I was amazed by the presence of a ritual to bring a Kuan Yin porcelain deity home in an informal shrine in Jalan Besar.
A void that captures a slice of the sky offers a momentary relief from the densely built up environment. How many of us look up and see this precious vacant space framed in clean, geometric outlines by the buildings? James Turrell's installation in the Chichu Art Museum on the island of Naoshima, Japan. A Chinese Courtyard House in Suzhou, China.
"I was storing my work, small pieces and objects and stuff in shoeboxes and you know, recycling a shoebox to store things is very common thing, I guess. So when I was invited in the 1993 Venice Biennale, you have a kind of booth, or a kind of small space in a very long corridor, which is divided into small spaces for all the artists to show theirs. Very long one, it feels very impersonal. So this shoebox, it was representing the space that was shown, I think it was space into space into space. The title is empty shoebox. It therefore makes it very mysterious I think. And also the size is a very small thing, very fragile object. I think all the qualities express many things I am interested in relation with sculpture. A few hours before the opening, I was checking my space and I couldn’t find the shoebox. So they took it out thinking it was trash. So I went out, went to the dumpster and it was right there and in the end, and I took it back and put it in again…"
Source: http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/audios/174/1903 |