Wook Heo‘s first exhibition in London is proving to be a success, and here are a few photos of the artist’s work presented at Mokspace, during the private viewing on 27 Jan 2012.
The artist’s love of Matisse is apparent in his vibrant palette and these photos highlight the three dimensional quality of Wook’s art. Enjoy the burst of colours in these photos!
Indian Artist Kanak Shashi was born in 1980 in Indore, India. Today, she is currently living and working in New Delhi, India where she specialises in Mixed Media and Painting. In 2002 she earned a B.F.A. from Faculty of Fine Arts Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in Vadodara, Gujarat, India. In 2004 Kanak earned an M.F.A. from the same institution. Her works have been featured in group exhibitions in India:
Group Exhibitions
2010
Drifters, Gallery Beyond, Mumbai, India
2009
Drifters, Art Konsult, New Delhi, India
Multitudes, Zen Art Studio, Cochin, India
Multitudes, Max Muller Bhawan, Bangalore, India
2006
PACHIMARI, Camp I & II, Lanxess ABS, Vadodara, India
She says,
“It is always difficult for me to speak or write about my work in words. I would rather love that my work speaks for itself. But if given a choice to express, I would say I love painting women and I celebrate womanhood through my paintings. I feel that with this, I am defining or evolving my own womanhood. My painting works at different levels – one very personal, the other very pictorial and painterly.
Since socially, I have not lived my life as a woman for almost 26 years, now that I am in my true body I feel completely at home, and each new experience and feeling makes me celebrate my womanhood. Perhaps being placed in a wrong body has inspired me to think and explore the woman image beyond the conventional horizons.
There is no fixed definition of ‘woman’ or ‘womanhood’, yet somewhere we all define it for ourselves… And that is what I am doing – living life through painting…
While painting ‘woman’, the most painted subject in human history, one realizes that most of these images celebrate the female figure as an object of desire for men. In fact, the stereotypes are so predominant that many a time, even female painters tend to represent woman through the male gaze. That’s why one of my intentions is to crack this mould of the pretty, submissive, persona-less image of women, in which each move and gesture of theirs is controlled in such a way that they come out as a mere sex object.
I choose a language which is very close to illustration, and I think representing woman in contrast light – a known and accepted language is a better choice. When I look out for references I find the work of Paula Rego, the Portuguese painter, very unusual. In there lies a very simple story telling technique to reach out to the viewer; but more than that – we both share similar subject matter and concern. I feel awed by her mastery in dealing with woman as a subject in her painting and illustrations.
My other favourite works are those of Elain De Kooning and Cindy Sherman.
I always wanted to paint my female figures strong, powerful and independent. To achieve these characters I used various pictorial elements, like lighting, use of bold strokes and distortion of certain parts of body, and putting less emphasis on others. While working on figures, I try to find and focus on the area where I feel lies the most strength and also the maximum vulnerability. Figures in my work generally take up most of the picture plane and vary from life-size to larger.
More importantly, my effort is always towards capturing a frozen moment, which I can see as an inner existential state coming through. I try capturing different states of female mind, mood and try to emphasize on distinct elements of their character. I let the facial expression, composition, color and other pictorial elements convey to the viewer, the mood I intended to portray/capture.
In my earlier paintings, I gave all the importance only to the main figure, and kept the background silent. Now I have started introducing new elements into the painting – origami birds, cats, plants and movement in the background. Even friends and people have started to come in now, which gives me more challenge to keep my stands firm, in context of seeing woman in a frame shared with man. Also, placing man and woman together in the frame brings up interesting interaction and conflicts.
It is very interesting to work on such paintings where one wants to give equal importance to both the figures; but to make this balance one could end up with too many new elements in the painting. That is why, in my painting process, it is very important for me that I conceive the figures and their position in the beginning, while the rest is achieved during the process. This approach is not only a lot of fun because of the element of dynamicity involved, but it also leaves me with the ability to surprise my own self!”
Please enjoy the work images of Kanak Shashi!
"Silent Argument", acrylic on canvas, 3 x 4 feet, 2009
"Altering Histories", acrylic on digital print, 2 x 3 feet, 2009
"God Mother", acrylic on canvas, 3 x 4 feet, 2007
"Altering Histories 4", acrylic on digital print, 2 x 3 feet, 2009
Lodh Shantu was born in Kolkata, India in 1968. He now currently lives and works in Delhi, India and specialises in painting. In 1993 he earned a B.F.A. at Shantiniketan in West Bengal, India. In 1995 he earned his M.F.A. at Shantiniketan in West Bengal, India. His work has been seen at the following exhibitions:
| Group Exhibitions | ||
| 2010 | The Drifters | Gallery Beyond, Mumbai, India |
| 2009 | The Drifters | Art Konsult, New Delhi, India |
| Classic Colonial Tales | Anant Art, India | |
| 2007 | No title | Newark Museum, Newark. USA |
He says,
“Growing up and living in this world of unjustified conflicts and contradictions, successes and failures…
My earlier works were quite reactive, in the sense that I reacted with craving and aversion towards the object of my expression in my artworks, which made me feel confident about their choice, but definitely frustrated me as the goal was to spread the similar political subjectivity all around. This practice did produce many eye-catching, hard-hitting projects as in public art projects, photographs, videos, posters and performance…
The previous series of paintings were called Classic Colonial Tales, they were mostly black and white, oil on canvas, and quite large in size, created by juxtaposing my family photographs and pictures of Queen Victoria downloaded from the net.
Thereafter I started attending 10-day Vipassana courses, which gave, rise to new esthetic questions and inspirations.
This gave birth to the ongoing series of painting. These are again black and white, gouache on paper. I was inspired by psychedelic art, Buddhist art and Chinese landscape painting. This ongoing series is not a critic as my earlier works were but emphasizes the meditative/hallucinatory aspect of painting. I take photographs of these and mirror them to produce an effect of near symmetry, near balance and the slowness of Intelligent Dance Music by painting in very thin layers. I have intentionally removed color from the paintings to attain an essence closer to Chinese landscape painting, which reduced distraction and seduction; I have also removed linear narratives which were quite central to my earlier works to produce a kind of Now and here, where the mind would not meander into the Past or Future. I am in a transition, as the ongoing experiments in art and sustained meditation in life will definitely lead to unknown quarters of the mind worth exploring as a newcomer to this zone of Mindfulness.”
Please enjoy images of his works:
“Humpty Dumpty II”, watercolor on paper, 26 x 20 in, 2009
Watercolour on paper, 26 x 20 in, 2009
“Man Eater”, watercolour on paper, 26 x 20 in, 2009
“Mask”, watercolor on paper, 26 x 20 in, 2009
Upadhyay Chintan was born in Partapur, Rajasthan, India in 1972 and is currently living and working in Mumbai, India. He received a B.F.A. in Painting from Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S.U Baroda in Gujarat, India in 1995. In 1997, he received his M.F.A. in Painting from the same university. In 2000-01, he received Gadi schloarship, NLKA, New Delhi, India, and in 2004 was awarded Charles Wallace Foundation Award for a residency in Bristol, UK. His work has been shown in numerous group and solo exhibitions throughout India, as well as over the world:
Solo Exhibitions
2008
Metastasis Of Signs, Gallery Espace, New Delhi, India
2007
Tentuaa Dabaa Do (Kill Her), Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur, India
2006
I Want to Be an International Artist, Seoul Art Center, Korea
Mutants, Sarjan Art Gallery, Gujarat, India
Baar Baar, Har Baar, Kitni Baar?, Sarjan Art Gallery, Gujarat, India
Clone Vithalla, Ashish Balram Nagpal Gallery, Mumbai, India
2005
Maya, Ashish Balram Nagpal Gallery, Mumbai, India
2004
Conker’s Installation Project, Spike Island, Bristol, UK
Designer Babies, Ashish Balram Nagpal Gallery, Mumbai, India
Group Exhibitions
2007
Have You Eaten Yet?, Asian Art Biennial, Taiwan, Japan
Beijing Art Fair, Art Fair, Beijing, China
Here & Now: Contemporary voices from India, Grosvenor Gallery, London, UK
2006
Satyagraha A group exhinbition by South African and Indian Artists, Travanore Art Gallery, New Delhi, India and Kizo Art Gallery, Durban, South Africa
“Pink Shop” Part of Hybrid Trends, Seoul Art Center, Seoul, Korea
Bombay Maximum City, Lille 3000, Lille, Frace
‘I am a slut’ a collaborative Video and performance with Amit Kekre, Gallery Beyond, Mumbai, India
KAAM, Arts India Gallery, New York, USA
KAAM, ArtsIndia West, St. Palo Alto, California
Annual show, Sakshi Art Gallery, Mumbai, India
2005
India/Australia cultural and regional exchange, KikArts Gallery, COCA. Perth, Australia
Sanjeev Khandekar has this to say about Chintan:
Our new world of transgenic realities and virtual possibilities has made it possible to have a new order for the world. This new order is precisely the contestation that Chintan wants to put forward through his works. Hyper-reality is the new order of the real, or ‘ireal’ is the new real, is the polemic that he offers through his more recent works.
For Chintan, the sculptures and his paintings serve as units of cultural information, symbols of political memes, kind of cyber game objects, substance-less, disinvested of material, inertia opening up the possibilities of new realms of reality.
All of his works strike a strange angle, as a built in architecture, or as if default system, what hits your eyes every time is the infantile visage, with the globus fat head and the conspicuous genitals of the body, making a weird and wonderful relationship between head and genitals apparent. Once we understand the limits of viewer’s gaze, the ideolological and fantasmatic coordinates of his works in the matrix of the late capitalist, consumerist contemporary society get denoted, and find their location.
Smart Alec is his new real, a copy of the copy, without an original, It stands for a symbol of New Man. Smart Alec is predicament and a dilemma, his desire and death. Smart Alec is new myth that Chintan is building, predicative of outmoded utopia of renewal of perception.
(This is an extract of an essay written by Sanjeev Khandekar, on Chintan Upadhyay’s recent works for private circulation. Sanjeev Khandekar is a visual artist, poet and writer. He lives and works in Mumbai.)
Metastasis Of Signs
Writer and independent curator, Johny ML, weighed in on Chintan’s works as well:
Once detached from the zones of production, signs gain independence from the ideology of their producers and start accumulating values that operate between the logics of the intentional and the experiential. Any society that consumes the signs while replicating the intentional ideology of the producers, also replicates the values created out of the consuming experience and these values proliferate in the social body as the cancerous cells ‘spill over’ from the zone of origin to other parts, conveniently passed through the unsuspecting mediums. This metastasis, a term Chintan Upadhyay adopts from the discourse of human pathology, effectively transcends from the realm of pathology to the realm of culture. Signs could be as polemical as the cancerous cells, not to mention the process of metastasis which could be even worse…
Please enjoy some images of his works!
“Chintu”, Oil & Acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24 in, 2010
Hyungji Park was born in 1977, Seoul, Korea and she is currently living and working in London. She was given a M.F.A. from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London in 2008, another M.F.A from Korean National University of Arts, Seoul, Korea in 2006, and a B.F.A. from Hongik University, Seoul, Korea in 2001.
She has a solo show titled ‘Strange Scenery’ at the Nordisk Kunst Plattform Project Space, Brusand, Norway in this year and it was great success. See her publication.
She has also shown her work globally as below;
Elizabeth Croft (critic) says,
Hyungji Park’s painting practice playfully creates surreal landscapes and scenes by combining visual references and painting styles. Born in Korea, and now living and working in London, Park extracts, dissects and collages together visual references from popular culture and art history to create strange new scenes.
Snapshots, images from the internet, magazines and advertisements, are chosen and re-presented, displaced from their original contexts and mixed with more conventional painting motifs, such as Japanese prints of seascapes. Individual components are picked out of their context, re-contextualized, mixed with other images, and developed to form new surrealistic scenes.
In her more recent work, Park has focused more on exploring ways of interpreting in paint, the different aesthetic qualities and visual grammars found in printed comics, graphic design and old wood-cut prints. Each source image is reinterpreted through a particular handling of the paint. Whilst one element may be depicted through a dripping, watery application of paint, others are reproduced in finely finished detail. The lines, forms and colours from the source material are transformed via different painting techniques so that the original sources are reframed as something else, no longer delivering their original function. Instead they deliver multiple fantasies, through the combination of surreal imagery and the painting medium.
Enjoy her work images!
“Dürer in Hokusai”, oil and acrylic on canvas, 140 x 140 cm (left), 140 x 100 cm (right), 2009
“What happened is unknown, but …is crystal clear”, oil on canvas, 77 x 102 cm, 2010
“Strange scenery 10″, oil on canvas, 80.5 x 70 cm, 2009
Shantanu Lodh was born in Kolkata, India and he is currently living and working in New Delhi. His series titled ‘Drifters’ were shown at Gallery Beyond in Mumbai, 2010 and at Art Konsult in New Delhi, 2009. Anant Art Gallery in New Delhi showed his previous series ‘Classic Colonial Tales’ in 2009. ’Classic Colonial Tales’ were mostly black and white, oil on canvas, and quite large in size, created by juxtaposing his family photographs and pictures of Queen Victoria downloaded from the internet.
He was inspired by Psychedelic Art, Buddhist Art and Chinese landscape painting. This on going series is not a critic as his earlier works but emphasises on the meditativ aspect of painting. He takes photographs for these and mirror them to produce an effect of near symmetry and near balance. He says
“I have intentionally removed color from the paintings to attain an essence closer to Chinese landscape painting, which reduced distraction and seduction, I have also removed linear narratives which were quite central to my earlier works to produce a kind of Now and Here, where the mind would not meander into the Past or Future. I am in a transition, as the ongoing experiments in art and sustained meditation in life will definitely lead to unknown quarters of the mind worth exploring as a newcomer to this zone of Mindfulness”.
Enjoy his work images!
‘Mask’, watercolour on paper, 26″ x 20″, 2009
‘Humpty Dumpty – II’, watercolour on paper, 26″ x 20″, 2009
‘Man eater’, watercolour on paper, 26″ x 20″, 2009
Qiang Wang was born in Heilongjiang Province, China and he is currently living and working in Beijing, China. He is specialised in painting, mixed media and new media. He was received a B.F.A. from Central Academy of Fine Arts, Bejing and he is a member of Northern Wilderness Printmaking Group. He became a freelance Artist soon after graduating from the Center Academy of Fine Arts. He lost all he could lose for this freedom. The only thing he has achieved is the independent right of thinking on social problems.
He is a sensitive person who can always seize typical social issues in rapidly changing society of China. Except for persistent thinking about money and desire, he can response quickly to some accidental social problems as well. China experienced horrible SARS epidemic in 2003. Qiang Wang created some paintings, installations and action art, such as <<City Tablets>>, <<City Virus>> and <<Blue Sky is Unguarded>>, which illustrated his thinking about the issue.
‘Bicycles’ were brilliant landscape in Chinese cities. But bicycles and related life felt squeezed with cars increasing rapidly in number. This kind of squeezing is not only physical, but also psychological. For instance, paths for bicycles are more and more narrow, and cyclists feel increasingly inferior and helpless. The large-scale installation <<The Plateau of Life>> illustrates his profound thinking about changes in Chinese cities. One hundred bikes were squashed one by one under the pressure of 5000 tons. These 100 flattened bikes were neatly laid out by him in the exhibition hall of Today Museum, creating the spectacular and sad impression. The exhibition of this installation was like a farewell ceremony to an era. Those squashed bicycles lying on the floor have lost the power of outbreak in silence.
His clothing series have been existing for a long time, but we can see his continual thinking about this topic through his different choices to clothes. At first he drew female nudes inside his used tops, which indicated that the issue he focused on then had obvious personal. The conflict in above series is embodied by him, or by other young people like him. Personal problem then developed into social one while he took military uniform as material. Young men and ‘Mao’ transformed into military life of male supremacy. The ambiguious relationship between flesh and clothes, became the one between power and flesh. Social issue turned into philosophy question when he used transparent material to make clothes. That is, social issue developed into the thinking about phenomenological significance between cover and display. Transparent clothes are no longer real clothes, which makes his art works possess surrealistic characteristics.
Enjoy his work images!!
‘Bicycles
‘ process, 2008, Beijing, China
‘Bicycles’, 2008, Beijing, China
‘The Plateau of Life’, installation, Today Museum, Beijing, China, 2008
‘The Plateau of Life’, Today Museum, 2008, Beijing, China
‘Clothes’ series I
‘Clothes’ series II
‘Clothes’ series, III
‘Clothes’ series, IV
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