randian | 燃点

She emerges and disappears, paint swirling and eddying, pigment lush and thick. She is familiar to the painter. He has painted her dozens of times. Day turns to dusk. He puts down his brushes.

As Groys notes in the opening passage of his essay, “On the New”, “We experience art history first of all as represented in our museums.” One might add, to be glib with Marx—and why not? —, secondly as farce.

Ding Yi’s paintings refuse to answer, to limit or be limited. Whether small or vast, their multi-hued fields of crosses map and divide pictorial space, transparent and unguarded, beguiling with pattern. But this is no panacea for interpretation, for anything-goes opinion. Look closely at each painting and you can become familiar with them, with the individual character of the multitude of marks that compose their seeming and actual similarity, the repetitions, threads and permutations, and yet still not know them

Why Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and why now? What are the nuanced relationships to identity and aesthetics we could distill from his oeuvre that might help us contribute to social change?

“Has the decision to host the Olympics not yet been made? Why is it that we dare not do such a thing?” —Deng Xiaoping, 1990

People crowd the raft of empty Coke cans and Pepsi bottles. Tourists, clubbers, musicians, students, sun bathers. Protestors are matched with actors, mendicants with diners, a photographer and his model with a mugger and his victim. The flag is red, the sky is grey, but unlike Delacroix’s “original”, there is no ship on the horizon, blind or otherwise.

I intend to speak of forms changed into new entities —Ovid, Metamorphoses

Martin Wong was a storyteller, often prefacing descriptions of his works with quips like “There’s a long story to this painting,” before going into versions of his autobiographical account of the details behind the scenes he’d craft.