donovan, Tom Driscoll, Brendan Fowler, Luca Frei, Johannes Girardoni, Liz Glynn, Jiri Kovanda, Maya Lin, Erik Lindman, Patrick Meagher, Virginia Overton, Ester Partegas, GT Pellizzi, Andy Ralph, Cordy Ryman, Aki Sasamoto, Marianne Vitale, Heidi Voet, Anicka Yi and Anton Zolotov.

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Yun-Fei Ji, Six Men and Two Women, 2006. Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, New York/Shanghai

August 30, 2012 – January 4, 2014

Chinese artist Yun-Fei Ji creates artworks using Chinese traditional materials such as ink and watercolor on handmade mulberry or xuan paper to explore the violence and suffering of communities affected by the Three Gorges Dam project in China, world’s largest hydropower plant. The dam project was not without controversy especially considering the displacement of millions of vulnerable communities and its destruction of the environment. The loss of forests and agricultural lands together with the displacement of villages has created an environmental disaster of epic proportion. Ji’s images capture the struggle and despair of people forced into worse conditions of poverty and degradation. These works raise questions and document the accountability of industrial development to local communities.

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Shi Zhiying, Rock Carving of Thousand Buddhas, 2013. Courtesy of the artist

June 20 – July 26, 2013

Shanghai born painter Shi Zhiying is known for her stark black-and-white paintings of rather uniform vistas—the wide, open sea; Zen sand gardens; blades of grass—all which occupy and fill viewers’ horizons. She writes, “I am fascinated by the ‘eternal.’ Some things haven’t changed, from the distant past all the way to the present and the future. They are something which everyone possesses.” This is the painter’s debut exhibition in the US.

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Takuma Nakahira, Untitled, 1971. Courtesy of the artist

May 23 – July 12, 2013
Opening Reception and Book Launch: Thursday, May 23, 6-8pm

Yossi Milo Gallery is pleased to announce Circulation: Date, Place, Events, the first solo show of Japanese photographer Takuma Nakahira in the United States. The exhibition will open on Thursday, May 23, and will be on view through Friday, July 12, 2013. An opening reception and book launch for Circulation: Date, Place, Events, will be held on Thursday, May 23, from 6:00 – 8:00PM.

Takuma Nakahira (Japanese, b. 1938) is a writer, critic, political activist and photographer with a legendary past who radically changed Japanese visual culture. By shooting stark, black-and- white images that are purposely blurry and grainy, Nakahira broke with Japan’s photographic history of social realism and allowed elements of uncertainty and expression into his work. Nakahira bases his photographic practice in the act of seeing and attempting to capture “pieces of reality cut out by means of the camera,” a statement made by Nakahira and critic, Kōji Taki in the first issue of Provoke. They go on to say that, the artist strives to create a “new form of thought” by transforming conventional language with the use of images that “at times…explosively ignite the world of language and concepts,” proving that the relationship between language and photography is central to Nakahira’s artistic practice. Nakahira would declare that the exhibition Circulation: Date, Place, Events first materialized this photographic methodology.

Circulation: Date, Place, Events was first exhibited in 1971 as part of the Seventh Paris Biennale. Each day, for seven consecutive days Nakahira photographed, developed and exhibited approximately one hundred photographs. The photographs are random glimpses from Nakahira’s daily activities in Paris, including strangers’ faces, produce stands, subway platforms, street posters and even his breakfast setting. Developing the photographs each night, Nakahira exhibited them without omission the following day. Once the walls of the exhibition space were crowded with photographs, the artist spread them onto the floor. The resulting project presented a limited reality dictated by guidelines of “date,” “place” and “events.” Following an argument with event organizers, Nakahira cut his project two days short. A few years later, in a dramatic break with his past work, Nakahira burned most of his earlier negatives and prints. For unknown reasons, the negatives of Circulation: Date, Place, Events were preserved.

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Yang Fudong, Mrs. Huang at M Last Night, 2006. Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, and ShangART Gallery

August 21 – December 8, 2013

Although widely unknown in the United States, Yang Fudong (born in 1971 in Beijing, lives and works in Shanghai) is one of the most important figures in Chinese contemporary art and independent cinema. For his first midcareer survey, BAM/PFA presents twenty years of the films, multichannel videos, and photographs that reflect the ideals and anxieties of Yang’s generation, a generation born during and after the Cultural Revolution that is struggling to find its place in the rapidly changing society of the new China. Yang has curated a special film series in conjunction with the exhibition that highlights his ongoing engagement with the aesthetics of film noir.

Yang’s films and film installations have an atemporal and dreamlike quality, marked by long and suspended sequences, dividing narratives, and multiple relationships and storylines. Many of his images recall the literati paintings of seventeenth-century China, made by artists and intellectuals who, faced with political suppression, pursued spiritual freedom by living in reclusion. Self-consciously evoking the literati, Yang calls his protagonists “intellectuals”; they are similarly confronted with the choice of participating in or abstaining from worldly affairs. In his series of photographs, for example, Yang brings the literati’s impassive attitude, emptied of any suggestion of agency or of the immediacy of experience, to the consumerist contexts of contemporary urban China: the fancy hotel room or restaurant, the swimming pool, the brothel. In other works Yang focuses instead on rural China, on the sense of isolation and loss as traditional villages are dissolved and communities scattered.

In his recent installations, Yang reflects on the process of filmmaking, creating spatially open-ended multichannel films that he calls a contemporary form of the Chinese hand scroll. These news works push further his theory that “anything which has been filmed can be shown.”

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Amy Yao, Untitled-1, 2013. Courtesy of the artist

May 22 – June 23, 2013
Opening reception: Wednesday, May 22, 6-8pm

Just in time for the summer, for those with a taste for realness and a desire for grit, comes Skeletons, Round Tables and Promotional Images. They represent authenticity, making and taking what’s theirs, with a shot of whiskey as chaser. Like metal and steel, leathery hands making leathery art, leather and tobacco scented candles and the latest issue of Monocle, Skeletons got lost in plastic. They embody the touch of another hand — images, concerns, places and light. Light, like aluminum to erase memories, moments lost in the sands of time on the beach.

In New York City, the liability of ascending rickety structures, inaccessible summits, hidden by the
ephemerality of vision, make some believe life is precarious. Tired of paranoia and the difficulties of
wasting time and space in the city, Yao has “checked out” and headed to the sunny shores of Southern California to engage in trendy sporting activities popular these days with artists East and West. There she worked with West Coast surfers and artists David Donahue and Chiz Ballreich to produce Skeletons using secret board glassing techniques to crystallize relations and timely responses onto the surfaces of idle aesthetic ladders.

Amy Yao (b. 1977, Los Angeles, CA) received her MFA in Sculpture in 2007 from Yale University School of Art, and BFA with Honors in 1999 from Art Center College of Design. Solo exhibitions include Bobas and Biological Clocks at the Soho House, Audio Visual Arts (AVA), New York, NY; Mistress, oooof! Les Bourses…, Green Gallery, Milwaukee, WI; The Real Housewives, New Jerseyy, Basel, Switzerland; Come to My Opening!, Jack Hanley Gallery, New York, NY. Yao has also participated in numerous group exhibitions including White Petals Surround Your Yellow Heart, curated by Anthony Elms, ICA, Philadelphia, PA; Emergency Cheesecake, Whitney Museum of Art, New York, NY; America Through A Chinese Lens, Museum of Chinese in America, New York, NY; Looking Back: The Sixth White Columns Annual, selected by Ken Okiishi and Nick Mauss, White Columns, NY; Greater New York, P.S.1/ MoMA, New York, NY.

Ametsuchi, Rinko Kawauchi. Courtesy of the artist

Wednesday, May 22, 6-8pm

Join Rinko Kawauchi for a book signing and reception at which the first copies of Ametsuchi will be available. In this new book from Aperture, Kawauchi shifts her attention from the micro to the macro, bringing together distant constellations and tiny figures lost within landscapes, as well as photographs of controlled-burn farming in which the cycles of cultivation and recovery span decades and generations.

Rinko Kawauchi has gained international recognition for her nuanced, lushly colored images that offer closely observed fragments of everyday life. In her latest work, she shifts her attention from the micro to the macro. The title, Ametsuchi, is comprised of two Japanese characters meaning “heaven and earth,” and is taken from the title of one of the oldest pangrams in Japanese—a chant in which each character of the Japanese syllabary is used. In Ametsuchi, Kawauchi brings together images of distant constellations and tiny figures lost within landscapes, as well as photographs of a traditional style of controlled-burn farming (yakihata) in which the cycles of cultivation and recovery span decades and generations. Punctuating the series are images of Buddhist rituals and other religious ceremonies—a suggestion of other means by which humankind has traditionally attempted to transcend time and memory.

Rinko Kawauchi (born in Shiga, Japan, 1972) studied graphic design and photography at Seian Junior college of Art and Design. Among her awards are the Kimura Ihei Photography Award (2002) and the International center of Photography Infinity Award in Art (2009). She has had solo exhibitions at Fondation cartier, Paris; Photographers’ Gallery, London; São Paulo Museum of Modern Art; and Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, among other venues. She was one of four artists shortlisted for the 2012 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. Kawauchi lives and works in Tokyo.

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L-R: Mary Ping, Thomas Chen, Wayne Lee. Courtesy of MOCA

Wednesday, May 29, 7pm

Thomas Chen, Wayne Lee, and Mary Ping, designers from MOCA’s current exhibit Front Row: Chinese American Designers, discuss how being Asian American in the fashion world has shaped their career trajectory and creative process. Moderated by Professor Thuy Linh Tu (NYU).

Thomas Chen was born in Wuhan, China and immigrated to the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan with his family at the age of eleven. He graduated from Parsons The New School for Design in New York and subsequently worked at Yeohlee, Habitual and Thakoon. Chen started his women’s wear label Emmanuelle in 2010.

Wayne Lee was born in Vietnam in 1974. Her family fled Vietnam in 1979 by boat and were marooned on an uninhabited island in Indonesia where they lived for a year before immigrating to Orlando, Florida. Wayne attended Vassar College and studied medicine at the University of California Berkeley. She worked as a buyer at Barneys New York before launching her own label in 2007. Wayne received the Ecco Domani Award in 2008.

Mary Ping is a graduate of Vassar College, receiving a BA in Art in 2000. In 2001, she launched her eponymous label after work experiences with Anna Sui and The Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute. In 2002, she debuted Slow and Steady Wins the Race, a label recognized for its sartorial wit and considered response to fashion. She is a winner of the 2005 Ecco Domani Award, 2006 UPS Future of Fashion, and a previous nominee of the National Design Award in 2009 and 2011. Her work is part of the permanent collections of the Museum at F.I.T. , the R.I.S.D. Museum, and was included in the Victoria and Albert Museum exhibit New York Fashion Now. In 2007, Ping was inducted into the Council of Fashion Designer of America (CFDA).

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Borrowed Landscape (Tropics of Africa, Asia and the Amazon via Brooklyn), 2013. Courtesy of the artist

May 17 – June 23 2013
Opening Reception: Friday, May 17, 7-10pm

Unnatural Selection investigates nature and its representation: How have humans conquered and organized nature, both to understand it scientifically, and to use it strategically?

The exhibition opens on Borrowed Landscape (Tropics of Africa, Asia and the Amazon via Brooklyn), a large-scale vinyl print of a photograph taken at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. It captures the spectacle of a simulated rainforest contained within a glass dome; we know that it is an artificial environment, yet we suspend disbelief and for a moment are transported to a distant tropical rainforest, a place very few of us will visit in person. Together with mixed media collages, paintings, live and artificial plants, and botanical drawings that reference 19^th-century scientific drawings in specimen trays, Unnatural Selection explores the pressure points where the natural world and the manufactured collide.

Naomi Reis was born in Shiga, Japan, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She was a recent Winter Workspace 2013 resident at Wave Hill in the Bronx, and will have an article in the Spring 2013 issue of Wilder Quarterly about the experience. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the IPCNY, Kunsthalle Galapagos, Blackburn 20|20, Lower East Side Printshop, Field Projects, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Exit Art. She is a graduate of the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania (MFA) and Hamilton College (BA).

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