Contemporary Art: Gunshots On Glass - Zha Zhao @ Chambers Fine Art, New York

 

(Drivebycuriosity) - Seven years ago the Chinese artist Zhao Zhao suffered a serious accident where his head hit the windshield of his car. Since then the painter uses this traumatic incident as inspiration for his works which show a fascination with powerful forces and violent impacts.

The gallery Chamberys Fine Art in New York`s classy art district Chelsea (522 West 19th Street, they are also in Beijing  chambers ), which specializes in contemporary Chinese art, has an exhibiton with new works by Zhao Zhao, called "Constellations II" (through August 22, 2015  exhibitions). The show is based on an experiment where guns where used to shoot on glass. The paintings (all oil on canvas) are painstaking reconstructions of what occurred when bullets penetrated glass.



        Powerful Forces And Violent Impacts

According to the press release Zhao Zhao limitted his palette to Prussian blue, Van Dyck brown and white and used brushes that range in scale from the largest available to the smallest consisting only of two or three wolf hairs. I am fascinated by the idea and the masterly skills the artist demonstrates. According to the gallery Zhao Zhao "paints canvases of considerable scale by using a technique appropriate for a miniaturist".

The pics here - shot with a humble Samsun camera - can only give a faint impression. If you can make it, a visit there is highly recommended.



Enjoy!

Contemporary Art: Sarah Dwyer @ Jane Lombard Gallery, New York

 

(Drivebycuriosity) - Whenever my way leads me to Chelsea, New York´s classy art district I try to look into one of the ubiquituos galleries. At Jane Lombard Gallery ( 518 West 19th Street  anelombard) I saw an exhibition of works by Sarah Dwyer, called "Sunk Under" (through June 27, 2015  current).

I like her friendly looking and colorful abstracts (oil on linen or on canvas). According to the gallery`s flyer "Dswyer´s paintings harness the kinetic energy expended in their making, retaining a visual tension whereby the pictroial narrative is in constant flux", whateer that might mean. But. let the pictures speak for themselves.



                               Constant Flux

Enjoy.

Stock Market: The Logic Behind China`s Rally

(Drivebycuriosity) - China`s stock market is on a tear. The Shanghai Composite Index, a gauge for the stock market in China, jumped about 150% in the recent 12 months! Stocks with primary listings in China are now valued at $10.05 trillions, an increase of $6.7 trillions in the past 12 month, reports Bloomberg (bloomberg). Now China overtrumps Japan ($ 5 trillion), but is still far behind the US (25 trillions).

Many believe that the huge jump is overdone and that China´s stocks are  in bubble. But I disagree. I think that China`s stock valuation, which is still less than half of the US, is appropriate. China´s stock market rally reflects the swift growing global importance of the country.  The stock market tries to evaluate the future, stock prices are the sum of the future company profits, discounted with an interest rate. China`s economy is still growing very fast, albeit moderately slowing, the last reported growth number was a plus of 7%. In some years China`s eonomy will reach the US level. With a population of around 1,2 billion - around 4-times the US number -  that will need just a quarter of the US per capita income.

The huge potential alone doesn`t explain the explosvie rally of the recent months of course.  I think we are seeing now a massive (positive) correction because  China´s stock market has been extremely undervalued in the recent years. Since 2011 many - maybe the majority of the pundits - have been continuosly predicting that China´s economy will crash soon (hard landing) which spoiled the sentiment for the Shanghai stock market (driveby). Since 2011 China´s stocks were priced for an armageddon.



                                                        Room To Grow

Last autumn the pessimism bubble finally popped, as every bubble has to someday. I think the sudden change has at least 5 reasons:

1. The alleged crash didn`t happen, China is still one of the fastest growing economies of the world.
2. Beijing is successive executing a fundamental reform program, iniated in 2013, including huge investments into airports, railways and other infrastructure, encouraging migration from the rural areas to bigger cities (with a higher productivity), softening the one-child policy, liberating stock trading between Hong Kong and mainland China and much more (driveby).
3. In the recent months Chinese centralbank has been reducing interest rates and rasing bank liquidity step by step.
4. China´s economy gets some tailwinds from lower oil and other commodity prices which reduces inflation rates; therefore consumers have more money to spend and industries (especially the transport sector) have less costs. 
5. The growing US economy is fostering China`s exports.

I believe that the Shanghai Composite Index will contuing his rise, because the country will manage the intended soft landing, meaning continuing high economic growth rates (not below 6%). China is still in the begin of a secular catching-up process which is fueled by extreme income & wealth differences to the US and other Western nation values. The huge country is rapidly transforming into a consumer economy like the U.S. and other modern countries. Many peasants are moving to the huge metropolitan centers which are spread all over the huge country to lift their standard of living. This creates a fast rising affluent middle class, giving consumer spending a boost as the still strong retail sales (the latest reported growth rates was 10%) demonstrate.

China´s growth should be boosted by the technological progress and advances of Internet, automatization of industrial production and 3D-printing. These developments raise efficiency and  productivity of China´s economy as success stories like Alibaba and Baidu demonstrate.

I believe that China´s stock market, which still costs less than half of the Wall Street listed stocks, is not in a bubble and has more room to grow. Enjoy!





PS For illustration I used a picture of the Chinese model Liu-Wen as a symbol for the modern China

Contemporary Art: The Fake Is Real, Verse Collective, New York

(Drivebycuriosity) - I enjoy looking into art galleries, there is so much to discover. In a tiny place on New York`s Broome Street I found an interesting pop-up show organized by the Verse Collective.

The roughness of the collection reminds me of street art. I like especially the collages and clored negatives. But let the pictures speak for themselves.

Enjoy!

Contemporary Art: Jesse Willenbring @ Gallery Laurel Gitlen, New York

 

(Drivebycuriosity) - Do you like abstract paintings? Then you might enjoy an exhibition @ gallery Laurel Gitlen, one of the more than 130 art dealers in New York`s Lower East Side (122 Norfolk Street laurelgitlen). They are showing paintings by Jesse Willenbring (through June 14, 2015 laurelgitlen). The show is called "Landline", maybe a reminiscence to the days, when people used to have telephone calls.

I enjoy his generous play with colors, media & shapes. But let the pictures speak for themselves.

On top of this post you can see "Punx luck" (2015, acrylic, flashe, charcoal, pastel, enamel, oil, paper, pencil on canvas)


               Plans to Build A Mountain

Above this paragraph follow: "Table, Mirror, Shape, Repeat" (2015, acrylic, fabric dye, flashe, paper, carcoal, pastel, enamel, oil on canvas);
"Picnic" (2015, acrylic, flashe, charcoal, pastel enael, oil on canvas);
"Plans to Build a Mountain" ( (2015, acrylic, fabric dye, flashe, carcoal, enamel, oil on canvas).

Enjoy!

Cinema: Hollywood Discovers (Real) Science Fiction

(Drivebycuriosity) - I love science fiction. Science fiction authors ask "what if" and they try to give plausible answers. The best of them speculate about the future by appreciating scientific possibilities, using a lot of logic; and they mingle their tales with physics, evolution biology and other sciences (hard science fiction). Real science fiction mixes entertainment with constructive and logical thinking.

Most of the usual Hollywood "Science Fiction" flicks aren`t really science fiction. The IMDb list of the most popular Sci-Fi flicks itemizes movies like "Avengers: Age of Ultron", "Transformers: Age of Extinction", "Guardians of the Galaxy", "TeenageMutant NinjaTurtles" and so on. There is not much science in it, if any. The typical  Hollywood "Science Fiction" film focuses on action and simple entertainment.

But there are exceptions: Recently I indulged into the movie "Ex Machina".  This film is the proof that a science fiction film can be smart, entertaining and stylish at once - the best movie of the year so far. The story: A young software coder gets a one-week appointment in a remote research facility in a mountain forrest to execute a turing test (proposed in 1950 by the computer pioneer Alan Turing). His employer, a billionaire genius, had created "Ava", a smart robot with a (partly) female body and wants to know if this android is really an AI. "Ava" will pass the test if her interviewer cannot distinguish her behavior from human.

Director Alex Garland, who also wrote the script, created a fascinating psychological triangle between the young and smart coder, who is eager to fulfill his job, the employer, a bully with a sharp mind, and the sexual highly attractive machine-girl ("sex machina"?). The movie does not only ask questions like: Can a machine develop self-interests and a sentiment and can a machine make choices & decisions by her own? The film is also spiced with scientific debates about evolution, creating life, freedom of will, sexual attraction (biology), survival strategies and much more. Even that the plot was highly intellectual - based on sciences like evolution biology - it had a lot of suspense and I  really cared about the fate of "Ava" and the humans.

The movie "Her"(2013) wasn´t quite as strong as "Ex machine" but offered also interesting thoughts & speculations about what we can expect from an AI. A lonely man falls in love with an intelligent operating system, called "Samantha" (with the voice of Scarlett Johansson), who confesses that "she" is simultaneously interacting with 8,316 other customers and is in love with 641 of them. Samantha  learns, adapts and "thinks" with an accelerating speed and she gaines almost infinite knowledge thanks to her access to the cloud (the global network of  computers). Soon she speeds far ahead of her human "lover.

"Her" is an entertaining & plausible speculation about trends in computer science (information theory)  and shows near future technologies as extrapolations of already existing gadgets like iPad, Siri (vice responding software), game consoles & TV controlled by hand gestures, 3d projections. And Spike Jonzes merged the skylines of Lost Angeles and Shanghai into a fascinating futuristic cityscape (urbanism). In contrast to the popular dystopian movies this film shows a pleasant and wealthy future, a world I would like to inhabit and maybe will sometimes.

The low budged production "Europa Report" (2013), which describes a human expedition to the Jupiter moon Europa with dramatic consequences, is based on real science and uses data acquired by the NASA.  "Starting in 1995, NASA`s Galileo probe began a Jupiter orbiting mission that lasted for eight years, until 2003, and provided the most detailed examination of the Galilean moons to date", writes Wikipedia (wikipedia). Europa`s "surface is composed of water ice and is one of the smoothest in the Solar System.…… The apparent youth and smoothness of the surface have led to the hypothesis that a water ocean exists beneath it, which could conceivably serve as an abode for extraterrestrial life" (wikipedia). Director Sebastián Cordero and script writer Philip Gelatt developed these insight into an inspiring drama showing the bliss of deep space travels but also the risks.


The movie  "Under the Skin"(2014) - which is visually stunning and an intoxicating cinematic masterpiece - shows 2 aliens wo are visiting earth, taking the human shape and are abducting young males. Scarlett Johansson acts as a sexually predatory alien camouflaged by a human skin. The camera follows "her" closely and shows how "she" is learning and using her aquired knowledge to handle the humans, like a human scientist would do.

And there will come more. Paramount studios are preparing a big budget movie titled "Story of Your Life" (2016; with Amy Adams & Jeremy Renner hollywoodreporter), based on Ted Chiang`s same named short story. The American writer is my favorite science author because he translates pure science into plausible but nevertheless entertaining fiction. In"Story of Your Llife" - which won the 2000 Nebula Award for Best Novella as well as the 1999 Sturgeon -  suddenly aliens arrive on the earth. The military is unsure if the visit is friendly or not and doesn`t know how to deal with the extraterrestrial. They recruit a female scientist, a professor for linguistics(!), who gets the order to decipher the alien´s language in order to communicate with the visitor and & to find out what they intend.


Maybe the time for (real) science fiction has come.

Contemporary Art: Lisa Yuskavage @ David Zwirner, New York

 

(Drivebycuriosity) - Lisa Yuskavage is considered as one of the most talented female visual artists of her generation (wikipedia). The American painter is known for her "sapphic dreamworlds" (observer). The gallery David Zwirner shows new works by Yuskavage @ their dependance on 533 West 19th Street in New York´s classy Chelsea district (through June 13, 2015 davidzwirner). A commentator calls this "the kind of exquisite blend of proto-modern European and post-modern American styles and references that we’ve come to take for granted in her work" (observer).

 

On top of this post you can see my favorite from this show (followed by the some detail shots). This  diptych is called "Bonfire, 2013-15" (Oil on linen). Observer`s commentator calls this "the kind of exquisite blend of proto-modern European and post-modern American styles and references that we’ve come to take for granted in her work" (observer).


      Inspired By Hugh Hefner´s Playmates?

Some of the other paintings remind me of sex dolls inspired by Hugh Hefner´s playmates. But they are put into mysterious setting. Anyway, let the pictures speak for themselves.

Enjoy!